Helsinki White Read online

  I run a heist gang. I’m a police inspector, shakedown artist, strong-arm specialist and enforcer. Three months ago, I was an honest cop. I’m not sure I care how or why, but I reflect on how I could have undergone such a drastic change in such a short time. Jyri wanted me to recruit some other tough cops, but I refused. More than four people is too many in on a secret. The group is just me, Milo, and Sweetness. Milo is a sick puppy, but he’s grown on me over time because of his enthusiasm. Sweetness is a baby-faced behemoth, whom I hired out of sympathy, because of his size and capacity to commit violent acts without enjoying them, and to piss Jyri off. Which it does. Jyri refers to him as “the oaf.” Sweetness often seems a simpleton, but he’s far from it.

  To quote Sweetness: “Life just is. Ain’t no reason for nothing.”

  1

  A little over three months before my meeting with Jyri, Kate gave birth to our first child, a girl, on January twenty-fourth.

  It was an easy birth, as childbirths go, no more difficult than squirting a watermelon seed out from between her fingers, only sixteen hours from her first contraction to me cradling our child in my arms. When I first held her, I felt a wealth of emotions I didn’t know existed, and I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but I loved Kate tenfold more for the gift she had given me.

  She was an easy baby. Didn’t cry much. Often slept through the night. She wasn’t officially named until her christening, but we chose to call her Anu. A simple and pretty name, pronounceable by Finns and foreigners alike, important in a bi-cultural marriage.

  Our bi-cultural marriage changed me. When I met Kate, like many Finnish men, I was unable to utter the words “I love you.” I’ve heard women complain more than a few times that their husbands don’t tell them they love them. The typical answer: “I told you I loved you when I married you. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.” But she told me often, with sincerity and without shame. I learned to return the sentiment. At first, it was awkward for me. Before long though, I learned to say it first, it felt natural, even good, and I couldn’t understand why it had ever been difficult.

  I had been suffering severe migraines for the better part of a year. I thought they were the result of stress related to Kate’s pregnancy—she had miscarried twins the previous December, and I was scared that it would happen again—but Kate insisted I had tests run. My brother, Jari, is a neurologist. I went to him and he sent me for an MRI. The day we brought Anu home from the hospital, it fell upon him to tell me that I had a brain tumor.

  Kate and I had always had a great relationship, were best friends as well as husband and wife, but there was a sticking point that stood between us. My failure to tell her about my past or current events in my life, especially if they’re unpleasant. She isn’t as bad as, say, characters on American television shows who throw hissy fits upon finding out that their spouse had a one-night stand twenty years ago and five years before the couple even met, and believe the lives of their spouses, even their deepest and most private thoughts and emotions, must be open books. But a couple times, Kate has found out things about me that shocked her, and she’d like me to open up, at least a little, so she can know and understand me better. It’s hard for me, just not my nature. Kate said she viewed my failure to tell her about events relevant to our life together as a form of lying. And it disturbed her that I kept much of my past under lock and key.

  I saw her point, and promised to try to learn to be more open. But she was a new mother, radiant, full of joy. I debated on how long to let her be happy before telling her I might die. I decided on two days. I probably would have put it off longer, but the biopsy to determine the nature of the tumor was scheduled in two days, on the twenty-eighth. It would have been hard to fabricate an explanation of why part of my hair was shaved off and I had a stitched-up surgical incision, and I figured she needed at least a day to get used to the idea.

  I sat with Kate on the couch, asked her to prepare herself, and took her hand. “The results from the MRI came back,” I said, “and I have a brain tumor.”

  Her face fell and tears glistened in the corners of her eyes. She tried to speak and faltered. When she managed it, her voice cracked. “How bad?”

  I explained the situation as best I understood it, as Jari had explained it to me, and told her that I would have a biopsy the day after tomorrow and it would give us the answer to that question.

  I said the best case scenario was that I had a meningioma, a tumor that originates in the meninges, the thin membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord. If so, it could be removed by a craniotomy and, with luck, I might suffer no permanent consequences at all and be back home in three days, maybe even be back to work in a couple weeks. I would require no chemo or radiation therapy, no nothing. It could, however, possibly cause problems with my speech or balance, weakness, even paralysis. Physical therapy could hopefully remedy these problems, if needed, and with luck I could be back to normal, or close to it, in only a few months.

  The worst-case scenario was that I had a Grade IV, rapidly growing and malignant tumor. If so, not much could be done, and I would have only a short time to live. Maybe only weeks. There were other possibilities with varying degrees or severity and requiring different treatments, and Jari hadn’t explained them all to me, because the list was long. But those were the two extremes.

  Kate took the news like a trouper, managed to stay calm. She started to cry a little but didn’t break down. “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  I had an awful migraine. After suffering from a near constant severe headache for a year, I was worn down, tired. Prolonged pain had sapped my strength and had left me in a permanent state of lethargy. Still, I’d continued working. “OK,” I said. “I’m more worried about you having to deal with this than anything.”

  “Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

  Another consequence of prolonged severe pain is that the desire to end it supersedes everything else. “Not really,” I said. “I just want this to be over.”

  She took me in her arms and held me for a while. There was nothing else to say.

  Some time passed. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about,” I said. I didn’t like bringing this up then, because I didn’t think she would like it, and I felt like I was using the possibility of my death as a way of manipulating her into getting my way. But I wasn’t. I wanted to honor her wishes and not hold this back from her, and I had to give Jyri an answer about the black-ops unit now. He insisted on it. He said yes, I could possibly die, but he had faith that removing the tumor would be no bigger a deal than pulling a tick out of a hound’s ear.

  When our desires conflict, if possible, I try to put Kate’s happiness ahead of my own. I promised myself I wouldn’t let work interfere with our relationship again. I’m a romantic at heart. I told Kate that the national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, had given me a job offer, and asked me to run a clandestine unit. It would use illegal methods to fight crime. I compared it to J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program, but more benign. Most of the illegal activity would be technological surveillance that violated privacy laws, and using that information to take cash, drugs, firearms, etc., from criminals, relieving them of the tools they need to ply their trades and using their money to fund our operation.

  I told her what Jyri said about truly helping people, saving young women from being forced into slavery and prostitution. I told her I thought I could make a difference, save some of these girls from having their lives turned into hell on earth.

  Kate shifted closer, pressed her body against mine. “Are you asking my permission?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I am, because I’ll break laws and it’s risky. And because if we’re going to live in this country, I think I have to. During the Filippov investigation, I gathered a lot of dirt on people in positions of power. I know too much. If I refuse, they’ll find a way to discredit and destroy me, to protect themselves. In a way, they’re offering to let me join their boys’ club. If you don�
��t want me to take the job, we should leave Finland and move to America. I want you to make the decision.”

  “Do you want this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I do. I feel that for the first time in my life, I have a chance to do something that makes a true difference. Most likely, I’ll never have another opportunity like this again. But I don’t have to make a difference. If you want me to turn it down, I will, without hard feelings or regrets.”

  She sat for what seemed like a long time, quiet. I watched her, admiring. Kate is a lovely woman. A classic beauty. Pregnancy had almost no effect on her figure, other than that her breasts were larger. She remained slim. Her long cinnamon hair hung loose. Her dove-gray eyes were far away, lost in thought.

  “Take the job,” she said, “but I want you to go on sick leave starting today.”

  “OK,” I said, “but I want to play around a little bit starting up my new project, getting it functional, just to give myself something to do.”

  She nodded agreement, and at that moment, without realizing it, I became a dirty cop.

  2

  On Thursday morning, I had the biopsy. Jari used his superpowers as a highly respected neurologist and had 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 muikun mäti—roe from whitefish the size of my finger, that carries a price tag commensurate with the arduous work of cleaning the eggs out of those tiny fish, and to my mind better than beluga caviar—and a bottle of good Russian vodka to go with it, reindeer inner fillet for the main course, and we had a homemade cake for dessert.

  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 Torkkelinmäki 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 surpris
e 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 eavesdrop on his calls and read his text messages. We now owned the dentist. These technological intrusions became our modus operandi.