James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

I boot up my laptop, stick a USB cable in it and begin. Mirjami asks what I’m doing and I explain. She calls me a stupid jerk, says she’ll do it and tells me to go to bed. I protest, jabber about Blu-ray transfer and the right cables for different devices. She tells me to be quiet, she knows all that.

I double up on everything: tranquilizers, pain medication and muscle relaxants, and wash it all down with a double kossu . Mirjami checks my knee and rebandages it. I say, “Wake me up in late afternoon so we can celebrate your birthday.”

I force myself onto my feet to make my way to the bedroom. Mirjami kisses my cheek. “Sleep well.”

But I don’t. Not right away. When it comes, though, I sleep the sleep of the dead.

I wake up on my own around five. Jenna is watching Anu. Sweetness and Mirjami sit at the dining room table, have open beers, shot glasses, and a bottle of kossu on it. They’ve already made a good dent in it. As usual, Sweetness doesn’t show it, but Mirjami is a bit giggly and bleary-eyed.

“Give me a birthday hug, then sit down and have a drink,” she says.

I’m still a little groggy from my sleeping potion. “I smell like a goat and need a shower,” I say. “Give me a few minutes.”

I shower and shave, put on new clothes, jeans and a shirt, to look party presentable. Kate bought these clothes for me. I hide it for Mirjami’s sake, but I don’t care about her birthday. If all goes well, Milo will bring Kate home day after tomorrow. Worry that all won’t go well preoccupies me.

I discover they’ve finished one kossu bottle, taken another from the freezer and opened it. It’s still early. My prognosticative powers tell me this night will end badly. Also, Jenna refusing alcohol is oddly disturbing. Possibly, she’s being sweet and staying sober to watch Anu so Mirjami can drink, but I could remain sober and do it. I’ve never seen Jenna turn down a drink. Forgoing booze on my account is out of character for her. I hug Mirjami and sit beside her. Sweetness pours a shot and pushes it across the table toward me.

I raise my glass. “To you, Mirjami. I hope your twenty-fourth year brings you all you wish for. You’ve been a godsend to me. I don’t know what I would have done without you.” This is true.

We drink our shots in one go. I get a beer from the fridge and put on the soundtrack from Pulp Fiction . It’s one of Mirjami’s favorites. We drink, and drink some more. I’m starving and they need some food in them to sop up some of the alcohol in their systems. The head start they got on me has left them coherent but whacked.

“Let’s eat,” I say.

“I want to go to a nice restaurant,” Mirjami says.

Not a good idea. She’s already too drunk. I’m not sure a restaurant would even want to let her in. I might have to throw my cop weight around to make it happen. I don’t feel like muscling anybody.

“What do you want to eat?” I ask her.

“Sushi.” She nods her head with vigorous certainty. “A mountain of sushi.”

Sweetness and Jenna both make faces, but it’s not their birthdays. Sushi sounds great to me.

“Why don’t we eat out in?” I ask.

Mirjami slurs a little. “Whaddaya mean?”

“I’ll call Gastronautti.”

She pours us all more kossu . “That place where you call and they’ve got about a dozen different restaurants and you order and they pick it up from the restaurant and bring it to your house?”

“That’s the place. And they have three different sushi restaurants to choose from on their list.”

She smiles a drunken smile that’s both sad and wistful. She forgets the sushi for a minute. “I had the windows in your Saab replaced with bulletproof glass,” she says.

Mystifying. “How could you get it done so fast?”

She toys with her glass. “I used my feminine charms.”

And her charms are many: She’s entrancing, excruciatingly beautiful, intelligent, responsible, has a good sense of humor, is a born nurturer with a great capacity for empathy, and pleasant company as well. She has vittuvaki , the power of the vagina. I don’t know the etymology of the term, perhaps it’s lost in the sands of time, but it stems from the era of pagan ritual and the celebration of the feminine, when it was believed the vagina possessed mystical potency. If anyone possesses vittuvaki , it’s Mirjami. Only one downfall prevents me from falling in love with her. I’m already in love with my wife.

Kate is my wife and the mother of my child, and I love her to the exclusion of all others. I lost the ability to feel emotion as a result of having the tumor removed from my brain, but it’s drifting back, slow but sure. For some weeks, my primary emotion was irritation. That’s fading, too. For Mirjami, although my sexual attraction toward her is magnetic-there are few heterosexual men who wouldn’t feel it-my primary emotion is tenderness.

“Thank you,” I say. “Let me repay you in sushi.”

“Isn’t Gastronautti extravagantly expensive?”

I smile. “It ain’t cheap.”

“What’s it like to be rich?” she asks.

I consider it. “Mostly, it relieves some of the pressures of life that plague most people.”

“How much did you, Sweetness and Milo steal from drug dealers?”

The questions of a drunk girl, childish in their innocence. My smile broadens and I sip kossu . “Oodles.”

“This seems like a good time to give Mirjami her present and crack the champagne,” Sweetness says.

I had forgotten about the champagne. It’s the last thing she needs. But what the fuck, it’s her birthday. I hid the liquor store gift bag stuffed with cash in a closet. I get it and set it in front of her, then play the good host and set out champagne glasses.

“Ugh,” Jenna says, so out of character that I wonder if she’s pregnant and has morning sickness. I say nothing and pour for the rest of us. “None for me.”

Strange indeed. I pour for the rest of us, we toast Mirjami’s birthday again and I tell her to open her gift.

She fumbles with the drawstring, gets it open and stares into the bag. She looks confused, shakes her head as if to clear it. She turns the bag upside down and shakes wads of cash onto the table.

“How?” Struck speechless, she can’t say more.

I don’t know if she wants to ask how much it is or how we got it. “Half a million, give or take. Proceeds from the evening. It was Sweetness’s doing. He should get the thanks.”

Drunk, she doesn’t hear the part about Sweetness, just throws her arms around me and starts at once laughing and crying. She’s got that annoying girl-drunk-weepy thing going on now. She gulps champagne and pushes the cash toward me. “It’s too much. I can’t.”

I laugh and push it back. “You can and you will.”

She doesn’t argue, just stares at the money with a disbelieving grin on her face.

From a wooden box on the bookcase where I keep miscellaneous odds and ends, I take an unopened pack of playing cards and hand it to Sweetness. “Show me the trick you cheated with.”

He says, “I’m pretty drunk, don’t know if I can,” but opens the pack and discards the jokers. He shuffles, I cut, and he deals. I get a royal straight flush and he gets a pair of deuces. He puts the cards back in order and does it again, except this time he gets the royal straight flush and I get the deuces. I saw nothing. He’s wearing a T-shirt, so has nothing up his sleeves.

“How the fuck do you do it?” I ask.

He zings out the deck in a long string in the air almost too fast for me to see, collapses it back together, hands it to me, and shoots me a sly smile. “Let’s just say it’s one of those things you learn when you have way too much time on your hands. I could try to teach you. You won’t be able to do it, though. You don’t have the dexterity.”