Helsinki Blood

by James Thompson

  “You’re quite thorough,” I say.

  “The amount you paid us buys thoroughness. Lastly, each and every house of prostitution was searched. The girl you’re looking for isn’t in any of them. I’m sorry to have failed you. No effort was spared.”

  I believe him. “You did a good job,” I say. “I may call upon you again. Or, if you want or need something, feel free to call me.”

  “Our business is concluded,” he says, and stands, signaling that we’re dismissed.

  • • •

  IT SEEMS like a long time since Milo and I pulled a B&E together, although it was really only two or three months ago. We haven’t lost the knack. We’re in the Russian trade delegation office by six thirty a.m. and out by seven. All my hopes are fulfilled. A cardboard box in the supply room is full of passports in no order, just tossed into it helter-skelter as girls were taken in. We’ll take them with us when we leave.

  They bother to neither shut down nor password-protect the one computer in the office, I assume because the protection of diplomatic immunity has made the Russians involved lax and careless. It contains names, addresses and phone numbers. I thought a hundred seventy-nine women and only seventeen apartments didn’t match up. The records in Sasha’s iPad were incomplete because he was only privy to information about their prostitutes in Helsinki, whereas this is a regional office. The network extends to Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and other cities as well.

  The names of which people are responsible for which women are in a list, by country. The Finns who work for the organized-crime group in the Russian diplomatic corps are also listed, along with bookkeeping records of their pay. I ask Milo to do a search and look for any information about Loviise. I hope that they have a record of her, including her current location. If so, we could go and get her right now. There’s nothing, my hopes are dashed. Milo just boots it down and takes it with us, power cord and all. The ring can be rolled up at any time now. I’m just waiting on Milo’s assassination Go Day to release the info.

  The discord between Milo and me is gone, or at least gone to the wayside for the time being. The productive morning pleased him as much as it did me. I spend most of the day reading Ed McBain. Kate bought an e-reader so she can download books. Rather than wait weeks and pay exorbitant shipping rates from the U.S. or UK to Finland, she can have them within minutes at a lower cost. She spends most of the day on the davenport, reading a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. She tells me she doesn’t want me to accompany her to therapy today. She feels good, confident enough to travel alone.

  This trip really has become a summer vacation, and when I put the coming massacre out of my mind, I feel relaxed and peaceful. It’s not hard to do. I can’t bring myself to care about the coming demise of the bastards who set out to hurt my family. My main role, it’s becoming clear, is that of chief cook and bottle washer. I look at cookbooks, plan a braised rabbit for the evening meal. That night, Kate and I make tentative, rather bungling love, like a couple of shy and inexperienced teenagers.

  Quiet living, sans a houseful of cops and talk of crime, death and mayhem, brings us together. We quickly develop a pleasant daily routine. I’m wealthy. I start to consider retiring, think about spending my life raising my daughter, start thinking I would like a second child. This is one of the few times in my life that I’ve felt a sense of harmony.

  Then Tuesday comes and blots all this out. Kate leaves for therapy. I play with Anu, and Milo knocks on the door. I won’t have to take a bus to Helsinki to murder Jan Pitkänen. Judging by the GPS tracker on his car, he’s coming to me.

  I ask a stupid question. “How did he find us?”

  “Duh. You’re on record as owning this house, and my boat has a GPS. He is a fucking secret police detective, after all.”

  Maybe this was inevitable. It makes me especially angry because I have no choice but to put Anu to bed and leave her alone. I’ve never done that before. I change clothes fast. Put on my bulletproof vest and a shirt and jacket over it. Milo’s not looking. I slip the quarter of a million I borrowed from Sweetness into one jacket pocket in case there’s the slightest chance to end this without blood, and my silenced Colt into a holster under it. Milo can follow Pitkänen’s car with his iPad. It’s synced with his computer.

  We have no vehicle, so we just walk, at a snail’s pace because it’s all I can do, in his general direction. His car comes toward us, he recognizes us, and slows from a distance, I suppose, having lost his element of surprise, considering his best course of action. He pulls up beside us. “Meet me in the cathedral,” he says.

  Great. The oldest parts of the cathedral—a small church for such a lofty description, it holds about seven hundred and fifty people—dates from the 1300s. It’s been at least partially destroyed several times over, the latest being in 2006, when the roof was burned, an act of arson. Still, most of it as it exists is hundreds of years old, and it’s a beautiful place, a place where one can feel the presence of God, and we’re about to desecrate it.

  We see his parked car. He got there well ahead of us. It’s either stake out his car and wait, which isn’t an option, because I have an untended infant at home, or walk in the front doors and see what happens. A church is supposed to be a place of refuge. I hope he chose it for that reason.

  We step in and the doors close behind us. The church is empty except for us. I hear clatter clatter clatter, and see Milo fall. I hear the same sound three more times and feel like Mike Tyson hit me with a combo to the chest, but I stay upright. Pitkänen took a place in a pew about thirty paces into the church and on the left for protection, and with a silenced pistol, shot us both as we walked in. If we hadn’t worn bulletproof vests, we’d both be dead now.

  “Goddamn it,” I say, “this is the house of God. Can’t we kill each other outside?”

  “That,” he says, “is exactly why we’re here.”

  I say, “Sorry about a few scars on your face. I sympathize, have some of my own. And it’s always a damned shame when your wife can’t get along with your girlfriend. But this is fucking mental.”

  He answers. “I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, he would not have sent a scourge like me upon you.”

  I get it. He’s so crazy that he makes Milo seem levelheaded and lucid.

  Also, it’s evident that he’s a crack shot. I see his head disappear as he ducks down. I motion for Milo to go to the left, and I walk down the center aisle.

  Pitkänen pops his head up, and I fire. The shot goes high and wild and thunks into a pew far beyond him. But it makes him keep his head down, and he’s trapped between Milo and me. I see Milo fire and hear his slide clatter. He stays low and quiet, so I guess he missed but at least kept Pitkänen trapped in place. These silenced weapons make me feel like we’re in a silent movie. I’m Tom Mix, here I come. I get to the row he’s hiding in. He shoots me in the heart twice more. I see the slide of his pistol is all the way back, so the gun is empty. He has to stop to reload. I don’t even try to shoot him. My pistol pointed at him disconcerts him and slows him down. I hop toward him on my good leg and throw myself on top of him instead.

  He struggles, but I’m bigger and stronger than he is. I pin him down and reach under his shirt. He’s also wearing a bulletproof vest. I pull it up and jam the muzzle of my Colt up and under it, until I feel the underside of his rib cage. I fire four times through his vital organs. He goes slack. Dead-fish eyes stare at me.

  I grab my cane, and use it and the pew to push myself up. I call out. “Milo, you alive?”

  I can’t see him. He’s still on the floor. “Yeah, it just hurts like a motherfucker.”

  “Well, get up and come over here.”

  He does it, weaving and staggering.

  “Would you go through his pockets and find his car keys? We’ve got to get him out of here, and I have to go home. Anu is there by herself. Kate wil
l shit a brick if she gets home before me.”

  It’s the long way out, but the cathedral has a small and much less noticeable side door. I feel a sense of the ridiculous as the two of us, both handicapped, and having just taken the equivalent of a vicious beating, grunt, groan and swear as we drag him away. There’s no damage to the church, except for some slugs buried in wooden pews and spent brass that will create a legendary mystery, and Pitkänen leaves no blood trail as we drag him away.

  We’re lucky. Pitkänen is just an average-sized man. And even luckier because Milo isn’t strong enough to heft him up with one arm and dump him in the trunk of his own car, but I am. So we drive away and park not too far from my house.

  I tell Milo he doesn’t have to explain his disappearance to his wife, but I do, so he’s in charge of body disposal. I make it home fifteen minutes before Kate. By that time, I’m so stiff I can barely move. I say I took Anu out to Milo’s boat. We were getting off and he was about to hand her to me, but I fell and hit my chest hard on an upright support beam. She asks to look at it. The left side of my chest is black and blue and swollen. She asks if I need an X-ray. I say no. Finnish style, she blows on it to make it better, instead of kissing it like an American. She’s becoming more of a Finn every day.

  40

  Kate and I pass the week in quiet solitude. I don’t want to touch a gun right now. I tell Kate I’m tired of fishing and sleep late with her in the mornings. We read, watch movies, eat well. There is no talk of the past or future. We live squarely in the present.

  On Friday, July 22, we watch the evening news. In Norway, a man named Anders Behring Breivik has gone on a politically motivated killing rampage. About three thirty in the afternoon, he detonated a bomb in Oslo, destroying or damaging government buildings. From there, he went to the island of Utøya, where a gathering of the Workers’ Youth League, affiliated with the Labor Party, was taking place. He went on a shooting spree. The body count is uncertain, but he killed between sixty and eighty people, mostly teenagers.

  An hour and a half before embarking on mass murder, he released his manifesto via the Internet, well over a thousand pages, to hundreds if not thousands of e-mail addresses, titled A European Declaration of Independence. It explains his political views. Among many other beliefs, he calls for white nationalism and for the deportation or annihilation of Muslims in the Western nations, to preserve European Christendom. He wants to launch a counter-jihad in the spirit of the Knights Templar, and even claims to belong to a neo-Templar organization, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, an anti-jihad organization sworn to fight Islam.

  Most interesting, from the perspective of our agenda, is that he cites the writings of Roope Malinen as having influenced his own writing and thinking.

  There’s footage from the destruction of buildings. Several people died in the blast. Some people on Utøya recorded the attack with cell phones and video cameras. Some clips make the news. We watch children being gunned down and dying. It’s heartbreaking. Kate cries. I can barely watch it myself.

  Milo calls and asks me to come over to his boat. I tell Kate he needs something done that requires a person with two working hands. I give her a hug and kiss good-bye, and suggest she turn off the television and watch no more of this madness. She doesn’t.

  Milo has a bottle of kossu and beers set out for us, in a cabin with a TV. I think the media is playing them over and over, but he’s recorded them. He pours shots. “Tomorrow is Go Day,” he says. “You were right—Malinen posted his itinerary in his blog. He’s going to his summer cottage to write his magnum opus, something to do with a cultural justification of misanthropy.”

  “You know,” I say, “once you let that first bullet fly, there’s no calling it back.”

  He nods. “I know. Malinen acting tomorrow in sympathy with Breivik will seal the deal. The guns, the video, the manifesto. No one will look further than him. We’ll walk away scot-free.”

  I agree. “Let’s drink to your success,” I say. We pour them down our necks and light cigarettes.

  “If you hadn’t tackled him, Pitkänen would have killed us both,” he says.

  “Yeah, he would have.”

  Milo pours us another. “Thanks for that.”

  Brothers in blood, brothers in arms. “What did you do with him?” I ask.

  “Drove him out to the countryside, packed his mouth with Semtex to get rid of dental records, then duct-taped his hands to his face to blow off his fingers, the point of course being to destroy his prints. And then, well, you can imagine the result. I walked about ten kilometers through woods until I came to a road with a bus stop, so no one would recall me being in the vicinity.”

  With practice, we’ve become quite good criminals.

  He points at a cardboard box, taped up, addressed and ready for mailing. “You thought releasing the info on prostitution would take attention away from us. It’s too late in the day and a Friday. It has to wait until Monday. I can mail these and plaster all our related documentation on the Internet then. Also, I can fly all the sex- and murder-related recordings of the chief and the minister at the same time.”

  “Check with me first. The situation has changed. After today, you don’t need anything to deflect attention from you. And the bad guys don’t have a chance to make any moves before the doors are busted in, and there will be no confusion about who is who. The prostitution ring and murder investigations will drain police manpower and create a media circus. Generate a lot of confusion. Let’s choose our moment carefully.”

  “You’d better go,” Milo says. “I have to make some changes to the manifesto. Skim through Breivik’s, then make some changes to mine. Claim that Breivik and Malinen were in contact and belonged to the same neo-Templar organization. Little stuff like that.”

  I stand, and we share a brotherly hug. “You’ll make it happen,” I say.

  He smiles. “From your mouth to God’s ear.”

  41

  I wake up, feel immediate fear and trepidation. I force myself to put those things away and ask Kate if she’d like to go out for the day. Maybe antiquing. I don’t want to stay in the house. The temptation to stay glued to the television and watch events unfold will be too great.

  She agrees. She loves the Mercedes SL we leased, and she finds any excuse to drive it a good idea. We go to a few places, make frequent stops to rest my leg and fortify myself with beer. People around us talk. We hear snippets of conversation about a bomb and disaster. Then, in early evening, I suggest we dine out. We make it home just before the ten o’clock news, and finally, I give myself permission to learn the aftermath of today.

  Everything was recorded on security camera tapes. Veikko Saukko’s head exploded like a melon slammed against an invisible wall. The chief and the minister got out of their golf cart near the green on the ninth hole. They disappeared into molecules. Where once was a golf cart, there was only a smoking pit. Newspeople quote Malinen’s manifesto. Those on the scene at his summer cottage aren’t allowed inside, but say police have informed them that Malinen has committed gun suicide, placed a .50 caliber Barrett rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger with his toe. They don’t say it, but this means his corpse is headless.

  There is no talk of conspiracy or frame-up, only conjecture about why a prominent figure, both a member of parliament and unofficial leader of hate groups, would commit such an act. They show clips of him speaking in public in which he appears unbalanced. Psychologist consultants put their two cents in. I don’t have to watch long to know that Milo and Sweetness will walk away from this, that we’re all now free, that we and our families are safe.

  I thought I might feel remorse because of this drastic and murderous act, but I feel only relief. I feel a sudden urge to make love to my wife.

  • • •

  ON TUESDAY, the shit hits the fan once again. Passports of hordes of women forced into the human slave
trade are delivered to the police. Addresses in Finland and abroad accompany them. After orders from me, Milo releases videos of the chief and the minister with apparent murder victims on the Internet. Apartments used as houses of prostitution, under the auspices of Russian diplomats, are raided. Dozens of arrests are made. It’s a good day.

  I receive a call from the prime minister. “Would it be possible for you to visit me here in my office today?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry to decline, but I’m in Porvoo and unable to drive. The bumpy bus ride is hard on my injured knee. I would prefer not to.”

  I hear the agitation in his voice. “Then may I visit you in Porvoo?”

  No way I can get out of that one. “I would be honored.”

  He arrives an hour later, exchanges pleasantries with Kate. I pour us old and rare single-malt scotch from Arvid’s collection, and citing warmth and sunshine, we go out to the backyard for privacy.

  “I assume you’re responsible for blackening the reputations of the dead,” he says.

  I don’t try to deny it, just say nothing.

  “I’ve seen the dirt you collected, via Jaakko Pahkala.”

  “The interior minister mandated me with the task of collecting it,” I say. “How was it he put it? He had observed that people adroit at one task usually succeed at others. I succeeded.” I add, “Beating him was cruel and unnecessary.”

  “An interesting complaint, coming from you. Fuck Jaakko Pahkala. Osmo gave you the mandate of collecting dirt on my political rivals, not the hierarchy of the National Coalition Party.”

  “I’m compulsively thorough,” I say.

  He gets down to business. “What do you want?”