the test results ramrodded through. I got an appointment with the surgeon who would remove my tumor the very next day. He was going to tell me whether I would live or die.
I insisted that Kate come with me and listen while the surgeon gave me the prognosis. I wanted her to have no doubts that, if the news was bad, I hadn’t soft-pedaled it to spare her. It was January twenty-eighth, a bitter minus eighteen outside. The city sheathed in ice, snow banked up high by plows along every roadway.
I found, to my surprise, that I was calm. The possibility of death didn’t frighten me as I thought it might. However, Kate’s nerves were a shambles. She shook, could barely speak. Waiting outside the surgeon’s office, she gripped the arms of the chair so hard that her knuckles turned bloodless white.
The surgeon was businesslike. The news was good. I had a meningioma, about three by four centimeters, in my frontal lobe. He embellished on what Jari had told me about meningiomas.
It might have been growing there for as long as fifteen years. It had probably been affecting my memory, concentration, cognition, and possibly my behavior all this time, without me noticing because it happened so slowly, and of course, I had nothing to compare it to. As brain tumors go, he said, I was lucky. I had an outstanding chance of survival, and a very good chance of going on to lead a normal life afterward. As Jari said, there would be no follow-up treatments. He would cut it out, and that would be it. I’d go back to my life as if it never happened. He asked about the frequency and duration of the headaches. I told him constant and described the severity. “You have an excellent headache,” he said, and smiled. His idea of a joke.
Then he moved on to unpleasantries.
After surgery, I might feel worse than I did then, but only for a short time. The intrusion would cause my brain to swell. I might possibly suffer dizziness, lack of coordination and motor difficulties, confusion, seizures, difficulty speaking, personality changes that could be quite severe, behavior that might baffle and even shock others. I might require therapy, but these effects should lessen over a time period he couldn’t predict. Could be days, could be months. If an effect lasted more than a year, though, I could assume it was permanent.
“On the other hand,” he said, “in two weeks it might be like this never happened at all. Any questions?”
Neither Kate nor I could think of any. The fear in Kate’s eyes, though, told me she had a question, but he couldn’t answer it. Would I really live through the operation, and if I did, what would I be like afterward?
“OK, then,” he said, and opened his calendar. “How does Tuesday, February the ninth, work for you?”
“Just dandy,” I said.
_________
TWELVE DAYS AND COUNTING until they opened up my skull. I wasn’t afraid until then. I had only thought about the possibility of dying. The surgeon’s suggestion that I might be permanently damaged, either physically or mentally or both, turned into an invalid, scared the shit out of me. I tried not to think about it, stayed zonked on tranquilizers and painkillers. I spent a lot of time lying on the couch, listened to music, watched movies, read, kept Anu tucked under my arm. My thumb was her favorite toy.
Kate tried to be brave. She would have waited on me hand and foot if I let her. She made my favorite foods, came home one day with
There can be no normality in a home if a family member is gravely ill, but we did the best we could, and we managed moments of happiness, shared laughter, comfortable silences. As difficult as it is to have a newborn, Anu eased our burden. She kept us busy, kept our spirits up. I thought she looked like Kate. Kate thought she looked like me. I hoped, despite our dysfunctional relationship, that my parents would come to see their grandchild. Mom called to congratulate us. Dad didn’t even come to the phone.
Kate was unable to make love because of recent childbirth, but she used an American expression I was unfamiliar with: “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” I didn’t ask what it meant, and remain uncertain of the relationship between the skinning of cats and oral sex, but I drifted off to sleep every night sated. Often, during the night, I heard Kate weeping. And at other times as well. When she was cooking, vacuuming, at moments she thought I couldn’t hear her.
A few days before my surgery, Kate came home with a gift for me. A kitten. She’d gotten him at the animal shelter. I don’t know what inspired Kate to give him to me. I had a cat once before, named Katt—Swedish for “cat”—and kept him for several years until I came home one day and found him dead. He tried to eat a rubber band and choked to death. I was truly fond of Katt, and his death hurt me. I named this kitten Katt as well, in memoriam.
He fell in love with me at first pet, wouldn’t leave me alone for a second. He followed me to the bathroom and scratched at the door until I came out. When I sat or lay on the bed or couch, he climbed up, sat on my shoulder, kneaded his claws in my skin, and purred, used my neck and the side of my head for a scratching post. I let him. I looked like I’d been attacked and mauled by a pack of small but vicious animals. Anu loved him, too. The feel of his fur, tugging on its tail and ears. Katt took it all in good stride.
In that time before my surgery, Kate showered me in love, affection and kindness. Fear lurked behind it all. She radiated it. I wished I knew a way to calm her, to offer her some kind of re-assurance and quell her dread, but I didn’t.
3
On the evening of Friday, February fifth, Milo, Sweetness and I committed our first heist. As the national chief of police, Jyri is able to collate a great deal of information from police around the nation, and he also has a cordial relationship with Osmo Ahtiainen, the minister of the interior. Among his other duties, Ahtiainen heads SUPO. Ahtiainen also has amicable and cooperative relationships with his counterparts in both Estonia and Sweden. Through his own position and relationship with Ahtiainen, Jyri has access to a mountain of information.
Jyri had fed me dossiers on the Finnish and Swedish Gypsies and information on the drug deal. They were to meet at the dog park set on top of the hill in the neighborhood of Torkkelinmaki at seven p.m. It’s a good meeting place. A wide-open area, plenty of people around letting their dogs run and play together.
I told Kate where I was going. She grimaced, told me not to get hurt, but made no attempt to dissuade me. Milo, Sweetness and I showed up at six and sat on park benches in a triangle around the park. My idea was to wait until the Gypsies arrived and for all of us to slowly amble toward them. We would have them surrounded, draw weapons and surprise them, take their weapons if they were armed, then just grab up their dope and money and get the hell out.
As I sat waiting, I decided it was an ill-thought-out and dangerous plan. I’m a lousy shot. Sweetness had never fired a gun. All four of the targets were hardened criminals, likely armed, and might prefer to fight. I pictured a gun battle at close quarters, stray rounds cutting down dogs and their owners. It ending with all of us lying dead on the ground, dogs sniffing our corpses. We had planned all along for Milo to attach global positioning system tracking devices to their vehicles before the heist, to make ripping them off again in the future easier. I called off the armed robbery and told Milo to just GPS their vehicles. We would B&E them later.
And so we did. We watched the men trade backpacks, shake hands, and drive away in two separate cars. They drove about six blocks, parked, locked their cash and contraband in the trunks of their vehicles, and went together into a shithole bar to celebrate the event. We followed, Milo picked their car locks, and within five minutes, we had their money, dope and three handguns.
The following evening, we did the same again. This time, we B&Eed a luxurious home in the Helsinki suburb of Vantaa. The dealer was a dentist running a drug business on the side. Sweetness surveilled his house beginning in early evening. The dentist went out for a Saturday night on the town. We didn’t know when he would get back, so we waited. He returned home, shit drunk, in a taxi at about four thirty a.m.
When he turned out the lights, we gave him a half hour to pass out and, using flashlights dimmed with red lenses, went through the house like we owned it. We found several grocery bags behind a shoe rack in a hall closet. They were filled with loose, used bills, mostly in small denominations. Milo booted up the dentist’s computer and installed viral software so that he could monitor every keystroke, track his e-mails. Milo could use the computer as if he owned it from the comfort of his own home. He also installed software into the dentist’s cell phone so he could
