Helsinki White iv-3

by James Thompson

  This is true. I’ve met several former Finnish Legionnaires, and several more who tried but washed out in basic training. Only one in seven applicants makes the cut.

  “What interest does France have in Mexico?” Kate asked.

  Moreau smiled. I looked around the table. His calmness of mien suggested an uncommon gentleness, and it set people at ease, despite his satanic appearance. “France has interest in all things international. The American government requested French assistance in Mexico to help reconcile the violence caused by friction between the drug cartels. That assistance came in the form of me.”

  That was quite a teaser for a story, and we waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

  Sweetness waited until everyone had their fill of cake and then proceeded to eat the rest of it by himself. And then jammed nuuska into his lip. I sighed. I thought again that he was going to have to play Eliza Doolittle to my Henry Higgins if I was to make him presentable.

  Then Moreau said, “It is little understood that the drug trade must be maintained, but controlled and balanced. Were the narcotics industry to suddenly cease, the economies of many countries, the U.S. among them, would be destroyed. I left the Legion a few years ago, am now a policeman, a superintendent in the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence Action Division. I was helping to restore that balance.”

  He got up. “Which reminds me. I have brought a small gift for Kari.” He had brought a backpack with him and left it in the foyer. He got up, took something out of it, came back and placed a clear plastic bag filled with white powder on the table. “This is a half kilo of uncut Mexican heroin,” he said.

  Kate’s jaw dropped. The others looked on with interest.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “You have destroyed this balance I spoke of. Because of it, now people commit suicide and a crime wave is in progress. If you distribute this, it will restore the balance and repair the situation for a time.”

  “How did you get it into Finland?”

  “In a diplomatic pouch. I travel on a diplomatic passport and am not subject to search.”

  I shook my head. “How the fuck am I supposed to move that much heroin?”

  Sweetness cleared his throat. He had made several trips to the balcony and his hip flask must be near empty. “I wasn’t exactly unemployed before I came to work for you. Me and my brother sold marijuana. Not a lot, just some, so we could have at least a little money. We never sold hard drugs, but I know some neekerit who do. I could front it to them, an ounce at a time or something like that. It’s worth about a hundred thousand euros. If I gave it to them all at once, they would steal it and leave the country.”

  Kate flew mad. “First you steal drugs. Now you want to sell drugs. And”-she pointed at Sweetness-“don’t use language like that in my home.”

  He was mystified. “I’m sorry. What language?”

  I stepped in. “Kate, he meant nothing derogatory. Most Finns still say neekeri. It’s always been the word for black people, and it’s slowly changing, because the press and academics know how ugly it sounds and are now making substitutions for it, but they still haven’t even agreed upon what the right word should be. Until black people started coming here in the 1990s, Finns had almost no exposure to blacks and had attitudes something like Americans in the 1920s. When I was a kid, in the 1970s, my schoolbooks said neekerit were simple but happy. They liked to sing and dance. Sweetness meant no harm. And Moreau is right. We meant well, but we went too far and people got hurt.”

  She softened. “Let’s discuss it later.”

  “OK.”

  “As to selling the heroin,” I said, “that’s not going to happen. Presumably, if junkies have the money to buy heroin, they have the money for a train ticket to another city. They can buy it elsewhere.”

  “Does that mean you do not accept my gift?” Moreau asked.

  “No, I’ll keep it. I might find other uses for it.”

  He grinned. “Such as planting it and framing your enemies? Inspector, your waters run deep.”

  I said nothing.

  Milo jumped in. “I have more presents we could open.”

  Kate groaned. “Milo, I don’t want to have to see any more guns.”

  “Well, how about the presents for you and Anu, then?”

  That got her. Curiosity overcame her anger and she smiled. “All right, then. Adrien,” she asked, “what inspired you to get those striking tattoos?”

  His smile was warm. I saw that he liked Kate, and that she found him charming, heroin or not.

  “I have jumped from airplanes eighty-seven times. On my thirty-seventh jump, my parachute failed to open. I thought I was a dead man, but it unfurled at about four hundred feet from the ground. I hit the ground like a rock, but was unscathed. I feared it was an augury of things to come. I felt that I needed protection afterward, so I took the wings of Icarus. As long as I don’t fly too close to the sun, I am now safe.”

  As the others filed back into the living room, I asked him what he wanted for his heroin.

  “At the behest of the French government, my goals are to find the son, recover the money and discredit the Real Finns Party. Were they to take power, Finland might leave the EU and upset the balance of things. Share information with me. Take me along when you conduct interrogations as you prosecute your murder investigation. I want nothing more.”

  “Agreed,” I said, but felt certain that he did indeed want something more from me.

  He cocked his head, inquisitive. “What did you do with all the drugs you stole?”

  “I kept some for blackmail or unforeseen circumstances when I might need it. But we tossed most of it in Dumpsters.”

  He tut-tutted me. “Such a waste.”

  We took our places with the others again, and Kate was opening her gifts. She held up a pair of shoes. She giggled like a little girl. “Manolo Blahnik Nepala pumps,” she said. She slipped them on and they fit her perfectly, meaning they were tight and painful, as Manolos are meant to be. She looked at Milo. “Did Kari tell you my size?”

  Moreau said, “He has an IQ of one seventy-two and an advanced sense of spatial relations. He also knows your bra size and, if you smile, the length of your teeth to a fraction of a millimeter.”

  Milo turned red. Moreau had made his point. He knew things.

  Kate then opened a package with a Gucci ‘marrakech’ evening bag with woven leather trim and tassels, and finally a bottle of Clive Christian No.1 perfume. She was in heaven.

  “The bottle is handmade lead crystal with a thirty-three-carat diamond in the neck,” Milo said. “Its ingredients include Madagascar ylang ylang, vanilla, orris, natural gum resin, sandalwood and bergamot. It was weird. I went to boutiques to find this stuff and the salespeople all spoke Russian instead of Finnish. Russian tourists buy them here and Finns can’t afford them.”

  Kate brought Anu to see her gift: a huge Steiff teddy bear. She loved it, kept petting the soft brown fur and wouldn’t stop. Arvid had fallen asleep in my chair. Sweetness was also sleeping. A flask of kossu-Finnish vodka-and half a cake had done him in.

  “The last is for you,” Milo said, and handed me a long and heavy package. I ripped off the wrapping and gawked at it, astonished. It appealed to my childish like-or-don’t-like instinct, and I liked it very much. It was a cane, cudgel-thick. The handle was a massive lion’s head made from several ounces of gold. I had gone to so much work to become anonymous, and this would make me stand out in any crowd. I didn’t care. I loved it. I would carry it.

  “Let me show you how it works,” Milo said. “Gadget canes were once very popular. They were made with just about every device imaginable. Bang down on the floor with the tip. It spring-loads the lion’s mouth and it snaps open. The teeth are steel razors. Sharp contact, like swinging the mouth against something, makes it clamp shut and bite with about three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, the same as a Rottweiler’s jaws. Pressing the eyes-one is a ruby, the other is emerald-d
isengages the spring and the mouth lets go. Unscrew the shaft, and there’s a twenty-inch sword inside.”

  While he explained, Kate unbuttoned her blouse and, at a discreet angle to the rest of us, began breast-feeding Anu. While I admired the cane, I noticed Moreau admire my wife in a way I wasn’t fond of. He picked up on my disapproval.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “You have a most lovely family. Your wife calls to mind someone I once knew, and she too had an infant.”

  I didn’t know if I liked him or detested him, but was sure that if my emotions were as they once had been, my feelings toward him would be nothing in between.

  I opened the lion’s mouth and smacked the edge of the coffee table. Anu yelped. It bit so deep I couldn’t pull it free, had to depress the eyes to make it let go. Kate looked at me with disapproval. I had disturbed the child and damaged the table.

  My knee would be fully recovered soon. I would limp, but it would be almost unnoticeable. “Milo,” I said, “this is the most wonderful toy I’ve ever owned. Thank you. It makes me almost sad I won’t need it for long.”

  “You can always use it,” he answered. “A man doesn’t walk with a cane, he wears it.”

  Moreau turned to Milo. “I think everyone is tired, perhaps we should make our exit. Are there more weapons in the unopened packages?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they anything special?”

  Milo grinned. “Extra special.”

  “Do you know how to use them?”

  Milo laughed. “Not a fucking clue.”

  “I’m probably familiar with them. Why don’t we drop off the others and have a look at them together.”

  Kate was off in her own little world, admiring her gifts, expensive and precious things that, when she was younger, brought up poor, she could never have conceived of possessing. She looked up at us. “Is this what comes of being a criminal’s wife?” she asked.

  Moreau answered. “No. This is what comes of being the wife of a powerful man.”

  Milo had thrown a hell of a party. Once the others were out of the house, we got Anu to sleep and made love again.

  22

  Milo came over the next day to finish his last “synthesizable VHDL model of exact solutions for a three-dimensional hyperbolic positioning system.”

  We sat at the dining room table. Kate lay near us on the couch, reading a book. I continued wading through files, a policeman’s nightmare drudgery. I was firm in my belief now, though, that the identity of Lisbet Soderlund’s murderer was an open secret, and the way to solve this case was through the application of intimidation and pressure, or maybe through the application of biographical leverage-blackmail-until someone ratted out the killer.

  I viewed these files with a different eye now, deciding who to approach. I agreed with Moreau, and I was now looking for someone who not only was capable of decapitating a woman but was also an accomplished marksman. This narrowed down the field a great deal. The shooter likely had considerable military experience, well beyond that of a typical Finnish conscript.

  It occurred to me that Moreau would fill the bill as the murderer. I made some calls, checked with the French police. They refused to provide details, but he wasn’t in Finland at the time of Kaarina Saukko’s murder. However, he was a policeman on a diplomatic passport, listed as an attache at the French embassy.

  The disappearance of Antti Saukko troubled me. It was entirely possible, given his relationship with his family, that his kidnappers released him and he chose to simply change his identity and disappear. Pursuing a missing person, unless there is some reason to indicate that said missing person is the victim of a crime, is trampling on that individual’s rights. We have the entitlement to abandon our lives at will, hence the policy of no body, no murder. The fate of the three missing children of kidnapper Jussi Kosonen concerned me, but it wasn’t my case.

  My cane leaned against the table beside me. Milo nodded toward it. “You know, you could poison the teeth on that thing if you wanted to. Did you enjoy your party yesterday?”

  “Yeah, I really did. And I meant what I said. The cane you gave me is my favorite possession. Do we have any money left after your spending spree?”

  “Oodles. Robbing dope dealers is so lucrative, I’m not sure why more people like us don’t take up the occupation.”

  “I’m sure some do, but have short-lived careers. Your sawed-off was a good idea. If you load it with something non-lethal, it could get us out of jams if we got stuck, say, pulling a heist and a few guys walked in. Just don’t do anything weird, like load it with bee-hive rounds or rat-poisoned buckshot.”

  The dark circles under his eyes deepened. Always a sign of trouble. Milo was both obdurate and rambunctious, an often annoying, even dangerous combination. Now he wanted a fight. “Well, would it be fucking OK with you if I just fucking carry lethal ammo, should fucking necessity arise?”

  I tamed him with the unexpected and then switched gears to disengage his temper.

  “Sure. Did you spend much time with Moreau?”

  I noticed Kate’s eyes drift from her book to us.

  “We dropped off Arvid and Sweetness. I don’t know why he thinks he’s fooling anyone hiding his drinking.”

  Now we had Kate’s full attention. She hadn’t caught on to Sweetness’s drinking. It can be hard to tell someone is drunk if you never see them sober.

  Milo fired up his machine and fiddled with it for a minute. “Goddamn it. These work, but not well enough. They pick up the cell phones but can’t track enough at one time and the range is too short.”

  “What do you need?”

  Asking was a mistake. Prolix Milo kicked into gear. “I can’t get my hands on one because of its military-grade sales status, and I couldn’t fake my way through it, and even by our standards, they cost a fortune. A GSM A5.1 Real Time Cell Phone Interceptor. It’s undetectable, can handle twenty phones in quad band and four base stations.”

  It meant nothing to me and I wasn’t interested. “What did you do after you dropped off the others?”

  Milo doesn’t have a raconteur’s bone in his body. “We went to my place and looked at the weapons. A Remington 870 tactical shotgun to handle ballistic breaching lockbuster shotgun rounds. A Heckler amp; Koch UMP machine gun. It’s much like the MP5 but state-of-the-art and made from the latest in advanced polymers. And a.50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle. It’s like something out of Star Wars. The optical ranging system is an integrated electronic ballistic computer…”

  He went on. Kate hated this kind of rambling constantly disturbing her tranquillity. This was what she had complained about. It made her feel as if she lived in a police precinct instead of a home, and she had also sacrificed a great deal of privacy having the team ginning around like they lived here.

  Milo would have continued but I cut him off. “What do you think of Moreau?”

  “He’s a really cool guy. He told me he would teach me how to use the.50 Barrett. Why did you shoot down his idea about selling the heroin?”

  “It’s tricky and dangerous. We just keep ripping off dealers. Keep them beaten down.”

  Milo switched to Finnish, so Kate wouldn’t understand. “So long as they don’t start a drug war and we have to hide it by dissolving any more bodies in acid. That really skeeved me out.”

  But Kate did understand. She set Anu on a cushion, turned around, rested her folded arms on the back of the sofa and her head on her arms. “Pardon me. What was that again? Something about bodies and acid.”

  I explained to her what had happened. That one gangster killed another and we had to cover it up, or gangsters would start gunning each other down in the streets, Helsinki Homicide would get involved and inevitably would trail the murders and the reasons behind them back to us.

  “We really had no choice,” I said.

  Since the beginning of the Cold War, because of its geographic location, Helsinki has been awash in spies. Out of survival instinct, these spies had made an unspoken agr
eement many years ago, early in the Cold War. Helsinki would be holy ground, a sacred city to which secret warriors could travel without fear. Even after the Cold War, Helsinki remained a city in which both its inhabitants and fringe dwellers existed in relative safety. I didn’t want to be responsible for destroying that tradition.

  “Apparently,” Kate said, “I’ve been kept in the dark about some details, but it’s gone something like this. You’ve committed a number of thefts, maybe dozens, I don’t know. But because you didn’t know what you were doing, you stole too much, and a lot of people have died because of it. You incited someone to murder, and you left the body to dissolve in a vat of acid. Am I correct here?”

  “Yes.”

  Milo was already putting his boots on, making his escape. He needn’t have. She wouldn’t be angry at him. I gave the orders. I was her husband. And he had given her, among other things, a two-thousand-euro bottle of perfume yesterday, as an act of friendship and to make up for her inconvenience. I was alone on the gallows. He shut the door behind him with a soft click.

  “This isn’t my home,” Kate said, “it’s a gangster hangout. Has it occurred to you that I might like to have people over, like Aino, friends from the hotel, but I can’t because Milo might slip and mention who’s been killed or body dumped? I don’t even know where Anu and I fit in your life. You’ve changed. You’re colder, more distant. I don’t know if it’s because of your job or your surgery or both.”

  I sat down in my armchair and considered which truths to tell her and which not to. I didn’t even know what the truth was. I still couldn’t tell her that I was nearly without emotion and felt little or nothing for her or our child.

  “I’m disillusioned,” I said. “I was misled, turned into Jyri’s cat’s-paw. I’m no more than a bagman and an enforcer for corrupt and criminal politicians. Sooner or later I’ll outlive my usefulness and they’ll find a way to dispose of me. I have to find a way to destroy them first. I’ll get money and passports. When the day comes, we’ll disappear.”