“Kekkonen was an ordinary soldier, and his comrades were boys from the same school. These included my dad and your great-grandfather. First, they went to Kuopio, where the situation was already under White control. From there they went to Iisalmi where they imprisoned local Reds. Dad said they executed a Red there. Their first one. The next stop was Varkaus, a Red stronghold deep in White Finland. White troops were concentrated around Varkaus, among them the Kajaani Guerrilla Regiment. Near the end of the fighting, the Reds withdrew to a factory and finally surrendered when it caught fire. The prisoners were taken out on the ice of a nearby lake. Locals identified the worst of the Reds, and they were taken out of the line and shot. The Whites executed over a hundred people. They also picked every tenth man from the line and executed them, too.”
I’ve read, in Kekkonen’s memoirs, that he saw the bodies on the ice after the event, but he didn’t admit to taking part in the killings. “There’s no proof that Kekkonen executed anyone at Varkaus,” I say.
Arvid shrugs. “I’m just telling you what Dad told me. You want to hear it or not?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“After Varkaus, the regiment fought on the front in Savo. At the end of April, they were sent to Viipuri. The Battle of Viipuri was the last major fight of the war, and several hundred were killed in action. Some two hundred Russian inhabitants were rounded up, taken to the old city walls and executed. Machine-gunned to death. The shooting went on for almost twenty minutes, and the shooters were none other than the Kajaani Guerrilla Regiment.”
Rumors and speculations given the stamp of truth-secondhand-by a Winter War hero. I have no idea if he’s making all this up as he goes along, but he would sure as hell upset a lot of people if he said it publicly. The Civil War remains the most emotionally charged event in the history of this country. After almost a hundred years, we haven’t even agreed on a name for the conflict: the Civil War, the Red Rebellion, the Freedom War, the Class War. The list goes on.
“The war was essentially over,” he says, “but by then Dad and the others had a taste for Red blood. In Hamina, during the second week of May, they executed over sixty prisoners. In the last week of May, they shot another thirty-something prisoners. Kekkonen made the leap from shooter to leader and ordered the execution of another nine Reds in Hamina. In June, Kekkonen, Dad and your great-grandpa were sent to Suomenlinna as prison camp guards. It was essentially a death camp. And the result of all this was that Kekkonen became a celebrated war hero. After the war, Kekkonen spent seven years as an investigator for the state police, during which time he was a Communist hunter. Like me. Like your grandpa.”
Kekkonen was a hero-even a God-like character-to me as a child. I guess to most of us. He was a gifted athlete, a war hero, he protected us from the Soviets. Except for a brief period, he served as prime minister from 1950 to 1956, and as president from 1956 until 1982. He was essentially an absolute ruler. At a certain point, he humiliated his opponents in presidential elections by neglecting to show up for televised debates. He knew he was unbeatable. As a child, I thought “Kekkonen” meant “president.” I remember asking Mom who she thought would be the next Kekkonen.
“During the Civil War and its aftermath,” Arvid says, “the Reds executed about fifteen hundred White prisoners, and the Whites executed upwards of ten thousand Reds. Do you know who ordered the execution of those almost ten thousand people?”
I shake my head, weary from his terrible tales. “Who?”
“Lord and Savior Marshal Mannerheim. That’s who. The great men of our nation saw to the extermination of Communists. I shot a few commissars in a POW camp, less than nothing in comparison. Why bother me about it? It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Under the influence of his revisionist version of history, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either.
“The great man, Kekkonen,” Arvid says. “Don’t make me laugh. He was a drunken whoremonger. He got more pussy than JFFUCKING-K, and his wife, Sylvi, put up with it. And those fucking propaganda films about him they show every year around Independence Day. More Leni Riefenstahl-type stuff that would have done the Third Reich proud. See the great athlete Kekkonen. See Kekkonen go to sauna. See Kekkonen swim in the lake. See Kekkonen chop wood. See Kekkonen, contemplative man of the people, sit on the edge of a dock and fish.”
“Why such acrimony?” I ask. “Kekkonen did a hell of a lot for this country. He kept good relations with the Soviet Union and maintained our sovereignty through Finlandization.”
“Because I detest hypocrisy, and I’m its victim. I’m just pissed off at the moment. Kekkonen paid a price for his success. He was a Communist-killer, just like I was raised to be. How do you think that must have made him feel, sucking Russian ass to save this nation. Taking orders from people he wanted dead. It must have been a living hell sometimes.”
I get his point. “And so, because of their connections from the Civil War, your dad and my great-grandpa were able to secure positions for you and grandpa in Valpo.”
He nods. “That’s right. Killing Communists. The family business. Mine, and yours, too, by way of inheritance.”
And now Jyri wants me to run a black-ops unit, mandated to fight crime organizations that rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Confluence.
Arvid looks across the table at me with sad eyes. We share a quiet moment, but the silence is comfortable this time. Finnish silence. After a while, he says, “Son, you better go soon. I’m tired. All this talk has worn me out, and I have to look after Ritva.”
“Yeah,” I say, “I better get back to work.”
I’m tired, too, and melancholic, worn down by so much ugliness. Compared to relearning the history of my country in this new light, even the Filippov murder seems cheerful.
39
I start back to Helsinki and turn on the radio. The weather forecast announces that the worst snowstorm of the season is on the way. Given the severity of what we’ve already experienced, this seems near impossible, but within minutes, thick sheets of snow start to pound the landscape. Road visibility sinks to almost nothing. I drive slow.
Jyri calls. He says, “Ivan Filippov and Linda Pohjola are at Filippov Construction, and their vehicles are there, too. I got you sixteen detectives. Twelve are on-site, waiting for you to orchestrate the raid. Two detectives each have sealed off Linda’s and Filippov’s homes. They’ll wait for you and the other detectives before beginning the searches. Is that everything you need?”
“For the time being.”
He rings off, and I change direction toward Vantaa. I call Milo and tell him to meet me at Filippov Construction.
I get there before Milo. The other cops are hidden in their vehicles around the area. I park. They spot me and follow to the front door. I explain to them that we’re looking for video disks, which they’re not to watch but to hand over to me for inspection, for camcorders and cell phones, for any device capable of shooting video, for bloodied protective gear and a taser.
I assign three detectives each the task of searching Linda’s Mustang and Filippov’s Dodge Journey. Filippov must have been watching us on a security camera and sprints out of the building in a rage. He’s not even wearing a coat. “Inspector, who the fuck do you think you are, and what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What does it look like? Search and seizure of your property.”
He screams. “This will not stand! Show me your search warrants!”
“In urgent cases,” I say, “any police officer can conduct a search without a search warrant. Additionally, I have verbal authorization from the national chief of police. Give me your car keys.”
He folds his arms, adamant. “Not a chance in hell.”
Jyri wasn’t joking, the detectives have brought crowbars with them. I borrow one and use it to snap open the Dodge’s passenger’s-side door, then take out my pocket knife and slash a seat open. The cushioning comes spilling out. “I can search your houses and vehicles like this if you want, or
I can be a little more gentle. You pick.”
He’s near to foaming at the mouth from fury, calls me a fucking cocksucker. I hold out my hand. He slams a key ring into my palm.
“Do these open all the locks to your vehicle, home and business?”
“Yes, you motherfucker, they do. I’ll get you for this.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Where do you expect Linda and me to go while you violate our property and privacy?”
I stamp my feet and rub my gloved hands together against the cold. “I couldn’t care less. Take a taxi somewhere. Have a couple drinks and something to eat. Enjoy yourselves.”
He’s already fringed white with snow, calms down, sees the wisdom of this. “When can we have our property returned to us?”
I shrug. “It depends. I’ve got a lot of manpower. Probably just a few hours.”
“And when will you release my wife’s body to me for burial?”
“When I’m done with it.”
He goes back into the building in a huff. I follow, repeat the routine with Linda, take her keys and both their cell phones.
The detectives begin to search in earnest, rip construction equipment from shelves, go through it, dump it on the floor.
Milo arrives. I usher him into Filippov’s office so we can speak in private, and we sit at his worktable.
Milo looks pissed off. “You’ve been hard to reach,” he says.
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been cutting me out of this investigation.”
“Now you’re back in.”
I fill Milo in on the deal Jyri offered me. I ask him formally, but, of course, I already know the answer. “Do you want to be part of a black-ops unit? Are you in?”
His smile is broad. The circles around his eyes gleam. He’s in heaven. “I want certain things,” he says.
“What?”
“An H amp;K machine gun. A. 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle. Flash-bang stun grenades.”
Milo, the boy and his toys. “We can arrange that. Maybe even get somebody to teach you how to use them.”
He ignores the slight. “Then I’m in.”
“First, we need to recover the evidence against Jyri.” I point at Filippov’s computer. “You can start there.”
“I’ve already been through the computers here. There’s no evidence in them.”
“How did you do that?”
“With intrusion software. I uploaded the hard drives to a server in Amsterdam and created mirrors of them. I found nothing related directly to Iisa Filippov’s murder, but turned up some financial discrepancies of some hundreds of thousands of euros. The money was deposited in numbered offshore accounts.”
I’m impressed. He’s the right guy for black-bag work. “Did you go through their home computers, too?”
“No, they weren’t booted up, and I couldn’t get it in. However, I got in touch with a staff member at Oulun Kotipalvelu, where Linda’s mother, Marjut, died. He’s worked there for twenty years and knew Marjut well. He checked the guest logs for me. Linda had visited semiregularly and saw her mother on September 9, 1998. Linda’s eighteenth birthday. After that, she never saw her mother again. Marjut had been in good spirits, but after Linda’s visit, went into a funk that lasted until she died. Marjut entered care in 1990, when Linda was ten. Linda was in foster care until she was sixteen, then disappeared and went off the radar until she came of age. Around the time that Marjut conceived Linda, she lived in Helsinki and worked as an escort or prostitute.”
“For Jonne Kultti?”
“Bingo. And Kultti offed himself three days after Linda visited Marjut, after which the mother and daughter were estranged. I think Marjut wrote to Kultti.”
“And the contents of the letter drove him to suicide. A viable theory.”
Milo lights one of his tough-guy cigarettes. “I also took your advice and Web-searched Bettie Page. A good call. It turned up some interesting stuff.”
He pauses. I’m afraid he’s going to sidetrack again. And a child was born in Bethlehem. But he doesn’t.
Milo says, “Bettie Page was placed in an orphanage at age ten, much as Linda was placed in foster care at the same age. Bettie Page’s father sexually abused her after she left the orphanage. I think it’s possible that Marjut bore Kultti’s child. She never told him, but she told Linda, and Linda went to look for him. Maybe Linda was afraid of rejection and never told Kultti he was her father. Maybe she thought the only way of having a relationship with Kultti was to work for him, and she re-created herself as Bettie Page to the extent that she had sex with her own father. She told her mother, who, consumed by grief, wrote to Kultti and let him know his own daughter was sucking his cock. Then he went to pieces and shot himself.”
“That would make Iisa and Linda half sisters and explain their close resemblance,” I say.
“We would need to run a DNA test to find out.”
I stretch out in Filippov’s chair. This line of inquiry feels right to me. If Linda and Iisa were half sisters, it might explain motivations for the murder that we’re as yet unaware of. “That’s a tough one. With half siblings, it’s hard to determine parentage without the cooperation of the potential parents, and in this case, they’re all dead. It could be done, but might take weeks.”
“I wonder if Iisa knew Linda was her sister?” Milo asks.
Then the lightning bolt hits me and I sit up straight. “I wonder if the dead woman in Rein Saar’s bed was really Iisa, or if it was Linda?”
The idea jars us both, and we ponder it in silence for a while. “Let’s split this team up,” I say, “and search all three places at once. We leave some guys here, you take some to Filippov’s house, and I take some to Linda’s, since I haven’t been there before. Maybe we can find some documentation to substantiate all this.”
Milo and I finish up at Filippov Construction, go through their phones and all the video disks we run across. We find nothing and leave to search Linda’s and Filippov’s homes.
40
I take my Saab, four detectives ride in a separate vehicle, and we drive through blizzard conditions back to Helsinki and Linda’s apartment. It’s a dumpy little one-bedroom, but neat and clean. Vintage Bettie Page posters line the walls.
The other detectives know their business. They run long needles through sofas and mattresses, looking for obstructions sewn into them. They tap the walls, looking for plastered-over safes or hidey-holes. They turn appliances over and look inside.
In her bedroom, I go through Linda’s things. I find a small trunk brimming with Bettie Page memorabilia, magazines and movies. I open another box and the rich smell of oiled leather hits me. It’s filled with fetish accoutrements: high-heeled shoes and boots, whips, leather costumes and restraints, ropes and gags.
I boot up her computer. It has a Bettie Page screensaver. It’s chock-full of videos, including what I take to be a complete collection of Bettie Page footage. I take a quick look and find scenarios of abduction, spanking, domination, restraints, slave training with bondage. Page sometimes played a stern dominatrix and sometimes a helpless victim, bound hand and foot.
Then I find Linda’s personal files. Videos she made of herself, reenactments of the Bettie Page movies. Videos of her and Filippov and their sexual role-playing. They have only a few variations on the themes I saw in the video Milo took from here. I see nothing from Rein Saar’s apartment, no images of Jyri or his political cronies, nothing to connect them to the murder. Just personal stuff. I’ll take the computer into evidence, but I’m sure they’ve covered their digital tracks.
I go through Linda’s clothes. She dresses well. I open her underwear drawer. She likes expensive, fetish-variety lingerie. Underneath it, I find her famous big, soft, green double-donged vibrating dildo. I picture her sticking it up Jyri’s ass and laugh, then bag it for DNA testing.
By Linda’s bed, in a desk drawer, I find a family album. It contains pictures of Linda and her mother from Linda’s infancy t
hrough the time of her mother’s death. Their correspondence, beginning at the time Marjut entered the mental rest home, is also here, all in original envelopes. The letters from her mother are touching, always assuring Linda that she’s getting better and will be out before long. Then she and Linda will build a new and better life. The final two letters are dated September 9, 1998, Linda’s eighteenth birthday and the last time she saw her mother alive. Both letters are short.
The one to Linda reads: “I love you dear, but what you’ve done is more than I can stand. Please stop. Love, Mom.”
The one to Kultti reads: “You may not remember me, but you told me you loved me once, when I was young. I bore you a daughter named Linda. You’re raping her, your own child. Please stop. Love, Marjut.”
I wonder if Linda saw this letter before her father blew his brains out, or after.
My phone rings. “Vaara.”
“This is Stefan Larsson, the owner of the Silver Dollar.”
“How did you get my number?”
His tone says I’m a moron. “I called information.”
Stupid of me to have it listed. I make a mental note to have it removed from the phone company’s public registry. “What do you want?”
“You’re investigating the death of a patron on my premises. Now you have something else to investigate.”
“What might that be?”
“After two days in jail cells, punishments they didn’t deserve, my bouncers were cleared of responsibility and released. They came back to work. A man wearing a hood attacked them this evening. In one hand, he had a set of keys, a couple sticking out between each of his fingers, and used it to punch them in the face. The beating left terrible puncture wounds. In his other hand he held a box cutter, which he used to stab them repeatedly. It was attempted murder. My bouncers are hospitalized.”
“So what are you calling me for?”
“The attacker was a giant in a hooded sweatshirt. I know goddamned good and well it was Sulo Polvinen, but when the investigating officers went to his house, his parents provided him with an alibi and said he was home all evening watching TV with them. I demand that you do something about this.”
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