Fatal Headwind

by Leena Lehtolainen

  Everyone from the previous night except Jiri came to see us off. Riikka and Tapio had their arms tight around each other, and Anne Merivaara thanked us for the company, while Mikke silently untied the lines and handed over our gear.

  “About Harri,” Anne suddenly said once we had already boarded. “I’ve been so bothered . . . I heard you’re a police officer. They never told us what really happened. It wasn’t—I mean . . . he didn’t do it on purpose, did he?”

  “You didn’t find anything to indicate that, like maybe a letter?”

  Anne shook her head. “But what if there were something at Harri’s apartment?”

  “I’ll be back at work tomorrow. I’ll take a look then,” I said reassuringly.

  Anne pulled a business card out of her back pocket.

  “If you wouldn’t mind . . . I’m still having nightmares about it.”

  Mikke was getting anxious because the wind was pushing on our boat, moving it toward the rocks and making it difficult for him to use the aft line to prevent a collision. Antti started the motor, and as I waved to everyone, I felt relief as much as melancholy over the last day of my vacation. After clearing the harbor, we set course for Inkoo and normal life. In the stiff wind, Rödskär dwindled to a point on the horizon after only fifteen minutes of sailing.

  2

  “Do I look like a boss?” I asked Antti on Monday morning. I wore a cement-colored safari-style blazer and matching pants. This was accompanied by my best police-lieutenant ponytail and subdued makeup.

  “Kind of a sexy boss,” Antti said with a laugh. “Get going already. It’s obvious how much you want to get back to work!”

  The drive from our house to the station didn’t take long, and I was there ten minutes before the regular start of the workday. In practice I didn’t have set hours, because violent criminals didn’t either. The reforms that had been going on over the past few years in the Espoo Police Department were going to affect my work too. The department’s neighborhood policing program had been receiving a lot of praise, and the police trading cards that officers had been handing out at the schools were a hit. Our unit had made strides too, mostly in breaking down the old rigid hierarchies. So despite my position as the commanding lieutenant of the Violent Crime Unit, I would still be visiting crime scenes and interviewing suspects and witnesses.

  The hallway smelled as it always had—like dust and coffee that had been sitting in the pot too long. I saw Puupponen in the break room.

  “Howdy, ma’am, welcome back! Where do we start?”

  “At our normal Monday meeting at nine thirty,” I managed to get out before Puupponen squeezed me in his arms. Next in line for a hug was Koivu.

  “Let’s take the lieutenant to her office. Don’t you try to wriggle away now, Maria.”

  The quiet in the hallway had just been a ruse. The whole unit was assembled in my new office. There were coffee cups and a raspberry cake on the table in front of the couch and a huge bouquet of white and dark-red roses on the desk. My predecessor, Jyrki Taskinen, who had moved up to direct the entire Criminal Division, was smiling in the front row.

  “The department bought you a new office chair,” he said, indicating a handsome red swivel chair. “The old one was sized for me and Ström. Notice the adjustable footrest.”

  “Ha, ha. Because my feet don’t reach the floor, right?” I said, laughing, even though what I wanted to do was cry. Apparently they really did want me back at work.

  Except Ström. There was no sign of him that morning.

  “Ström is sick. Stomach bug,” said Lähde, Ström’s only friend in the unit.

  “Poor little Strömy has always had a weak stomach,” I replied, receiving a raucous chorus of laughter. Then they made me cut the cake so everyone could have a slice.

  “Ström will pick up his boxes when he gets back. We tried to air out the room too,” Puupponen said apologetically. “He smoked like a chimney in here, even though it’s against policy.”

  “The roses cover the smell nicely. Now go ahead and eat your cake so we can get to work,” I said, trying to make it sound like a command. Ström’s absence wasn’t a surprise. Our competition for this job had been bruising. According to Ström I was only chosen for my gender, so he appealed the decision. The appeal was denied, but when the position opened up in the middle of last October, only seven weeks after Iida’s birth, Ström was asked to fill in for me while I was on maternity leave. Everyone was sure he would refuse on principle, but he accepted, and now I was taking over a unit he had been leading for nearly a year.

  I had heard rumors about the state of things. Koivu, Puupponen, and Taskinen had visited occasionally, and the others called sometimes. Ström hadn’t been an easy boss. Anu Wang, whose family originally came from Vietnam, had received the worst of it, with Ström actually saying out loud that she had been hired to fill a quota. “That slant-eyed bitch” had just been too much for him, but according to everyone else, Anu had been doing fine. She was the first ethnic-minority woman to graduate from the police academy, so she was used to standing out from the crowd.

  Challenges aside, we could have used Ström in the morning meeting. He had been the lead investigator on all of the current cases and had the best grasp of the overall situation. So my first meeting back at work consisted of hearing disjointed bits of cases and making assignments according to notes Ström had left. Fortunately the open cases were all simple crimes: a drunken brawl between a group of friends in a pub and an assault outside a shopping center with a dozen witnesses watching. The previous week, Ström had completed the pretrial investigation of a stabbing at a beach over the Midsummer holiday, which had been the summer’s most complicated case.

  My first few days at work were mostly taken up with paper pushing and meetings, which were an exasperatingly common part of my new position. Ström came back to work on Wednesday and settled back into his old office, which he shared with Lähde. He didn’t stop in to say hi, so when his file boxes were still darkening the corner of my office at one that afternoon, I marched over to talk to him.

  Ström looked pale. His skin, usually ruddy with acne scars, hung pallid from his face, and his snuff-brown hair was mussed. His aviator sunglasses concealed his eyes, and a cigarette smoldered in his hand.

  “Howdy, Ström, good to see you’re feeling better. We should have a sit-down. There’s a ton we need to review. What’s your schedule like tomorrow?”

  “Who knows? Depends on whether someone gets killed tonight,” Ström said.

  “How about a long lunch tomorrow? At a real restaurant instead of the cafeteria. My treat,” I said, trying to sound friendly.

  Ström shook his head. “I have a meeting with the prosecutor on the beach-stabbing case at twelve. If you want a meeting, you’ll have to wait until Friday afternoon. Would three o’clock work?”

  Frigging Ström. He was doing this on purpose! He wanted to test whether I would still be willing to work crazy hours after having a baby. Just handling our most important business would take at least three hours, and Ström knew it.

  “Yeah, that works,” I said calmly. “You’re tied up with that fraud case over in White Collar, right?”

  “Yeah. Goddamn mess. But I don’t really want anything bigger right now. I’m ready for a break after having to babysit the boys and that slant-eyed chick all year. I’ve had to explain everything to her and Puupponen in single syllable words.”

  “Don’t you ever let me hear you call her ‘slant-eyed’ again!” I hissed before I realized that Ström had been trying to get me to lose my cool on purpose. That had been easy for him ever since we were in the academy together.

  Ström just snorted, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another.

  “Did you have anything else or can I get back to work?” he said, indicating his computer screen, which had already gone dark. I could have sworn he’d been playing Tetris before I came into his office.

  “Friday at three in my office,” I said pointedly
, emphasizing my right to the boss’s office and position. I wasn’t going to let Ström smoke there anymore, even though I knew he would become increasingly difficult as the level of nicotine in his blood fell.

  By Friday my stylish safari pants were dingy, so I decided to head to work in an old black sports coat and jeans. In the pocket of the pants, I felt something stiff. Anne Merivaara’s business card. I had completely forgotten my promise to call her about Harri.

  After my routine morning tasks, I pulled up the report on the investigation into Harri’s death. It was short and to the point. As Koivu had said last October, it had been a simple slip-and-fall accident. Nothing had turned up in Harri’s things at the scene of the accident or in his apartment to indicate suicide.

  I read the report through a couple of times, and when I ran into Koivu in the break room, I quizzed him about the case. It had been ten months since the investigation, so it took him a minute to snap to, but the name “Rödskär” kicked his memory into gear.

  “Yeah, I got to take a ride in a real helicopter. There wasn’t anything suspicious, though. Just an accident. I even went to his apartment and didn’t find a suicide note or anything.”

  “Did you look at his computer?” I asked, remembering a case in which a kid who only ever spent time with his computer had left a suicide note open on the screen and then hung himself right there. The leg of his swinging corpse pulled the plug out of the wall, and no one thought to look for a message on the machine until someone bought it and found the note on the hard drive.

  “It was an Olivetti laptop, and he had it with him on the island. We didn’t go through every file, since it was obviously an accident, and it seemed all it had were lists of birds and marine biology mumbo jumbo. Why can’t they call a seagull a seagull instead of using some crazy Latin name?” Koivu asked.

  I patted him on the shoulder. “And you think it’s less ridiculous calling someone ‘Eagle Two’ during a stakeout? People use code names all the time to make themselves feel more important or like they’re in control. Maybe we try to turn our job into a game of Cops and Robbers so we can forget how dangerous it is.”

  Back in my office I called Anne Merivaara with the news.

  “Anne Merivaara’s phone, Juha Merivaara speaking.”

  “Hello, this is Lieutenant Maria Kallio from the Espoo Police. Is Ms. Merivaara available?”

  “I believe she’s in a meeting. Can I help?”

  “Actually, it’s a personal matter,” I said sternly.

  “Anne Merivaara happens to be my wife. Didn’t we meet on Rödskär last weekend, Lieutenant?”

  On the island, Merivaara hadn’t stood on ceremony, but apparently on land different norms applied.

  “Yes. Could you leave your wife a message to call me back? She can get hold of me through the Espoo Police switchboard. Tell her that I found the information she was looking for. Thank you. Good-bye,” I said with as much honey in my tone as I could muster.

  Only after hanging up did I realize that Juha Merivaara had been there when they found Harri’s body. Would he be able to tell me anything I hadn’t already heard? But Koivu had handled the case with his usual care, so he surely had gotten everything important out of Juha Merivaara.

  Anne Merivaara called at three fifteen, just as Ström finally arrived, fifteen minutes late, for our meeting. Briefly I told her that there was no ambiguity about Harri’s cause of death. Anne sounded strangely thankful, as if before Harri’s death she had been concerned about his emotional equilibrium. Because Ström was waiting on the other side of the desk looking impatient, I didn’t start asking him questions about the investigation, which he had led. The case was closed after all. That definitely wouldn’t be a good way to start out our new working relationship.

  The meeting turned out long and muggy, since Ström was in no rush to get home and there was no breeze outside. He and his wife had divorced four years earlier, and their kids, Jani and Jenna, stayed over at Ström’s studio apartment every other weekend, but they were with his ex-wife this weekend.

  After the meeting I felt reasonably up to speed on all of the open cases and the approaches Ström had taken. The previous night there had been a run-in between a Finnish gang and a Somali gang in downtown Espoo. I had felt pretty important as I assigned Puupponen and Wang to investigate. This was the third clash between the gangs, and we needed to defuse the state of war before there were more confrontations and tensions amplified. From what Wang said, I got the idea that Ström had been firmly on the Finnish gang’s side. Ström held an obvious disgust for any and all immigrants, unless they were white and brought home gold medals.

  Despite all his prejudices, Ström had a sharp eye for policing. And while his analysis of the details could be skewed at times, he usually had a good grasp of the overall picture. Ström seemed to want to show me that he had handled leadership of the unit better than I ever could, so he explained his investigative methods in extensive detail. In another mood he could just as easily have concealed information.

  “Do you have your car?” he asked when we finally wrapped up after his third cup of coffee and about tenth smoke break.

  I nodded.

  “Could you drop me off at the train station? I’m headed into the city.”

  “Of course.” I took his request for a ride as a sort of attempt at an olive branch, which seemed to come from Ström in the most surprising situations.

  Once we had closed up our offices and got to my car, I tried to reciprocate. “What are you up to tonight?” I asked as I accelerated out of the parking garage.

  “I thought I’d start getting shitfaced at Planet Hollywood. Hirvonen is probably already waiting there,” Ström said, referring to his drinking buddy. Hirvonen worked in the crime lab. “I can take it a little easier on the weekends now that I’m not in charge of anything. What about you? Is your old man watching the offspring?”

  “As you know, her name is Iida. Iida Viktoria Sarkela. I took care of her for a year, and now it’s Antti’s turn.”

  “Ah. The boys and I were sure a feminazi like you would never birth a boy.”

  “Shut your face or you’re walking the rest of the way,” I said, though not angrily. Ström’s nastiness about my feminist tendencies gave me some latitude to toss back my own sexist comments when I felt like it. The fact that Ström was making fun of Antti taking paternity leave was no surprise. Even my own parents had been confused. Antti considered his leave, which would last at least until Christmas, as a much-needed breather from university politics.

  We were both satisfied with how our family life was set up, so why the hell did I feel so restless?

  The people I had met on Rödskär wouldn’t leave me in peace, even on the weekend. On Saturday my in-laws came by to celebrate Iida’s first birthday. Antti’s mother brought a copy of a magazine I didn’t usually read.

  “When you were on Rödskär, you met Tapio Holma, the opera singer. There’s an article about him in here.”

  The title was “How to Survive Life at a Turning Point.” There were three interviews: a businessman who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; a female priest whose only child had died in an accident; and Tapio Holma, an opera singer who had lost his voice.

  Tapio Holma, 42, won the Timo Mustakallio singing competition sixteen years ago. His career as a schoolteacher fell by the wayside when the opera stages of German called. For the past five years, Holma has been engaged with the Hamburg State Opera, but he has also made regular guest appearances with the Finnish National Opera and at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. His role three years ago as the Marquis de Posa in Verdi’s Don Carlos made him a darling of Finnish opera audiences. The heroic baritone seemed to be following in the footsteps of Tom Krause and Jorma Hynninen straight to the top of the international scene. He was courted to play the role of Count Almaviva in the Marriage of Figaro at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, one of the world’s leading opera houses. But it was not to be.

  “Early last summer
I started noticing that my voice was getting tired faster than normal and that it was starting to ‘leak,’ as we say. Late in the summer I played Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca at the Salzburg Music Festival, and the final performances were pure torture: my voice simply wasn’t working.”

  A voice therapist diagnosed Holma with severely loosened vocal cords, apparently a result of overexertion. The initial treatment called for rest, so Holma took a leave of absence. After nearly a year’s sabbatical, his baritone still isn’t back to normal, so now the future may call for surgery.

  “No one can promise me that surgery will bring my voice back,” Tapio Holma says calmly. “That’s why I’m still not sure yet whether I’m going to take the risk. But I have to make a decision soon, because in this world it only takes a couple of years to be forgotten. The competition is really fierce.”

  At the same time his voice was giving out, Tapio Holma also experienced another crisis, but the worst pain of that is already behind him now. For ten years, Holma was married to the German soprano Suzanne Holtzinger. On the opera stage the baritone usually pursues the soprano in vain, like in Tosca, in which Suzanne Holtzinger played the lead role in Salzburg. In the opera, the depraved Scarpia attempts to make Tosca give herself to him in exchange for the life of Tosca’s beloved, the tenor Cavaradossi. Tosca pretends to agree but then kills Scarpia. In reality the baritone also lost the soprano to the tenor. Holma’s wife fell in love with the singer playing Cavaradossi.

  “Our marriage had been on the rocks for a while, so my wife’s decision wasn’t really that much of a surprise. Of course two big life changes at the same time was an ordeal. There’s no denying that.”

  A change of scenery helped ease the crisis. Tapio Holma returned to his hometown of Espoo. Bird-watching, a hobby since his childhood, has kept his spirits up.