Sweetness got behind the wheel, hit the flask again and we pulled out.
“You’re fast,” I said. “Have you trained?”
He grinned. “Naw, just another of my natural gifts.”
We rode in silence for a while. Something rolled back and forth under my seat. Judging by the sound, it was a bottle of booze to refill the flask throughout the day.
“How much do you drink?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t keep track.”
“Been drinking hard long?”
“More since my brother got killed. It’s not so much that I like to get drunk. It just steadies my nerves.”
Sweetness is one of those rare juicers. You never know when they’re tanked: they never slur, their eyes don’t droop. He always seems sober. He drove fast, wove in and out of traffic along the icy roads with careful precision. I said nothing, wanted to give it some thought. What I said wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Sometime there would come a point when he’d have to choose whether to self-destruct or build a life for himself.
At NBI HQ in Vantaa, he filled out his application for a job as a linguist. He got the job through nepotism, but it wasn’t a sham. Our team needed a linguist with exactly his abilities, for translation of electronic eavesdropping on foreign criminals. He only lacks Dutch. We could use someone who speaks it, because so much pot and Ecstasy comes from Amsterdam. We got it done and started out toward Arvid’s. We wouldn’t be taking his Toyota again. The shock absorbers were worn out, and every bump in the road jarred my knee, sent pain shooting through it. I have a Saab 9–5, 2007 model, which I love. We’d be taking it from now on.
On the way, I asked him about his plans for an education. Since he was now an NBI employee, he didn’t have to go to the police academy in Tampere. He could stay here and attend the University of Helsinki or a polytechnic trade school.
“I got a job,” he said. “What do I need school for?”
“That was our agreement when I hired you,” I said. “I expect you to earn a degree. What you study, though, is up to you.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “You can pick for me.”
Then I got it. He would apply for whatever I suggested, then fail the entrance exam but claim he tried and acted in good faith.
“No,” I said. “It’s your life, and what we’re doing now won’t last forever. You make a decision, and you study like hell for the entrance exam. If you don’t go to school, you can’t work for me. End of story.”
This made him mad. He didn’t speak to me for the next hour.
After we picked up Arvid’s clothes, I asked him if Milo had been teaching him some computer skills. “No. I don’t like being around him if I don’t have to. He calls me names, makes fun of the way I talk and tells me I’m stupid. I’m not stupid.”
Sweetness has an East Helsinki accent and uses the area’s slang. Sometimes I don’t get what he’s saying. Helsinki is funny that way. Dialects vary so much that you can often place a person’s roots to within half a mile. East Helsinki dialect screams lower class.
“I’m not going to take much more of that shit from him,” Sweetness said.
“You want me to speak to him about it?”
He scoffed. “Pomo, I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.”
“Just don’t hurt him like you did the dope dealer.” I was curious. “Did that bother you?” I asked.
“Naw, he deserved it. I couldn’t care less.” He switched topics. “Milo taught me a little about surveillance, though. I got some good pictures to show you.”
“I told you to stay in the car and out of sight.”
“Milo said that was bullshit, that I had to learn to be-what do you call it? — surreptitious. I gotta say, he was right. I got some great pics.”
After physical therapy, Sweetness took me home, and I invited him to eat with us. It was like watching a pig at the trough. He ate at lightning speed, watched with an empty plate to make sure we had our fill, then devoured every last bite left on the stove. Why did I think my relationship with Sweetness was going to equate to Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady?
10
February eighteenth, Thursday. Nine days since my brain tumor was removed. My luck was extreme. My headache disappeared. I suffered no common physical side effects. No weakness, motor control or problems with coordination. No difficulties with speech. No more seizures. No mental deficiencies. Quite the opposite. Each day, I felt that my powers of cognition and memory increased. I remained, however, emotionally flat.
I continued my one-month sick leave. It didn’t go as Kate and I had imagined: quiet time together, just us and our child. Milo and Sweetness were always underfoot. Arvid, though, knew how to make his presence unobtrusive. Kate liked him more and more over time. He mostly kept to himself, listened to music with his MP3 player, tended to Anu, grocery shopped and often cooked. He was an excellent chef, and taught Kate much about traditional Finnish cuisine. As a longtime world traveler, his English was good.
Sweetness played chauffeur, took me to physical therapy three times a week, stopped by to see if we needed anything approximately every ten minutes. At night, he surveilled politicos. He bought a good camera. He showed me his videotaped victories with pride. He had a close-up of Hanna Nykyri, head of the Social Democratic Party, with a dick in her mouth. A wider shot proved said dick didn’t belong to her husband. He had a picture of Daniel Solstrand, minister of foreign affairs, with a dick in his mouth. Owner of said dick appeared underage. Sweetness had pics of the national chief of police and the minister of the interior with a variety of woman, a veritable bevy of quail.
The minister, Osmo Ahtiainen, is an overweight pig not choosy about his quiff. A video showed the fat fuck minister in the saddle of a woman who looked like she might be the village blacksmith. She changed the TV channel with a remote control. The sound was off. He didn’t notice. He came, squealed and grunted. She fake came with him, gave him the “Oh, baby, you’re the best” patter.
One morning, while we were alone, I had a talk with Arvid. I asked him if he would like to be our bookkeeper, since Jyri wanted ledgers kept. “The murder you’re accused of falls under the National Security Act,” I said. “If I get caught, and you have the books, they can’t be used against me.”
“You won’t get caught for the simple reason that police corruption, at least in the public consciousness, is so rare here as to be non-existent, and you’re the most famous cop in the nation, so no one would believe it. It would be like trying to convince them that Jesus was a pedophile.”
It’s true. After being shot twice in the line of duty and being decorated for bravery both times-and especially since Milo and I stopped a school shooting and were glorified in the press for saving the lives of children-I’m a nationally respected figure.
“But sure, I’ll do it,” he said. “It will be fun. I’ll keep them in a code from the war and teach it to you, make it feel like the old days.”
Most of Arvid’s time in the war was spent in Valpo, our secret police during those years.
Then I brought up what I really wanted to talk about, and told Arvid about going flat and feeling no emotion. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep up the pretense, and it will cause me to wreck my marriage,” I said, “or it will cause me to make an error in judgment in my work and get somebody hurt.”
I had already told him about my black op, ripping off drug dealers, taking money.
“I already told you, boy,” he said. “You inherited your family blood. You’re a killer, you just need the right justifications so you can pretend otherwise. There have been times in my life when I felt nothing. It started during the Winter War. I felt no fear, no joy or misery, no guilt. It went away over time, but sometimes, when I’m under stress, I still go numb inside. Our circumstances are different, your problem is neurological and mine is post-traumatic stress syndrome. I’m just saying I have an idea of what you’re going through. You love your wife. Just because you can’t feel it right now doesn’t mean it isn’t so. And this black-bag operation-you’ve been lying to yourself-people are going to die and you knew it when you took it on. Maybe you’re better off if you don’t feel anything for a while.”