Nights of Awe (10 page)

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Authors: Harri Nykanen

BOOK: Nights of Awe
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Simolin didn’t get mad, he just smiled shyly. He clearly possessed that brand of quiet, stubborn resolve that shouldn’t be underestimated. If Simolin had been a boxer, he would have been the kind that you could knock to the canvas time and again and he’d always just pick himself back up.
“Why weren’t the images of the victims released?” Simolin asked.
I recounted the reasons that had been discussed in the meeting. Simolin didn’t look convinced.
“I think the photos would have brought us some good tip-offs. Now we don’t even know all their names or where they live.”
Simolin was right about that. A little unexpectedly, Hamid’s cousin Tagi didn’t have a permanent address. He had moved a couple of months back from his place in Kannelmäki and hadn’t given a new address to anyone, not even his cousin. Or then Ali Hamid hadn’t told it to his wife.
He hadn’t been seen at the vocational school where he was registered for weeks, and they didn’t know anything about him.
The background of Ali Hamid’s body-shop employee Wasin Mahmed had also been checked and everything corroborated the notion that he didn’t have anything to do with the case.
“If we don’t see any progress in the investigation, we can release the photos tomorrow.”
“The killers might have already skipped the country by then.”
Once again Simolin was right.
“Nothing we can do about it. Go home and go to bed,” I said.
“Soon.”
“Well, I’m going now.”
My mobile rang.
“Detective Kafka.”
“It’s Vivica Mattsson from the City Theatre. You were here this morning.”
“Hi.”
I glanced at Simolin. He was already reviewing the next tip-off, and wished me an over-the-shoulder goodnight.
I stepped out into the corridor. For some reason I didn’t want Simolin listening in on the conversation between Mattsson and me.
“You asked me to call if I remembered anything.”
“Right… So you remembered something?”
“What someone yelled on the bridge… I just came home from rehearsal and I dropped by a convenience store on the way. There were two Arab-looking guys in there. They were arguing, and one of them barked ‘
Manjak!
’ at the other one. I’m pretty sure I heard the word
manjak
from the bridge.”
“Do you remember anything else?”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.”
“Every bit of new information is a help.”
“Do you already know who killed those men?”
“No.”
“Or you do, but you won’t tell me, is that it?”
Her voice was flirtatious.
“No.”
“Couldn’t you interrogate me… even just a little?”
“Some other time.”
“That’s probably what you tell all the girls.”
I wondered if she had dropped in at the pub on her way home. Nevertheless, I felt that something was sparking up between us – or else it was just wishful thinking.
“I’m sorry, when I’m tired I start saying all kinds of inappropriate things. Rehearsal lasted eleven hours. Hopefully you’ll solve the case. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” I blurted out stiffly.
I looked at my phone and felt like a cardboard-dry civil servant. For someone over forty, I was still a complete amateur at verbally manipulating women.
I sat for a moment at my desk, still intoxicated by the call. Then I went online, opened up Google, and entered a search for Vivica Mattsson.
I spent ten or so minutes browsing through articles about her. I found out that she was from Tammisaari, an only child, had been left fatherless – like me – at the age of twelve, and had been a wild tomboy as a child. She had a show champion Jack Russell terrier named Ole. She spoke French fluently and was single. I exited Google and leant back in my chair. It still took a minute for me to let Vivica Mattsson go.
“
Manjak
,” I said out loud.
I took my phone and pulled up the number of my old schoolmate who had lived in Israel for twenty years. He spoke both Hebrew and Arabic fluently.
My friend’s wife answered and called her husband to the phone. After a brief preface, I went to the point.
“
Manjak
, nothing else, just
manjak
?”
“Right.”
“It’s a derogatory Arabic term, but it has at least a couple of different meanings depending on the context in which it’s used. In Finland it could mean either faggot or syphilitic, for instance. Does that match what you’re looking for?”
“It does indeed.”
If Mattsson had heard correctly, the shouter was probably the man who fell to the roof of the train. There would have been no reason for the men standing safely on the bridge to shout. So he was probably an Arab, just as we had suspected. And the fact that he used an Arabic taunt implied that the men that he was running from were also Arabs.
I decided to get back in touch with the imam.
7
 
I had a one-bedroom flat in the Punavuori district, on Merimiehenkatu. I’d already lived there for thirteen years and my mortgage was practically all paid-up. If I had to describe the place in a few words, I’d call it a bare-bones bachelor pad. On the other hand, all of the furnishings, the TV and the stereo were quality stuff. A few contemporary oil paintings hung from the walls. I had got a good deal on them from my cousin, who was a moderately successful artist. He had given one of them to me on my fortieth birthday.
When my mother had died, I had brought over a couple of antiques from her apartment: a mahogany bed for the bedroom and a mirror for the entryway. The antiques were a better match for my brother’s disgustingly posh place in Eira. I’m not envious by nature, but disgustingly posh was an accurate way of describing my brother’s home.
Or actually the flat was his wife’s, whose family was so rich that she didn’t understand words like
poverty
and
deprived
, except maybe in theory.
I dumped the Chinese takeaway I had picked up on the way home on the counter and set the table. Beef in black-bean sauce and fried rice. I wasn’t a big kosher freak, but I didn’t go out of my way to eat pork either. I popped open a cold beer to wash down my meal.
My phone rang just as I was finishing. It was my disgustingly rich brother Eli calling.
“I saw the news. You still at work?”
“Just got home.”
“I’m out front. Buzz me up and I’ll come say hi.”
I pressed the buzzer and waited. It wasn’t like Eli to drop by without advance warning, especially this late.
Eli looked a little goofy in the gaudy tracksuit he was wearing. His shoes and outfit looked like they had just been pulled out of the packaging. I cracked a couple of beers, and my brother didn’t turn up his nose. He sat down on the living-room couch. For brothers, we looked totally different. Eli was round-faced, three inches shorter and fatter than me. He played tennis, skied and played golf, but he was still always putting on weight. He looked around as if he were in the market for an apartment.
“If you’re looking for a bigger place in the neighbourhood, I know about one. The heirs are selling. It’d be a good buy, even just as an investment.”
“Do I look like someone who’s investing in real estate?”
“I could get you a low-interest loan.”
“Interest that low doesn’t exist.”
“Have you decided about Yom Kippur Eve yet?” Eli asked.
He had invited me to his home to celebrate the Day of Atonement. I had received a couple of other invitations as well. Evidently a Jewish man my age who lived alone was a hopelessly pitiful case. I was like a ward whose care was the joint responsibility of my whole extended family.
“Unless some miracle happens, I’ll be there.”
“You’re not telling me that a forty-year-old Jewish cop still believes in miracles, are you?”
“Just little ones.”
“Don’t let a miracle come between you and your family. Silja asked me to tell you she’ll be mad if you don’t show up.”
“I’ll try.”
“Uncle Dennis is going to be there, too.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Seems to be holding up.”
I got along well with my uncle the best of all my relatives, except for maybe Eli.
“Day after tomorrow is Hanna’s birthday,” Eli reminded me.
I remembered. Hannah, who was known as Hanna, was my sister. She was seven years younger than me and had killed herself five years ago. She suffered from schizophrenia. The disease had flared up when she was in Israel at a kibbutz. She had been sitting at a local café one evening when a bomb-rigged car drove up and exploded. Six people died, including four of Hanna’s kibbutz friends. They dug Hanna out from the under the bodies and gore. Through some miracle she only had minor injuries, but she never got over it psychologically.
“Who else have you invited?”
“Max and his wife.”
Eli and my second cousin Max were partners in a law firm, Kafka & Oxbaum. Max had all the symptoms of a social-climbing arsehole times two.
“Why’d you invite Max?”
“He said it’s been a while, that it’d be nice to see some relatives, like you. I had to invite him.”
“You’d think that a rich fifty-year-old wouldn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to.”
“You wouldn’t believe how many things there are in life that you have to do even if you don’t want to. First Mum bossed us around, then the wife, and now traditions. Sometimes I think it would have been a lot easier to have been born Lutheran.”
“Especially on Yom Kippur,” I added.
“Then too.”
I was tired and I yawned. Eli drained his bottle and stood.
“Is it true that those guys who were killed were probably Arabs?” he asked.
I admitted it, because that information had already been reported on the news.
“Hopefully they killed each other. I mean, I hope it’s not some neo-Nazi hate crime,” Eli added quickly. “That’s the first thing that came to mind.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Does the case have anything to do with us?”
Eli’s question surprised me.
“What do you mean?”
“With the Jewish congregation?”
“Why would it?”
“Everything’s possible these days. Even though Finland’s a little out of the way, we’re not going to be left in peace for ever.”
“Do you know something that I don’t?”
“Of course not, it just came to mind somehow… Thanks for the beer, even though it took the punch out of the run.”
“Say hi to the wife and kids.”
Eli jabbed a thick forefinger at me.
“And remember: the day after tomorrow. Be there.”
“I’ll try. ’Night.”
Eli pulled on his wool cap and bounded down the stairs. I watched from the window and saw him exit the building and turn towards the shore. Suddenly he stopped, looked around, and got into the passenger side of a Volvo hatchback parked at the edge of the street.
Eli hadn’t dropped by while he was out on a run. He had dropped by on purpose.
8
 
When you scratch the surface of a Jewish man, his mother starts to come out, in both good and bad.
I spent my entire childhood and youth afraid that my mum would pounce just as I was kissing my neighbour Kaija Lindström in the basement, or insinuating my hand into Karmela Meyer’s pants.
For her part, Mum considered men next to useless, and never glanced at a single one after Dad died. Sometimes it seemed to me as if his death came as a relief to her. Her big, black underpants billowed on the courtyard laundry line like a banner of war. It was clear to anyone who saw those panties that the front they concealed would never be surrendered again.
Maybe the worst thing was that I didn’t dare to invite any friends over because Mum would subject them to a cross-examination that would conclude with her pronouncing judgment without ever giving the defence the floor.
We tried to understand Mum, because she’d been through a lot. She was born in Poland, and when Germany invaded in 1939, her mother had fled with her to Finland. She had been ten at the time. At the age of eighteen, she had married a fabric merchant twenty years older than herself. He had died in the late 1940s and the business had gone under. About a year later, relatives who were trying to marry off my father brought my mother and father together. Only a couple of months passed before Wolf Kafka was an ex-bachelor.
The union with the fabric merchant had been childless, but my mother had three children with my father: Eli, me and Hannah. When Eli was born, Mum quit her job at a hair salon.

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