Helsinki Blood

by James Thompson

  A debt subcategory is labeled “fines.” It seems girls who commit infractions are financially punished. The totals are further split out by percentage, which I interpret as thirty percent for the girls and seventy for Sasha and whoever he worked for.

  I think it works like this: Girls are made to work as indentured servants, promised freedom when their debt is paid. But infractions result in fines, and I’m sure that coming close to paying off the debt, manufactured in the first place, results in more imaginary infractions and fines, so that the debts are never paid and freedom never given. An insidious and most efficient system.

  I do the math in my head. If I’ve interpreted the information correctly, Sasha and cohorts have seventeen apartments in Helsinki that each bring in about six thousand euros a month. This comes to about one and a quarter million euros annually. A hundred and seventy-nine girls don’t fit in seventeen apartments, so there must be more properties outside Helsinki, someone else’s responsibility, and the real total income is multiples of the amount on his spreadsheets.

  Even the finances behind the business revolt me. I don’t know what I’ll do, how I’ll punish people when I get to the bottom of all this, but it must be something severe enough to do justice for the misery and horror they’ve meted out to these women. I can’t turn to the government. Diplomats are above the law, and anyone involved and caught would simply be returned to Russia. I hear myself sigh. Try as I might, I’m just not built for pacifism.

  I call Natasha Polyanova. Her phone is disconnected. Sasha’s phone contacts include a “YM.” I hope this is the number of Yelena Merkulova, the ambassador’s wife. I call it. A woman answers. “Da.”

  My Russian is weak. This is too important for me to make a mistake and misinterpret something. I introduce myself in English. Hers is excellent. “How can I help you, Inspector?”

  “I’m looking into the death of Sasha Mikoyan. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may.”

  “I know no one by that name.”

  I take a stab at faking my way through it. “Early yesterday morning, you were with your lover, Sasha Mikoyan, in Hotel Kämp, your normal meeting place for trysts. This is documented by hotel security cameras. Natasha Polyanova called him and relayed a message to him that there was business he must attend to immediately. You followed him to an apartment in Punavuori and found him about to engage in a sex act with a disabled child. Understandably, you were shocked and enraged. Words were exchanged, and the nightmare ended with you stabbing him to death.”

  Her voice doesn’t waver. She offers no more reaction than she would to a waiter describing the evening specials. “What is it you wish from me?”

  “A chat. Nothing more. I’m unconcerned with Sasha Mikoyan or your . . . incident. He was involved in human trafficking. I would like to discuss it with you.”

  “Very well. My husband is in St. Petersburg. Meet me here at the embassy at three p.m.”

  “Unfortunately, some people in the embassy have negative feelings toward me. If I walk in, I might never come out again. Can we choose a more neutral location? I have no power to arrest you, or rather, to have you prosecuted, as you well know.”

  “Then meet me on the Esplanade, across the street from the coffee shop, near the fountain. The weather is supposed to be beautiful. Perhaps we’ll have a walk.” She rings off.

  “We need to have a talk,” Sweetness says.

  “Let’s see what happened to Kate’s brother first,” Milo says, “while Kate is asleep.”

  “Milo,” I say, “can’t the voyeur in you wait until you get home? I don’t even want to know what happened to him.”

  “Won’t take but a few minutes,” he says, and commandeers the computer’s mouse. I get up and go to my armchair, to give him the computer driver’s seat. Milo the voyeur. A guy who B&Es people’s homes, not to steal from them, but just to see how they live. If I don’t let him look, I won’t have his attention while we talk, because all he’ll think about is this. Our computers are networked, so he’s run John’s to his to mine.

  “I used a motion sensor to activate his webcam,” Milo says, “so the only things recorded are when he sits on his couch, where he likes to sit when he snorts drugs.”

  I pet Katt and ignore Milo while he plays.

  Sweetness watches with him. After a few minutes, I hear them start making noises and swearing under their breaths.

  “Ouch.”

  “Fuuuccckkk.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “God fucking damn.”

  “Fuuuuucccckkkkk.”

  Milo turns to me. “Jesus, that was enough to puke a dog off a gut wagon. Well, that’s one problem you won’t have to deal with again.”

  I suppose I have to see. I sent Milo there. Whatever happened is in part my responsibility. I push myself out of my chair and lean on the table to keep the pressure off my knee.

  Milo starts at the beginning. John lays two big bags of dope on the table, side by side. He pours some powder from each and cuts it into rails with a razor blade. He rolls up a twenty-dollar bill, snorts them and cuts two more. And then two more. And then two more. He sits straight up, eyes wild, like he’s plugged into an electrical outlet. I expect his hair to stand on end.

  Milo fast-forwards. John slumps forward. Blood shoots out of his nose and mouth. He jerks and twitches. The blood keeps gushing. He pulls a pillow up to his mouth and bites it, as if it will stanch his internal bleeding. He topples over, out of sight.

  I’m not sure if I should be angry or not. “Did you give him bad dope?” I ask.

  “Of course not. I stole it from his dealer. It’s the same shit he’s been using.”

  “So,” I say, “he did the coke, and then heroin. The coke ran through his system too quickly, and without it to hold him together, he ODed on heroin and his heart pretty much exploded.”

  “You are correct, sir.”

  “Erase it,” I say, “and forget it ever happened. My marriage would be over if Kate found out.”

  “He did it to himself,” Milo says. “He could have gone to rehab.”

  “I know,” I say, “but I never want to speak of it again.”

  Milo knew that John, given that amount of drugs, would OD. Milo killed him as surely as if he put a gun to his head. He set up the webcam so he could view his handiwork, but he did it for Kate and for me. Kate can never go to her brother to self-destruct again. I feel only gratitude.

  I sit back down with Katt for a few minutes until the mind movie of John dying fades. Suddenly, the pain is excruciating. My knee screams a shrill throb. I’ve done everything Jari told me not to when he shot it up with cortisone, and I’m paying the price. A half glass of water sits on the table beside me. I drop a couple codeine and Tylenol tabs in it and wait until they stop bubbling, then chase a couple tranquilizers with it.

  I take back the chair in front of the computer. I still have all the files from the kidnapping of Veikko Saukko’s son and daughter in it. Included in them is information concerning his employees. I look at Phillip Moore’s file. At the time of the kidnapping, going on two years ago, he had a boy, now age eleven, and a wife, although they were estranged.

  His son attended the International School of Helsinki. His wife taught English in a high school. Pictures of both of them are in the file. I bump the pics over to my cell phone, and find Moore’s number in the download from Saukko’s iPhone. I send him a message with the photos attached. The message is short. “Burned car. Girl dead. Blood debt.”

  Moore calls me straightaway. “What is the meaning of your message?” he asks.

  “We had that discussion before you got out of our Jeep. Knowledge equals collusion.”

  “I told you I’m a soldier and a bodyguard, not a murderer, and I disapprove of hurting women and children.”

  “I’m uninterested in what you approve or disap
prove of.”

  “I had no prior knowledge that your car would be firebombed.”

  “You’re a bad liar. Tell me the truth.”

  “I only know that his girlfriend had a miscarriage, and that the girl who was burned so badly is your subordinate’s cousin and your mistress.”

  I don’t bother to clarify the mistress comment. “Lie to me again,” I say, “and I’ll hang up and proceed to make good on my word.”

  “So you’re ready to take me on. It could prove fatal.”

  Sweetness sets a kossu on the table beside me. “I agree that people will die. Who they are remains an open question.”

  He hesitates, thinking. “In the interest of saving blood from being spilled, I’ll tell you what happened. In return, you give me a chance to get my family out of the country.”

  I sip the kossu. The pain in my knee is calming down. “I’ll agree to make that part of the arrangement. Tell me the story, and I’ll decide if I feel it fair to place other demands upon you.”

  “We have to come to an arrangement,” he says, “or I have to hunt all of you down to save my family and my own skin.”

  I say nothing.

  “I had nothing to do with firebombing that car, and I didn’t know about it until after the fact. It was Veikko’s idea, I believe after consulting with some Russians. NBI Captain Jan Pitkänen and the two Corsicans carried it out.”

  “Even if you didn’t learn about it until after it happened,” I say, “you failed to inform me. I told you that you work for me now. Kill the Corsicans.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “You’re lucky I’m not demanding that you kill Veikko Saukko, but especially after the kidnap-murder of his daughter and shooting death of his son, it would spark the biggest manhunt in Finnish history and you would be caught. Kill the Corsicans, and they’ll just have their bodies dumped and be forgotten.”

  “That’s a fucking lot to ask,” he says. “I’ll have to leave the country as well.”

  “Not my concern. No Corsicans, no Shit List until they can be replaced. It buys me time. Call me when it’s done.”

  “I’ll get you for this one day.”

  “Fine. I’ll see you then.”

  He rings off.

  “Damn,” Sweetness says. “You’re not fucking around, are you?”

  I close my eyes and think. It goes against my nature to threaten a man’s family, but my own comes first.

  Pitkänen. The minister of the interior’s axman. I spared Osmo Ahtiainen’s life and this is the thanks I get. Maybe he doesn’t know his man is waging war on me. I start to call him but think better of it. It would tip him that I have someone inside, and as head of the secret police, he could run phone records checks and know who it is in about two and a half minutes.

  Impressed and a little shocked, Milo asks, “Were you really going to go after Moore’s family?”

  “Of course not,” I say, “but my track record left him uncertain about it. I didn’t think he would take the risk, and I was right.”

  “We need to have a meeting,” Milo says.

  Milo has changed. Before, he had a needy side to him. A need to impress. A need for recognition. A need for approval. All that seems gone now, replaced by self-possession and confidence. Being shot and cut, maimed and disabled, has tempered his steel. Suffering made him grow up.

  25

  We check the bedrooms. All the girls, including Anu, are asleep. I put the sauna on to ensure our privacy. We sit in silence in the living room and think our private thoughts while it warms. Sweetness, of course, breaks out more alcohol. I unwrap my knee and inspect it. It’s more swollen than it should be, but not oozing pus, and considering the abuse I’ve put it through, I suppose it’s OK.

  We crack beers, hose ourselves down with the shower, and sit down in the sauna. Milo throws three dippers of water on the stones without asking. I’ve been to sauna with him before and he has the young-man, sauna-is-a-contest mentality. I was the same in my twenties. Now, in early middle age—and I’ve noticed most men get like me—I want to work up a good sweat without scalding myself. When it gets so hot that it burns the inside of my nose, I get out, shower in cold water, and cool down before going back in.

  “Take it easy on me,” I say. “And sauna etiquette dictates that I should sit in the corner and toss the water.”

  Milo is too thin. If he turned sideways and stuck his tongue out, he would look like a zipper. I once asked him if those were his legs or if he was riding a chicken, and it got under his skin. He’s by no means weak, though, just skinny and covered in ropy muscle.

  He ignores the rebuke and gets down to the meat of the situation. “Who lives and who dies?”

  The Gandhi pacifist life may not be working out for me, because of necessity, but I just don’t want to hurt anyone else. “We could begin by looking for a way out of this where nobody dies.”

  Sweetness turns his beer upside down with his thumb covering the top, to cool down the neck so he can drink out of it without burning himself. “Sorry, pomo, not possible. My baby died.”

  I don’t point out that it would have been aborted anyway. I suppose he doesn’t want to face it.

  “And besides,” he says, “we have so many enemies, how can we ever make peace with them all?”

  Milo ticks them off. “Veikko Saukko, and if Moore doesn’t kill them, the two Corsicans, the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, the Russian diplomats you’re trying to nail for human trafficking. Every fucking one of them is above the law and has people that do their dirty work for them.”

  I let out a hopeless sigh. “And don’t forget Roope Malinen.”

  He got his seat in parliament, but we hurt the extreme right and fucked up his hate agenda by exposing their drug pushing.

  “I have another goal as well,” I say. “Those spreadsheets are all about human trafficking. I want those girls helped, especially Loviise Tamm.”

  Milo and Sweetness nod agreement. “The men that brought her feel they own her now,” I say. “She needs protection.”

  “Her mother called me,” Sweetness says. “She made arrangements for them to live in the countryside where they can hide and Loviise will be forgotten.” He swills beer. “I know you want Kate to see Loviise to prove something to her. But, pomo, I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t make everything right between you and your wife. It won’t.”

  I built it up in my mind as if it would, but he’s right and I’m aware of it. “I think maybe we should all go stay at my house in Porvoo for a while. The windows are bulletproofed and the river runs in front of it, which is one less angle we can be easily attacked from. Plus, it’s bigger. This place is too small for five adults, a baby and a cat to live in.”

  I inherited the house from Arvid Lahtinen. His wife of fifty years was in agony from bone cancer. He helped her die. I helped him cover it up. We became close friends. He was like a grandfather to me and made me his heir. Then, I suppose, feeling he had nothing left to live for, alone at age ninety, he blew his own brains out.

  “I’m living here?” Milo asks.

  I throw water on the stones. Steam rises and hisses. “I think we all have to stay together. The easiest way to get us is to cut us out of the herd and take us down one at a time.”

  “Killing cops is a huge deal,” Milo says. “We take care of our own. If you and I or our families were killed, Helsinki Homicide would pursue it to the ends of the earth, never let the case die.”

  I finally understand what has happened. It comes as a revelation, and with it, I see the inevitable outcome. There are certain men in this world who refuse to succumb to pressure, who will see things to the end of the line no matter the cost. Such men are shunned by society as dangers, and feared by the powerful. Such men are begging to be killed.

  Milo, Sweetness and I are
three such men. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood. Each of us bound to the others by the knowledge that only we can count on ourselves not to kill one another. We did our jobs too well, observed no limits, not even legal boundaries, and served justice instead of our masters. This, not theft or crime or deaths, was the infraction for which we must be punished.

  I know where Milo’s thought train is headed. It’s insanity. Still, I need to let him articulate the plan he’s cooked up so I can punch holes in it. “You have an idea,” I say. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Give me a minute to think. Let’s cool off.”

  We step out of the sauna into the bathroom, take turns running cold water over ourselves, slurp long hits from the kossu bottle, and go back into the heat.

  “OK,” I say, “tell us.”

  “We massacre them all in one day.”

  This idea is so typical of Milo that I almost laugh. “Spell out who all is included in ‘them.’”

  “Veikko Saukko, the national chief of police, the minister of the interior, and Jan Pitkänen.”

  “I like it,” Sweetness says.

  Now the laughter bursts out of me. “You just talked about how the murder of a couple cops would spark an investigation that would never end without a prosecution,” I say. “You’re discussing a mass murder of historic proportion. We would never, ever, get away with it. Not to mention that it’s hard to justify murder at all, let alone such a bloodbath.”

  I toss more water on the stones, fill the room with a satisfying blast of steam.

  “Of course we wouldn’t,” Milo says. “Unless we had a fall guy.”

  “A fall guy?”

  “A lone gunman. With good luck, we could even end up investigating the murders ourselves.”