James Thompson: Helsinki Blood

Most people love summer. It’s so short that it’s like a flower that blooms and quickly dies. People make such a huge deal out of it. We must have as much fun as possible while we can. Celebrate. Celebrate. Celebrate! Socially, it’s pressuring. If people don’t want to go to a summer cottage, pick berries and barbecue-or, if they stay in the city, don’t sit on the patios and drink fourteen hours a day-they’re considered deranged. And the whole country shuts down in June and July while people vacation. No work gets done. Fuck summer. If I were a flower, I’d be a lily. They only open at night.

When we moved here from Kittila, my hometown in the Arctic Circle, we got rid of all our old furnishings as a way of symbolizing a fresh start. It had all been collected by me over the years. Almost everything here is sparkling and new, chosen by Kate and me together, to make it ours instead of mine.

My tour of our home was some sort of self-punishment, an emotional self-flagellation. A re-enforcement of the knowledge that this is a home meant for a family, not for a man living alone, estranged from his wife.

I sat down in my oversized crushed blue velvet armchair. I more or less lived in it. I clenched my teeth to keep from grunting out loud from the coming blast of pain, and pulled my bad leg up onto the matching footrest in front of it. Being shot in the same knee for a second time did it no good at all. I already had a bad limp from when I was shot the first time, almost twenty years ago. The same went for my face. A second gunshot wound in the same jaw-the first a couple winters ago-created the current need to drink the kossu with meds. This latest wound tapped a bundle of nerves in my face, and because of the pain, I couldn’t manage to chew without it-even speaking was difficult-and tolerating soup for every meal was insufferable.

This was my second week of self-imposed isolation, except for dragging myself out to buy basic provisions. I had tried the company of others. I went to my brother’s midsummer party, but felt lonelier there among the revelers than I would have here at home by myself.

I had thrown away my crutches because they rendered me unable to carry anything. And also because of vanity. I despise the appearance of weakness. Everything I needed was close by. I had a granny shopping cart with two wheels. I gimped around with my cane in my left hand and pulled the cart with my right.

I checked to make sure my silenced.45 Colt was within easy reach, tucked under my seat cushion, the handle jutting out. After having been shot a total of four times, I vowed to never go unarmed again and to teach myself to be a crack shot, even though I have no interest in guns or marksmanship. However, only a reckless dumbass cop is stupid enough to have eaten this many bullets. I had no faith that I would become any wiser, so I needed to protect myself.

I hadn’t spoken to another soul for days, other than to say thank you to the store checkout clerks and delivery people. My wife, Kate, hadn’t answered my calls or text messages for a week, despite my right to see our daughter. My two proteges in our three-man crime unit-a euphemistic wordplay in our case, because as policemen, we’ve used Machiavellian rationalizations about the end justifying the means-inundated me with calls and text messages after we closed our last case.

Soon after, Kate left me and took Anu with her. I wasn’t angry, just frightened. Detective Sergeant Milo Nieminen and Sweetness, real name Sulo Polvinen, officially a translator but in truth my assistant and strong-arm man in the National Bureau of Investigation, were concerned about me being alone in my current state: shot to pieces, less than functional and, they left unsaid, distraught about my family situation.

I ignored them for a time, and finally sent texts telling them I was fine, asked them to please fuck off, and saying that I would contact them when I was ready. Milo respected that. He had problems of his own. A bullet shattered the carpal tunnel and severed the radial nerve in his right wrist, causing paralysis of his hand. He has very limited motion in it now, including his all-important trigger finger.

He would have called it his gun hand, as he considered himself a self-described pistoleer before the bullet put an end to that delusion. I think he envisioned himself a Wild West anti-hero, a Finnish Wyatt Earp. Plus, Adrien Moreau, who Kate blew in half with a sawed-off shotgun, lopped off his ear and it was sewn back on. It doesn’t hang quite right and he already had self-image problems, so I imagine looking in the mirror is difficult for him, let alone the automatic double-take people make when they see a disfigurement, no matter how small. I know all about that.

Sweetness came out unscathed. He’s a natural killer, and had just dumped two clips of.45 caliber hollow-point rounds in our perp, at near-point-blank range, while neither Milo nor myself managed to even hurt anyone, let alone defend ourselves when we received our injuries.

Sweetness is rich from money we’ve stolen-as are Milo and myself-and has absolutely no conscience but a heart as big as his six-foot-three, two-hundred-sixty-five-pound frame. Sweetness ignored my text and showed up at my door with three cases of beer and a carton of Koskenkorva bottles, a dopey grin on his baby face. I hired him because he took some hard knocks and I felt sorry for him, but also because of his innocence and honesty, his capacity for violence, and because I was drunk at the time. I’ve never regretted the decision.

Sweetness places great faith in the saying “If the alcohol, tar and sauna won’t cure you, you’re already dead.” Neither of us knows what the tar is for, or what you’re supposed to do with it to use it as a curative. We sat together for a while, had a couple shots and beers, talked about nothing. I promised him that if he gave me some space, I would call him if I needed something, and if I needed nothing, I would call him when I was ready for company. He agreed.

When I shut the door behind him, I realized how much I envied him his contentment, his happiness, his simplicity. Many people mistake his simplicity for stupidity because of his size and childlike face, and treat him as a Lennie Small, from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men . He is, in fact, astute and observant, and speaks five languages fluently. Despite our agreement and my refusal to respond, he texted three times daily, “just to make sure.” I was uncertain what he wanted to be sure of.

Sweetness looked up to me as a father figure. When I met him, he seemed lost. His brother had been killed by two bouncers. An accidental death, although better judgment on their parts would have prevented it. Sweetness’s father put him up to murdering the bouncers, and he tried to stab them to death with a box cutter. He managed only to disfigure them, and his father, a worthless piece of human garbage, finished the job as they lay in their hospital beds. He’s now serving a long prison jolt for the double homicide.

Sweetness’s true nature is a combatant, his calling a killer. He’s my friend, I don’t judge him for it. I did, however, insist as a pre-condition to hiring him that he get a higher, university or polytechnic-level education, because life in an illegal covert operation couldn’t go on forever.

I wanted only one thing for myself, to get my wife and child back and restore balance to our home. Kate was staying at Hotel Kamp, where she’s general manager, although currently on maternity leave. My last case went bad and had a devastating effect on her. She witnessed the horror and, having no choice, even took part in it, and the result was the severe psychological damage that she now suffers. And it was my fault, because of a glaring error in judgment.