Lucifer's Tears

31

It’s time to pick up where Milo left off. I’ll tail Linda, maybe have a chat with her if the opportunity arises. I head southwest, from Porvoo toward Vantaa. Powerful winds gust and make the car shimmy. Snow drifts in fat flakes. The air currents shift, and for a couple minutes, the snow flies up toward the sky instead of down toward the ground. It amuses me, doesn’t happen often.

I ponder Arvid’s revelations. Part of me wants to believe him, because I feel some affection for him and Ritva. As a Finn, though, I want to dismiss all of it as a cheap scam designed to weasel out of trouble. The detective in me is skeptical. First, because he lied to me in the beginning and claimed he was never at Stalag 309. Second, because he may be jerking my emotions, using the grandpa angle, telling me to call him Ukki to make me let my guard down and use me as a patsy. I need to be wary of Arvid. I wonder, too, if he would really write a book intended to destroy the self-image of a country he worked so hard to protect.

The ring of my cell phone breaks my thoughts. Securitas Arska calls. He’s at Roskapankki. The guy who stole John’s boots is there. “Give me half an hour,” I say.

I change direction and start toward Helsinki, drive fast despite the snow. I call John and tell him to meet me at Roskapankki. He says he’s busy right now. I hear a squeal and giggle in the background. I’m interrupting a fuck session. Good for John. “Too bad,” I say. “Go there now. I’m going to get your boots back for you.”

He brightens. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

Headache Alien screeches. I find myself furious. John is a decent guy, problems or no, didn’t deserve to have a speed freak steal his boots and leave him barefoot in the snow in minus twenty degrees. Then I realize the real reason for my anger is that said speed freak was mean to someone Kate loves. Same difference, I’m enraged.

I enter Roskapankki. John skulks near the bar, ashamed. Arska sits on a bouncer stool near the door, says he didn’t have to detain the guy I’m looking for, he isn’t going anywhere. He points at a table with four losers sitting at it, half-full pints of beer in front of them. I slide Arska two fifties. I order six beers at the bar, tell John to bring them to the table. I pull up two chairs and sit with four derelicts in their mid-twenties. Their eyes tell me they’re flying. They look at me, amused and curious. John sets beers in front of all of us and takes a seat beside me, huddles close for protection. I note, to my surprise and pleasure, that he’s sober.

“Hi, guys,” I say. “My name is Kari. Let’s be friends.”

They check out the gunshot scar on my face. Their laughs are bemused. They’re thinking, what the hell, free beer. We clink glasses. John doesn’t have to tell me who stole his boots. The lankhaired greaseball fuckwad beside me is wearing them. I don’t have to tell him I’ve come for the boots. My presence here with John announces it.

“Nope,” Fuckwad says.

I smile. “Nope what?”

“Haista vittu.” Sniff cunt. His friends tense up, smell violence brewing and start working themselves up to beat the shit out of me, en masse.

My dad says that to me when he’s drunk and angry. I don’t like it. “I’m a cop,” I say, “and I’m prepared to overlook your stealing John’s boots if you kindly and quietly return them. I also won’t shake you down for drugs.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not holding, and I’m keeping the boots. Fuck off and run along now.”

He wants to be tough in front of his friends. They chuckle. I sigh. “I’d rather not go to the trouble of arresting you.”

One of his buddies says, “I recognize you. You’re one of the cops that killed that retard down the street yesterday.”

“Yep,” I say.

Fuckwad laughs, has no respect for anyone or anything. “Please, arrest me. It will make a great story. Retard killer arrests boot thief.” He points at John. “You should have seen the look on that guy’s face when I told him to take his boots off and give them to me. He didn’t even put up a fight, just sat down in the snow and did it.”

He cackles at the memory. He’s serious, he’d rather go to jail than return the boots. I suppose he’s arrested on a regular basis and it makes no difference to him. John stares down at the floor, humiliated. Fuckwad’s friends howl and knee-slap.

Of course, humiliating John was the point of stealing the boots in the first place. Disgracing others is Fuckwad’s idea of a good time. Both my headache and temper flare. I won’t arrest Fuckwad. At least not today.

When I was a young guy and first moved to Helsinki, I bartended in rakalat like this on occasion to make ends meet. The beer glasses are cheap and thick-hard to break-but the surface tension of the glass is so great that when they shatter, they explode.

I laugh along with them, good-natured. With my left hand, I hold up my pint in front of Fuckwad’s face and squeeze. He looks at me, smirking and quizzical. I squeeze harder, the glass goes off like a bomb, shatters into a thousand pieces. Beer and glass fly away from me toward Fuckwad, into his face and across the room. He recoils in his chair and gawks disbelief, face beer-soaked and covered with tiny bleeding cuts.

His friends shoot upright to their feet and back away. John and I remain seated. I glance around. Arska still lounges on the bouncer’s stool. He winks at me, amused. The bartender gapes, says nothing.

Fuckwad’s eyes brim with tears. “You fucking asshole,” he says, “you could have blinded me.”

I pick little glass shards out of my left hand and flick them at him with my right. “That was the idea,” I say. “Didn’t work.” I pick up another pint. “I could try again.”

He trembles and raises his hands to his face. “Please no.”

“I asked you nicely. Give me the boots.”

He tries to jerk them off as fast as he can. He turns his chair over and pitches to the floor. He keeps tugging at the boots.

I get up, stand over him and wait. I let blood drip from my hand onto his head. He offers me the boots.

I take them. “Get out,” I say.

His eyes dart, looking to his friends for backup, but they’re chuckling again, this time at his humiliation. He rights his chair and pulls himself back into it. He gives me a pitiful look of appeal.

“I said out.”

He whimpers. “It’s minus fucking twenty-five degrees.”

I nod toward John. “If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for you. I’m going to stand outside and watch. You’re going to walk until I can’t see you anymore.”

He gathers his courage and little remaining dignity, and starts to take his coat from the back of his chair.

I shake my head. “No coat.”

He lurches toward the door. I give John his boots and follow, and John tags along behind me. I thank Arska, step outside, ball up some snow in my cut hand and watch Fuckwad hurry along the ice.

John stands beside me. “I didn’t know it was possible to crush a beer glass in your hand,” he says.

“Me neither,” I say.

He puts an arm around my shoulders. “I’ll never forget this.”

“Me neither.”

“I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“Be a brother your sister can be proud of. Be her friend.”

“I’ll do my best,” he says.

“Tell her you missed your Sedona Wests and bought them back from UFF,” I say.

“I haven’t been around much. Nobody noticed they were gone.”

I check my watch. We’re near the house. Jari and his family are coming over for dinner tonight. I have just enough time to groceryshop, go home and check on Kate, and still make it to Filippov Construction and tail Linda when she gets off work.