Sweetness cuts him loose, he gets out of the Jeep and ambles away in damp clothing. I hear him whistling a tune, as if none of this had ever happened. Sweetness squirts the vodka from the syringes into his mouth.
19
We drive around the corner. It’s a little after ten a.m. Thank God I slept all day yesterday, or I never would have made it through the night. There are no parking spaces, so we use a parking garage and walk a couple blocks. Walking is the last thing I want to do right now. It hurts like hell and I want to go to bed. But our missions aren’t yet complete. It’s Mirjami’s birthday. We go to Fazer, the city’s best bakery, and too tired to shop, I just ask the girl behind the counter to give me the biggest, richest chocolate cake they have and to write Hyvaa Syntymapaivaa Mirjami-Happy Birthday Mirjami-on it in frosting.
We sit and have coffee while she writes it and boxes it up. Sweetness adds a little something to the coffee from his flask. “Jesus, what a night, huh?”
“Yeah,” I answer.
I pay. We go to the Alko in Stockmann department store, I buy a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne and a gift bag and we head back to the car. Before starting the engine, Sweetness takes a healthy gulp out of a Stolichnaya bottle. I’ve never said anything in the past because I thought he would stop this on his own, and because since we’ve been associated, I’ve been too physically fucked up to drive and, good-natured as he is, he’s always offered to take me wherever I’ve needed to go. More or less been my man Friday. But drunk driving rankles me.
“Has it occurred to you,” I ask, “that every time you drink and drive, you’re putting innocent lives at risk? You just threatened to kill a man if anything happened to your loved ones. You could kill someone else’s loved ones.”
He turns to face me, grim. “Am I good driver?”
“Yes.”
“You ever seen me sloppy drunk behind the wheel?”
“No.”
“You wanna get out and walk?”
He’s never taken this tone with me before. “No.”
“Sitten turpa kiinni”-Then shut your face.
It’s my fault. He’s exhausted, frightened and frustrated. I picked exactly the wrong time to bring it up. I shut my face, or more literally, my muzzle.
I stop the exchange by calling Mirjami. “Happy birthday,” I say.
“Thanks. It’s heartening to know I’ll never be as old as you.”
I giggle. Old cheap jokes always get laughs out of me. “We’re on our way to pick you up.”
“Did your night work out? Did you find the girl?”
“We found her and lost her. It’s a long story and it’s been a long night. We haven’t slept.”
“We’ll be in the lobby. Jenna is sick.”
“Hungover?”
“No, just sick. She vomited last night and this morning. And I’ve got Anu, so we didn’t even touch the minibar.”
We arrive at Hotel Cumulus and escort them to the vehicle. Jenna, even with her normal Snow Queen coloring, looks pale.
We get a parking spot near my apartment building. I get out of the Jeep first, scan the windows and rooftops for watchers but see no one. We tramp inside. I can’t remember being this exhausted since before I had brain surgery, when my constant migraine gave me insomnia. Still, there’s more to do before I can sleep. I have to download the information from the daunting pile of electronica I’ve stolen into my computer. The owners will call the service providers, report them as stolen and have them locked. Some already will have. I need to salvage all the info I can before the others get around to it.
I boot up my laptop, stick a USB cable in it and begin. Mirjami asks what I’m doing and I explain. She calls me a stupid jerk, says she’ll do it and tells me to go to bed. I protest, jabber about Blu-ray transfer and the right cables for different devices. She tells me to be quiet, she knows all that.
I double up on everything: tranquilizers, pain medication and muscle relaxants, and wash it all down with a double kossu. Mirjami checks my knee and rebandages it. I say, “Wake me up in late afternoon so we can celebrate your birthday.”
I force myself onto my feet to make my way to the bedroom. Mirjami kisses my cheek. “Sleep well.”
But I don’t. Not right away. When it comes, though, I sleep the sleep of the dead.
20
I wake up on my own around five. Jenna is watching Anu. Sweetness and Mirjami sit at the dining room table, have open beers, shot glasses, and a bottle of kossu on it. They’ve already made a good dent in it. As usual, Sweetness doesn’t show it, but Mirjami is a bit giggly and bleary-eyed.
“Give me a birthday hug, then sit down and have a drink,” she says.
I’m still a little groggy from my sleeping potion. “I smell like a goat and need a shower,” I say. “Give me a few minutes.”
I shower and shave, put on new clothes, jeans and a shirt, to look party presentable. Kate bought these clothes for me. I hide it for Mirjami’s sake, but I don’t care about her birthday. If all goes well, Milo will bring Kate home day after tomorrow. Worry that all won’t go well preoccupies me.
I discover they’ve finished one kossu bottle, taken another from the freezer and opened it. It’s still early. My prognosticative powers tell me this night will end badly. Also, Jenna refusing alcohol is oddly disturbing. Possibly, she’s being sweet and staying sober to watch Anu so Mirjami can drink, but I could remain sober and do it. I’ve never seen Jenna turn down a drink. Forgoing booze on my account is out of character for her. I hug Mirjami and sit beside her. Sweetness pours a shot and pushes it across the table toward me.
I raise my glass. “To you, Mirjami. I hope your twenty-fourth year brings you all you wish for. You’ve been a godsend to me. I don’t know what I would have done without you.” This is true.
We drink our shots in one go. I get a beer from the fridge and put on the soundtrack from Pulp Fiction. It’s one of Mirjami’s favorites. We drink, and drink some more. I’m starving and they need some food in them to sop up some of the alcohol in their systems. The head start they got on me has left them coherent but whacked.
“Let’s eat,” I say.
“I want to go to a nice restaurant,” Mirjami says.
Not a good idea. She’s already too drunk. I’m not sure a restaurant would even want to let her in. I might have to throw my cop weight around to make it happen. I don’t feel like muscling anybody.
“What do you want to eat?” I ask her.
“Sushi.” She nods her head with vigorous certainty. “A mountain of sushi.”
Sweetness and Jenna both make faces, but it’s not their birthdays. Sushi sounds great to me.
“Why don’t we eat out in?” I ask.
Mirjami slurs a little. “Whaddaya mean?”
“I’ll call Gastronautti.”
She pours us all more kossu. “That place where you call and they’ve got about a dozen different restaurants and you order and they pick it up from the restaurant and bring it to your house?”
“That’s the place. And they have three different sushi restaurants to choose from on their list.”
She smiles a drunken smile that’s both sad and wistful. She forgets the sushi for a minute. “I had the windows in your Saab replaced with bulletproof glass,” she says.
Mystifying. “How could you get it done so fast?”
She toys with her glass. “I used my feminine charms.”
And her charms are many: She’s entrancing, excruciatingly beautiful, intelligent, responsible, has a good sense of humor, is a born nurturer with a great capacity for empathy, and pleasant company as well. She has vittuvaki, the power of the vagina. I don’t know the etymology of the term, perhaps it’s lost in the sands of time, but it stems from the era of pagan ritual and the celebration of the feminine, when it was believed the vagina possessed mystical potency. If anyone possesses vittuvaki, it’s Mirjami. Only one downfall prevents me from falling in love with her. I’m already in love with my wife.
&nbs
p; Kate is my wife and the mother of my child, and I love her to the exclusion of all others. I lost the ability to feel emotion as a result of having the tumor removed from my brain, but it’s drifting back, slow but sure. For some weeks, my primary emotion was irritation. That’s fading, too. For Mirjami, although my sexual attraction toward her is magnetic-there are few heterosexual men who wouldn’t feel it-my primary emotion is tenderness.
“Thank you,” I say. “Let me repay you in sushi.”
“Isn’t Gastronautti extravagantly expensive?”
I smile. “It ain’t cheap.”
“What’s it like to be rich?” she asks.
I consider it. “Mostly, it relieves some of the pressures of life that plague most people.”
“How much did you, Sweetness and Milo steal from drug dealers?”
The questions of a drunk girl, childish in their innocence. My smile broadens and I sip kossu. “Oodles.”
“This seems like a good time to give Mirjami her present and crack the champagne,” Sweetness says.
I had forgotten about the champagne. It’s the last thing she needs. But what the fuck, it’s her birthday. I hid the liquor store gift bag stuffed with cash in a closet. I get it and set it in front of her, then play the good host and set out champagne glasses.
“Ugh,” Jenna says, so out of character that I wonder if she’s pregnant and has morning sickness. I say nothing and pour for the rest of us. “None for me.”
Strange indeed. I pour for the rest of us, we toast Mirjami’s birthday again and I tell her to open her gift.
She fumbles with the drawstring, gets it open and stares into the bag. She looks confused, shakes her head as if to clear it. She turns the bag upside down and shakes wads of cash onto the table.
“How?” Struck speechless, she can’t say more.
I don’t know if she wants to ask how much it is or how we got it. “Half a million, give or take. Proceeds from the evening. It was Sweetness’s doing. He should get the thanks.”
Drunk, she doesn’t hear the part about Sweetness, just throws her arms around me and starts at once laughing and crying. She’s got that annoying girl-drunk-weepy thing going on now. She gulps champagne and pushes the cash toward me. “It’s too much. I can’t.”
I laugh and push it back. “You can and you will.”
She doesn’t argue, just stares at the money with a disbelieving grin on her face.
From a wooden box on the bookcase where I keep miscellaneous odds and ends, I take an unopened pack of playing cards and hand it to Sweetness. “Show me the trick you cheated with.”
He says, “I’m pretty drunk, don’t know if I can,” but opens the pack and discards the jokers. He shuffles, I cut, and he deals. I get a royal straight flush and he gets a pair of deuces. He puts the cards back in order and does it again, except this time he gets the royal straight flush and I get the deuces. I saw nothing. He’s wearing a T-shirt, so has nothing up his sleeves.
“How the fuck do you do it?” I ask.
He zings out the deck in a long string in the air almost too fast for me to see, collapses it back together, hands it to me, and shoots me a sly smile. “Let’s just say it’s one of those things you learn when you have way too much time on your hands. I could try to teach you. You won’t be able to do it, though. You don’t have the dexterity.”
True. I have the grace of a bear, and a lifetime of weight lifting has left my stubby hands as thick as they are wide. I often break things by accident because I’m too rough with them. My hands have only two settings. Stop and go. It comes to me that, at least in that way, I must be a lousy and clumsy lover.
Impressed, I order a mountain of sushi, and we have champagne, with the ever-present kossu on the side, of course, while we wait, and Sweetness and I tell the story of how we found and lost Loviise, sans the double killing.
“How do you know she didn’t put the knife in his back?” Jenna asks.
“I don’t,” I say, “and if she did, considering what he had waiting in store for her, I don’t care. I tend to believe her, though, and I’m curious about the identity of the magazine-beautiful woman. She’s the killer. But given the circumstances surrounding the murder, the Russians won’t want Finns investigating the case, they’ll invoke diplomatic privilege to shut it down, and it’s not my problem. I would give odds on a bet that the apartment is already cleaned out, redecorated and painted, like nothing ever happened there. Out of curiosity, though, I’m going to run the prints we lifted through the computer, just to see if we get a match.”
The sushi arrives. Sweetness has never had it before. He gives it a tentative sniff, suspicious. “Is this the equivalent of fucking Chinese girls?” he asks.
I ask what he means.
“It’s good, but two hours later you’re horny again.” He guffaws at the old bad joke. His raucous laughter makes Mirjami and me laugh with him. Jenna scowls, doesn’t find jokes about him having sex with other women humorous. Nor will she touch the food. Not feeling well has put a bug up her ass.
Sweetness discovers the pleasures of sushi, and the three of us devour two massive platters of it. The evening has gone well. With so much drink, I expected tears, arguments, the usual drunken party ending. It didn’t happen. In the wee hours, we all decide to turn in.
Mirjami follows me to the master bedroom. I’m drunk, but not wasted. She’s blasted, weaving as she slips the spaghetti straps from her summer dress over her shoulders. It slides to the floor. Barefoot and braless, she steps out of it, peels off her panties and comes toward me. She puts her hand on my crotch and rubs the hard-on she knew she would find there.
I take her hand away from between my legs and hold it.
“Give me the birthday present I’ve been waiting for,” she says.
Dear God, she’s beautiful. When I first met her, I had a hard time not staring at her, and with her naked in front of me, all I can do is let my eyes roam up and down her lissome body. “I can’t,” I say.
She starts to unbutton my jeans. “Then let me give you the present I know you want from me.”
I take both her wrists in one hand. “We talked about this once. I can’t cheat on Kate.”
The booze and disappointment make her temper flare. Anger flashes in her eyes. “Kate who? I don’t see any Kate.”
“My wife, Kate. The mother of my child.”
Her voice rises to a near shout. “Every goddamned man in Helsinki wants to fuck me, and I don’t want any of them except one. You, you fucking bastard. And that one man turns me down. You’re an ungrateful asshole.”
Drunken braggadocio perhaps, but not far from the truth. “Maybe, but I’m a faithful one. I’m faithful to you too, in a way. I would do anything you asked of me, except this. And if I did do it, would you feel the same way about me afterward? If I dumped Kate for you, how could you ever trust me to not treat you the same way? I’m sorry, but I have a wife.”
She slaps the bed, I suppose in lieu of slapping me. “Your wife. Your wife. Where is this fucking wife? Wives take care of their husbands and children. Who takes care of you? Who cares for your child? Who is the woman that has devoted herself to you? I am. I am.” She screams the last. “I am!”
She lowers her voice again. “If anybody is your wife, I am. Some stupid vows don’t mean shit. Actions have meaning. I show you every day that I love you. In practice, I am your wife. I am your wife.” Again, she shouts and smacks the bed. “I am your wife!”
She bursts into tears and sits on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands.
I sit next to her and take her in my arms. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She buries her face in my shoulder and sobs. She smells of citrus and flowers. It takes a while for her to cry herself out. Then she looks up at me with heartbroken brown eyes. “Can I at least sleep beside you?” she asks.
I nod. “Yeah.” I stand up and take off my jeans. She moves to the head of the bed and pulls back the covers. I can’t sleep next to her if s
he’s naked. Something will happen. I take a T-shirt from a drawer and hand it to her. “Would you please put this on?”
She gets it and she’s too beaten down with disappointment to argue. It serves as a baggy, miniskirt-length nightgown. It doesn’t detract from my desire for her. She would be sexy in a potato sack. I usually sleep naked too, but keep my boxers on.
She doesn’t try to snuggle up. I keep turning her words over in my mind, picturing her naked in front of me. Is it possible to pass through this life without causing pain? Not even to the ones we care about the most? I fake sleep.
Mirjami interlaces the fingers of her left hand with those of my right. I feel a slight vibration ripple through the mattress. She’s masturbating. She sobs when she comes. I keep my eyes shut and pretend it isn’t happening.
21
At nine the next morning, a gentle knocking on the bedroom door wakes me. I ignore it, want to lie here, doze, and enjoy a hangover day. Hangovers get a bad rap. The vicious ones are awful, of course, but the milder ones, if I don’t have to do anything, can be rather enjoyable. The lethargy that accompanies them forces me to relax. Pizza and Jaffa-orange soda-the combination of sugar and salt, are the best cure. Most people don’t realize that the cause of a hangover is in large part not the consumption of alcohol, but the body’s outrage at being deprived of it. Alcohol, in a sense, causes instant addiction. Hence the hair-of-the-dog cure.
Mirjami doesn’t wake. The knocking turns to pounding. Jenna shouts, “I need to come in.”
“Then come in,” I shout back. She enters and sees us in bed together. She already knew Mirjami and I were together in here last night from the shouting. Her expression is neither approving nor disapproving. She couldn’t care less, ignores me and begins shaking Mirjami awake. “You have to take me to the doctor,” Jenna says.
Mirjami looks dog-sick. “Yeah, OK. Give me a minute.”
Jenna returns with coffee for her to expedite the process.
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