Lucifer's Tears (26 page)

I tell him about Arvid and the implications about Ukki.

“You seem to want to protect the memory of your grandfather,” he says.

I picture Ukki beating the hell out of a starving prisoner, tied to a chair, with a fire hose sap. It splits open and buckshot flies. I shudder. “Wouldn’t you?”

He shrugs. “Perhaps not. It would depend on the situation. Tell me about your grandparents on both sides.”

“I called Mom’s parents Ukki and Mummo. We didn’t go there often, but I loved being at their house. They were sweet to me, and my brothers and sister, too. After Suvi died, they doted on me, I guess because I was the youngest after she passed away. I didn’t get to know them that well, though, because they died when I was eleven and twelve, respectively. Ukki smoked like a train, and lung cancer killed him. I think Mummo died of loneliness. The only thing I remember odd about them was their intense hatred of Russians. Just the word ‘Russia’ could send them into tirades.”

“Because of the war?”

I nod.

“You told me your father’s parents were cruel.”

“Mean-spirited in the extreme. Really shitty people.”

“So you have no desire to protect their memories in a positive light, as you do your mother’s parents.”

“They were mean to kids. He was drunk on Midsummer’s Eve, stood up in a boat to take a piss, fell into the lake and drowned. Their sauna burned down. She died in the fire. Fitting deaths for both of them.”

“That’s serious acrimony.”

I shrug. “So.” I remember something. “They hated Germans like the plague, as much as Ukki and Mummo hated Russians.”

“The war affected people in deep ways,” he says. “Do you want to talk about the ways in which they were cruel?”

“Not at present.”

I light yet another cigarette. Just thinking about them makes me uncomfortable.

He switches gears. “How is the visit from your wife’s brother and sister going?”

“Not well. Mary seems to have a good heart, but she’s a religious fanatic and a right-wing political nut. Likewise, John seems like a decent sort, but he’s a drunk and drug abuser.”

I tell Torsten about the fiascos with John.

“This week,” he says, “you assaulted a mentally ill person to protect children. You became so intent on protecting your grandfather that you suffered some kind of episode, and you lied to your wife to protect her from her own family. Your desire to protect seems to have no bounds.”

“Is that a criticism?” I ask.

“No. An observation.” He asks, “Whom have you loved in your life?”

I’m afraid this is going in a silly boo-hoo-hoo direction, but I promised myself I’d try to work with Torsten. I think about it. “My parents, Ukki and Mummo, my brothers and sister, my ex-wife, when we were young, and Kate.”

“No one else?”

“No people, but I loved a cat, named Katt.” I laugh aloud at the maudlin idea of it. “The dumb bastard choked to death on a rubber band.”

He appears thoughtful, fills his pipe again and lights it. “May I offer a conjecture?” he asks.

“Be my guest.”

“Your father beat you when you were a child, but you say you bear him no ill will. Yet you have little contact with your immediate family. Is it possible that you don’t see them now, because you were the youngest, and none of them did anything to protect you from your father?”

“They were afraid of him, too.”

“Failure to protect is a form of betrayal. Your sister died. She left you. Another form of betrayal. Your ex-wife betrayed you in the literal sense and abandoned you. Even Katt died and left you. Your Ukki has turned out to have been a war criminal and this tarnishes your image of him. A betrayal. Is it possible that you’re overprotective of Kate because she’s the only person in your life who has loved you without betrayal, and that, deep down, you fear that if you lose her, you’ll never know love again?”

“I have to think about it,” I say.

“You told me that during the Sufia Elmi investigation you felt that a suspect threatened Kate. You developed symptoms similar to a heart attack, pulled your car to the side of the road, put a gun to his head and threatened to kill him.”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“That’s immaterial. The point is that your symptoms and responses are consistent with those of severe panic attacks. This lends credence to my suggestion.”

He’s right.

He leans forward. “Has it occurred to you that Katt and Kate are almost the same name? A curious coincidence.”

I’ve had enough, can’t take such ridiculous Freudian bullshit, and resist the urge to mock him. “Let’s call it a day,” I say.

Torsten is professional and means well, but I doubt I’ll see him again. I realize that if I’m ever really going to open up to anyone, it can only be Kate.

The snow, already almost waist-high, pours down in a torrent. Lucifer doesn’t relent. Dante states that the devil resides in the ninth circle of hell, trapped in the ice like the rest of us, and I feel that he’s here, watching over us with approval. Except for the fact that the extreme cold makes my bad knee useless, I couldn’t care less. Let the snow fly.

I find Jyri Ivalo shivering on the stoop of Rein Saar’s apartment building. We nod greeting but don’t speak. We take the lift to the fourth floor. I break the crime-scene tape and unlock the door. We step inside.

“Look familiar?” I ask.

Jyri’s face sags. He fumbles with the buttons on his overcoat, but trembles so hard that he can’t open them. He’s experiencing deja vu and horror. I wait and let the truth sink in. The meanings of the veiled cryptic messages in my conversations with Filippov and Bettie Page Linda are now clear to me. They have no fear of conviction because they’ve framed Jyri for Iisa’s murder. If Rein Saar doesn’t go to prison, Jyri will take his place. He’ll never let the investigation look in their direction. Who better to protect them than the national chief of police?

Jyri wanders into the bedroom, looks around in disbelief, sits on the bloodstained bed. “Why is this happening to me?” he asks.

“Describe-exactly-what happened when you came here with Linda,” I say.

He pulls it together enough to answer. “I told you I was drunk, it’s all a bit blurry. But it happened here, in this room.”

I stand over him. “I said exactly.”

“We came into this bedroom and she wasted no time. She stripped her clothes off except for black stockings, and told me to take my clothes off. She had a dildo, as you thought, and took it out of the closet. She sucked me off and used it to masturbate.” He averts his eyes. “Then she used it on me.”

“Show me where you were and the position she was in when she blew you,” I say.

He gets up and moves to a spot beside the bed, across from the closet. “I stood here.” He moves his hands to where her head had been. “And she knelt here. The whole thing lasted for maybe ten minutes.”

“And then what?”

“Then she went to the bathroom, I guess to wash her mouth out.”

I shake my head at his stupidity and point at the hole in the closet door. “She positioned you so that she could make a video through there.” I open the door and show him the stool. “That’s where the camera was.”

He sits on the bed again and buries his face in his hands.

“You’re known to have had sex with Iisa Filippov. Linda and Iisa look alike. She placed herself so that, with her back to the camera, no one could tell the difference between them. She went to the bathroom to spit out your come and save it, to have a sample of your semen and DNA, damning proof of your affair with Iisa, should it be required.”

He looks up at me, haggard. His mouth spasms. “How do we fix this?”

I kneel down and stare into his face. I’ve seldom seen a man look so broken. “When you tell me why they framed you, maybe I can answer that question.”

He forces himself to focus. “As you said, I had sex with Iisa and Linda. Cuckolding Filippov twice must have driven him to murder and revenge.”

Jyri needs a moment to come to grips with a situation that could destroy him. “Let’s go to the kitchen,” I say.

He follows me. I find an ashtray and we sit at the table. I shake Marlboros out of my pack for both of us. We smoke and let a few moments pass in silence.

“You’re being evasive,” I say. “Stop hedging and tell me the truth. All of it. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”

He nods, steels himself. Coming in here and realizing what has been done to him was a hard jolt, but he’s a tough bastard. I watch him recover by degrees. It doesn’t take long.

“I don’t know the particulars about Filippov’s relationships with his wife and Linda,” he says, “but I can tell you about his business affairs… and a few other things.”

“Tell.”

“Filippov wanted to expand his construction business. He wanted government contracts for big projects. He spread a lot of money around in order to get them.”

“You’re saying he bribed government officials.”

“Correct.”

“Which ones?”

“At this point, their names are inconsequential. I’ll tell you later if the need arises. He spent a lot of money on bribes and was dissatisfied with the results. The reason he came to the party on the night his wife was murdered was to express that dissatisfaction in strong terms.”

“And the result was?”

“None. He was told that he’ll get what he gets, when he gets it.”

“And the ‘few other things’ you mentioned?”

“I wasn’t the only one to have sex with both Iisa and Linda. There are four of us-officeholders-that I know of. There could be more.”

“So, in addition to bribing you with money, he was pimping out his wife and mistress to get these contracts.”

“In retrospect, it appears so.”

I sit back and take a second to put the pieces together. “My guess is that Filippov and Linda set up the others the same way they did you. Filippov more than likely acquired sex videos and DNA samples from all the corrupt politicians who took his money and fucked his wife. You fucked him as well, pushed him too far.”

“But why kill his wife?” Jyri asks.

To give him the whole picture, I tell Jyri about Milo blackbagging Linda’s apartment, about the audio track of the murder and about the video he turned up. Jyri takes it all in.

“Aside from some bizarre sexual-fetish issues,” I say, “Filippov is a straitlaced guy. His wife was a whore and a constant embarrassment. She refused to have sex with him. She fucked everybody under the sun except him. He had what was apparently a gratifying affair with Linda and got what he needed from her. Iisa became an irrelevant millstone around his neck. Murdering her was both revenge on her and a way of getting what he wanted from the establishment. And also, because of the nature of his and Linda’s fetishes, it got them off.”

I’m confident that when Iisa was murdered, although he didn’t understand the particulars, Jyri knew that he and other politicians were being set up. He planned to frame Rein Saar to save himself. I’m sure he eased his conscience as Arvid claims Marshal Mannerheim did in regard to Jews. Like Mannerheim, the chief is prepared to throw innocents to the dogs for what he conveniently perceives as the good of the nation. Rein Saar is intended to be a sacrificial lamb.

We both chain cigarettes off the last ones. “Tell me how you’re going to get me and the others out of this,” Jyri says.

“The murder was videotaped. More than likely, all of you were also videotaped. And there are your DNA samples. Plus, Iisa Filippov kept a diary. It may contain information damning her husband. If all those things are recovered, it might be possible to cover this up.”

“Do it,” Jyri says. “I’ll make sure you get all the resources you need. Just do it.”

I shake my head. “The thing is, I’m not sure I want to. I won’t let Rein Saar get sent down for a murder he didn’t commit. Filippov has to be convicted of the crime. When he gets his day in court, no matter how much evidence gets buried, all of this is going to come out, and all your careers will be ruined. And, I have to say, you all deserve it.”

Jyri drums his fingers on the table, thoughtful. “Filippov killed his wife at least partly out of embarrassment. If you recover the fetish videos of him and Linda, I can threaten to release them. I’ll offer to let him commit suicide and leave a confession letter to save himself the humiliation. Given his mind-set, he might take the deal.”

At first, I have trouble believing he said it. I didn’t realize I was sitting across the table from Machiavelli. If he’ll go that far, I wonder if he would go one step further, fake Filippov’s suicide and have him murdered.

“I’ll give you anything you want,” he says, “just make this go away.”

“That’s another problem for you,” I say. “I don’t want anything.”

He leans toward me. “I’ve been thinking of putting together a black-ops unit. Anti-organized crime. The mandate is to go after criminals by whatever means necessary, to use their own methods against them. No holds barred.”

“We already have such a group. It’s called SUPO.”

“There’s a problem with SUPO,” he says. “They don’t work for me.”

I shake my head again, this time in amusement. “So you want to be some kind of Finnish J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Yes.”

This makes me laugh in his face. “No,” I say.

His face twists so much that he reminds me of a gargoyle. “You think I don’t know you, but I do,” he says. “You suffer from a pathetic need to protect the innocent. You think you’re some kind of a Good Samaritan in a white hat, but you’re not. You’re a rubberhose cop, a thug and a killer, as you’ve demonstrated. You’ll do anything to get what you view as justice. Let me give you an example of how badly we need this kind of unit. Only about a half dozen cops in Helsinki investigate human trafficking. In Finland and the surrounding countries, thousands of gangsters orchestrate the buying and selling of young girls, and hundreds or thousands of those girls pass through this country every year. With our limited legal resources, we can’t possibly make even a dent in the humanslavery industry. Picture all those victims and how many of their bright shiny faces you could save from abject misery, abuse and terror, from being raped time and time again.”