Harri Nykanen - Behind God's Back

“He would have cleaned up the mess, or at least helped Roni clean it up.”

“What if the mess was too big to be cleaned up with their money?”

“Then it would have had to be a truly massive… How would Roni have ever achieved anything of that scale?”

“I don’t know, but I know there are plenty of ways. Some guys are gamblers, some make bad investments, others take drugs. Roni was in Lapland when his father was shot. One possibility is that the father knew of the threat and sent his son away to safety. He locked himself up in the house and told everyone he was sick.”

“Is that what you suspect?”

“It’s one possibility that occurred to us.”

“Have you interrogated Roni?”

“No, we’ve talked to him, that’s all. We don’t have any evidence of anything like what I just mentioned. Other motives could exist. Does anything else occur to you?”

My uncle leant back in his chair and let his head fall back until his gaze hit the spot where the ceiling and the wall met. It was his typical stance when he was concentrating. It was his way of shutting himself off from the outside world. I let him think in peace.

“Is there room for the victims’ Jewishness in your theories? I’m not talking about the most obvious thing, anti-Semitism, but something related to our community. Could that be the factor linking the two cases?”

“That occurred to us, too, but we couldn’t come up with the link.”

“How about the Jewish congregation? Jacobson was on the board.”

“But not Max, at least as far as I know.”

“No, but he was on the congregation’s security committee ever since your brother resigned.”

“That’s not much of a coincidence. Any congregation member who’s the least bit active is invited to take a leadership position.”

“It’s only been a month and a half. Your brother’s resignation was unexpected.”

“Do you know why he resigned?”

“Because of time commitments, evidently. I heard that Silberstein was a little peeved. Max stepped in for him.”

I hadn’t heard about this, but I wasn’t too up on goings-on in the congregation. I only attended synagogue on the most important holidays, like Yom Kippur, which was coming up way too soon.

“What do you know about the killer?” my uncle asked.

I broke the Criminal Investigations Act by revealing confidential information to him, but with my uncle I knew that I’d get my investment back in spades. Furthermore, I trusted him. He would never do anything that would put me in a compromising position. I told him everything, down to the surprise visit from Sillanpää.

“That’s quite the quandary you’re in. You could have excused yourself from the case because of Eli, and Lea too.”

“I didn’t want to, at least not yet. If anything else comes up, I guess I’ll have to.”

“More coincidences. The presumed killer is working for Baltic Invest. Your friend at the Security Police suspects that the killer is here in Helsinki to assassinate a Russian criminal while he attends synagogue. That sounds believable at first, but when you start thinking about it, it doesn’t. Not really. In the first place, why kill someone at the synagogue? It’s not the easiest place for an operation like that. The synagogue will be monitored and guarded, and making a getaway would be difficult. It would be a lot easier to kill the Russian somewhere else. Let me show you something…”

My uncle rose, retrieved a folder from the glass-fronted bookcase, and handed it to me. It contained press clippings from an Israeli newspaper, some in Hebrew and others in English. They were about Amos Jakov, who was considered one of the wealthiest men in Israel, and delved into the criminal investigations focusing on him and Benjamin Hararin.

“I’ve been keeping up with the story purely out of my own interest,” my uncle said.

“I heard that the investigations had been called off,” I said.

“That’s true. But they might be starting up again. It all depends on one man.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you follow events in your spiritual homeland? The Israeli Minister of Justice resigned four months ago, and the new Minister of Justice has announced that the affair will be investigated down to the very bottom. He’s a dangerous man; evidently he’s so insanely honest that he intends to expose his experience and knowledge of bribes involving politicians from his own political party. He has already revealed how the Mossad sold information gathered through wiretapping to businessmen, and how they made millions off it by buying or selling stock at the right time. One columnist wrote that the new Minister of Justice is so principled that he can look forward to a very short life.”

My uncle’s story sparked a vague memory that I sensed was somehow important, but I couldn’t get a proper grip on it.

“Who is the new Minister of Justice?”

“Haim Levi. Former secretary of the Labour Party. He has held prominent positions in the party for almost fifteen years. Levi also knows about the Mossad’s doings, so they don’t have a lot of love for him, either.”

“Haim Levi,” I repeated, as I remembered where I had heard the name. He was the young man posing with his host in the photo in Samuel Jacobson’s office. The former exchange student had metamorphosed into a man of influence. No wonder Jacobson had hung the picture on his wall. I doubted it had been there before Levi’s advancement to power player.

I told my uncle about the photo. He furrowed his bushy brows and gazed at me, almost in wonderment.

“So now do you understand?”

“I’m not following…”

“Levi will be paying a visit to Finland soon, and Samuel was one of those responsible for planning the agenda. Last time we met, he said that Levi had announced that he wanted to go and relive old times at their cottage. He was an exchange student here, and stayed with the Jacobsons. My guess is that the target is not some Russian mafioso, it’s Levi. And my guess is that your friend at the Security Police knows it, too.”

It was starting to feel like, in addition to keeping tabs on me, Sillanpää always tried to screw me over whenever I ran into him. My instincts told me that my uncle was right and that Levi was the killer’s true target. But in spite of the political dimensions, Sillanpää’s deception felt too egregious. I asked myself what he imagined he was achieving by sending me after some Russian mafioso. Then I answered my own question: he was afraid I would arrest Nurmio before they had accumulated sufficient evidence that he had been hired to kill Levi. If that were the case, Sillanpää had, strictly speaking, told the truth. And it was presumably also true that he wanted to exploit my connections to the Jewish congregation. I had to admit that the mafia man thing was a pretty clever ruse. While Sillanpää was sending me off on a wild goose chase, the information brought in by my investigation would help them crack the Levi case.

I decided that he wanted to hide the true target because it involved foreign policy and the delicate relationship between Finland and Israel. Anything of the sort was too sensitive to turn over to normal criminal investigators. Such matters were hallowed to the Security Police.

After reflecting on it, I eventually decided to see how things progressed without revealing my suspicions to Sillanpää. I’d borrow a page from his book, and bluff.

I decided to start by making the rounds of the bigwigs in the Jewish community. In a sense I had already begun with my uncle and brother, but now I’d step outside the family. I chose Silberstein as my first target.

I didn’t beat around the bush; I went straight to his workplace. He was upper management at a large engineering firm, where the lords of millimetre-precision machining and the princes of stress calculations sat in meticulous, modest cubicles staring at their computer screens, as if all earthly wisdom were contained therein.