by Joanne Pence
She would discover what the police hadn’t. Aulis and his Finnish friends had lived here. Most were young men, and except for Mika, bachelors. She didn’t know any bachelors who didn’t go to neighborhood restaurants at least once in a while, and often to bars as well. The Noe Valley area was filled with friendly neighborhood establishments, and enough singles to make them interesting. The area hadn’t changed that much in the past thirty years, from all she’d heard.
She made a list of long-established nightspots and restaurants.
She and Connie began the evening at a listed bar, asking if the owner or anyone else there had lived in the neighborhood some thirty years earlier. No one had. They worked their way through other places, asking about customers, owners, and other establishments as they went. A few “old-timers” remembered some Finns in the neighborhood, but no one remembered their names or what happened to them. At The Golden Spike restaurant, the chatty owner suggested a nearby Swedish smorgasbord. No Finnish restaurants existed in the city, now or thirty years ago, or Angie would have gone there first.
The Swedish restaurant’s owner was active in the community, and the Lutheran church, and knew Aulis, but that was as far as it went.
Back to barhopping, they came across some people who’d been students back in the late sixties and who remembered a Finnish guy named Sam. All they remembered was that he had been killed—they thought by another Finn.
Angie doggedly dragged Connie to the one last restaurant and three last bars on her list, tearing her away from a number of gallant men who offered drinks and anything else they wanted.
“We’re so close,” Angie cried with frustration, shoving her piña colada aside. “But this just isn’t panning out. Let’s go home.”
“Good idea.” Connie stood, but was a bit wobbly on her stiletto heels. “I don’t even like the guys in this place. We could go back to that second bar, though. Did you notice the Polynesian-looking fellow who kept smiling at me? To die! Or, wait, was he at the third?”
“Forget it, Connie.” Angie looped her arm around Connie’s and the two of them tottered outside.
As they reached Angie’s car, Connie rubbed her stomach. “I don’t feel so good.”
“You aren’t going to be sick, are you?” Angie asked in alarm.
“I don’t think so. It must be just a stomach ache. From all that herring at the smorgasbord. I should never eat herring.”
“And everyone knows herring doesn’t mix with gin and tonic.”
“Oh, please!” Connie turned several shades of green.
A small grocery store was at the corner. “Let’s get you some Pepto-Bismol. It should help until you get home and lie down.”
The grocer took one look at Connie’s sickly pallor and tipsy state and pointed Angie in the direction of the medicines.
Connie leaned heavily against the counter, her shoulder against a bread rack. “We’re here trying to find anyone who knows Cecily,” she said, her words a little slurred. The grocer was a middle-aged Chinese man. He stared silently at Connie, clearly torn between wanting her gone before she squashed the bread, and human curiosity as to how long she could stand upright. “You don’t know Cecily, do you? It was a long time ago. No, you’re too young to remember her.”
“Did she live around here?” he asked.
Connie rubbed her forehead. “She sure did. Right up there on Liberty Street, according to my friend Angie. She was young and pretty—I mean Cecily, not Angie. Angie’s single. I was married once, though. A real shithead. My ex, not Cecily’s. She was nice. She had a couple of kids, and a Finnish friend. But then she left, or died, or something.”
“Oh, that Cecily,” the grocer said.
Angie walked up with the biggest bottle of Pepto-Bismol she could find. She couldn’t believe her ears. “You knew Cecily Turunen?” she asked, and shoved the bottle into Connie’s hands.
“I didn’t know her personally, but I knew who she was. My father used to own this store, and I worked here after school. She used to come in with her kids. She was a nice lady. Then it seems something or other happened, and they all disappeared—her, her husband, their friends. It was weird. Everyone talked about it for days.”
“Oh, my God!” Angie cried, scarcely able to believe her good fortune. “You did know her!”
Connie was fighting with the bottle top. “See, I told you it was a bad idea to go to all those bars and restaurants.”
“I didn’t know her,” the grocer said. “Not really. One of my customers was a good friend of hers. Why?”
“We could have simply gone grocery shopping,” Connie murmured, whacking the side of the cap on the counter. “But no-o-o-o-o.”
“I need to find out more about Cecily,” Angie said. “Lots more. Can you tell me how to reach that customer?”
He thought a moment while eyeballing Connie, who had finally gotten the bottle open and was now glugging pink stuff like it was water. He winced and said, “Well, I couldn’t do that, but if you want to leave your name and phone number, I’ll tell her about you. She’ll need to decide if she wants to contact you or not.”
Angie quickly wrote down the information and gave it to the grocer. “Thank you so much. Tell her it’s very, very important that I speak to her. It’ll just take a little while, and I’d be eternally grateful.”
“Sure thing. By the way, I think your friend is going to need more than Pepto-Bismol.”
Angie had forgotten all about Connie. She swiveled around to find her still standing, but her eyes were shut and her forehead rested on a flattened loaf of Wonder bread.
Chapter 22
On the northern, Mendocino coast, five miles past the fishing town of Gualala, Paavo turned Angie’s Ferrari onto a small paved road that snaked uphill into the coast range mountains. Ten minutes later, he reached a gravel-packed private road.
He and Angie were headed toward a home he’d visited a few times as a teenager with Aulis. The area had changed very little, and the route came back to mind with surprising ease.
A large wooden gate stood open in the barbed-wire fence, leading to a wood-framed house. Beyond it, the forest was thick and dark with pines. Joonas Mäki opened the front door and walked toward them.
He greeted Angie, then clutched Paavo’s arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek just as he used to when Paavo was a little boy. He was lanky, with a full head of bushy salt-and-pepper hair. His eyebrows were gray, the individual hairs thick, coarse, and corkscrewed, and, as Professor White had remembered, met in the center.
Paavo and Angie followed him into the house Aulis had helped him build. Paavo was about eight or nine years old at the time, and had enjoyed coming to the country to play while the men worked.
Before that, Joonas had also lived in San Francisco.
Memories flooded Paavo’s head as he entered the main room, with a potbellied stove in the corner and small double-hung windows. Originally the house was one big room with an outhouse in the back, but when Joonas married, a bathroom was among the new additions.
Joonas’s wife waited in the house for them. She’d prepared a hearty brunch and they caught up on old times and Aulis’s condition as they ate. Afterward, Angie gave Paavo a nod. She and Hannah took care of the cleanup while Paavo and Joonas put on heavy coats and went outdoors.
They walked to a bluff overlooking highway, beach, and ocean. In a mesmerizing rhythm, waves crashed onto tall boulders standing in the water, sending magnificent white plumes high into the air. The land was lonely and isolated and cold, but it was also incredibly beautiful. Both men took in the vista before them in a moment of mutual awe.
“Did you know that Finland was created by the Water Mother, Paavo?” Joonas’s voice smiled.
“No. I’ve not heard that.”
“Water and wood and winter. That’s what Finland is all about.” He seemed lost in thought.
After a respite, Paavo said, “I’ve learned a little about my parents, factual things, but not about their character
. Some of this present danger, I’ve come to suspect, goes back to them and their causes, and their deaths. Help me understand, Joonas.”
Joonas’s gaze fixed on Paavo, sorrowful and wistful. “You are so much like your father, sometimes it makes me think I am still a young man. How could I be this old when I look across the room, and there is Mika, just the way I remember him?”
A sudden anger gnawed at Paavo. “All these years you knew, and you kept it from me. Why?”
“I had to. Aulis made me promise.”
He tamped his ire. “Tell me about him.”
“There were four of us,” Joonas began, hands tucked into pockets, eyes fixed on the sea. “Myself, your father, Sami Vansha, who Americanized his name and called himself Sam Vanse, and a fourth man, Okko Heikkila. The four of us worked to help our people back in Finland.”
“You had family there?” Paavo asked.
“Okko and Sami did. Okko’s brother was imprisoned by the Soviets and died in the Gulag. Sami had family, too, but where Okko was quiet, Sami was a hothead. Any chance to cause trouble, Sami was right there. I imagine that’s what got him and Mika killed.”
He fell silent. Paavo waited.
“When I was in Finland, after the war, when the Soviets occupied the lands our government had ceded to them, I will never forget how my father kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes and canned and dried food near the door, ready to grab it and run if necessary. He had been a vocal opponent of the Soviets, and knew he could be arrested at any minute. Although it never happened, he lived only to age fifty-three. My mother said he died because all that happened to his country broke his heart.”
Paavo remained quiet as Joonas’s thoughts drifted to the past.
“She died not long after helping me get passage to the United States.”
“And Mika?” Paavo asked finally.
Joonas hesitated, and then said slowly, “After the Soviets finished fighting against the Germans, Mika and his parents lived in Soviet-occupied territory. Many people tried to escape the madness of those years, and were killed. Mika’s parents were among them.”
A chill stabbed through Paavo, and he hunched deeper into the thick fleece coat. He told himself it was the icy ocean wind.
“Mika was just a child,” Joonas said. “Other refugees fleeing the country, friends of his father, took him with them. He lived in England until he graduated from school, then came to the U.S. on a student visa. He was the only one in his family to make it to this country, although it had been the dream for all of them. That was one reason, I believe, that he was so passionately against the Soviet Union. He blamed it for his parents’ deaths.”
Paavo nodded silently. So his father had lost his own parents. At least he had known why. Paavo mentally gave a shake of the head. He was not here to judge or accuse, but to learn the truth. To find out as much as he could about the man who had been his father.
“I saw what an all-too-powerful government could do to the rights of individuals,” Joonas continued. “Even after the Soviets returned some of our land, Finland still lived under its shadow. That was why I joined with Mika and the others. That was why we worked together for our homeland, and its freedom.”
“Did Mika have any living relatives in Finland? Any here?”
Joonas sighed. “None that he knew of. He left the old country as a child alone. I expect you might have some distant cousins, but I don’t know who.”
For the second time in this visit, he was shaken. He hadn’t thought about having people related to him, not even when he had asked Joonas. He’d asked as a cop, seeking facts, but suddenly the thought of having cousins, however removed, was inexplicably welcome.
“I am sorry I don’t know more, Paavo.”
He stared out at the water before answering. “Don’t be. I never expected to learn who my father was, let alone his background or what he looked like.”
“He had your eyes. Very big, very blue. His hair was dark brown, almost black.” Joonas paused, then grinned with warm affection. “You have your father’s nature. He was always serious, very intense. He had a high idealism as well, one that remained unshaken. As time went on, things began to happen…dangerous things, and more and more dangerous people became drawn in, for reasons far different from Mika’s and the group’s original reasons.”
“Who were these people?”
“What can I say? They were in it for the money—money began to be a part of our work. I was not working with them at that point. I got out. I told Mika to do the same.”
“But he didn’t.”
They walked along the windy bluff awhile before Joonas answered. “He felt it was wrong to ignore the sorrows of people back home. Your mother tried to turn him around, but Sami…Sami was like a cancer, always eating at him, always reminding him of what had happened at home, and that he needed to take revenge on the Soviets for what they did to Finland, and to his family.”
Paavo sucked in his breath, finally reaching the point to ask the question he came here for. “Who killed them, Joonas?”
“Aulis never wanted you to know. He was afraid for you.”
“It’s time I learned,” Paavo said.
“We worked with Russian smugglers—they were criminals, and in time it became clear they belonged to the Organizatsiya. There’s nothing worse than them. Not the Italian Mafia, none of it. The only thing worse, maybe, was the old KGB. But they’re gone, and the Organizatsiya continues to this day.”
“Who are they?”
“These days we call them the Russian Mafia.”
Paavo was staggered. “They killed him? You’re sure?”
Joonas’s eyes softened, his voice low. “I understand your mother witnessed it.”
Paavo’s stomach clenched at the horror of it. “Tell me about my mother,” he said after a while.
“All I know is that she died. She loved you and your sister very much. That was the part that hurt the most, telling you she was no good, that she had abandoned you and your sister. But it was the only way Aulis believed you would not try to find her—the only way to keep you safe. If he told you she was dead, as you got older, you’d say where is her grave? Where is her death certificate? Her will? How did she die? He knew you might ask a million questions he had no answer for. So he told you your name was Smith, you were illegitimate, and that your mother had walked out. It was the kind of story you wouldn’t be inclined to pursue.”
He sucked in his breath. Aulis’s assumption was accurate. He said, “The police thought she faked her death.”
“Did she?” Joonas asked. “Or did the Organizatsiya? Or did she truly die there? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I was scared. I moved up here, bought this land.”
Paavo closed his eyes briefly, feeling a sudden sting behind his eyelids. Joonas, more than any document or FBI file, had made these people come alive for him. “I need to find out what happened back then.”
Joonas turned world-weary eyes on him. “Okko might know more—he worked with Mika and Sami and was much closer to all they did than I was. He can tell you more about those days. Let us go inside and call him. You two need to meet. He lives high in the Sierras.”
Joonas found the number and phoned, but an answering machine came on with a long beep, as if filled with messages. Joonas dialed Okko’s close friend and neighbor to ask if he had any idea when Okko would return. The neighbor said he didn’t know, but that Okko had left suddenly, and had been gone for over a week.
Chapter 23
“I don’t believe this,” Angie said as she and her cousin Richie sat by the window in a coffee shop in the town of Gideon. Four hours ago she hadn’t even known there was a town called Gideon halfway between Sacramento and Mount Shasta, and now that she’d seen it, all two blocks of it, she didn’t want to know it existed.
“Eat your banana split, but not too fast, we might be here awhile.” Richie adjusted the red bandanna on his neck. “This thing is too damn tight. How do cowboys wear them? Don’t
they have no Adam’s apples?”
Angie studied the street and tried not to laugh. Last night a message from Richie said he’d see her in the morning, that they were going to the country. Since she’d just returned from a journey to Mendocino with Paavo, traveling with her cousin was hardly appealing.
It became even less so when, shortly after Paavo left for work, she heard a knock and found Yosemite Sam in her doorway. Richie announced he wanted to fit in with the locals. Somehow, an overweight, middle-aged, olive-complexioned Italian in a butternut leather vest, blue and white striped Ralph Lauren shirt, red bandanna, starched and creased Calvin Klein denims, beige hand-tooled cowboy boots, and a silver rodeo belt buckle big and bright enough to signal distant planets was not her idea of how to fit in with anyone, anywhere, ever. She gave thanks he wasn’t also wearing a white ten-gallon hat and hip-hugging holster.
He swore he knew what he was doing. She felt positively conservative in her twill trousers, turtleneck sweater, boots, and new purple parka.
Things went from bad to worse when she walked out to the street.
A red Ford F350 one-ton long-bed truck with purple and yellow phantom flames, a silver grill guard, and monstrous off-road mud Super Swamper tires awaited them. He practically had to lift her into the extended cab’s passenger seat.
“What’s going on?” she’d asked, peering out the window to the sidewalk far below. She’d been on lower Ferris wheels.
“You’ll see,” he’d said with a grin, crawling into the driver’s seat. Then they were off. He spent the rest of the trip talking into his cell phone, making deals, buying and selling stocks, betting on horses….
From Gideon’s only restaurant, Linda’s Eats and Sweets, they had a clear view of the post office. Richie’s so-called real estate connections had tracked Eldridge Sawyer to “Edward Sanders” with a post office box in Gideon. It was up to Richie from that point. He began by mailing Sawyer a nine-by-twelve fluorescent pink envelope filled with information on discounted rifle and ammo supplies. He then called the Gideon post office and learned that mail became available around noon each day.