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 suppressed 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.
Yep. I try to think who I could trust to release the skank in the event of our deaths to create a tangible blackmail threat. Only one name comes to mind. Jari, my brother. I’ll write him a letter with the user name and password to get to the skank and elucidate.
“I can make that difficult for them,” I say. “I just need to have another little chat with Jyri Ivalo and explain the situation. And besides, they could have done that already. They want us alive until we give the ten million back.”
“Should we use it to bargain our way out of trouble, then give it back?”
“No. We’re in the kind of trouble no bargaining will cure. Not over the long haul.”
“Then what’s the plan?”
“Kate will be home soon.” I say it with confidence but offer a silent prayer that Milo can really make it happen. “I want this over before she arrives. And Loviise Tamm’s future is on a tight time frame as well. If it hasn’t happened already, odds are good that what they have in mind for her will psychologically and emotionally devastate her, probably for life.”
I say another silent prayer that she hasn’t been fed to the sharks yet and forced into prostitution. Girls in her position are broken in by being raped and beaten over and over until they just give up and do what they’re told. “We start the search for Loviise this evening.”
“It’s a big city. How?”
I’m suddenly exhausted again. “I’m going to take a nap. I’ll let you know when I wake up.” I wash the gop off the teeth in the lion’s head of my cane, oil them so they don’t rust, and lie down in bed.
Sleep doesn’t come. Images flicker through my mind like a slide show. A tear gas canister blowing out my window. Kate blowing Adrien Moreau in half with a sawed-off shotgun. The bodies of little children his accomplices left in shallow graves. Sweetness destroying the biker’s knee. The sound of it. He’ll never walk on it again. Instead, like me, he’ll drag his leg around for life. So much violence. I went into self-imposed isolation to avoid it. Or rather, after understanding just how volatile I’ve become, to avoid hurting others. My emotional state is fragile. I’m unpredictable. I don’t want to be. I want to move on from all this ugliness.
The past won’t let me be. I have to sleep. I tire easily and may be in for a long night of police work, or some facsimile of it. I dry-swallow a couple pills and wait for them to knock me out, but my mind keeps churning and turns, as it so often does, to Kate.
13
I roll out of bed at six p.m. I slept all day after sleeping fifteen hours last night. I tell myself it’s because I tire easily and we have a long night ahead of us, but I know damned well sleeping near round the clock is a sign of depression. Milo said I’m in “shock.” I don’t know, maybe I am. I don’t much care.
The girls are sitting side by side at the dining room table, somber, speaking sotto voce. Sweetness is sitting on the floor in front of the TV, playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. With our watchers incapacitated and the message sent, I think my apartment is safe, at least for
now.
Some burgers are in a pan on the stove. We have no bread in the house because Jenna and Sweetness are avoiding the dreaded carbohydrates that would turn them into slobbering fat monsters. I add some salt and eat two with my fingers. I ask Sweetness, “Ready to roll?”
He snaps off the TV and stands up. “Just let me get my stuff.”
Said stuff includes a bulletproof vest. It’s made of lightweight material, like a mesh T-shirt, with pouches that hold Kevlar inserts. It won’t stop a big-bore Magnum round, but is sufficient protection for the greater majority of gunshots, and is unobtrusive, hard to spot under a loose shirt. He puts a windbreaker overtop to provide sufficient pockets and hide his pistols and other necessities: twin .45 Colt 1911s in shoulder holsters that accommodate their silencers, a sap in his waistband, razor-edged knife, Taser and extra magazines for the Colt, and a second backup .45 Colt with a three-inch barrel in an ankle holster. Plus a small flashlight.
I’m carrying all the same gear, except that I only pack one full-sized Colt in a shoulder holster and the smaller backup. Since he’s ambidextrous, two benefit him, but not me. It’s a warm evening, I’m already sweating from the added clothing and weight. If we’re to find Loviise, we have to play to our strengths. I’m a gimp with a modicum of common sense. Sweetness is a physical powerhouse with little of it.
I see now that Milo rounds us out as a team. He possesses little common sense or physical prowess, but his intellect, IQ 172, stoned or not, allows leaps of thought that have moved cases forward in ways I wouldn’t have been able to without him. I wish the little bastard were here with us now. Without him, playing to our strengths means strong-arm work and intimidation, methods I hoped to get away from, effective as they may be.
I wish we could carry out this investigation in the proper way and use standard police work. Having experienced both, I prefer it to gangster-style tactics. But police protocol, although effective, is slow and painstaking. Leaving a swath of fear and dread behind us moves cases along at lightning speed.
Sweetness got the girls to pack while I slept and we all go out to the Jeep Wrangler. I install Anu’s car seat and belt her in. Sweetness opens the driver’s door.
“Nope,” I say.
“Nope what?”
“Nope, you can’t drive after drinking when Anu is in the car.”
His face turns red, embarrassed. “Keep your voice down. I don’t want Jenna to know.”
Like most juicers, he believes he’s boozing on the sly. “She already knows. Everybody knows. Give the car keys to Mirjami.”
He goes hangdog but says nothing and hands them to her.
She drives through both the main arteries and back streets of Helsinki for the better part of an hour, until I’m convinced we’re not being tailed, and we eventually take the girls to Hotel Cumulus, a ten-minute walk from my apartment, and see them inside.
Then I give the keys to Sweetness—I have no choice, my knee won’t allow me to drive—and actually, I trust him behind the wheel, or almost, but not enough to endanger my child. He’s the best drunk driver I’ve ever seen, better than most people sober. I’ve only seen him obviously drunk once. In quantities of a bottle a day of vodka or less, usually chased with beer, alcohol has no visible effect on him, and also, he has far and away the fastest reflexes I’ve ever witnessed on such a big man. He even dances well and with grace.
I tell him to swing by Milo’s place around the corner and we take the elevator up. I open the door of the tiny apartment. God, what a shithole. Piles of everything from dirty clothes to unread newspapers to filthy dishes cover every surface, except for his worktable, which is neat, orderly, even polished. His reloading kit and all the accessories—brass, lead, powder, some things I don’t recognize—are lined and stacked in rows with obsessive-compulsive precision.
Mounted on the wall behind the table is a long case that displays his war memorabilia, including the Hitler Youth dagger his mother stabbed his father with for philandering. The rest of the apartment is a borderline health hazard, but the display case hasn’t so much as a single fingerprint on it. No doubt about it, Milo is three bricks shy.
“Notice something missing?” Sweetness says.
I look around. “Yeah. Where the fuck is the gun cabinet?”
“Stolen,” Sweetness says.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. It’s cold and hard. The sheet and blanket hang to the floor. I pull them off to reveal a futon mattress on top of the gun cabinet, which lies on its back. I pull the mattress off and fling it aside. “I guess happiness really is a warm gun,” I say.
Sweetness yucks and shakes his head. “Fucking Milo,” he says.
I open it. Our armory is inside. It’s a big one. We’re ready for war. I ask Sweetness, “What do you think we need?”
He scratches his head, adjusts his crotch. “We’re looking for a girl that’s probably locked up. Maybe she’s locked up with other girls, and maybe they have a minder with them to keep them in line. Maybe even a few men. We need stuff to B&E them and then take on a few guys if we have to.”
I see it the same way. I grab the Remington 870 tactical shotgun and load it with ceramic ballistic breaching rounds, to blow the locks off doors. Then we both take a couple flash-bang stun grenades each, to make a grand entrance if need be. I pocket a .357 snub-nosed that we lifted from a drug dealer a while back, in case we need a throw-down gun to manufacture a frame job. And last, I grab Milo’s pride and joy, a 10-gauge Colt shotgun made around 1878. As an antique, it doesn’t even require registration. Sweetness is a crack shot with both hands. I can’t shoot for shit. Milo has ammo for the sawed-off on his reloading table. Every shell is labeled: rock salt, bird shot, triple-aught buck and flechettes—shot tipped with razors to cut people in half. Kate shot Adrien Moreau with flechettes.
When Milo first bought all this, a mini-armory, I thought it ridiculous. His wisdom stands proven. I load the sawed-off with rock salt and pocket some extra rounds. It will tear the hide off people without killing them.
I hunt around his kitchenette, find an unopened package of big plastic garbage bags—thinking he might actually use them when he bought them was a glaring case of self-denial—and put the shotguns in them so we can carry them around without scaring the citizenry. Good enough. We lock up behind us and go in search of Loviise Tamm.
14
Back in the Wrangler, Sweetness asks, “Where to first?”
Helsinki is crawling with prostitutes, awash in them. Girls working their way through the university, seasoned pros, sex slaves, and everything in between. Some even advertise, and many are entrepreneurs working out of their apartments. Why not? Pimping is a serious matter, but as long as prostitution isn’t organized, there’s no law against it. There are several Thai massage parlors on Vaasankatu, near my apartment. I get a kick out of watching middle-aged men glancing around, looking furtive, trying to ensure they enter the parlors unnoticed while inadvertently doing everything possible to attract attention, before they enter and seek a massage with a happy ending.
It makes the most sense to start our search for Loviise with the most popular whore bars. There aren’t many, only a couple upscale ones at present, and I’m guessing their owners know far more about prostitution in Helsinki—who does what, who offers what services, who pimps, who the organized-crime figures are behind the slave trade—than the police who monitor such things.
Problems present themselves. There are no good reasons for the staff or prostitutes in the clubs to share such information with us, but many reasons why they shouldn’t. And when we announce we’re looking for a particular girl, after we leave, the phone lines will crackle red hot as everyone in the trade is informed, then whoever has Loviise will make her and themselves scarce until we give up and go away. I guess I just have to figure it out as we go along.
“Let’s go downtown and start with Whitechapel,” I say.
<
br /> It’s fashionable among a certain set, expensive and—most relevant to our task—high exposure, so there’s not a chance of finding Loviise there. But it’s the city’s most popular whore bar, and as such, I hope the best source for information. The name Whitechapel comes from the district in London where Jack the Ripper murdered prostitutes. Quaint.
We’re silent for a while on the ride over. I know Sweetness, something is on his mind. He works up to it and spits it out. “Jenna knows I still drink?”
“You both drink like pigs in the evening, so she doesn’t have much room to criticize, but you’re asking me if she knows you drink all day long. The answer is yes.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Not a word. We all know, but we don’t talk about it. You’re an alcoholic and you can’t hide it. Why is it you alkies always think your breath doesn’t stink like booze if you drink vodka? I promise you, it does. You were a hard drinker and she fell in love with you anyway. In fact, I think she’s glad you drink. It gives her an excuse to booze along with you at night and call it ‘partying.’ But you promised to stop drinking during the day and to quit carrying that flask. You lied to her. My guess is that disappoints and disturbs her.”
He doesn’t comment, just drives in silence. The truth wounded him.
My phone is on quiet but vibrates. It’s Milo. My heart thuds. Anxiety about Kate renews itself. “Where are you?” I ask.
It’s a video call. His face looks haggard and grim. He whispers. “I’m on the front porch of the address you gave me, crouched down beneath the window beside the front door. You can look in for yourself.” He holds the phone up and angles it so I can see through a gap in sheer tattered curtains. I see a distorted image of Kate and her brother. They’re sitting together on a couch that’s falling apart. I see a bottle of booze and two half-empty glasses on the coffee table in front of them.
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