Robert Goddard - Found Wanting

They rumbled over a narrow bridge to an adjoining island and turned left past a high stone wall. ‘How long have you lived here, Pekka?’ Eusden asked.

‘Nine years. Some exile, hey? But, truthfully, I like it. I’m near Helsinki but not in it. That suits me. It keeps my memories at just the right distance. Timo told you all about my… troubles, no?’

‘Yes. He did.’

‘He helped me a lot. More than he needed to. So, I owe him. Which is lucky for you. I don’t normally talk to anyone about Saukko.’

‘I know. I’m grateful.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be. Knowing this stuff… can be unhealthy.’

They crossed a second bridge to a further island and slewed to a halt in a courtyard flanked by barrack blocks converted into apartments. Most of the windows were in darkness and a profound silence closed about them as they climbed from the car.

‘Welcome to my world, Richard,’ said Tallgren.

The apartment was small and felt smaller still thanks to the crammed bookshelves lining every spare wall and the piles of books and papers that had overflowed on to the floors beside them.

Stripped of his mitts and parka, Tallgren looked just what the domestic disorder might have led Eusden to expect: untidily dressed, grey hair overdue for a trim – a middle-aged academic content in his own shambolic environment. Except that he was an academic no longer.

‘I set some coffee going before I left,’ Tallgren said as Eusden hung up his coat in the tiny hallway. ‘You want some?’

‘Fine.’ Eusden would have preferred a stiff drink, but he knew better than to ask for one.

‘Come into the kitchen. It’s the warmest room.’

An aroma of coffee had filled the kitchen in Tallgren’s absence. An electric percolator stood ready on the crumb-strewn worktop. He grabbed a couple of mugs and waved Eusden to the table opposite, where a crumpled copy of Helsingin Sanomat lay, folded open at the page in the business section Eusden had seen earlier, with the photograph of Tolmar Aksden and Arto Falenius. Tallgren pushed it aside as he delivered their coffees.

‘Black OK? I’m out of milk.’

‘No problem.’

‘And cream.’ Tallgren nodded down at the newspaper. ‘Looks like they got it all.’

‘Do you regret tangling with them?’

‘You bet.’ Tallgren took a reflective sip of coffee, then sat down and folded the paper back on itself. The faces of Aksden and Falenius obligingly vanished. He smiled. ‘I’ve seen enough of that pair.’

‘What can you-’

‘Hold on.’ Tallgren raised his hand. ‘This is how it’s going to work, Richard. You give me the full story of what brought you here. The whole thing. Then, if I’m convinced you’re not… some kind of spy for those bastards… I’ll tell you everything I know. You’re sitting here with me because of Timo. No other reason. I don’t know you. He says I can trust you. OK. But that’s a two-way street. And you’ve got to trust me first. Do we have a deal?’

It was a relief in many ways to have no choice but to share everything he knew with somebody else. Tallgren sipped his coffee and smoked his way through a couple of roll-ups while Eusden recounted the events that had brought him to Suomenlinna. He took out the double-headed-eagle envelope and showed Tallgren the piece of paper with the fingerprints on it. He talked about Marty and Clem and all the people he had met in the course of one desperate week. He held nothing back. He laid it all on the line.

When he had finished, Tallgren topped up their coffees and said, simply, ‘It’s worse than I thought.’

‘I’ll assume you know as much Finnish history as the average non-Finn, Richard, which is zero,’ said Tallgren. ‘So, I’ll try to keep it simple. Sweden surrendered Finland to Russia in 1809, but Tsar Alexander the First granted the Finns self-government. He knew he’d have too much trouble with us otherwise. The Grand Duchy of Finland, as it was called, was part of the Russian Empire, but not part of Russia. It ran its own affairs. That made it a haven for anti-Tsarist revolutionaries – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists, nihilists – in the years before the First World War. It became Lenin’s second home. He and Stalin met for the first time at a Bolshevik conference in Tampere in 1905.

‘I set out to write a full study of the revolutionaries active in Finland during that period. It was a fascinating subject. I never thought it was dangerous as well. The Falenius Bank, as Saukko was called back then, was mentioned in a lot of correspondence as a source of loans to such people. Well, Arto Falenius was willing to admit his grandfather lent money to revolutionaries, though he denied they were gifts in effect, never repaid. He also denied Paavo sheltered mutineers who took part in a short-lived Red uprising here on Suomenlinna in 1906. It was odd. The evidence was clear and I couldn’t see a problem. Paavo Falenius was a socialist sympathizer. Good publicity, I’d have thought.

‘Then I came across some other information that confused the picture. Lots of new stuff was leaking out of the Soviet Union around then thanks to glasnost. It turned out from some of it that Lenin suspected Paavo Falenius was a double agent, feeding information about the revolutionary groups to the Tsarist government in St Petersburg. True? I never found out for sure, because that was when I really got Arto’s attention, by probing his grandfather’s relationship with a shadowy character called Karl Vanting.

‘Vanting was Danish, born in Copenhagen in 1884. He moved to Helsinki in 1905 specially to offer his services to Lenin as an active revolutionary. He played a big part in organizing the 1906 mutiny and a general strike the same year. The story was that he was a bitter enemy of the Romanovs because he was an illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander the Third. It could be true. There was supposed to be a resemblance. And my researches showed his mother worked as a maid in the Danish royal palace of Fredensborg. She was dismissed in December 1883. Karl was born five months later. Pregnancy was probably the reason for her dismissal. The Tsar and the Tsarina, Dagmar, went to Fredensborg with their children every summer to visit their Danish relatives. So, the timing fits. Karl’s mother married a Copenhagen shopkeeper called Vanting in 1885 and the boy took his stepfather’s name.

‘The same material that quoted Lenin as suspecting Paavo Falenius of working for the other side mentioned Vanting as his alleged confederate. This is where it gets murky. Vanting left Helsinki in 1909, destination unknown. It took a lot of work to follow his tracks. He dropped out of revolutionary politics altogether and turned up on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, working as a clerk for the aide-de-camp to the Governor of the Danish Virgin Islands. The aide-de-camp’s name was Hakon Nydahl. Denmark sold their Virgin Islands colony to the United States in 1917 and Nydahl went home. Vanting didn’t go with him. He stayed on, working for the new American administration. Then, in the spring of 1918, he got himself attached to a US regiment sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. He spoke quite good Russian and they were short of interpreters.

‘The Russian Civil War was the Whites against the Reds – crudely speaking, Tsarists versus Bolsheviks – in the aftermath of the Revolution, complicated by parts of the old Empire trying to break away and British, French, German and American forces trying to grab territory and/or stop the Reds winning. Plus rescue the Tsar – if they could. Finland declared independence from Russia at the end of 1917 and then had its own Reds against Whites Civil War. Unlike in Russia, the Whites won, with a little help from the Germans. It was all over by May 1918. Thousands had died. And thousands of Reds had been taken prisoner. This is where they were held. Here on Suomenlinna. The fortress became a prison.