Helsinki White

12

The next night, I made a call to the police in Estonia, gave them the ID info from the hookers we’d sent back there to get a new lease on life. Three were in the hospital, raped and beaten, used rubbers stuffed in their mouths. One was dead, killed in her apartment. Her hands in a kitchen sink filled with water. A toaster tossed in. Electricity fried her face glossy black. She was fifteen. They had gone straight from the boat to a whore bar hangout. Word of the pimps’ arrest made it there within hours. They took the blame. I tried to do good. Their blood was on my hands. It was an experiment I wouldn’t try again. Arvid was right, people would be hurt. I was a fool.

Milo finished building his toys. His laptop and the mobile eavesdropping devices’ stations were slaved to the computer he had built. By this point, Milo and Sweetness had attached GPS tracking devices to the vehicles of most of the major criminals in Helsinki. We could watch them travel on a computer screen.

The capabilities were limited by range and the number of phones they could monitor at one time, but Milo set up his mobile eavesdropping stations to monitor the phones of criminals on our upcoming heist list. Their calls were recorded, as were their SMS messages. If they were in Russian or Estonian, Sweetness translated. Milo could set his phone up to ring when a particular criminal’s phone was in use, handy if we planned to rob said criminal at a particular day and time. The criminals told us where they were, what they had, and when to rob them.

We burgled, heisted, robbed, almost nightly. My role, because of my lack of mobility, was to sit in the car and watch, cell phone in hand, to make sure no one walked in on Milo and Sweetness. Since the B&Es were almost always in the wee hours of the morning, I left after Kate was asleep and was home before she woke. My family life was at least outwardly unaffected. Kate knew. I hid nothing. I sensed her disapproval, but she didn’t complain.

During B&Es, Milo mirrored the hard drives from criminals’ computers, stole their banking codes, lifted their financial info, inserted viruses so that he could manipulate their computers from his own. We emptied their bank accounts, left them penniless. We continued in this way for weeks. A small fortune accrued.

There were consequences, some foreseen, some unforeseen.

I believed, and at that point rightly so, that no violence would be necessary. These thefts would be seen as betrayals among criminals, who would then go to war because of them. Foreign criminals are reticent to kill each other in Finland. Russian and Estonian criminals prefer to kill each other in their home countries, where corruption is rife, because they have little fear of prosecution, whereas in Finland, they almost certainly will be caught and incarcerated. The Helsinki Homicide history intimidates them. No murder had gone unsolved in Helsinki since 1993.

However, in the criminal world, to come up missing a large quantity of cash or drugs leads to mistrust. Theft isn’t an acceptable excuse. Mistrust and uncertainty, like as not, end in homicide. In Tallinn and St. Petersburg, mafia wars raged. The body count, both cities combined, numbered seventeen. And of course, that only counted the bodies that had been found. This was OK with me.

Milo listened to the threats made during their telephone conversations. When the thieves were caught—meaning us—we would be tortured for days, slowly destroyed physically but not allowed to die. They would cut off our dicks, make us eat them. And so on.

If I wanted criminals locked up, either Finnish or foreign, I had various options. Drugs or guns discovered during B&Es could be left in place, or moved to the home of a criminal I had a particular disdain for and used for a frame-up. A simple phone call to the police would lead to an arrest. I had yet to exercise this option. Gangsters running free could be robbed again.

Unforeseen consequences. We did our job so well that we ran Helsinki dope dry. Junkie suicides and pharmacy break-ins reached astronomical proportions. A pharmacist was shot to death.

Milo and Sweetness stopped any pretense of comradeship. Milo called Sweetness “the court jester,” “doofus,” “clown,” “the other half of a halfwit.” Sweetness responded with a long list of insults suggesting Milo was effete: “Mary,” “sissy,” and my favorite, “Miss Froufrou.”

On March third, I went to Fazer, the best bakery in Helsinki, and bought the fanciest cake they had. Fazer makes some of the world’s best chocolate, and this was Karl Fazer’s first shop. He opened it in 1891. I had a coffee and a pastry while I was there, because the back room is built under a dome that echoes. You can eavesdrop on conversations around the room from reflecting voices.

Then on to Alko, the state-run liquor monopoly. I had specialordered a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac. Price: one thousand five hundred euros. The youngest cognac in the blend is fifty years old. The oldest, about a hundred years. I hid them until the evening, then set them on the table. Kate and I waited until Arvid ambled in. “Happy ninetieth birthday,” I said, and we sang to him.

It moved him so much that he almost shed a tear. He opened the cognac box and took out the crystal decanter. “It was the only gift I could find that’s older than you,” I said. It made him laugh and we passed a pleasant evening.

On March seventh, Anu was christened and officially named. Winter hung on as if it would never end. The temperature was minus ten that day. We asked my brother, Jari, and his wife, Taina, to be Anu’s godparents. They’re good people, have two fine boys of their own. I invited Jyri Ivalo to the ceremony, and to our house afterward for coffee and cake. He took it as a sign of respect, a gesture meaning that I wanted to solidify our relationship. He attended and gave Anu the traditional gift of a silver spoon set.

Milo didn’t attend. During the ceremony, he was busy black-bagging Jyri’s home. He made a mirror copy of Jyri’s hard drive and photographed relevant papers. We now had the user names and passwords for all information available to the national chief of police. Milo said Jyri was so fucking stupid he didn’t even password protect his home computer. He also planted a MAC-10 and eight balls of heroin and cocaine in various places around the house. More insurance, should Jyri choose to betray me.

On March fifteenth, my sick leave officially ended and I returned to duty, whatever that meant. I supposed I had an office at NBI headquarters with my name on the door. I had no intention of ever going there to find out. The date, the Ides of March, struck me as a harbinger.