I think it finally sinks in that she’s twice Jenna’s age. “And of all the things to do in Turku,” Kate asks, “you would most like to spend your day with the trolls?”
Jenna grins wide and gives a vigorous nod of her head. “Uh-huh.”
They compromise. Muumin World is on the island of Kailo beside the old town of Naantali. The town grew around an old convent, and is composed mostly of wooden houses along narrow cobbled streets that house handicraft shops. They can all have their fun.
Sweetness wants to drive. I say sure, but no kossu. He hands me the keys. I toss them to Milo. He likes to drive, I want to think. I notice Moreau has stubble blurring his wings of Icarus. I ask why. He says he believes we’ll wrap this up soon. He’s growing hair for changing identities.
We load up the vehicles and agree to meet in the market square for lunch. I put Anu’s car seat in the back of the Audi, strap her in, and we get on the road.
In my mind, I replay my conversation with the minister of the interior. He said that in early 2009, Veikko Saukko promised to donate a million euros to Real Finns. A short time later, his son and daughter were kidnapped. Welshing on a million-dollar promise causes hard feelings. This provides motive.
Veikko’s son, Antti, was himself affiliated with the racists. This provides potential accomplices. He disappeared, although the ten-million-euro ransom had been paid. The kidnappers had made good on their bargain to release the daughter. Why show good faith in her instance, and then dispose of the son? Unless Antti took part in the kidnapping, rather than being a victim of it. And if he then fucked his racist buddies somehow, it could have sparked the shooting of his sister as payback. Antti had recently been stripped of his position as chairman of the board of Ilmarinen Sisu Corporation. Fucked in the ass by his father without provocation. Well, there was that fucking-Daddy’s-wife thing, but still, this provides additional motive.
Jussi Kosonen supposedly perpetrated the kidnapping. He’s dead. His three children are missing. It stinks of a setup. Kosonen was a patsy. If they kidnapped his kids while his wife was away and forced him to keep Kaarina Saukko in his basement and later deliver her, he would be useless after retrieving the ransom money for them. Hence, a bullet in the back of his head. It would be the most practical thing to do with him. His children likely got the same treatment.
And I was right, our black-ops unit had predecessors, and they were military. My guess would be sheep-dipped Erikoisjaakarit, Special Forces, and they had gone to Russia on a mission concerning the human slave trade. So, like me, they had higher motives than ripping off dope dealers. And they were pros. And they died. And we’re bunglers. We’d better goddamned well improve our paramilitary skills.
The quiet has gone on for too long. Nervous puppy Milo has to break it. “Want to hear a joke?” he asks no one in particular.
No one answers. This doesn’t stop him.
“A priest checks into a hotel and says to the clerk, ‘I assume your porn is disabled.’ The clerk answers, ‘No, Father, it’s normal porn, you sick fuck.’”
Moreau chuckles. Sweetness guffaws. I smile. I never thought to practice laughing.
“Somebody tell a story,” Milo says.
Sweetness asks, “What kind of story?”
Milo thinks about it. “A fuck story. And it has to be true.”
No one volunteers.
“Kari, you taciturn bastard. Tell us a story.”
I’ve never told a sex story, although I have a number of them. I spent years as chief of police in an area with a major ski resort. A perk of being a single cop in a tourist area is the availability of women looking for short-term affairs-vacation entertainment. I never went overboard with it, but if I felt the need, women were almost always there for me. I’ve seldom listened to sex stories, either. The kind of people I’ve mostly spent my life around don’t brag about intimacies, don’t need that kind of self-esteem reinforcement. I decide I’ll try it, just this once, to see what it’s like, even though I know this is some kind of brain surgery post-op quirk manifesting itself.
“OK. This one time. Some years ago, back when I lived in Kittila, it was the night before Christmas Eve. I was making rounds, stopped in Hullu Poro, a big bar there. I was in civilian clothes but had my Glock in a belt holster. This girl comes up to me. She’s a half-Arab and half-German aerobics instructor, about five foot five, had on a tight T-shirt and jeans, and I could tell she had a six pack and an ass so high and firm you could sit a beer can on it. Skin the color of milk chocolate. Black hair down to her ass. Perky breasts. Around twenty-five years old. A beautiful girl. She took a plane to Levi by herself for Christmas on a whim.
“She walked up to me, I didn’t even see her coming. ‘Can I see your gun?’ she asked.
“I said ‘No.’ She asked if I was a cop, and I said ‘Yeah.’ ‘Will you show it to me later?’ she asked. I said ‘Maybe.’
“She asked me what time I got off and I said midnight. She wanted to go techno dancing and asked if I would take her. I said I would be honored. She said it was too bad I was a cop, she’d like to do some X.
“As it happened, I busted some Austrian Eurotrash rich kid that night for speeding, going about a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Baron von Dogfucker or something like that, who had brought about a hundred of his closest friends to celebrate Christmas with him in Levi. He had enough Ecstasy with him for all of them to celebrate in high style for days. He had a baggie full of the shit and I had never tried it, so I thought, What the fuck, and stuck four hits of it into my pocket before I entered it into evidence.
“After work I went up to her room and brought a bottle of wine. We had a glass, I said ‘Surprise,’ and took a couple of tabs out of my pocket. We ate one each. I didn’t like it at first, it felt like my mind was shaking apart, but it didn’t last long and then it was a really enjoyable high.
“I took her to a place where they were spinning techno. She kept falling over, laughing, had no sense of up, down or sideways. I kept scooping her up and setting her back on her feet. She swept all the drinks off the bar with her arm. I bought us more.
“She wanted me to take her home. She wanted to hear Finnish language and asked me to read to her, so I pulled a Bible off the shelf and opened it at random to the book of John. Just when I got to ‘and the Word was made flesh’-I’ll always remember the citation. It’s 1:14-she made her move and we started fucking. The floor, the bed. The sauna. The snow. You can do it in the snow after the sauna for a few minutes when your body temperature is high enough, just don’t get your genitals in it. I tacked a sleeping bag to the roof and we climbed up and fucked under the moon.
“And she was an expert at sucking cock. Every time I came, she sucked me again and made me hard, over and over. At some point, we took the other hit of X. She loved 69, had almost no bodyweight. I was three times her size and turning and lifting her was no more difficult than rolling myself over in bed.
“The date lasted thirty hours. After maybe the tenth time, my orgasms were dry, just powerful contractions. We did it nearly twenty times. Afterward, my dick was so tender it was hard to touch it without discomfort for days. I took her back to her hotel. She called me to say good-bye and I gave her a ride to the airport. We never spoke again. I never wanted to do it again. The experience was unrepeatable. At Baron von Dogfucker’s hearing, I learned that the Ecstasy was in four-way hits. We were supposed to break them into pieces, so we were really high. When I drove her to the airport, she told me that her father had just died, and she came to Levi after his funeral with nothing but the clothes on her back. She was just escaping. She was a nice girl.”
“Damn,” Milo said, “that was a good story. I didn’t know you can fuck in the snow.”