James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

“Let’s start with your business,” I say.

“Very well. If we must.”

The other hoodlums listen in rapt attention, hang on his every word.

“You’re a teenage boy. I’m given to understand you’ve lived alone since age thirteen. How did you manage to get that by social services?”

He lights a cigarette. He has an ashtray in a stand by his throne. “I gave them no cause for inquiry. I haven’t missed a day of school in that time. My grades are the highest in my class. I dress well.”

I feel like I’ve entered a fictional world. That this is a Sherlock Holmes tale and I’m surrounded by the Baker Street Irregulars, but they answer to a pint-sized and disfigured Professor Moriarty.

“My business is this,” I say. “I’m looking for a girl named Loviise Tamm. She’s been kidnapped by a member of the Russian diplomatic delegation. Their embassy is Russian soil. I can’t enter it and search for her any more than I could the Kremlin. She is to be forced into prostitution. The delegation has, to the best of my knowledge, seventeen houses of prostitution, but I don’t know their locations. Sooner or later, she’ll likely wind up working in one of them. I want you to use your people to surveil the diplomats, many of whom are actually spies, identify the people involved with prostitution, find out where the houses of prostitution are, and locate the girl if possible. She’s easy to spot. She’s tiny and has Down syndrome.” I take out her photo and pass it around the room. “It seems to me that the easiest way to do that would be to enter the houses as customers. Your crew looks like it would have few qualms about using the services of prostitutes.”

He looks thoughtful for a moment. “Why don’t you just use police for this?”

“For personal reasons, it falls outside their purview.”

He glances at a kid on the floor. Said kid hops up and brings him a beer. “I know a little about surveillance,” Ai says. “Why don’t you just GPS and monitor their vehicles? Chalk-mark their tires for certainty. Use security camera footage to get the license plate numbers and images of the people involved.”

Milo breaks in. “The cars are swept every day for bugs and bombs. The vehicles all have tinted windows. They’ve arranged their transportation so that no one can see who enters or exits the vehicles coming and going from the embassy.”

Ai turns sarcastic. “So you’re an expert on Russian embassy surveillance counter-measures.”

“No,” Milo says. “It’s standard diplomatic security protocol.”

Ai sips beer. “But yet, you believe we can accomplish all this and defeat their security measures, when you, trained detectives, are unable to do so.”

“Sulo thinks you can,” I say. I use his real name, as I doubt Ai knows his nickname. “Can you or can’t you?”

“That would depend on my motivation.”

I take Sasha Mikoyan’s credit card and account access codes from my wallet. “This is the account of a dead man. I checked it today, it’s still active and contains a hundred and three thousand euros. More than likely, you can withdraw three thousand euros a day in cash from an automatic teller machine, or if you prefer the safety of emptying it into another account, in the event that it gets locked, my colleague”-I gesture toward Milo-“will help you set up something offshore.”

He holds out his hand, I put the card and codes in it, and he looks them over. I’m certain he’s never had a chance to make so much money.

“Agreed,” he says.

“Do you have the means and will to accomplish this task? For that much money, I expect a successful outcome.”

“We do, and you’ll have it. Our means might be,” he pauses, searching for the correct word, “zealous.”

I turn to face his friends. They’ve listened and are dumbfounded at the prospect of so much money. I have their respect now. I could ask them if they had fucked their sisters and they would tell me the truth. “How many of you have felony arrests?” All but two raise their hands. “How many of you are armed?” Four hold up pistols. A few display knives.

I ask Ai, “Would you like me to open rat jackets on all of you? Odds are good some of you will be arrested, and if I say you work for me as informants, I can almost certainly get the charges dropped.”

He considers it. “A gracious offer, but we decline. It strikes me as something that will come back to haunt us later. If we need to do something drastic, we’ll use juveniles.”

I hand him a business card. “I want regular reports.”

“You’ll have them.”

My earlier curiosity is renewed. “Don’t any blacks live here?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He gets up, goes to another room, and comes back with a Crossman air rifle. He loads a pellet into it and pumps it a dozen times to get a lot of pressure behind the projectile. He goes to an open window. A girl of about five plays downstairs in the yard. He shoots with it. She shrieks in surprise and pain.

“We prefer the company of good, God-fearing white folks,” he says. “After being stabbed, shot, beaten and so on, the blacks all decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Besides, it made room for my friends to move into their apartments. Most of us live here now.”

Yep, the kid is like the devil. I’ve never seen a child in such mental anguish. “Regular reports,” I say, and we take a taxi home.

My phone rings at nine a.m. It’s the National Bureau of Investigation forensic mechanic.

“I got fascinated by the explosion in your Audi and pulled an all-nighter,” he says.

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“You may not thank me when you hear the findings. First, there was a hot fuel mix in the gas tank. Enough to start the car, but not enough to keep it running long. There was ether both in front of the fuel injectors’ carbonized nozzles and under the driver’s seat. I’m pretty sure a hole had been drilled so that it aimed up under the driver’s seat and squirted fuel. When the line lost pressure, fire shot backward up the line, ignited the ether under the seat and also set off the gas tank.”

“So it was a pro job.”

I hear him suck hard on a cigarette and gulp what I assume, from the blowing then slurping sound, is hot coffee. “And very slick. Here’s how pro it was. Ether eats through plastic, so the ether was poured into plastic bags, probably freezer bags or something, and those bags were placed in thin, watertight balsa wood boxes, so that a portion of the ether leaked into them. The flame coming out of the carbonized nozzles set the balsa wood, which is absorbent, on fire, which in turn ignited the ether and started the process. It was hard to spot the remains of the burned-up boxes, because balsa doesn’t leave much and there was already carbon all over the place. I picked up traces of acetone from the balsa leftovers, so I’m pretty sure that was the scenario. Somebody wants you dead, or at least burned to a crisp.”

“What do you preferably drink?” I ask.

“Good single-malt scotch. Why?”

“I’ll bring a bottle by for you by way of thanks.”

I can almost hear his smile. His job doesn’t garner much appreciation. “Stay safe,” he says.

• • •

KATE AND I take a taxi to see Torsten Holmqvist. I met Torsten not long after moving to Helsinki. I had broken the Sufia Elmi case, one might say by attrition, because so many people under suspicion died. I was shot in the face. I had been promised a slot in Helsinki Homicide, but the department decided I needed my psyche delved into before starting in my new position.

I never liked Torsten. He’s a Swedish-speaking Finn, wealthy, and I got the impression that like many rich Swedish-speaking Finns, he believes he’s battre folk , as I’ve heard them call themselves, a cut above the rest of us commoners. I find everything from his expensive preppy clothing to the apple-scented tobacco he smokes in his briarwood pipe pretentious, and he thought I couldn’t see through him when he tried to manipulate me. I interrogate people for a living. He never seemed to understand that he and I are, in a sense, in the same business, and it annoyed me. It wasn’t that he’s bad at his job, quite the opposite. He was just the wrong therapist for me.