Just to tease him, I pulled the.45 from the holster clipped to my belt at the small of my back and plunked it onto the table. “Want to hang it behind the bar while I drink?”
He grimaced. “Put that fucking thing away. That’s why I want to talk to you. That kind of shit scares people. That guy you hit with your cane coughed up blood.”
I didn’t care, said nothing.
“You’re a police inspector, and I respect that,” he said, “but I’m sheriff in this bar. I don’t want or need help.”
I saw that I’d really upset him. “I apologize. I know I screwed up when I opened my mouth and threatened that asshole, but when he insulted me, I just lost it for a minute. Like I told you when you asked me then, it was a bad day.”
He scrutinized me. “Is today a bad day?”
I had to laugh a little. “Worse.”
“I’m sorry, but you know where I’m going with this, right?”
“Yeah, I do. If I keep frightening the good citizens, you’re going to have no choice but to ban me from the bar.”
He nodded.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll behave. This crew I’m with saves me from myself in my darker moments. I’m sorry I put you in an awkward position.”
He stood upright and put a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks for understanding. I promised to buy you a beer the next time I saw you. What will it be?”
“A Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. To sweeten my disposition.”
“And for the rest of you?”
Jenna got a pilsner. Sweetness took a lager and three shots of kossu. Mirjami got a mineral water. She sat next to me, Anu in her stroller between us. Mirjami reached over and gave my hand a squeeze. “The little one has to be taken care of,” she said, “and I think a few drinks would do you some good.”
She had a way of making me smile. Her small kindnesses were touching. At that time, she was the only person who didn’t irritate me just by the nature of her existence. Excluding Kate and Anu. For Kate, I felt a mixture of love, anger, dread and fear. We have to be careful who we love in this life. To give others love is to give them the power to destroy us. It’s so easy to love Anu. Unconditional love that she returns out of innocence. I reached into her stroller and she wrapped a tiny hand around my index finger. I wanted to savor her unconditional love now. It wouldn’t last forever.
Mike brought the drinks. I grabbed a kossu from in front of Sweetness. The shot glass was misted with frost. They kept the kossu in the freezer, as it should be. I knocked it back.
“Atta boy,” Sweetness said.
It went down with a cold burn that mellowed into a warmth in my stomach and spread all the way to my fingers and toes. The others talked. I ignored them. I wasn’t thinking, not anything, just being. When my glasses emptied, both beer and kossu, more kept appearing in front of me. Time passed, Milo wandered in, pulled up a chair and sat beside me. We said nothing, just looked at each other. I was certain that, like everyone else, he thought I looked like overwrought shit.
After a couple minutes, he went to the bar and came back with a cola. “What do you want to see happen here?” he asked.
“I want to see Kate here. Whatever it takes.”
“What about her brother?”
“What about him?”
“Obviously, Kate isn’t going to come back just because I ask nicely, or she wouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”
I nodded agreement.
“So I’ll have to pressure her by threatening to harm John.”
He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He had a thick black brace on his right wrist and hand to immobilize them. His fingers stuck out of the end. “Fine,” I said.
“As long as he’s there, she’ll always have a place to run to.”
“Are you asking me if I want you to kill him?”
He said nothing.
“No. I don’t want that.”
“I booked our tickets. My plane leaves in two hours. I have an eleven-hour one-way flight. The return flight is in four days, twenty-six hours including one layover. Give me his address.”
I memorized it from the return address on the letters John wrote to Kate. All of which asked to borrow money. “Four thirty-seven Grove Acre Drive.”
Milo took out an iPad, opened Google Earth, and zoomed in on it at street level. Why the fuck didn’t I think of that? My mind wasn’t working right. It was on overload and I hadn’t realized it. I reminded myself that I had to be careful not to make mistakes.
We saw a small, ramshackle single-family dwelling with a little yard. The street was lined with similar houses on both sides of the street, in various degrees of dilapidation.
Milo pondered this. “Whoever is harassing you is escalating their methods. However, I don’t think lives are in imminent danger, as it would be more expedient to have just killed you in the first place.”
I nodded agreement, swilled beer.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
“Do you realize you’re in some kind of shock?”
I thought I was just suffering from a combination of pain and anxiety. “I know I’m not thinking straight. My wife, my home, my body all fucked up. I’ve been coping, but today I feel overwhelmed.”
“I have to go,” he said. “When I get back, we’ll sort this out and put an end to it.” He handed me a set of keys. “These are to my apartment and gun safe. If you need to take extraordinary measures, go in there and get the right ordnance for the job.”
I finished off another kossu. “I owe you.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure you’ll have a chance to pay me back.”
He got up and left. After a while, the window repairmen called and informed me that my windows were now bulletproof. I paid our bill, thanked Mike, and dropped him a fifty as a way of both apologizing for the trouble I’d caused and for the good treatment he’d given us.
We went back to my apartment. Only the chair, with the deep cuts from glass shards, gave any indication that something untoward had happened here. It was only early evening, but I was so exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open, and asked Mirjami if she could look after Anu while I napped. She didn’t mind.
I looked around, tried to be a cop for a few minutes. I stood in front of the big window and imagined I was a sniper looking for a firing position to kill someone in here. That couldn’t happen now, but we were under surveillance, and our watchers had chosen such a place, as evidenced by the tear gas grenade, which had been propelled by a firearm. I could likely see them too, if I knew where to look.
Sweetness came over and looked out with me. He had no knowledge of such things. He chose civil service over military service, and spent his mandatory time playing with children in a kindergarten instead of with men in the forest playing war games. He asked me what I was doing, and I explained.
“Pomo”-boss-“you know the number of people likely responsible for all this can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Actually less. It’s just a question of when we get off our dead asses, pay some visits, and put a stop to this bullshit.”
“Soon,” I said.
My worry for Kate had been so all-consuming, at first it made the harassment, a brick through a window, seem inconsequential. But at least to some degree, I had come to my senses. Someone crossed a line and I was beyond anger. Things were done that could have hurt my little girl.
I went into seclusion with the hope that it would bring catharsis, help rid me of anger. Allow me to reach inside myself and find a pacifist buried somewhere in my soul. Instead, I found a vengeful spirit that demanded a price be paid. The noise of the young people drinking, laughing and listening to music made me want to scream at them all to shut the fuck up. I took a sleeping pill and waited for it to kick in. As I fell asleep, visions of murder danced in my head.
10
J uly thirteenth. I wake up, plagued by anxiety, frustration and worry. I want to be alone. My apartment is full of people. My mind i
s bent. My nerves destroyed.
I get out of bed and find the others sitting in the dining room. I go out to the balcony to smoke. Sweetness follows me. “Bad news,” he says.
Just the idea of more bad news pisses me off. He points down at the street. The windows have all been beaten out of my Saab. I’m furious but feel no adrenaline. Although my emotions have returned to some extent, they’re by no means normal. Part of that abnormality is that adrenaline doesn’t accompany rage. I have no fight-or-flight response.
“It was about four this morning,” he says. “I heard the smashing and pulled on some jeans so I could go down there, but they worked fast and were gone before I could even get a look at them.”
I’ve been thinking like a victim instead of a predator, working from a defensive mind-set instead of taking the offensive. We must be under constant surveillance in order for our enemies to know the best times to attack us. I do what any cop with half a brain should. I watch for watchers.
I scan the rooftops. It’s a clear summer day, blue skies and sunshine. I look for the glint of light on optics. And I find it, but not where I thought it would be. It’s in the window of the apartment across the street from mine and one over. It offers a good view of most of my living room. The sun makes a double flare on the optics, so it’s binoculars, not a rifle scope. I tell Sweetness to look without looking.
He bends over, lights a cigarette and glances up over his cupped hand. He recently started smoking. He used nuuska-a kind of snuff-since he was a kid and so is addicted to nicotine, but women tend not to be turned on by a mouth with tobacco in it, especially since it tends to stick between the teeth, a bit unsightly-women who aren’t smokers themselves tend not to be thrilled by cigarettes either, but even less so by nuuska-so he traded his lungs for love. Plus Milo and I smoke, and Sweetness looks up to and mimics us, especially me.
“Well, pomo,” he says, “what’s the plan?”
I think it over. Thanks to cortisone shots taking the edge off the pain, my mind as well as my body is working better today. “I’ll get dressed, then we’ll both go downstairs. I’ll go out the front door and check out the damage done to my Saab. You go out back to the inner courtyard, between the buildings, and circle around the block so they don’t see you. Just press the buzzers for every apartment, someone will let you in, then you go get them and bring them out so we can talk to them.”
“Get them how?”
I shrug. “Knock on the door. That usually works. If they ask who it is, say police and hold up your National Bureau of Investigation ID. If they still don’t open, or notice that your ID says you’re a translator instead of a cop, use your silenced.45 as a key and shoot the lock to pieces. If you do, call me. I’ll come up and talk to other cops if they show, to make it seem like a legit bust. I’ll bring some dope to plant on them. If you have to shoot them, try not to kill them. We need to interrogate them.”
One of the nice things about being a famous cop is that other police, and everyone actually, tend to believe anything I say.
We get outside. I gimp over to my Saab. There’s a note inside, on the driver’s seat. “There are ten million ways your family could die, too.”
Someone is working very hard to get me to kill them. About ten minutes later, two men come out the front door of the building they were surveilling us from, Sweetness behind them, doubtless with his pistol at their backs. I lean against my Saab. He walks them over to me. They look like bikers: long hair, biker boots, primary drive chains from motorcycles as belts-handy because they can be used as steel whips or turned sideways and swung as flexible bludgeons-and leather vests. They don’t have gang colors, though, so they must be independents. One is rail thin, the other on the chunky side. The kind of blubber that comes from sucking down beer day and night for years.
I hold up the note threatening my family. Only someone in the know could have written it, because the official story for the media stated that the ten million euros in ransom money had been recovered. A good ploy. Finders keepers and tax free, too. Assuming they can get it back from me and my colleagues.
“Whatcha gonna do,” Chunky says, “gun us both down here in the middle of the street, in broad daylight?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet,” I say, “but you’re doing your best to talk me into it.”
They both smirk. Skinny leans against the hood of my car. Chunky stands in front of me with his arms crossed and legs spread. The ignoramus says, “Suck my dick, crip.”
Sweetness kicks out in a kind of high stomp that catches the side of Chunky’s knee and it buckles. I hear the crunch. Ligaments, tendons, all the shit that holds his knee together, give way. He falls to the street and grabs his destroyed knee with both hands. To his credit, he sucks it up, doesn’t make a sound, but the awful pain shows in his eyes.
“Inspector Vaara doesn’t likes back talk,” Sweetness says.
“No,” I say, “he doesn’t. No one likes a smarty-pants.”
“You’re cops?” Skinny asks.
“So they tell me. But you don’t have to call me inspector. Sir will suffice.”
I carry what is known as a gadget cane. Especially in the Victorian era, canes were made with every conceivable device built into them. Mine is my most prized possession and worth a fortune. Milo gave it to me, a gift purchased with our ill-gotten gains.
It’s made of thick ash. The handle is a lion’s head made of gold and weighs about half a pound. A cane meant for a big and strong man. Bang down on the floor hard with the tip, it spring-loads the lion’s mouth and snaps it open. The teeth are steel razors. Sharp contact, like swinging the mouth against something, forces the fangs backward, they trigger the mechanism, and the mouth clamps shut and bites with about three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, about the same as a Rottweiler’s jaws. Pressing the eyes-one is a ruby, the other is an emerald-disengages the spring and the mouth lets go. Unscrew the shaft and another weapon, a twenty-inch sword, is unveiled.
Chunky has gone silent, sucking up pain. I picture what the tear gas might have done to my six-month-old little girl. I slam my cane’s tip into his solar plexus. It knocks the breath out of him and the pressure opens the mouth of the gold lion that comprises the cane’s handle. I run my fingers over the lion’s razor-sharp teeth, draw a little of my own blood. I shrug my shoulders. The lion’s mouth opening means that the fates have intervened and given me a sign. I smack him on his side with the lion’s mouth. It snaps shut and gouges a deep wound in his beer-swollen belly. Blood drizzles out of him.
“I think I just invented a poor man’s liposuction,” I say.
He chokes from pain and vomits.
“Just wait here a few minutes,” I say, “while I run an extension cord out here and get the Hoover. We’ll have you as trim as Celine Dion in the twinkle of an eye.”
He looks up at me and tries to mouth some words, but just pukes again.
“Or you and your buddy seem close. Maybe he’ll show his friendship by sucking the fat out of your wound.”
I look at Skinny. “And if I tell you to do it, believe me, before I’m done, you’ll beg me to let you.”
I return my attention to fat fuck biker. “No, wait. That means I have to gouge more pieces out of you, so the fat is removed from various places to create symmetry. It’s important to me that you feel svelte and attractive, like an improved person when we’re through. It will be good for your self-image. I think a poor self-image is what brought you to this moment of ignominy that you’re now suffering. We give you a makeover, put you in a suit, your confidence will skyrocket, and before you know it, you’ll have your own office in the World Trade Center, trading stocks and bonds.”
I smack the tip on the sidewalk and the lion’s mouth springs opens. “Yuck,” I say. “On second thought, you really should have a doctor look at that,” and shake the bite of beer fat out of the lion’s mouth and onto his head. “Well,” I say, “now you’re going to walk like me.” I lift my shirt and
show him the handle of the Colt sticking out of the waistband. “Look at my face. Do you want to be handsome like me, too?”
He manages to talk through gritted teeth. “Sir, I apologize for my bad attitude. Would you please stop hurting me now?”
I notice there’s a woman standing at the front door of my building, watching. I ignore her.
Back to Skinny. “The story,” I say.
“Sir,” he says, “we got a get-out-of-jail-free card on a drug bust, plus a hundred euros each a day to watch you.”
“So, a cop put you up to this?”
“Yes, sir.”
“His name?”
“He didn’t give one, didn’t even show us ID.”
“Then how do you know he’s a cop?”
“Because he got us out of the can and got the charges against us dropped. The apartment he put us in is vacant. We didn’t know you’re police officers.”
Like it would have made any difference. “Have you been smashing my windows, writing notes, playing dirty tricks?”
“Yes, sir. But we didn’t teargas your house. The cop did it himself.”
“You’ve frightened and endangered my friends and family. How do you intend to make that up to me?”
His voice quakes. “Sir, I apologize for the trouble we’ve caused you, and we’ll do whatever you tell us will satisfy you.”
“Tell me about the cop.”
“He didn’t look too good. Broken nose. Fake front teeth. Some scars on his face and what looks like a surgery scar beside his left eye.”
He’s describing Captain Jan Pitkanen of SUPO, the minister of the interior’s hatchet man. Milo destroyed Pitkanen’s face, reduced it to pulp with the butt of his pistol. Milo beat him half to death, but it was Pitkanen’s own fault. When Milo approached him, he failed to identify himself and reached inside his jacket. He might have been reaching for a gun. I told Milo he went too far, though, and Pitkanen wouldn’t forget it. However, he wouldn’t be harassing me without the knowledge of the minister, Osmo Ahtiainen. Further, he almost certainly ordered Pitkanen to do so.
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