Helsinki White

21

Kate set the table and went to the kitchen. As if on cue, the door buzzer rang and I let Moreau in. He was forty-five minutes late. I recognized in him a man who was never late, never disorganized, always prepared, always in control. He had indeed been watching us from somewhere and made his entrance when it seemed most appropriate.

Kate came to greet him and, because he was down on one knee removing his boots, her primary view of him was of the large and ornate French Foreign Legion paratrooper wings tattooed on the sides of his head. They startled, even frightened her.

He stood, took her hand and introduced himself, and his pleasant demeanor offset her initial reaction. He went into the living room and introduced himself to everyone by turn, and then we all went to the dining room.

My mother had taught Kate to make a traditional Finnish birthday-type cake-my favorite kind-and she did it well, with layers of fruit-based filling and a simple frosting made of cream and sugar. The kind of frosting many Americans are so fond of, that comes ready-made in a can, is now available in Finland, so at Kate’s insistence I once gave it a try. It’s so sweet that it’s like eating rotten candy, disgusting to me. I also find American coffee useless. They drink it weak, like hot black water.

Moreau gestured toward the pile of gear in the living room. “You are preparing for a paramilitary operation?” he asked.

Milo loved to talk about our group. He looked at me for permission and I nodded yes.

I watched the storm come in as he talked. The sky was first zinc, then black and heavy, and then the rain came, wind-driven into silver diagonals. Kate rocked Anu back and forth in her carriage. Katt reclined on my shoulder.

I waited for an appropriate moment. “Adrien, tell us about yourself.”

“I grew up in Finland, in Iisalmi-a small town in the east,” he said. “This is the first time I have been back in over twenty years.”

Now we spoke English, but yesterday we spoke Finnish. His manner of speaking our mother tongue made me believe him. It carried an odd intonation, unusual word choices and grammatical constructions. I’ve noticed this before about the speech patterns of long-term expats.

“I attended the University of Helsinki and studied philosophy, because I wanted to find out who I was and what I wished to be. By the time I completed my master’s, the answer was clear, and I joined the French Foreign Legion.”

“Why not the Finnish army?”

“I had already served in the Finnish army. It has been said that every young man needs his war, and I needed mine. Finland has not fought in a war for sixty-five years now. Finnish boys must seek their glory elsewhere. I have served in Chad, Rwanda, the Cote d’Ivoire, the Gulf War, Gabon and Zaire, Cambodia and Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Afghanistan and, of late, in Mexico. You would be surprised how many Finns are in the Legion, for just that reason.”

This is true. I’ve met several former Finnish Legionnaires, and several more who tried but washed out in basic training. Only one in seven applicants makes the cut.

“What interest does France have in Mexico?” Kate asked.

Moreau smiled. I looked around the table. His calmness of mien suggested an uncommon gentleness, and it set people at ease, despite his satanic appearance. “France has interest in all things international. The American government requested French assistance in Mexico to help reconcile the violence caused by friction between the drug cartels. That assistance came in the form of me.”

That was quite a teaser for a story, and we waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

Sweetness waited until everyone had their fill of cake and then proceeded to eat the rest of it by himself. And then jammed nuuska into his lip. I sighed. I thought again that he was going to have to play Eliza Doolittle to my Henry Higgins if I was to make him presentable.

Then Moreau said, “It is little understood that the drug trade must be maintained, but controlled and balanced. Were the narcotics industry to suddenly cease, the economies of many countries, the U.S. among them, would be destroyed. I left the Legion a few years ago, am now a policeman, a superintendent in the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence Action Division. I was helping to restore that balance.”

He got up. “Which reminds me. I have brought a small gift for Kari.” He had brought a backpack with him and left it in the foyer. He got up, took something out of it, came back and placed a clear plastic bag filled with white powder on the table. “This is a half kilo of uncut Mexican heroin,” he said.

Kate’s jaw dropped. The others looked on with interest.

“For what?” I asked.

“You have destroyed this balance I spoke of. Because of it, now people commit suicide and a crime wave is in progress. If you distribute this, it will restore the balance and repair the situation for a time.”

“How did you get it into Finland?”

“In a diplomatic pouch. I travel on a diplomatic passport and am not subject to search.”

I shook my head. “How the fuck am I supposed to move that much heroin?”

Sweetness cleared his throat. He had made several trips to the balcony and his hip flask must be near empty. “I wasn’t exactly unemployed before I came to work for you. Me and my brother sold marijuana. Not a lot, just some, so we could have at least a little money. We never sold hard drugs, but I know some neekerit who do. I could front it to them, an ounce at a time or something like that. It’s worth about a hundred thousand euros. If I gave it to them all at once, they would steal it and leave the country.”

Kate flew mad. “First you steal drugs. Now you want to sell drugs. And”-she pointed at Sweetness-“don’t use language like that in my home.”

He was mystified. “I’m sorry. What language?”

I stepped in. “Kate, he meant nothing derogatory. Most Finns still say neekeri. It’s always been the word for black people, and it’s slowly changing, because the press and academics know how ugly it sounds and are now making substitutions for it, but they still haven’t even agreed upon what the right word should be. Until black people started coming here in the 1990s, Finns had almost no exposure to blacks and had attitudes something like Americans in the 1920s. When I was a kid, in the 1970s, my schoolbooks said neekerit were simple but happy. They liked to sing and dance. Sweetness meant no harm. And Moreau is right. We meant well, but we went too far and people got hurt.”

She softened. “Let’s discuss it later.”

“OK.”

“As to selling the heroin,” I said, “that’s not going to happen. Presumably, if junkies have the money to buy heroin, they have the money for a train ticket to another city. They can buy it elsewhere.”

“Does that mean you do not accept my gift?” Moreau asked.

“No, I’ll keep it. I might find other uses for it.”

He grinned. “Such as planting it and framing your enemies? Inspector, your waters run deep.”

I said nothing.

Milo jumped in. “I have more presents we could open.”

Kate groaned. “Milo, I don’t want to have to see any more guns.”

“Well, how about the presents for you and Anu, then?”

That got her. Curiosity overcame her anger and she smiled. “All right, then. Adrien,” she asked, “what inspired you to get those striking tattoos?”

His smile was warm. I saw that he liked Kate, and that she found him charming, heroin or not.

“I have jumped from airplanes eighty-seven times. On my thirty-seventh jump, my parachute failed to open. I thought I was a dead man, but it unfurled at about four hundred feet from the ground. I hit the ground like a rock, but was unscathed. I feared it was an augury of things to come. I felt that I needed protection afterward, so I took the wings of Icarus. As long as I don’t fly too close to the sun, I am now safe.”

As the others filed back into the living room, I asked him what he wanted for his heroin.

“At the behest of the French government, my goals are to find the son, recover the money and discredit the Real Finns Party. Were they to take power, Finland might leave the EU and upset the balance of things. Share information with me. Take me along when you conduct interrogations as you prosecute your murder investigation. I want nothing more.”

“Agreed,” I said, but felt certain that he did indeed want something more from me.

He cocked his head, inquisitive. “What did you do with all the drugs you stole?”

“I kept some for blackmail or unforeseen circumstances when I might need it. But we tossed most of it in Dumpsters.”

He tut-tutted me. “Such a waste.”

We took our places with the others again, and Kate was opening her gifts. She held up a pair of shoes. She giggled like a little girl. “Manolo Blahnik Nepala pumps,” she said. She slipped them on and they fit her perfectly, meaning they were tight and painful, as Manolos are meant to be. She looked at Milo. “Did Kari tell you my size?”

Moreau said, “He has an IQ of one seventy-two and an advanced sense of spatial relations. He also knows your bra size and, if you smile, the length of your teeth to a fraction of a millimeter.”

Milo turned red. Moreau had made his point. He knew things.

Kate then opened a package with a Gucci ‘marrakech’ evening bag with woven leather trim and tassels, and finally a bottle of Clive Christian No.1 perfume. She was in heaven.

“The bottle is handmade lead crystal with a thirty-three-carat diamond in the neck,” Milo said. “Its ingredients include Madagascar ylang ylang, vanilla, orris, natural gum resin, sandalwood and bergamot. It was weird. I went to boutiques to find this stuff and the salespeople all spoke Russian instead of Finnish. Russian tourists buy them here and Finns can’t afford them.”

Kate brought Anu to see her gift: a huge Steiff teddy bear. She loved it, kept petting the soft brown fur and wouldn’t stop. Arvid had fallen asleep in my chair. Sweetness was also sleeping. A flask of kossu-Finnish vodka-and half a cake had done him in.

“The last is for you,” Milo said, and handed me a long and heavy package. I ripped off the wrapping and gawked at it, astonished. It appealed to my childish like-or-don’t-like instinct, and I liked it very much. It was a cane, cudgel-thick. The handle was a massive lion’s head made from several ounces of gold. I had gone to so much work to become anonymous, and this would make me stand out in any crowd. I didn’t care. I loved it. I would carry it.

“Let me show you how it works,” Milo said. “Gadget canes were once very popular. They were made with just about every device imaginable. Bang down on the floor with the tip. It spring-loads the lion’s mouth and it snaps open. The teeth are steel razors. Sharp contact, like swinging the mouth against something, makes it clamp shut and bite with about three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, the same as a Rottweiler’s jaws. Pressing the eyes-one is a ruby, the other is emerald-disengages the spring and the mouth lets go. Unscrew the shaft, and there’s a twenty-inch sword inside.”

While he explained, Kate unbuttoned her blouse and, at a discreet angle to the rest of us, began breast-feeding Anu. While I admired the cane, I noticed Moreau admire my wife in a way I wasn’t fond of. He picked up on my disapproval.

“Forgive me,” he said. “You have a most lovely family. Your wife calls to mind someone I once knew, and she too had an infant.”

I didn’t know if I liked him or detested him, but was sure that if my emotions were as they once had been, my feelings toward him would be nothing in between.

I opened the lion’s mouth and smacked the edge of the coffee table. Anu yelped. It bit so deep I couldn’t pull it free, had to depress the eyes to make it let go. Kate looked at me with disapproval. I had disturbed the child and damaged the table.

My knee would be fully recovered soon. I would limp, but it would be almost unnoticeable. “Milo,” I said, “this is the most wonderful toy I’ve ever owned. Thank you. It makes me almost sad I won’t need it for long.”

“You can always use it,” he answered. “A man doesn’t walk with a cane, he wears it.”

Moreau turned to Milo. “I think everyone is tired, perhaps we should make our exit. Are there more weapons in the unopened packages?”

“Yes.”

“Are they anything special?”

Milo grinned. “Extra special.”

“Do you know how to use them?”

Milo laughed. “Not a fucking clue.”

“I’m probably familiar with them. Why don’t we drop off the others and have a look at them together.”

Kate was off in her own little world, admiring her gifts, expensive and precious things that, when she was younger, brought up poor, she could never have conceived of possessing. She looked up at us. “Is this what comes of being a criminal’s wife?” she asked.

Moreau answered. “No. This is what comes of being the wife of a powerful man.”

Milo had thrown a hell of a party. Once the others were out of the house, we got Anu to sleep and made love again.