Milo listened to the threats made during their telephone conversations. When the thieves were caught— meaning us—we would be tortured for days, slowly destroyed physically but not allowed to die. They would cut off our dicks, make us eat them. And so on.
If I wanted criminals locked up, either Finnish or foreign, I had various options. Drugs or guns discovered during B&Es could be left in place, or moved to the home of a criminal I had a particular disdain for and used for a frame-up. A simple phone call to the police would lead to an arrest. I had yet to exercise this option. Gangsters running free could be robbed again.
Unforeseen consequences. We did our job so well that we ran Helsinki dope dry. Junkie suicides and pharmacy break-ins reached astronomical proportions. A pharmacist was shot to death.
Milo and Sweetness stopped any pretense of comradeship. Milo called Sweetness “the court jester,” “doofus,” “clown,” “the other half of a halfwit.” Sweetness responded with a long list of insults suggesting Milo was effete: “Mary,” “sissy,” and my favorite, “Miss Froufrou.”
On March third, I went to Fazer, the best bakery in Helsinki, and bought the fanciest cake they had. Fazer makes some of the world’s best chocolate, and this was Karl Fazer’s first shop. He opened it in 1891. I had a coffee and a pastry while I was there, because the back room is built under a dome that echoes. You can eavesdrop on conversations around the room from reflecting voices.
Then on to Alko, the state-run liquor monopoly. I had specialordered a bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac. Price: one thousand five hundred euros. The youngest cognac in the blend is fifty years old. The oldest, about a hundred years. I hid them until the evening, then set them on the table. Kate and I waited until Arvid ambled in. “Happy ninetieth birthday,” I said, and we sang to him.
It moved him so much that he almost shed a tear. He opened the cognac box and took out the crystal decanter. “It was the only gift I could find that’s older than you,” I said. It made him laugh and we passed a pleasant evening.
On March seventh, Anu was christened and officially named. Winter hung on as if it would never end. The temperature was minus ten that day. We asked my brother, Jari, and his wife, Taina, to be Anu’s godparents. They’re good people, have two fine boys of their own. I invited Jyri Ivalo to the ceremony, and to our house afterward for coffee and cake. He took it as a sign of respect, a gesture meaning that I wanted to solidify our relationship. He attended and gave Anu the traditional gift of a silver spoon set.
Milo didn’t attend. During the ceremony, he was busy black-bagging Jyri’s home. He made a mirror copy of Jyri’s hard drive and photographed relevant papers. We now had the user names and passwords for all information available to the national chief of police. Milo said Jyri was so fucking stupid he didn’t even password protect his home computer. He also planted a MAC-10 and eight balls of heroin and cocaine in various places around the house. More insurance, should Jyri choose to betray me.
On March fifteenth, my sick leave officially ended and I returned to duty, whatever that meant. I supposed I had an office at NBI headquarters with my name on the door. I had no intention of ever going there to find out. The date, the Ides of March, struck me as a harbinger.
13
Wednesday, March seventeenth. It was late morning. I lounged around in bed. Katt had crawled inside my shirt, shredded my chest with his claws and fallen asleep. Anu chewed on the little finger of my left hand. I was doing nothing, thinking nothing. Just existing. My cell phone rang. I reached over, careful not to wake Katt, and took my phone from the nightstand. Jyri Ivalo was calling. To answer or not to answer? I answered.
“Good morning,” I said.
“And good morning to you. I have a job for you.”
We’d heisted the town dry. I had nothing to do, wanted to do nothing. “I’m covered up in work,” I said.
“Lisbet Soderlund was murdered. Her head was sent by mail to the Finnish Somalia Network. It was sent by normal post, packed in Styrofoam peanuts and newspaper. A note composed of letters cut from headlines of a newspaper said ‘nigger lover.’ Forensics is there now. The case is yours. I need you to go over there right now.”
I turned the relevant facts over in my mind, considered the ramifications of taking the case. The Finnish Somalia Network, as the name suggests, is a political group that represents Somali immigrants in Finland. Soderlund was a Swedish-speaking Finn—and so, needless to say, white—politician belonging to the Swedish People’s Party. Soderlund was a member of the European Parliament for about a decade. After the 2007 elections she was chosen to be the new minister of immigration and European affairs. She had come to be a symbol in her self-appointed role as a champion of immigrants’ rights, far beyond the call of duty of her post. As the government’s foremost advocate of immigrants’ rights, she became the object of contempt and hatred of the extreme right and racists. For a time, until it was removed because of its illegality, a Facebook page existed called I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Soderlund. The page attracted some hundreds of members.
Her head in the mail was an escalation over a previous event involving the Finnish Somalia Network. During the last holiday season, they were sent a pig’s head, along with a note reading “Merry Christmas.”
I said, “It’s political, it’s high-profile. Her assassination will be remembered by history and the eyes of the world will be focused on the investigation. It will draw attention to me that I don’t need. It doesn’t serve your purposes, either. It’s a bad idea.”
“It’s the most significant murder in the region since Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986. I agree, and I don’t want you involved. However, the president does.”
“Why the fuck does Tarja Halonen think I should investigate this?”
Jyri sighed, aggravated. “It goes back to the Sufia Elmi murder. Immigrants are going to be up in arms over this. There will be protests, maybe retaliatory crimes. You solved the only case in our history of a high-profile black person’s murder. Therefore, Halonen believes your involvement will give the immigrant community confidence that the government is committed to solving Soderlund’s murder, and help assuage their anger. And she’s probably right.”
“Then I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it,” I said. “The president gets what the president wants.” There was no possible argument to the contrary. “But let’s do it like this. You say this is a matter of national security and I can’t speak to the press until the case is over. You take the limelight and attention away from me.”
“That was my plan. The address is Kuninkaantie 38. Let me know what happens. I have to keep the president apprised.” He rung off.
I THOUGHT ABOUT bringing Milo, decided against it. He would talk incessantly and have strong opinions on every detail. I didn’t want to hear them. I called Sweetness and he drove me to the crime scene. It had been five weeks since my surgeries. In a couple weeks, after I gained just a little more strength in my knee, I could trade in these crutches for a cane and drive again.
On the way over, I tried to impress the gravity of this case on Sweetness and repeated Jyri’s comparison to the murder of Olof Palme.
“Who’s he?” Sweetness asked.
I couldn’t fucking believe it. Had this boy been to school? Did he spend history classes sniffing glue?
“He was a Swedish prime minister and was assassinated in 1986. He was a harsh critic of both the U.S. and the USSR, among other governments. The murder went unsolved. Conspiracy theorists claim that either the CIA or KGB assassinated him. The point is that these two murders will be compared, and the whole world will be watching to see what happens.”
“Are we going to be famous?”
“Probably.”
“Cool.”
The city streets were still lined with high banks of snow and ice, but we hadn’t had much fresh snow for a while, so they were dirty and gray, the edges fringed in black filth.
A large crowd, mostly black people, had formed outside the Finnish Somalia Network. Sweetness pushed our way through and helped me walk until we made it inside. Two crime scene techs and a pathologist were examining
