Helsinki White

38

It’s a warm today. The sky blue. A perfect day for sailing, and we have hours until we reach the islands of northern Åland. Saukko had his cook stock the boat with enough food for an army. Saukko thought of everything, from fresh fish bait to a box of the figurado cigars we had smoked. I guess I did a good job of convincing him I liked them. The sea is calm, and I hope the trip will smooth the waters between Kate and me as well.

After I solve this murder, and I’m near to it, I’m going to solve my work-related problems as well. I didn’t become a cop to be a thug. Time will fix this. I’ll accumulate dirt on powerful people so they can’t hurt me without destroying themselves. I’ve collected much skank, I’m close to it now. Then I’ll do my job on my own terms or just walk away. Resign. Do as Kate said. Take her back to the States with the money I’ve stolen and collect stamps.

Kate and I slather on suntan lotion, make sure Baby Anu is sun-protected head to toe, and sit side by side in deck chairs that fold out so you can lie down in them. Her hangover fades and her mood improves, and after a while she hooks her little finger around mine. We snack, sun, drink soft drinks, let Milo do all the work. I notice Sweetness isn’t boozing. I wonder if the change in his relationship with Jenna has sobered him up. The sea was crowded with all manner of craft when we left Helsinki, but the farther north we go, other vessels are fewer and farther between.

Life on a small island in Åland must be interesting. Waterworld. An alternate way of living. Inhabitants take boats to the grocery store, to bars in the evening if they want to socialize. Everywhere.

Milo has the map, and after several hours he tells us we’re now in waters that contain the islands donated by Saukko’s foundation, and it’s time to start watching. Some are only specks of rock, some are large. Kate softens, her bitterness dissipates. At a certain point, we go downstairs to a cabin and make love. When we come back up, the yacht is moored near a largish island. A dock juts out into the ocean, but beside and behind the dock is a cave. Its roof is several yards high and it goes about twenty yards back under the island. We’re on the south side of the island, and this end of it is lightly forested and around a hundred yards across.

Inside the cave are a twin-engine fishing boat and a Jet Ski. Whodda thunk? We’ve really found Antti.

“We saw no hurry and waited on you,” Milo says. He edges the yacht up to the dock. Sweetness hops over to it and ties us off.

I doubt we’ll need them, but we don bulletproof vests and the rest of our gear. After all, if my theory is correct, Antti did kill a man. We follow a narrow path and the smell of cooking meat. We walk about fifty meters and find a big ramshackle hut in a clearing with two people outside it in folding chairs, making dinner on a grill. One is Antti. He’s wearing a tie-dyed shirt, shorts and flip-flops. The other is a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, about eight months pregnant.

Antti smiles. “Damn, it’s been a year. I thought you’d have stopped looking by now. And we were going to leave next week and move to Fasta Åland where there’s medical care, before Mari gives birth. What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to say this,” I tell him, “but I have to arrest you.”

“For what?”

OK, we can play this out if he wants. “The faking of your kidnapping, your sister’s actual kidnapping, the theft of ten million euros, and the murder of Jussi Kosonen.”

He sits back, crosses his legs and sips at a beer. “I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. I was kidnapped and released. When they released me, I decided I didn’t want to go back to my old life. I came here with Mari for the peace and quiet, waiting to be forgotten. There’s no crime in any of that.”

“I’m pretty sure that when we search, we’ll find the ransom money. That’s our proof.”

“Search to your heart’s content,” he says.

Mari hasn’t said a word, but she looks scared. “Are you OK?” I ask her. “Do you need anything?”

“Just for you to go away.”

“Let’s start inside,” I say. “Antti, would you please accompany us?” I want to keep an eye on him.

What we find inside startles me. He’s built a small but lovely modern home with all the amenities, and then camouflaged the exterior with boards from old fishing cabins.

“This is great,” I say. “I’m impressed.”

“Thanks,” Antti says. “I did everything myself in my spare time. Took me five years. I’ve been waiting to get away from my old life for a long time.”

“Couldn’t you have found an easier way?”

He shakes his head. “You don’t know my father.”

He’s so relaxed and amiable that we ignore procedure. We don’t cuff him. No nothing. Like idiots. I bend over to look under the bed. A gunshot scares me so bad I almost piss myself. The bullet whizzes past me and shatters a window on the other side of the bedroom. The next round hits me in the side. The bulletproof vest stops it, but the shot knocks the wind out of me. Milo was drawing his pistol as Antti took aim at his head. And then boom after boom after boom, all hell breaks loose and Antti jerks like a puppet until half his head flies off and he falls. Then Sweetness stands over him and dumps the remainder of his ammo in Antti’s face until his .45s are empty.

After sixteen rounds in the chest, face and head, there isn’t much of him left. It’s a real fucking mess. His girlfriend tries to come in but Milo pushes her out so she won’t see it.

For a couple minutes we all just stand there, uncertain what to do, then a familiar voice repeats the phrase I first heard it utter. “I hope I haven’t interrupted you at an inopportune moment.”

I turn, and Moreau stands in the doorway, Kate in front of him with Anu in her arms. The muzzle of his Beretta touches her head.

“Shall we step outside?” he says. “The stink of open intestines is a bit overwhelming in here.”

We trail out and he tells everyone to make themselves comfortable. He takes his gun away from Kate’s head and brings a chair for her. “Please, one at a time, place your weapons at your feet and kick them toward me.” Milo, God bless him, tries to prove himself the pistoleer he always wanted to be and quick draws, tries to save us all. Adrien is like lightning and puts a bullet through Milo’s wrist. His gun drops and he holds his arm up to look at it. He tries to wiggle his fingers but they don’t move.

“I told you,” Moreau says, “Deputy Dawg can never beat Yosemite Sam. I’m the rootinest tootinest here outlaw in the West. Your carpal tunnel and radial nerve are wrecked. I doubt you’ll ever use that hand again. It’s going to hurt like hell in a minute.”

“Fuck you,” Milo says. His repertoire of comebacks is limited at the moment. He slumps to the ground but sits up, holds his wrist with his other hand.

Moreau collects our Colts and piles them well out of our reach.

There are only two chairs. Kate has one, I take the other. “What do you want?” I ask.

“The ten million. Hand it over and I’ll leave you in peace.”

“Antti died before he told us where it is.”

“I am sorry. I cannot believe that you would be so stupid as to kill him before he told you.”

He’ll never believe I was too stupid not to cuff and guard him, but I try. “He pulled a gun, Sweetness shot him.”

“And with verve! Still, you are just not that stupid.”

I consider pleading with him. Nothing I say or do will make any difference. He’ll stick with whatever agenda he’s planning. “Do you know everything?” I ask. “For instance, who killed Lisbet Söderlund?”

“Of course. I’ve known all along. This is the way it works,” Moreau says. “I am going to torture the group of you until I have the money. We have all the time in the world, and I will cause you immense pain. I would spare you that. Please give me the money.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I would if I had it. But I don’t.”

“Then I’ll fill you in on the details as you suffer,” he says. “As leader, you must suffer first. As once you were, so again you shall be.”

I try to blank my mind, to steel myself for what’s to come. I don’t ask him to spare Kate, because the sign of weakness might entice him to hurt her first.

“I will start at the beginning,” Moreau says. “Over a year ago, my former Foreign Legion comrades engineered the kidnapping of Kaarina Saukko with Antti. They found Kosonen, the dupe. He frequented their shop, and they took his children. They planned the crime, robbed the home, did the technical work. Antti knew the user name and password at the security company because he had been there while they planned the system, watched the technician open his computer and memorized them. No magic there, but the B&E at the company made the robbery seem more sophisticated and less of an inside job.”

I have shorts on. Moreau examines my knee, puts his pistol to the exact point of entry from when I was shot before, and fires. The bullet passes through the old exit scar. The pain is awful and I grunt, but won’t allow him the satisfaction of a scream. Good-bye, reconstructed knee.

“The patsy collected the ransom money, Antti killed him, betrayed my colleagues and disappeared. He left them the paintings, I suppose as recompense, without considering that they have provenance and are worthless without a pre-heist buyer for a private collection. Apparently, he came here, to this island, to meet his girlfriend.”

She nods and confirms this.

“As punishment for betrayal, they shot Kaarina. They assassinated her with a .308 Winchester, which they, arrogantly enough, kept rather than disposed of. Find it. You’ll have your murder weapon and no doubt solve the crime in short order. Then they set about looking for Antti, with no luck. They surveilled the police for a year, kept up with their progress. The police couldn’t find him. If they could follow the police but jump one step ahead, as police act cautiously while they build cases, they could take their ten million. Too much time passed. Afraid police interest in the case would wane, they called me, offered me a split, and used their connections to convince Veikko Saukko to have me brought in. I contacted you to convince you that the Saukko kidnap-murder and the Söderlund assassination were likely related, to keep the Saukko case a police top priority while I remained informed of developments. Then I could kill Antti and take the money back. To aid in this effort, Marcel and Thierry committed the robberies posing as Islamic fundamentalists—they wore charcoal camo stick to disguise themselves as blacks and spouted some rhetoric in ridiculous accents—and also committed the racial murders, simply to make it appear they were related to the Söderlund assassination, to keep your enthusiasm high.”

He examines me with a speculative eye. “Open your mouth.”

I refuse.

“Well,” he says, “it’s either my way or I shoot you through both jaws.”

Wisdom dictates I open my mouth. He sticks the barrel in it, blows out the bridgework from where my own teeth were shot out, and creates a wound that will leave a scar just like the one I had removed. The pain is awful. I feel woozy. He reaches in his pocket and hands me something. “It’s a bindle of heroin. Sniff only a tiny bit. You are what is called opiate naïve. If you use too much, you will overdose, or at least pass out. I want you aware.”

He moves to Antti’s girlfriend. “If you do not tell me where the money is, I will kill your baby.”

She screams and covers her belly with her hands. “I don’t know, he never told me.”

“You have ten seconds,” he says.

She cries, begs, pleads. He counts. I open the bindle, pour some heroin on my thumbnail and snort it. The pain melts away. Relief makes me sigh. I’m not opiate naïve. I used narcotics to combat my headaches. I remain coherent.

He counts to zero and fires at an angle through the side of her belly. The bullet exits the other side of her stomach. The baby, if not dead, soon will die. She only moans and weeps silent tears. Her man, her dream, her child. She’s lost everything.

“We now have a time constraint,” Moreau says. “If she does not receive medical attention, she will die of internal bleeding.”

Kate makes not a sound, but on her face she wears a scream of terror and clutches Anu tight.

He kneels beside her. “You need not fear me. You remind me very much of someone so close to me that I would die myself rather than harm you. She is gone, but as long as you exist, in a way she does as well.”

He walks back over to me. “Yes, there was a rumor that whoever killed Lisbet Söderlund would get her job, but it was just that, a rumor, started by Roope Malinen. In truth, my Foreign Legion colleagues murdered her by agreement with Malinen, who promised them a permanent, lucrative, and competition-free concession in the Finnish heroin market. Malinen lied. He had no authority to promise anything in return for the assassination of Söderlund. He hated her and made a false promise concerning a heroin concession in the hopes that he could make good on it later, simply because he wanted her dead. You have gone a long way toward seeing that promise kept. They cut her head off with a meat saw in their food shop. I’m sure, if you live through today, you can find plenty of DNA from the saw and blood-spatter specks around their kitchen to prove it. Saukko demanded a spectacle of dedication to hate, which they gave him. Saukko said quit bullshitting around on the Internet and do something, hinting that it might change his mind about his campaign donation. Word went down the line via Malinen that Saukko wanted a display. Marcel and Thierry did it for political reasons, in the hopes that Saukko would then honor his million-euro campaign commitment. Saukko welshed anyway.

Kate finds her voice. “Why would you let us live? We know who you are.”

“I assure you that you do not. I do indeed work for the French government, but I have a stack of various identifications two inches thick. They will tell you that I work for them one day, then deny it the next.”

“Have you considered that we don’t know where the money is and you’re killing us all for nothing?” she asks.

“I recognize it as a possibility.”

“You’re an ugly human being,” she says.

“As I once told your husband, I am a peacekeeper. Sometimes, keeping the peace requires extreme measures. Giving me the ten million euros will restore harmony to all our lives.”

“For such an altruist, you seem quite concerned with wealth.”

“In fact, I have no interests other than my work, and my tastes are frugal. My wealth is symbolic. In darker moments of doubt, I tally my accounts, and the sum figure serves as proof and reassures me that I have followed the career that was my destiny. There is little more to it than that.”

“But still, you would kill us all to acquire it?”

“Oh yes, with the exception of you.”

He walks over to Milo, flicks open his stiletto, and lops off Milo’s right ear. Blood slops down his neck. “You are the weakest. I believe you will talk first. This is also a matter of time. If you wait too long, it cannot be sewn back on. The next time you get a turn, I’ll sharpen a stick, pop out your eye and perform a makeshift lobotomy on you. Instead of calculating ineffable permutations with your big, big brain, you’ll spend your life being pushed around in a wheelchair with a drool cup strapped to your chin. It’s remarkably easy to do. The man who popularized the procedure sometimes performed hundreds in a single day, divided the brains of whole institutions full of mental patients.”

Milo doesn’t make a sound. Not even the look on his face changes. The ear looks like an odd mushroom lying on a rock in the sun.

Moreau continues his explanation. “Antti kept the children at the summer cottage—which the family had not used in years—while he disappeared during the kidnapping. When he left with the money, he abandoned them. With their father dead, there was little to be done. Marcel and Thierry overdosed them with heroin hot shots in their sleep.”

“And you don’t think they’ll try to hunt you down and kill you after you’ve stolen their hard-earned fortune?”

“They were no longer required and a hindrance. I saw no reason to share the ten million with them after they bungled their own mission and called upon me to fix it. My purpose here is manifold. One is to control the drug trade. Another is to squelch the racist movement that seems to be veering out of control in Finland. These upset the order of things. My mission for my employers is, succinctly put, to restore order when situations require it. The heroin you watched me give to my former comrades had some parts of it, near the bottom of the bag, poisoned, in order to confuse matters and hide the poisoning for a time. Notice that the heroin I gave you was pure, not cut. And so they sold strychnine-laced heroin to racist elements, who in turn sold it to dealers who primarily deal with blacks in the name of, as they put it, ‘nigger sedation.’ Unfortunately, this will lead to some deaths, but the trail will lead back to the white supremacists. It will, however, result in the incarceration of these racist drug dealers, while at the same time rousing sympathy for their immigrant victims. My comrades became liabilities. If you live through today, you’ll discover that I’ve made it easy for you to solve your cases and, once again, shine as a hero. Albeit, a crippled one. It might make you feel better to know that, after all the unnecessary pain they caused—mostly out of enjoyment, I might add—they died badly indeed.”

Kate says, “Milo is in agony. Would you let me give him some heroin and put his ear in the shade so maybe it can be saved? It’s cooking on that rock.”

“For you,” he says, “anything.”

He hands her a bindle and she walks to the other side of the clearing to tend to Milo. Kate picks his ear up and moves it to the shade, to keep it cooler and slow decomposition.

Moreau strides over to Sweetness. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground. His flask is in his hand. He sucks at it.

“Wise move,” Moreau says. “Breaking you, big man, requires forethought. How to torture an elephant? I have a feeling you can endure a great deal, but you are a romantic and feel much affection for the others. That’s why I hurt them first.”

His back is to Kate. Milo wears his leather jacket with the specially made holster to make his sawed-off invisible. Apparently, Milo never showed it off to Moreau. Kate sets Anu on the ground, slides out the shotgun and points it at Moreau. It looks huge in her hands. It’s hard for her, but she puts a thumb on each hammer, pulls with all her might, and slowly they ease back and click into place.

Moreau doesn’t have to look, doesn’t even turn to face her. He knows the sound.

“And after all the nice things I just said about you.”

She says, “Don’t move.”

He doesn’t.

She keeps the barrels straight although she’s shaking hard and the gun is heavy. When she gets to within about four feet of him, she pulls both triggers. The gun roars, flames and smoke leap out of the barrels. Milo was supposed to have the gun loaded with rock salt. Instead, the ammo was razor-sharp fléchettes. The blast cuts Moreau near in half, along his midsection. Not much holds the two pieces of him together. His blood and guts, bone chips, gore, spray out and onto Sweetness. Moreau falls, yet he still lives. I see him blink. His jacket is on fire. The flames spread.

The gun kicked up and back and lacerated the side of Kate’s head. Blood runs down her cheek. She wipes at it and smears it. It drips onto her shoulder. She drops the gun and slumps to the ground. I speak to her but she’s withdrawn inside herself, in shock. She doesn’t move or speak. Her mouth hangs open and spittle dribbles down her chin.

Now Moreau’s shirt and pants are burning. Sweetness pours kossu on him. The flames leap. Moreau can’t move but winks at Sweetness, as if this is a joke only the two of them can share. Sweetness pulls out his horse dick and pisses on him, says “Adieu.”

I look over. Mari, the pregnant girl, is dead. She bled out. Only Sweetness is functional. I ask him to take Milo’s ear to the boat and put it on ice.

The heroin kept me able to think. The pain is returning in spades. I sniff a little more and push myself up with my cane. I hobble over to Milo and shake a little more onto my thumbnail. It’s hard to talk and I slur. “Sniff thith.”

He inhales it and still doesn’t speak, but I see his body relax.

I hobble to Kate and slump beside her. She stares straight ahead, won’t speak to me. I look at her head. There’s a lot of blood, but that doesn’t mean anything. Head wounds always bleed a lot. I think it’s just a simple cut, nothing more. I pick up her hand and let go. It drops back in her lap, limp. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Traumatic shock.

Sweetness comes back. “I know where the money is,” he says.

I want to beat him to death. “Then why didn’t you tell him?”

“I just figured it out. Look at the graveyard behind the house.”

Set back in the clearing are four cairns marked with wooden crosses. They mean that sometime way back when, fishermen got stranded here, probably waited too long into the winter season to leave and got frozen in and died. The ground was too hard to dig, so they covered their friends in rocks and marked their resting places.

“The weathering is the same, consistent, on all the piles except one,” Sweetness says, “and the cross is a little different, too. The money is under the rocks.”

I have to call for a helicopter to medevac us all out of here, but I will not leave that money to be returned to that racist motherfucker Saukko, or to be stolen, probably by Jyri, when they tear this island apart looking for it. After all the suffering that’s been caused by it, I’ll burn it first. I try to speak as little as possible. It hurts like hell. “Try to get it.”

He brings Anu to me, then goes to work. He throws the rocks onto the other cairns as he digs. Breaks up the cross, leaves no evidence that the cairn was ever there. And people call him stupid. The two sports bags of cash are at the bottom. It took ten minutes.

Milo walks over. He’s a bloody mess, but the heroin pulled him together. He says to Sweetness, “Can you drive a boat to Turku?” Milo points. “It’s that way. The boat’s GPS map will guide you.”

Sweetness nods. “I think so.”

Milo talks slow and pauses in the middle of sentences, but stays focused. “Antti’s is the fastest boat, and it’s long forgotten except by us and Saukko, and he won’t think to start tracking it. The keys are on a nail over the kitchen sink. Make sure it’s fueled and leave now. When you get to Turku, take a bus to Helsinki. While you’re on your way, go for a swim and wash the blood off you the best you can. The wind will dry you before you get there. As soon as you get to Helsinki, before you go home, hide the money where no one would ever think to look.”

Kate rolls over on her side, balls up in a fetal position. I ask Milo, “Can you call?”

He requests the helicopter, tells him there are dead civilians and officers down. Fucking Milo. He can’t part with his toys. He collects the Colts and his sawed-off, puts them in our holsters and pockets, and lies down beside me.

I hold Anu on my chest with one hand. I put the other hand on his shoulder. I say, “Just tell them the truth, except say that Moreau shot Antti.”

“OK,” he says, and passes out.

I think about Moreau. He flew too close to the sun, his wings of Icarus melted, and he fell burning to the earth, plummeted to his death.