“You know who it is?” Sweetness asks.
“Yep. You squeezed his partner’s shoulder so hard that you dislocated it and broke his collarbone.”
“What do you want to do with these fuckwads?” he asks.
I lean against the side of my now windowless Saab. “Be creative,” I say.
I look up. Jenna and Mirjami watch through my window.
Skinny’s hand is on the hood of my car. Sweetness grinds a cigarette out on the hand, looks thoughtful, pensive. Skinny doesn’t move or protest, just grimaces. “You guys ever seen the movie American History X?” Sweetness asks.
They both nod.
“You remember near the beginning, when Edward Norton makes the guy open his mouth so his teeth are against the curb, and then he stomps on his head and it mushes like a melon?”
Their eyes go wide with panic.
“Let’s do that,” Sweetness says.
They don’t move. Sweetness twists Skinny’s arm behind his back, jerks up and dislocates his shoulder, then throws him onto the asphalt. The two bikers exchange a look that says, We’re helpless, we’re better off taking our chances than having this ogre keep wrecking our bodies one piece at a time. They crawl to the curb, put their arms at their sides, open their mouths and suck concrete.
Sweetness looks at me. I shake my head no. Sweetness stands over them, stomps a combat boot as hard as he can on the pavement between their heads. Skinny recoils, lifts his head and drops it again, knocks his own front teeth out. Sweetness finds this funny, chuckles and says, “Dumbfuck.”
“Boys,” I say, “you fucked with my family. You come back and we’ll hurt you a lot worse than this. I’ll kill you both slow. I don’t want to see your faces again. My suggestion is that you vacate Helsinki. Do you understand me?”
They’re both too fucked up to speak.
“I asked you a question.”
They each manage to spit out, “Yes, sir.”
“Tell your police buddy I’ll be paying him a visit.” I gesture to Sweetness to come with me, and we leave them where they lie.
11
The woman still waits on my stoop. “Are you Inspector Kari Vaara?” she asks. Her accent is thick and hard for me to understand.
She’s fortyish, has salt-and-pepper hair done up in a bun. She looks older than her years, has the look of hard work and a difficult life that changes people’s faces. She has on a plain dress and shoes that speak of a limited income. I expect a complaint for beating people to jelly on the street on this fine summer morning. “Why do you ask?”
“Need help.” Her accent is Estonian-Russian, her Finnish broken.
Sweetness tells her in Russian that he can translate for her if she likes. A nasty little piece of history is that during the Soviet occupation of Estonia during the Second World War, Stalin had tens of thousands of Estonians shipped off to Siberia. Russians were brought in to repopulate. Most of the forcibly emigrated Estonians froze and starved to death. Part of the population now speaks Russian as a first language.
I remember that the U.S. had a crisis over busing children as a form of integration. I think Boston had the biggest shakeup over it. I think of Stalin and his form of integration policies with gulags and the deaths of millions. American problems often seem paltry to me. Maybe because they’ve never been invaded and forced to fight a nation bent on subjugating them, while Europe has been awash in blood and terror since the Pax Romana. I don’t count their civil war, a mess of their own making.
She nods and rambles for a minute, nervous.
Sweetness translates. “Her daughter has disappeared from Tallinn. She thinks men brought her here. She says she has friends here, and they told her you’re sympathetic to foreigners, that you might help her.”
“Tell her to go to the police, explain whatever it is that makes her think her daughter is here, and file a missing person’s report.”
They exchange a few words. “She’s done that,” Sweetness says, “and she got the distinct impression that nobody gave a damn.”
She says something else.
“The bikers we just stomped the shit out of. She asked if that’s what you do to bad people.”
“Tell her yes, if I think circumstances warrant it.”
Sweetness translates. She answers.
“She says, ‘Good. Please do something like that or worse to whoever took my daughter.’”
I give in. She’s won me over. “Ask her to come upstairs with us.”
Once inside my apartment, I tell her to make herself comfortable and offer her coffee. I ask Mirjami where Jenna is. She went to lie down, wasn’t feeling well. I ask Mirjami for a few minutes of privacy and she goes to my bedroom. Milo taught Sweetness how to use the bug sweeper to make sure there are no surveillance devices present. He gives the apartment the once-over. There aren’t any.
The woman watches Sweetness with curiosity but doesn’t ask about it. I sit next to her on the couch to put her at ease. Sweetness brings coffee for us. He sits in my chair to translate for us. I see the tension melt out of her. Coming here to ask a favor from a stranger caused her anxiety. Kindness relaxes her.
I ask how she found me. The Estonians in Helsinki have their own communities and networks. She says they knew how.
I speak intermediate Russian, studied it in school, but it’s rusty and her accent is difficult for me, so I ask her to tell her story to Sweetness and let him repeat it to me. They talk for a few minutes, then he relates it.
“Her name is Salme Tamm. She’s widowed. Her daughter’s name is Loviise and she has Down syndrome. It’s a mild case. Her IQ is over fifty and, within limits, she’s functional. She’s nineteen years old. She had a job cleaning offices, but through some friends, she met some men who offered her secretarial work in Helsinki. Loviise took a class where they taught her filing and some basic things, and she got excited about it. Salme told her not to trust strangers, but three days ago she didn’t come home. Salme thinks these men have bad intentions and Loviise is in trouble. Like most people with Down, she’s small, only four foot eleven, but her features are close to normal.”
Salme seems to understand Finnish, if not speak it. She takes a picture of Loviise from her purse and hands it to me. She’s pretty in her own way. It’s not hard to get a handle on what happened. Her diminished intellect makes her easy to manipulate. Her diminutive size makes her excellent fodder for pedophiles, a good earner. Some men involved in the human slave trade duped her, likely brought her to Helsinki, took her passport and whatever money she had, and told her she had to reimburse them for the cost of bringing her here. A scam, as the cost is only about twenty euros. And that she will work off the debt whoring. At the moment, she’s locked up somewhere. Not much time has passed yet, it’s hard to say what damage has been done to her.
I look up from the picture to Sweetness. “What do you think?”
“You’re a physical wreck. People are playing deadly games with us. We have our own to look after at the moment.”
An image comes into my mind. Kari Vaara rides a white steed. It runs at full gallop, hooves pounding and thundering. The wind is at Vaara’s back. Trumpets sound. Milo bought tickets to bring Kate home three days from now. If all goes well, she arrives to find Loviise here, safe and sound. Vaara has saved a disabled girl from the clutches of villains, from the worst of fates. Loviise can’t begin to express her undying gratitude. Everything Vaara has done in the past is vindicated. The horror Kate suffered is given meaning, and her emotional problems stemming from it disappear in the face of goodness. Kate flings her arms around Vaara, the savior of innocents, and declares her undying love.
Kate is constantly on my mind, and I turn ways to earn her love back over and over in my mind. But this isn’t just about her. I need this for myself. If I could truly save this one girl, in some tiny way, it would justify all I’ve done. It wouldn’t make things right or restore balance to my inner world, but the symbolism would be there, proof that doing good is pos
sible for me.
“No,” I say, “tell her if Loviise is in Helsinki, that you and I will find her and return her to their home.”
“You’re insane,” he says.
“A valid assessment, but I’m going to do this, with or without you.”
Sweetness tells her we’re going to do our best. I understand well enough to get that he downplayed my phrasing so as not to make her hopeful, and he takes her contact information. She throws her arms around me, careful not to hurt my face, and thanks me over and over. After that, there’s no way I can let her down.
12
After Salme Tamm leaves, Sweetness gives me a stern look, as he would a wayward child. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“I started this black-ops garbage of ours so I could do things exactly like this. You know, help people, especially young women in trouble. This girl is in deep shit.”
He has a pull out of his flask and sits forward with his elbows on his knees. His big frame nearly fills my oversized armchair. “Before you can help anyone else, you have to be able to help yourself. You can barely get around the house. How are you going to investigate a missing person? Who was most likely conned and abducted by criminals, I might add.”
I finish off my coffee. “The cortisone shots are working. My jaw is almost pain free at the moment, and my knee is improved. And I have you to help me.”
“Pomo, you hardheaded asshole. This is beyond foolish. We have enemies watching us, and we don’t know what their limits are, if they have any. We have two women and a baby in this house that we have to take care of. Safeguarding them is our first priority. Call the cops that deal with human trafficking in Helsinki, pass it off to them and let it go.”
He made salient points. I weave my way through them. “There are hundreds of prostitutes in Helsinki. There are seven detectives mandated with monitoring the human slave trade. I’ve spoken with a couple of them. They’re pissing in a rainstorm. For every arrest they make, a thousand gangsters are ready to step up and take their place. The profit in buying and selling young women is tremendous. As to the girls, we load them in your Jeep Wrangler and drive around for about an hour to make sure we’re not being tailed, then we leave them in a hotel until the job is done. Or pick them up every night after we’re done working, if you and Jenna and your love that’s bigger than any love that ever loved a love can’t stand to be apart for a whole night.”
He leans back in the chair and thinks it over. “If Jan Pitkanen is harassing you and it means the minister of the interior is behind him, it’s ninety-nine out of a hundred that the national chief of police is in on it, too.”
“Those two are like Frick and Frack. Where one turns up, you generally find the other. I warned the chief if he fucked with me anymore, I would kill him.”
“You going to?”
I play with my cane, remember I need to wash the beer fat glop out of its mouth. “I don’t want to, but can’t rule it out. People lose respect for those who don’t live up to their threats. On the other hand, Roope Malinen hates our guts, he could have a part in all this.”
Roope Malinen, Finland’s best hater-he can boast of writing the nation’s most popular blog-was elected to parliament and chairs the committee on immigration affairs. He hates us because we humiliated him and exposed him for the dickless coward he is. He most likely hates me the most, since I was the brains behind the operation that helped ensure Real Finns didn’t take the election. Plus, Malinen had his eyes on a million euros Veikko Saukko promised as a campaign contribution, and our activities made sure he didn’t get it.
Saukko, a billionaire racist, had promised to boot up a million euros to the campaign kitty if a display of serious intent to rid the country of immigrants was exhibited. I’m told that, after neo-Nazis murdered dozens of mostly blacks with strychnine-laced heroin, he was true to his word, but gave it to the National Coalition Party to disseminate.
I haven’t spoken to him since the death of his son. Saukko wanted me to investigate the case, the prime minister, who wanted to give Saukko his way ordered me to take it. Saukko, as well as the interior minister, wanted me to find and capture his son, Antti Saukko, a murderer, but not put him in the docks and make him face a court of justice. Saukko wanted to find his boy and give him his freedom, or a semblance of it, since that freedom would keep him under his father’s thumb, and the threat of a murder charge hanging over his head forever. Saukko likes manipulating his kids. I can’t think of a more effective way.
But Antti wasn’t fond of that plan, and when we found him, he drew down, tried to kill us, and he had to be shot in self-defense. Saukko might have been able to live with that, but since Sweetness put sixteen hollow-point slugs in Antti and left him faceless; and since Kate blew the man he hired to find his daughter’s killer in half with a sawed-off shotgun; and since the ten million in ransom money Antti stole from him disappeared, as I’m sure Saukko correctly assumes, into our offshore bank accounts, I can understand why he might want revenge.
Upon consideration, it could be that all these people with their various axes to grind are plotting against us together.
Sweetness asks, “We have all these powerful people lined up against us. What have we got to work with?”
I lie back on the couch with a couple pillows under my head and work it through. I was duped into a black op under the belief that its primary mandate would be to save women from being forced into prostitution. The op was self-funded, and we robbed the dope dealers of Helsinki blind to acquire those funds.
The true purpose was fundraising for the National Coalition Party, the party of the rich, and for Real Finns, a populist movement with an often incomprehensible agenda that changed almost daily. They did, however, manage to drain supporters from other, more centrist parties, allowing the NCP to win. The Real Finns garnered enough votes to take part in government, but because of their wilder policy positions, such as withdrawal from the European Union and a return to our old currency, the Finnish markka, were dismissed out of hand. They declared themselves an opposition party, and the NCP victory was complete.
However, in the event that the election didn’t work out as planned, I was given the job of collecting dirt on the Real Finns’ hierarchy and that of other parties as well, so they could be destroyed by scandal if necessary. Sweetness did the initial surveillance and proved to have a knack for recording people in the most compromising positions, but I needed him for other things. I decided to cover my ass and didn’t just collect skank on NCP competition. I hired Finland’s premier filth-monger, Jaakko Pahkala, a so-called journalist who freelances for all the skank rags, to surveil the NCP as well. I have something on almost everybody, except those who have nothing to hide, and there are few enough of those about.
And on the interior minister and the national chief of police, I have something special. Sperm samples, currently residing in Milo’s freezer, that connect them to the Filippov murder. They thought, pompous fools that they are, that they were so irresistible that Ivan Filippov’s mistress just couldn’t help herself and had to perform fellatio on them. She was collecting DNA to frame them for murder, though she ended up being the victim herself.
There were four samples, unmarked. Theirs, and those of two other crooked politicians I have yet to identify. Cigarette butts and their attendant DNA, the bane of the criminal. I scooped them up earlier in the summer while we were socializing with the rich and powerful aboard the minister of interior’s yacht. They even had the courtesy to smoke different brands and make it easy for me to identify them later. I knew which samples belonged to who. Offenders really shouldn’t smoke. I sent them off with the sperm samples to a private genetics testing lab.
The chief, Jyri Ivalo, tried to cover up the Filippov murder because he’d had an affair with the victim. In addition to the sperm, I also have a video of the chief engaging in a fetishistic sex act with her. Making the video public would have humiliated him and ended his career. I saw no need for that and sup
pressed the evidence involving him. Ivalo made me an offer to run a self-funded black-ops unit mandated to use illegal means to fight crime. Ivalo cited human trafficking as their primary target.
It soon became clear though, that Jyri Ivalo was disingenuous concerning the black op. Although I could fight human trafficking if I wished, Ivalo’s main objective was stealing from criminals not only for political fundraising but also personal enrichment. Further, the minister of the interior, who among his many other duties oversees the secret police, SUPO, was in league with him. They insisted that I and my accomplices accept a percentage of the money we stole. They left me no choice. If I wasn’t complicit, I wasn’t trustworthy. Their ax over my head: my wife isn’t a Finnish citizen. They would have her deported. I was stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.
Flying his sex tape on YouTube would not only make him a laughingstock and destroy his career, but force the reopening of the Filippov case and possibly land him in prison. And now, it appears, he’s involved in threatening my family and placing them in danger. His gratitude for suppressing this evidence appears short-lived.
“Skank,” I say.
“Skank?” Sweetness repeats.
“The pix you and Jaakko Pahkala took of politicians taking bribes and having extramarital and/or homosexual liaisons. The material I’ve been paying to collect for months. It’s career-destroying material, and it was collected without regard to political party affiliation. It’s a powerful weapon in our small arsenal.”
“Where is it?”
“In Internet cloud space. Pahkala uploaded it to one account. Milo moved it to another, more secure account and shared the user name and password with me. We memorized it. There’s no written record that it exists.”
The flask reappears. My two underlings: a drunk and a stoner. Who could ask for anything more. “Killing us would eliminate that threat,” Sweetness says.
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