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 Pitkänen of SUPO, the minister of the interior’s hatchet man. Milo destroyed Pitkänen’s face, reduced it to pulp with the butt of his pistol. Milo beat him half to death, but it was Pitkänen’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 Pitkänen wouldn’t forget it. However, he wouldn’t be harassing me without the knowledge of the minister, Osmo Ahtiainen. Further, he almost certainly ordered Pitkänen to do so.
“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 Bo
ston 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 possible 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 Pitkänen 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 Maline
n 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.
Helsinki Blood Page 6