I take back the chair in front of the computer. I still have all the files from the kidnapping of Veikko Saukko’s son and daughter in it. Included in them is information concerning his employees. I look at Phillip Moore’s file. At the time of the kidnapping, going on two years ago, he had a boy, now age eleven, and a wife, although they were estranged.
His son attended the International School of Helsinki. His wife taught English in a high school. Pictures of both of them are in the file. I bump the pics over to my cell phone, and find Moore’s number in the download from Saukko’s iPhone. I send him a message with the photos attached. The message is short. “Burned car. Girl dead. Blood debt.”
Moore calls me straightaway. “What is the meaning of your message?” he asks.
“We had that discussion before you got out of our Jeep. Knowledge equals collusion.”
“I told you I’m a soldier and a bodyguard, not a murderer, and I disapprove of hurting women and children.”
“I’m uninterested in what you approve or disapprove of.”
“I had no prior knowledge that your car would be firebombed.”
“You’re a bad liar. Tell me the truth.”
“I only know that his girlfriend had a miscarriage, and that the girl who was burned so badly is your subordinate’s cousin and your mistress.”
I don’t bother to clarify the mistress comment. “Lie to me again,” I say, “and I’ll hang up and proceed to make good on my word.”
“So you’re ready to take me on. It could prove fatal.”
Sweetness sets a kossu on the table beside me. “I agree that people will die. Who they are remains an open question.”
He hesitates, thinking. “In the interest of saving blood from being spilled, I’ll tell you what happened. In return, you give me a chance to get my family out of the country.”
I sip the kossu. The pain in my knee is calming down. “I’ll agree to make that part of the arrangement. Tell me the story, and I’ll decide if I feel it fair to place other demands upon you.”
“We have to come to an arrangement,” he says, “or I have to hunt all of you down to save my family and my own skin.”
I say nothing.
“I had nothing to do with firebombing that car, and I didn’t know about it until after the fact. It was Veikko’s idea, I believe after consulting with some Russians. NBI Captain Jan Pitkanen and the two Corsicans carried it out.”
“Even if you didn’t learn about it until after it happened,” I say, “you failed to inform me. I told you that you work for me now. Kill the Corsicans.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“You’re lucky I’m not demanding that you kill Veikko Saukko, but especially after the kidnap-murder of his daughter and shooting death of his son, it would spark the biggest manhunt in Finnish history and you would be caught. Kill the Corsicans, and they’ll just have their bodies dumped and be forgotten.”
“That’s a fucking lot to ask,” he says. “I’ll have to leave the country as well.”
“Not my concern. No Corsicans, no Shit List until they can be replaced. It buys me time. Call me when it’s done.”
“I’ll get you for this one day.”
“Fine. I’ll see you then.”
He rings off.
“Damn,” Sweetness says. “You’re not fucking around, are you?”
I close my eyes and think. It goes against my nature to threaten a man’s family, but my own comes first.
Pitkanen. The minister of the interior’s axman. I spared Osmo Ahtiainen’s life and this is the thanks I get. Maybe he doesn’t know his man is waging war on me. I start to call him but think better of it. It would tip him that I have someone inside, and as head of the secret police, he could run phone records checks and know who it is in about two and a half minutes.
Impressed and a little shocked, Milo asks, “Were you really going to go after Moore’s family?”
“Of course not,” I say, “but my track record left him uncertain about it. I didn’t think he would take the risk, and I was right.”
“We need to have a meeting,” Milo says.
Milo has changed. Before, he had a needy side to him. A need to impress. A need for recognition. A need for approval. All that seems gone now, replaced by self-possession and confidence. Being shot and cut, maimed and disabled, has tempered his steel. Suffering made him grow up.
25
We check the bedrooms. All the girls, including Anu, are asleep. I put the sauna on to ensure our privacy. We sit in silence in the living room and think our private thoughts while it warms. Sweetness, of course, breaks out more alcohol. I unwrap my knee and inspect it. It’s more swollen than it should be, but not oozing pus, and considering the abuse I’ve put it through, I suppose it’s OK.
We crack beers, hose ourselves down with the shower, and sit down in the sauna. Milo throws three dippers of water on the stones without asking. I’ve been to sauna with him before and he has the young-man, sauna-is-a-contest mentality. I was the same in my twenties. Now, in early middle age-and I’ve noticed most men get like me-I want to work up a good sweat without scalding myself. When it gets so hot that it burns the inside of my nose, I get out, shower in cold water, and cool down before going back in.
“Take it easy on me,” I say. “And sauna etiquette dictates that I should sit in the corner and toss the water.”
Milo is too thin. If he turned sideways and stuck his tongue out, he would look like a zipper. I once asked him if those were his legs or if he was riding a chicken, and it got under his skin. He’s by no means weak, though, just skinny and covered in ropy muscle.
He ignores the rebuke and gets down to the meat of the situation. “Who lives and who dies?”
The Gandhi pacifist life may not be working out for me, because of necessity, but I just don’t want to hurt anyone else. “We could begin by looking for a way out of this where nobody dies.”
Sweetness turns his beer upside down with his thumb covering the top, to cool down the neck so he can drink out of it without burning himself. “Sorry, pomo, not possible. My baby died.”
I don’t point out that it would have been aborted anyway. I suppose he doesn’t want to face it.
“And besides,” he says, “we have so many enemies, how can we ever make peace with them all?”
Milo ticks them off. “Veikko Saukko, and if Moore doesn’t kill them, the two Corsicans, the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, the Russian diplomats you’re trying to nail for human trafficking. Every fucking one of them is above the law and has people that do their dirty work for them.”
I let out a hopeless sigh. “And don’t forget Roope Malinen.”
He got his seat in parliament, but we hurt the extreme right and fucked up his hate agenda by exposing their drug pushing.
“I have another goal as well,” I say. “Those spreadsheets are all about human trafficking. I want those girls helped, especially Loviise Tamm.”
Milo and Sweetness nod agreement. “The men that brought her feel they own her now,” I say. “She needs protection.”
“Her mother called me,” Sweetness says. “She made arrangements for them to live in the countryside where they can hide and Loviise will be forgotten.” He swills beer. “I know you want Kate to see Loviise to prove something to her. But, pomo, I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t make everything right between you and your wife. It won’t.”
I built it up in my mind as if it would, but he’s right and I’m aware of it. “I think maybe we should all go stay at my house in Porvoo for a while. The windows are bulletproofed and the river runs in front of it, which is one less angle we can be easily attacked from. Plus, it’s bigger. This place is too small for five adults, a baby and a cat to live in.”
I inherited the house from Arvid Lahtinen. His wife of fifty years was in agony from bone cancer. He helped her die. I helped him cover it up. We became close friends. He was like a grandfather to me and made me his heir. Then, I suppose, feeling he had nothing left to live for, alone at age ninety, he blew his own brains out.