Helsinki Blood

Ritva’s room. Everything is antique. The bed. The wardrobe. The chest of drawers. A writing desk. They were together for fifty years. They might have bought them all new. The closets and drawers are full of their things. I make room for ours and wonder if I’ll be sleeping in here tonight.

Everyone is hungry. For the first time in a long time I feel that I can take Kate and Anu out and they’ll be safe. I suggest Wilhem A, a restaurant just a few minutes’ walk from our house. It’s atmospheric. Its large patio extends out over the river. Moored boats are lined up in front of the patio. It’s a lovely evening, still daylight, a breeze coming off the river. We order beers, except for Kate. She orders orange juice. What Torsten said appears to be true. Valdoxan appears to have replaced alcohol as her nepenthe.

She’s healing. I offer a silent prayer of thanks and hope that she continues. I have an inkling that her situation is like falling down a well. She can see light at the top, and it’s narrow enough for her to climb out, but the walls are slick and precarious. It would be all too easy for her to slip and hurtle back to the bottom and land with a splash, once again in the freezing water.

Sweetness, of course, lines up three kossu shots and knocks them back one after the other, “to build his appetite,” which is already enormous and needs no enhancement. In keeping with their diet, he and Jenna order steaks. He orders two.

I would like to join them, have a good piece of red meat-I miss it-but my gun-shot mouth isn’t up to chewing it yet. Instead, I have roasted salmon in mushroom sauce. Kate has a perch fillet in dill and remoulade sauce.

We take a stroll down the boardwalk after dinner. Pushing Anu’s stroller spares me the decision of whether to hold Kate’s hand or not, as I have to guide the pram with one hand and limp along with my cane in the other.

We get home. Kate announces she’s tired, needs sleep. I’m exhausted as well. Carrying Anu, I tag along up the stairs behind her and into the bedroom. She cocks her head and looks at me, quizzical.

This is a kind of litmus test. I’m nervous. “Can I share the bed with you?” I ask.

She sits down on the bed, mulls it over and nods. “You have to sleep somewhere.”

I feel a great sense of relief. That’s good enough for now. We perform our pre-bed ablutions, take our medications, stand side by side as we brush our teeth. Without speaking, we climb into opposite sides of the bed. I kiss her shoulder and wish her good night. She doesn’t respond.

35

In the morning, there’s no food in the house, so we go out for breakfast. Kate is polite, if not warm, toward me. On occasion, I see her face go blank for a moment, as if she’s having little lapses, either unable to recall something or remembering something she would rather not.

Afterward, she asks if we can explore the old town. It’s a little maze of arts-and-crafts stores, antique shops and junk for tourists. She loves this shit. I play the good husband, trail around behind her with my wallet ready as she chooses little things that catch her eye.

Handmade place mats for the table, some candles, a bottle opener with a handle made from a reindeer antler. This is tourist season. A small army of husbands and wives follows exactly the same routine. Porvoo is primarily Swedish-speaking, so I can at least be of some use, translating questions to clerks for her on occasion. Mostly just for fun. The clerks cater to a lot of foreigners, and most speak English well.

Kate tires easily. We go to a grocery and do a little food shopping. By the time we get home, she’s ready for a nap. She has therapy at four. Sweetness promised to drive, and I promised to come along. The bus ride is only about an hour, but I worry that being surrounded by strangers-or even just the social pressure of having to spend so much time alone with Sweetness-would be unnerving for her. I picked up two newspapers at the grocery. One shows a couple of my photos from Yelena’s suicide scene. The other, showing more taste, chose not to run them.

The Russian ambassador was recalled. Soon he’ll be, as the Ripper and the Raper put it, fish chum. I killed him with my photos as surely as Milo killed Kate’s brother by giving him so much dope. I can’t bring myself to care. I hope his gangster partner, Yelena’s father, hangs him from a cross and crucifies him. Finland requested permission to remand him pending further investigation. Moscow refused, and made a formal complaint because Finnish police processed the crime scene without diplomatic consultation. Exactly what I expected.

But it reminds me that I have another task to carry out, and soon: finding the nearly two hundred girls pressed into sexual slavery on the list Sasha had in his iPad. And Loviise. They suffer as I procrastinate. For a man hanging around doing nothing, I have much to do. Try to bring my wife back to good health and keep my family together. Play whatever part I must to end our feud with the greater powers of the establishment and make us all safe again. As the homicidal Adrien Moreau would have put it, restore harmony to all our lives. No small order.

But when I think of those women, again I hear the trumpets sounding and the pounding of my white charger’s hooves as I engage in battle to save the day. I see the look of love and adoration on Kate’s face, the ugliness of the past erased, my reward for all the good I’ve done. And if I manage to free all those women, it would no longer just be the act of symbolism of saving a single girl, but an act that helps a great many people. Some true vindication of the vicious things we’ve done.

In our time as a black-ops unit, we may have crossed the line, but the people we hurt were bad. The world would be better off without most of them. In those cases, justice was served. I served it through criminal actions. That was wrong, but I believe in the adage “Who must do the hard things? He who can.” Though I don’t regret my actions, I don’t want to repeat them. I don’t like hurting people. I don’t want to jeopardize my marriage. I need only to look in the mirror to see that I’ve done my duty. Now I wish only to live in peace.

Milo shows up around two, comes to the house and asks Sweetness to help him bring his things in from the boat. Sweetness is the only one of us undamaged, and as a result, finds himself constantly playing errand boy for all of us, but he never complains. Alcoholism and sociopathic tendencies aside, he’s a good kid.

I go out with them to have a look at Milo’s boat, moored near the house. It’s a twenty-five-foot Coronado with two cabins, about forty years old but well cared for. Milo, convinced as he is that everyone is fascinated by technical details, fills us in on everything from its masthead sloop to its draft to how many watts the solar panels generate to details about its engines and props and even its Danforth-style anchors. For Sweetness and me, much of his lecture might as well be in Greek, but we’ve learned it’s easier to indulge him than shut him up.

Even by his standards of haggard appearance, he looks exhausted. Eyes like bloody holes in his head may be the result of his smoking dope along the ride, but still. “Hard night?” I ask.

“I was up all night writing the manifesto,” he says. “It’s not hard, and I’m having fun with it, but it’s pretty time-consuming.”

Most of what he’s brought along is guns and bullets. He’s hesitant to leave the sniper rifle in the boat, but I don’t want Kate to see it or the massive amount of ammo. Enough to fight a short war, there’s no way to explain it. His pistol is fine, standard police fare, but I especially don’t want her to see his beloved 10-gauge Colt sawed-off shotgun, as she used it to blow Adrien Moreau in half.

The three of us sit down on the dock, let our feet dangle over the water and light cigarettes. “I cruised by Veikko Saukko’s mansion,” Milo says. “Sure as shit, just like his calendar says, he was out behind the house, knocking golf balls into the sea. Kind of weird, isn’t it? I’m going to kill one man practicing golf and two men playing it on the same day. Generally, people don’t consider it a dangerous sport.”

“Do you have a plan and a schedule yet?” I ask.

“One time, I went to a junkyard looking for a carburetor for a car I used to have,” Milo says. “A piece-of-shit Volkswagen from the seventies. This big fat fuck was in a shack-the so-called office-lying on a couch with the springs popping out of it, watching a soap opera on a TV so old it was black-and-white and had rabbit-ear antennas, eating a bag of candy. I asked him if they had one. He said, ‘I dunno.’ I asked him if they had that make of Volkswagen. He said, ‘I dunno. Maybe. You gotta go out and look around.’ I said, ‘Well, goddamn it, what the fuck do you know?’ He said, ‘Not much. The less you know, the less you have to do.’ I thought that was true and pretty wise, especially coming from that dumb shit. And it applies here. How much do you really want to know?”

I shrug and flick my cigarette butt into the river. It goes out with a hiss and starts its journey toward the