To Catch a Cook: An Angie Amalfi Mystery (13 page)

On the northern, Mendocino coast, five miles past the fishing town of Gualala, Paavo turned Angie’s Ferrari onto a small paved road that snaked uphill into the coast range mountains. Ten minutes later, he reached a gravel-packed private road.

He and Angie were headed toward a home he’d visited a few times as a teenager with Aulis. The area had changed very little, and the route came back to mind with surprising ease.

A large wooden gate stood open in the barbed-wire fence, leading to a wood-framed house. Beyond it, the forest was thick and dark with pines. Joonas Mäki opened the front door and walked toward them.

He greeted Angie, then clutched Paavo’s arms and gave him a kiss on the cheek just as he used to when Paavo was a little boy. He was lanky, with a full head of bushy salt-and-pepper hair. His eyebrows were gray, the individual hairs thick, coarse, and corkscrewed, and, as Professor White had remembered, met in the center.

Paavo and Angie followed him into the house Aulis had helped him build. Paavo was about eight
or nine years old at the time, and had enjoyed coming to the country to play while the men worked.

Before that, Joonas had also lived in San Francisco.

Memories flooded Paavo’s head as he entered the main room, with a potbellied stove in the corner and small double-hung windows. Originally the house was one big room with an outhouse in the back, but when Joonas married, a bathroom was among the new additions.

Joonas’s wife waited in the house for them. She’d prepared a hearty brunch and they caught up on old times and Aulis’s condition as they ate. Afterward, Angie gave Paavo a nod. She and Hannah took care of the cleanup while Paavo and Joonas put on heavy coats and went outdoors.

They walked to a bluff overlooking highway, beach, and ocean. In a mesmerizing rhythm, waves crashed onto tall boulders standing in the water, sending magnificent white plumes high into the air. The land was lonely and isolated and cold, but it was also incredibly beautiful. Both men took in the vista before them in a moment of mutual awe.

“Did you know that Finland was created by the Water Mother, Paavo?” Joonas’s voice smiled.

“No. I’ve not heard that.”

“Water and wood and winter. That’s what Finland is all about.” He seemed lost in thought.

After a respite, Paavo said, “I’ve learned a little about my parents, factual things, but not about their character. Some of this present danger, I’ve come to suspect, goes back to them and their causes, and their deaths. Help me understand, Joonas.”

Joonas’s gaze fixed on Paavo, sorrowful and wistful. “You are so much like your father, sometimes it makes me think I am still a young man. How could I be this old when I look across the room, and there is Mika, just the way I remember him?”

A sudden anger gnawed at Paavo. “All these years you knew, and you kept it from me. Why?”

“I had to. Aulis made me promise.”

He tamped his ire. “Tell me about him.”

“There were four of us,” Joonas began, hands tucked into pockets, eyes fixed on the sea. “Myself, your father, Sami Vansha, who Americanized his name and called himself Sam Vanse, and a fourth man, Okko Heikkila. The four of us worked to help our people back in Finland.”

“You had family there?” Paavo asked.

“Okko and Sami did. Okko’s brother was imprisoned by the Soviets and died in the Gulag. Sami had family, too, but where Okko was quiet, Sami was a hothead. Any chance to cause trouble, Sami was right there. I imagine that’s what got him and Mika killed.”

He fell silent. Paavo waited.

“When I was in Finland, after the war, when the Soviets occupied the lands our government had ceded to them, I will never forget how my father kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes and canned and dried food near the door, ready to grab it and run if necessary. He had been a vocal opponent of the Soviets, and knew he could be arrested at any minute. Although it never happened, he lived only to age fifty-three. My mother said he died because all that happened to his country broke his heart.”

Paavo remained quiet as Joonas’s thoughts drifted to the past.

“She died not long after helping me get passage to the United States.”

“And Mika?” Paavo asked finally.

Joonas hesitated, and then said slowly, “After the Soviets finished fighting against the Germans, Mika and his parents lived in Soviet-occupied territory.
Many people tried to escape the madness of those years, and were killed. Mika’s parents were among them.”

A chill stabbed through Paavo, and he hunched deeper into the thick fleece coat. He told himself it was the icy ocean wind.

“Mika was just a child,” Joonas said. “Other refugees fleeing the country, friends of his father, took him with them. He lived in England until he graduated from school, then came to the U.S. on a student visa. He was the only one in his family to make it to this country, although it had been the dream for all of them. That was one reason, I believe, that he was so passionately against the Soviet Union. He blamed it for his parents’ deaths.”

Paavo nodded silently. So his father had lost his own parents. At least he had known why. Paavo mentally gave a shake of the head. He was not here to judge or accuse, but to learn the truth. To find out as much as he could about the man who had been his father.

“I saw what an all-too-powerful government could do to the rights of individuals,” Joonas continued. “Even after the Soviets returned some of our land, Finland still lived under its shadow. That was why I joined with Mika and the others. That was why we worked together for our homeland, and its freedom.”

“Did Mika have any living relatives in Finland? Any here?”

Joonas sighed. “None that he knew of. He left the old country as a child alone. I expect you might have some distant cousins, but I don’t know who.”

For the second time in this visit, he was shaken. He hadn’t thought about having people related to him, not even when he had asked Joonas. He’d asked as a cop, seeking facts, but suddenly the
thought of having cousins, however removed, was inexplicably welcome.

“I am sorry I don’t know more, Paavo.”

He stared out at the water before answering. “Don’t be. I never expected to learn who my father was, let alone his background or what he looked like.”

“He had your eyes. Very big, very blue. His hair was dark brown, almost black.” Joonas paused, then grinned with warm affection. “You have your father’s nature. He was always serious, very intense. He had a high idealism as well, one that remained unshaken. As time went on, things began to happen…dangerous things, and more and more dangerous people became drawn in, for reasons far different from Mika’s and the group’s original reasons.”

“Who were these people?”

“What can I say? They were in it for the money—money began to be a part of our work. I was not working with them at that point. I got out. I told Mika to do the same.”

“But he didn’t.”

They walked along the windy bluff awhile before Joonas answered. “He felt it was wrong to ignore the sorrows of people back home. Your mother tried to turn him around, but Sami…Sami was like a cancer, always eating at him, always reminding him of what had happened at home, and that he needed to take revenge on the Soviets for what they did to Finland, and to his family.”

Paavo sucked in his breath, finally reaching the point to ask the question he came here for. “Who killed them, Joonas?”

“Aulis never wanted you to know. He was afraid for you.”

“It’s time I learned,” Paavo said.

“We worked with Russian smugglers—they were criminals, and in time it became clear they belonged to the
Organizatsiya
. There’s nothing worse than them. Not the Italian Mafia, none of it. The only thing worse, maybe, was the old KGB. But they’re gone, and the
Organizatsiya
continues to this day.”

“Who are they?”

“These days we call them the Russian Mafia.”

Paavo was staggered. “They killed him? You’re sure?”

Joonas’s eyes softened, his voice low. “I understand your mother witnessed it.”

Paavo’s stomach clenched at the horror of it. “Tell me about my mother,” he said after a while.

“All I know is that she died. She loved you and your sister very much. That was the part that hurt the most, telling you she was no good, that she had abandoned you and your sister. But it was the only way Aulis believed you would not try to find her—the only way to keep you safe. If he told you she was dead, as you got older, you’d say where is her grave? Where is her death certificate? Her will? How did she die? He knew you might ask a million questions he had no answer for. So he told you your name was Smith, you were illegitimate, and that your mother had walked out. It was the kind of story you wouldn’t be inclined to pursue.”

He sucked in his breath. Aulis’s assumption was accurate. He said, “The police thought she faked her death.”

“Did she?” Joonas asked. “Or did the
Organizatsiya
? Or did she truly die there? I don’t know. I don’t
want
to know. I was scared. I moved up here, bought this land.”

Paavo closed his eyes briefly, feeling a sudden sting behind his eyelids. Joonas, more than any document or FBI file, had made these people come alive
for him. “I need to find out what happened back then.”

Joonas turned world-weary eyes on him. “Okko might know more—he worked with Mika and Sami and was much closer to all they did than I was. He can tell you more about those days. Let us go inside and call him. You two need to meet. He lives high in the Sierras.”

Joonas found the number and phoned, but an answering machine came on with a long beep, as if filled with messages. Joonas dialed Okko’s close friend and neighbor to ask if he had any idea when Okko would return. The neighbor said he didn’t know, but that Okko had left suddenly, and had been gone for over a week.

“I don’t believe this,” Angie said as she and her cousin Richie sat by the window in a coffee shop in the town of Gideon. Four hours ago she hadn’t even known there was a town called Gideon halfway between Sacramento and Mount Shasta, and now that she’d seen it, all two blocks of it, she didn’t
want
to know it existed.

“Eat your banana split, but not too fast, we might be here awhile.” Richie adjusted the red bandanna on his neck. “This thing is too damn tight. How do cowboys wear them? Don’t they have no Adam’s apples?”

Angie studied the street and tried not to laugh. Last night a message from Richie said he’d see her in the morning, that they were going to the country. Since she’d just returned from a journey to Mendocino with Paavo, traveling with her cousin was hardly appealing.

It became even less so when, shortly after Paavo left for work, she heard a knock and found Yosemite Sam in her doorway. Richie announced he wanted to fit in with the locals. Somehow, an overweight, middle-aged, olive-complexioned Italian in a but
ternut leather vest, blue and white striped Ralph Lauren shirt, red bandanna, starched and creased Calvin Klein denims, beige hand-tooled cowboy boots, and a silver rodeo belt buckle big and bright enough to signal distant planets was not her idea of how to fit in with anyone, anywhere, ever. She gave thanks he wasn’t also wearing a white ten-gallon hat and hip-hugging holster.

He swore he knew what he was doing. She felt positively conservative in her twill trousers, turtleneck sweater, boots, and new purple parka.

Things went from bad to worse when she walked out to the street.

A red Ford F350 one-ton long-bed truck with purple and yellow phantom flames, a silver grill guard, and monstrous off-road mud Super Swamper tires awaited them. He practically had to lift her into the extended cab’s passenger seat.

“What’s going on?” she’d asked, peering out the window to the sidewalk far below. She’d been on lower Ferris wheels.

“You’ll see,” he’d said with a grin, crawling into the driver’s seat. Then they were off. He spent the rest of the trip talking into his cell phone, making deals, buying and selling stocks, betting on horses….

From Gideon’s only restaurant, Linda’s Eats and Sweets, they had a clear view of the post office. Richie’s so-called real estate connections had tracked Eldridge Sawyer to “Edward Sanders” with a post office box in Gideon. It was up to Richie from that point. He began by mailing Sawyer a nine-by-twelve fluorescent pink envelope filled with information on discounted rifle and ammo supplies. He then called the Gideon post office and learned that mail became available around noon each day.

“If he don’t show up today,” Richie said, “we’re going to be stuck here overnight.”

“What do you mean by that?” The horror of being stuck anywhere with Richie was more than she wanted to contemplate. “There’s a chance he’s not here?”

“Well, see, when I was sweet-talking the lil’ gal at the post office to find out when the mail would be delivered, I casually mentioned it was for Ed Sanders—something he wanted right away. And she said that was odd because he was away. He’d told them hold his mail. But then she checked the hold and it was over today.”

Angie gaped. “You got a postal employee to give you that information?”

He beamed. “Women love me.”

She bit her tongue. “I hope she was right. I don’t know how much ice cream I can eat before the owner here starts to suspect something. If she doesn’t already.” Angie again looked askance at her cousin’s outfit. At least the diner was empty, so she didn’t have to face nearby gawkers.

“Don’t worry about it.”

She was nibbling on her second banana split, while Richie had eaten two and was now slurping the end of a chocolate malt, when he stiffened, his eyes fixed on the post office. A tall, powerfully built man wearing a camouflage jacket, pants, hat, and jackboots—a real friendly looking guy—stood on the sidewalk, glancing through mail that included a fluorescent pink envelope. He stuffed it inside his jacket and started walking.

“Okay, babe, it’s Saturday night!” Richie tossed some money on the table and was out the door, Angie chasing after him. Once on the sidewalk, he grabbed her arm and practically dragged her across
the street toward Sawyer’s truck. She was too stunned to try to stop him.

Sawyer climbed into the truck and started the ignition just as Richie shoved Angie hard against his back fender. “You bitch!”

With a shriek, she fell to the ground.

“You talk to me like that and you won’t say anything for a week!” His face was purple, one hand on the fender as he leaned over her. “Get up!”

He lifted his foot as if he was going to kick her.

“Don’t!” she screamed, her arms thrust out protectively. Had he gone crazy?

Suddenly Richie flew about five feet into the air, to land sprawled on his stomach. Sawyer stood over him. “That’s no way to treat a lady.”

Richie slowly sat up. “Hey, can I say ‘that ain’t no lady, that’s my wife’?” He gave a quivery chuckle.

Sawyer wasn’t having it, but turned away from him with contempt. “You all right, lady?” he asked, holding out his hand to help her stand.

Angie nodded. He grasped her wrist and her entire body left the ground as he pulled her to her feet. When she landed, she thanked him and brushed herself off.

“Hey, she don’t like my new truck.” Richie, also standing, pointed to his flashy long-bed. “I don’t have to put up with shit like that!”

Sawyer jabbed a finger into her cousin’s chest, his nose nearly touching Richie’s forehead. “Listen, rhinestone cowboy, you take your problems somewhere else. Gideon doesn’t want your kind around here.”

“I want to go home,” Angie said, stomping toward the truck.

Richie lifted his hands, stepping back out of Sawyer’s way. Sawyer looked from him to Angie in disgust, then got into his truck and drove off.

“What was that all about?” she asked when Richie joined her.

“Slight of hand. Hope I didn’t hurt you none. Follow me.”

Just around the corner was a ten-year-old black Chevy sedan. He unlocked the doors. “Hurry.”

Her head was reeling as she jumped into the passenger seat. Richie flipped a switch on something that looked like a radar detector and headed back to the main road, turning in the direction Sawyer had gone.

The detector beeped.

“Where did you get this car? And what’s beeping?” Angie asked.

“It’s easy to pay someone to drop off a car for you,” he explained, cruising away from the town. “The rest of it, we had to do on our own—you got to be ready to improvise. You were pretty good back there.”

She decided not to say she wasn’t acting.

He continued. “The beep means we’re connected with a little homing device under Sawyer’s back fender. Soon we’ll know where he lives. After that, it’s up to you and your boyfriend. On the way back, let’s stop at that restaurant again.”

“Not another banana split?”

“No. I saw some tutti-frutti on the menu. I haven’t had any of that since I was a kid.”

Although it was late when Angie returned to the city, she contacted Paavo and agreed to meet him in Aulis’s hospital room. She’d felt bad that a couple of days had gone by since she’d last been there. Cousin Richie dropped her off on the sidewalk, refusing to drive up to the entrance. “Hospitals are bad luck,” he said. “I leave them alone, and they do the same for me.”

She had just turned onto the corridor with Aulis’s room when she saw a little man wearing work pants, a black watch cap, and denim jacket sneak inside. He quietly shut the door behind him.

No guard was present. The city couldn’t afford to continue with one full-time, so Paavo’s friends on the force stopped by regularly. The stranger must be one of Aulis’s friends, she told herself, and he wasn’t being sneaky, but careful and quiet, not wanting to disturb a man in a coma…?

Angie teetered in the hallway, torn between going to find a nurse to enter the room with her, or bursting in immediately to find out who the man was. How long would she have to wait before convincing a nurse to join her? If the man meant harm, how much damage could he do while she dickered? She had no choice.

Hitting the door hard, she swung it open. The little man was bending low over Aulis. “Who are you?” she demanded.

At the sound of the door flying open, he turned his head, his eyes startled. Suddenly he bolted toward her. She swung her tote bag, smacking him square in the stomach and knocking him back into the room. All she could think of was to escape—and to yell for help. She spun around and ran smack into a brick wall.

Familiar hands caught her. “Paavo! Quick—that man is trying to hurt Aulis!”

She jumped into the hall before looking back into the room to see the little man clutching the foot of the bed with one hand, the other pressed against his stomach.

“Paavo?” he whispered.

Paavo stepped toward him. “You are?”

“Okko Heikkila.”

They went to a Japanese restaurant with small, individual tatami rooms where they could talk uninterrupted and unobserved by others. Although Heikkila agreed to go with them, it was clear he didn’t like it. Since Paavo’s car was a two-seater, and Okko drove a pickup, they rode separately to the restaurant. Once they arrived, both Heikkila’s and Paavo’s demeanors were even more serious, and the two said little as they ordered dinner.

No more than ten words passed between the two men until the cocktail waitress brought a flask of warm sake and small porcelain cups. She poured them each some, then left. Heikkila drank his cupful in one gulp, then poured more rice wine for himself.

Angie hated such silence. She tried to relieve the tension by talking about the beauty of the Sierras where Heikkila lived, asking him about the level of snowfall this year compared to others, and anything else innocuous she could think of. The anxiety level at the table remained high, thickening the air.

The waitress brought miso and replenished the flask of sake. Angie noticed that Heikkila was already beginning to feel the effect of it.

The miso was followed by a platter of sashimi, and then the waitress heated the center hot plate for shabu-shabu, in which the diners dip paper-thin raw meat and vegetables into boiling water, cooking their food and creating a broth as they eat. It’s a leisurely, congenial meal, and soon as Angie had hoped, the food and wine began to loosen the taciturn Okko’s tongue.

“What are you doing in San Francisco?” Paavo asked.

“Can’t a man take a vacation? I heard Aulis was hurt and came to visit him.” He glared at Angie.
“Didn’t know I’d be hit by a cannonball-hurling harridan for my trouble.”

“Well, you scared me, and then you tried to run,” she protested.

“I don’t like strangers,” he said.

Paavo quickly poured them both more sake. “I’m interested in Omega Computing. How it was working there for you and Mika and Sam.”

Heikkila sipped his wine. “I’ll tell you. Those days were different. Better. People programmed in Fortran. Computers were monsters kept in refrigerated rooms. We thought IBM’s 360/65 was the greatest invention known to man.”

Angie suppressed a smile, considering she had a Palm, a cell phone, and an electronic scheduler in her tote bag. She hoped none had been damaged by his stomach.

“Did you and my father know each other before going to work at Omega?” Paavo asked.

“We met at work. Mika and Sam met in college—San Francisco State. Later, Sam was also hired. He was a flaky, impulsive guy, always emotional. See, it made sense he got us mixed up with sympathizers against the Soviet government. You got to remember, it was the sixties. People had causes. Students and American-born Finns held protests, petitions, sit-ins. And meetings. Meetings to stage more meetings. Joonas, Mika, Sam—even Aulis—we hated the Soviets.” He swished some beef in the hot broth.

“What were your ideas of support?” Paavo asked, doing the same.

Heikkila smiled wryly. He didn’t have to say it, but Paavo heard the sentiment:
smart, like your father
. “While in college, Sam went back to Finland to visit family. He made connections with an underground movement, led and driven by the ‘intelli
gentsia,’ as he put it. Being a student with an American work visa drew attention. Sam thought of himself as an intellectual—a radical poet. He would have loved Paris in the twenties—except that he didn’t know French and he wasn’t a poet. He lived for being a radical and making contacts. That was his thing, contacts. Before long, he recruited others, especially Mika. While Sam played with intrigue and heroics, Mika was all idealism and patriotism. You know, his parents were killed by the Communists—”

“Yes,” Paavo said softly, “I’ve heard that.”

Angie watched his face and could see how much Okko’s simple words troubled him. Even for herself, listening to Okko made Mika and his parents so alive that she, too, felt the grief of their deaths. And Sam, she could have wrung his neck! Didn’t he ever consider what might come of his toying with people’s lives and emotions?

“So Sam led the rest of you to the movement against the Soviets?” Angie asked.

“That’s right. The dissidents needed communications equipment for their
samizdat
movement. Sam had his contacts—a group of radicals called themselves the Kalevala. The name was from the epic poem that gives the legends, myths, and folklore that make up the soul of the Finnish people. Perhaps Joonas was the old and wise Väinämöinen, a powerful seer with supernatural origins, and I was Ilmarinen, a smith, and forged the ‘lids of heaven’ when the world was created. Sam was Lemminkäinen, an adventurer-warrior and charmer of women. And Mika was the tragic hero Kullervo, who is forced by fate to be a slave from childhood and avenge his father’s death.”

Paavo broke into the old man’s reverie. “So when
Sam came back with this idea of helping this
samizdat
movement, what did all of you do?”

“For a long time, our help was fairly minimal. If we could get our hands on equipment the dissidents needed, they’d give us money to buy it, and then connect us to some Russians who’d smuggle it into the USSR. That all changed after Sam met Harold Partridge.”