book that Jyri told me implicates Arvid Lahtinen as a collaborator in Nazi war crimes. I don’t have much time before meeting Milo, but I want to check on Kate. Besides, I need to look at the book and want a few minutes of peace and quiet.
Kate sits at the dining-room table with Mary. Kate is wearing a T-shirt that reads PROPERTY OF JESUS.
When we decided to move to Helsinki, we also decided to get all new furnishings. The things in our house in Kittila were acquired by me and predated our relationship, had the traditional Nordic blond-wood look, which Kate doesn’t care for, and so we made a clean start in that way as well. Our new apartment has a big living room, decorated with dark leather couches and chairs, a walnut coffee table and a big entertainment center with a flatscreen TV. The interior wall is lined with built-in shelves that hold hundreds of books and CDs.
It’s a corner flat, and two sides of the room are lined with windows looking out onto Harjukatu and Vaasankatu. At the corner, where those two sides meet, a door opens onto a small balcony. I don’t smoke inside our home, so I insisted that we find a place with one, so I can have a cigarette without leaving the apartment.
At the rear of the living room, a low dais next to the kitchen serves as a dining area. We bought a big table for it that can seat ten, so we can have dinner parties. The kitchen has brushed-stainlesssteel fixtures. The refrigerator and induction oven are the ultimate in functionality and look like something designed in a space program. The bathroom is on the small side, but like maybe half the apartments in Helsinki, has a sauna in it, which I also insisted on. It’s electric instead of wood-burning, and because of it, the heat it throws off is too dry for my taste, but it serves its purpose. We have two bedrooms, one for us and one for the child on the way.
I kiss Kate hello, exchange pleasantries with Mary. They seem to be having a serious conversation, so I leave them in peace. John has gone out to explore the city. I’m tired and want to rest and read for a while. I take Einsatzkommando Finnland and Stalag 309 and lie down on the sofa.
I open the book and go to the index, look up Ukki, and, to my disappointment, find his name. There’s only one listing. I turn to the appropriate page. Toivo Kivipuro is mentioned as one of seven Valpo detectives working in Stalag 309, along with five Finnish interpreters fluent in Russian and German. I find no account of Ukki’s actions there. Details concerning Arvid are more extensive. A prisoner in the camp recounts that Arvid and other detectives took part in executions. Only one particular instance is cited in explicit detail, but the implication is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
I skim through the book and learn a few things. The Finnish security police, Valpo, was founded in 1919 to protect the new Finnish Republic from Communists in both Finland and Soviet Russia. Professional links to German secret police were established during the 1920s and maintained after the Nazi rise to power. Finland and Germany cooperated in the fight against both domestic and international Communism, an acute concern in Finland because of her shared border with the Soviet Union. Their common enemy unified Valpo and the Gestapo.
Valpo and Gestapo leaders developed personal friendships and cemented the relationship. Racial hatred seeped out of Germany into the Valpo consciousness, and into the Finnish mind-set at large. Racial slurs for Jews began to appear in Valpo documents. Valpo sniffed out ideological enemies on Finnish soil. They surveilled and detained them. They traded information with the SS leadership. The SS had a say in the fate of detainees.
I skip around the book and hit the high points.
Stalag 309 opened in July 1941. It was a normal German prisonerof-war camp. In other words, an abattoir. Twelve Finns and between fifteen and thirty members of Einsatzkommando Finnland worked together there. It was huge, held several thousand inmates, had special sections for “dangerous prisoners.” Bolsheviks, both military and civilian. Jews. Commissars. Russian officers and maybe also noncoms. Details remain fuzzy. The German army destroyed most of its records when it dismantled the camp in 1944.
Germans looked for informers in the camp and used them to collect data. Valpo assisted in setting up these networks. On page 218, I find a set of eleven criteria used to determine eligibility for execution. The rules were written in such a way that the Gestapo could execute anyone they chose at their discretion: political organizers, administrators, Red Army officers, intelligentsia. And, of course, all Jews.
Each day, individuals were selected, their names called out. They were driven outside the camp. Their clothes were taken away. They were dressed in sacks and forced to climb down into bomb craters. A bomb crater could hold a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred people. They were machine-gunned to death. When the craters were full, the victims were covered over with dirt.
I read enough to get a good sense of what happened there. Pure evil. A little piece of the Holocaust. I also see that, while not much is written about Arvid, it’s enough to get him extradited, maybe convicted. I need to find out if he lied to me. If he told the truth, I want to help him. Even if he lied, I consider whether I want to help him wriggle out of this mess. I don’t know yet. If Ukki were alive, I would still love him. I wouldn’t condemn him for past sins and ancient history, so how can I do it to Arvid? I check my watch. It’s time to go back to work.
16
I drive to Pasila. Two detectives, Ilari and Inka, are sitting in the common room. They glance up at me. Ilari nods. Inka ignores me. Ilari is in early middle age, has a bad haircut-he parts it too far over on the side and rakes thinning hair over his scalp to cover his bald spot-a mild dandruff problem, and a paunch. He does, however, wear expensive suits to work. Inka is middle-aged, has a short, shapeless haircut that renders her sexless, as do her frumpy clothes. She also has a paunch. Our two other team members, Tuomas and Ilpo, are working a kidnap murder and are seldom seen lately.
Ilari and Inka are reading today’s Helsingin Sanomat, the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper. They quarrel over who gets the sports section. I pick up the local news section. Murders rarely make the front page of Sanomat. The Filippov murder gets an eighth of a page, says nothing of interest. The press has left me alone about it. Arto and the PR folks are fielding the calls, an advantage of working for a major metropolitan police force.
One pastry sits in a box on the table. Ilari takes it.
“I wanted that,” Inka says.
Ilari shrugs. “You snooze, you lose.”
She calls him a bastard. He tells her to go fuck herself. I go to my office.
I log on to my computer and check e-mails. Without knocking, Milo jerks my door open and shouts, “Boo!”
It makes me jump in my chair.
“See,” he says, “you don’t like it, either.”
Milo is strange and antagonistic. It makes me laugh. “At least I wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction in secret,” I say. “Did you turn up anything at Saar’s apartment?”
“The only thing of interest was in his laptop. He has a collection of photos and videos of himself having sex with Iisa and other women in his bedroom. Judging by the camera angle, that’s the purpose of the hole in his closet door.”
“Doesn’t make him a murderer. Have a seat. The Filippov autopsy results are here.”
Normally, autopsy transcriptions aren’t delivered until months after the event, but I asked nicely, so the coroner sent me a summary.
Milo pulls up a chair next to mine so he can see my monitor screen. The autopsy painted a portrait of the crime much as we imagined it: Iisa’s broken bones, torture with a riding crop, cigarette burns, and cause of death- suffocation. But it turns up a major surprise. Several of the burns were inflicted not with a cigarette but are consistent with wounds caused by a drive-stun taser. This suggests that the killer first used the taser to incapacitate Iisa, then enlisted it as a pain compliance tool by inflicting multiple and prolonged shocks.
Time of death was somewhere between six and eight a.m.
“If Iisa was tased,” Milo asks, “then what was the point of hitting her with the frying pan?”
“Maybe to cover up the tasing,” I say, “to make it seem like a crime of passion rather than premeditated. The murderer might have thought the taser burns would go unnoticed because of the multiple cigarette burns.”
Milo looks thoughtful.
Forensics has e-mailed the results from Rein Saar’s shirt. I open up the file. The collar and shoulders were soaked in his own blood, from the blow to his head. His blood makes blood-spatter patterns from the riding-crop beating of Iisa Filippov hard to analyze, in terms of angle and velocity. It will have to be sorted out through DNA
