Nights of Awe (22 page)
Authors: Harri Nykanen
Once she had made it twenty yards past us, my uncle said:
“I’ve been coming to this park almost every day for five years and I know every single dog in the area by sight. I’ve never seen this one before. And that woman clearly didn’t know the dog or its habits. I’m sure it isn’t hers.”
If someone was following me, they were doing a good job, because I hadn’t seen anyone on my tail. I parked my car in about the same spot on Aurorankatu where the white minivan had stood three days earlier.
Eli’s firm Kafka & Oxbaum was located in a set of elegant old offices. A
mezuzah
, a small brass case containing excerpts from the Torah, hung from the doorframe. No other signs of Jewishness could be seen, unless you counted a photograph where Eli and Max posed with a fat man in a yarmulke. Judging by the background, the photo had been taken in Jerusalem.
mezuzah
, a small brass case containing excerpts from the Torah, hung from the doorframe. No other signs of Jewishness could be seen, unless you counted a photograph where Eli and Max posed with a fat man in a yarmulke. Judging by the background, the photo had been taken in Jerusalem.
Eli dealt mostly in corporate law; his speciality was international contract law. Now and again he’d descend among the hoi polloi. According to him, he only took criminal cases to maintain a feel for the field. His partner Max Oxbaum, on the other hand, specialized in copyright law.
Eli wasn’t around, but Max was. He was reading a thick folder in his office and looked a little surprised to see me.
Max was in his shirtsleeves, but he was wearing a tie. The shirt was light blue with white pinstripes. A black leather belt vanished somewhere in his fifty pounds of excess mass. As a young man, he had been like a fat version of John Steed. He had started going bald before the age of forty; only a few wisps of hair remained above his ears. Like my brother, he had an exorbitantly expensive watch.
Max held out his hand and said: “I would have called if you hadn’t showed up.”
“Why?”
“Why… Because of Ben Weiss, of course. You’re the one investigating his death.”
“Who told you?”
“Meyer… he was shocked. Who would have ever believed that something like this could happen in Finland?”
“I would. It happens everywhere, except Disneyland. Why did Ben Weiss need your help?”
“He wanted to know about Finnish copyright practices. He was planning on manufacturing some Finnish fur models in Israel.”
“What did he tell you about himself and his business?”
“Not much. He was feeling out the possibility of partnering with Meyer and asked what kind of man he was. I told him everything I knew. He was supposed to go back to Israel on Monday. That was about it.”
“Where was he staying?”
“Some hotel, I guess. I don’t know.”
I already knew that Weiss hadn’t been staying in a hotel. That had been checked out.
“Did he know anyone here?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. The meeting only lasted about half an hour.”
I looked around silently for a minute. Then I looked at Max again while continuing to remain silent.
Max began to fidget anxiously.
“Did you have any other questions?”
“Where’s your father?”
“My father?”
“There’s an ‘on holiday’ sign in the window.”
“In France. He and Mum have a small place near Nice.”
“When did he leave?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“Of course they did.”
I stood to leave. I stopped in the doorway and asked:
“Who’s the fat guy in the picture?”
“In what… oh, that one, Benjamin Hararin. He’s one of Israel’s richest businessmen. Construction business, speciality chemicals, financing. Eli and I met him when we were in Jerusalem.”
“Are you guys in business together?”
Max’s expression became simultaneously cagey and insinuating.
“Perhaps. But it’s better if I don’t say anything more at this point.”
On the way to HQ, I thought about Dan Kaplan. The childhood bonds of friendship had loosened years ago. When I had met him on my previous trip to Israel about ten years ago, we had spent a couple of evenings together.
Even though we had had a good time, things had been a little strained between us. He had become aggressive and cynical.
Still, it was difficult for me to think of him as a common criminal, the kind who it was my job to pursue.
Nor was catching Dan Kaplan going to be easy. He was in the country under an assumed name; that had already been checked. The fact that he hadn’t seen his relatives, even his father, indicated that he wanted to keep his presence in Finland secret. And if Dan was currently a Mossad agent, like I believed, he had the support of the entire organization behind him. Everything he did had been planned in advance, and the moments when things could go awry had been taken into account.
Yet I was certain that Dan was still in Finland. If he had been sent here to prevent a terrorist attack, then his job was still unfinished, and Dan Kaplan wasn’t the kind of man to leave a task undone.
I found Simolin in Stenman’s room. Both of them glanced at me.
I asked if there was any news on the Focus yet.
“Oksanen’s still looking into it,” Simolin answered. “He likes car stuff.”
“Come take a look at this,” Stenman said.
There was a photograph on her computer display. I took a closer look at it.
“Tagi Hamid,” Stenman prompted.
“Where’d the photo come from?”
Stenman scrolled downwards, revealing text in English.
“We got a more detailed response from the Danish security police to the enquiry we sent out through Interpol, or actually it came to us through SUPO. Hamid lived there a couple of years ago, and he has contacts with several Palestinians who knew a terrorist named Ismel Saijed.”
I asked Simolin what we had got from Tagi Hamid’s neighbours.
“The next-door neighbour saw a foreign-looking man and woman enter the apartment the other day. That’s all. Hamid was a quiet guy, didn’t come or go much. Most of them had never even met him.”
I asked Stenman to continue.
“Saijed lived in Copenhagen from 1999 to 2001, and he has a forged Danish passport that he uses to go by the name of Issa Shamahdi.”
Stenman clicked the front page of the passport up onto the screen. The photo was of a middle-aged, curly-haired man with a heavy beard and thick-rimmed glasses. Even just shaving the beard would change his appearance completely.
“The Danes presume that he has several other Danish passports. If he’s in Finland, as the Danes and Israelis suspect, then he’s probably using the passports here. Quite a coincidence that Hamid comes to Finland from Denmark at the same time as Saijed is suspected of entering the country.”
“The suspicion is based solely on tip-offs, I assume?”
“At least for now,” Stenman admitted. “According to the information from the Danish police, Saijed travelled to Athens in June 2001 and participated in the attack on the El Al passenger plane. The plane was shot at simultaneously with two bazookas, but one of the grenades missed and the other one didn’t explode, it just passed through the plane. Members of several terrorist groups participated in the attack. The Israelis picked up his trail, but then he disappeared. Saijed has a long career as a terrorist. He began in his twenties and took part in a bombing in Paris in 1980. The bomb blew up in front of a synagogue; three people died and about twenty were injured.”
“Hopefully he’ll never kill again,” Simolin reflected out loud.
“The end is the most interesting part, to me at least,” Stenman remarked. “The Danish police claim to have wiretap information according to which terrorists are planning an attack in Finland. The architects of the attack are presumed to be Saijed and Hassan Bakr, who has done gigs for Abu Nidal’s terrorists and others. Bakr has arranged dozens of bombings. In 1986, two of Abu Nidal’s terrorists attacked a synagogue in Istanbul with grenades and sub-machine guns. Twenty-one Jews died, three of them rabbis. Bakr is believed to have planned the attack. His favourite targets are companies owned by Jews, Jewish restaurants, synagogues and the like.”
Stenman took a small pause.
I was certain that Denmark had got most of their information from Israel, and that SUPO knew it too. If SUPO wanted more information, it had to play with Mossad’s cards. I still didn’t understand what point there was keeping information from us.
“Do the Danes also have a passport photo for Bakr?” I asked.
“No. And no fingerprints for either.”
“That would have been too easy. And we haven’t got anything on the deceased that got hit by the train?”
“The fingerprints have been sent out through Interpol, but we haven’t heard anything. I can try and hurry them up,” Simolin said.
“Do it.”
I digested Stenman’s newsflash for a moment longer.
“So the man who was waiting for Saijed in the Citroën might have been Bakr.”
“It crossed our minds too,” Simolin conceded. “And he had accomplices too, or at least one accomplice, the woman.”
“I believe that the woman is Finnish,” Stenman said. “In the first place, not many Arab women have driving licences, and in the second place, it’s difficult to imagine an Arab woman getting up to something like this. Besides, Arab women usually come to Finland with their families. We need to start looking for an Arab who’s shacked up in his girlfriend’s apartment.”
“Have you requested the phone records?” I asked Simolin. “We might be able to pinpoint the apartment based on calls Hamid received at the body shop and at home.”
“If he called from there,” Simolin added.
The sounds of hurried footsteps came from the corridor. Oksanen charged in chomping on a slice of pizza, a can of diet soda in his other hand.
“I think I found the car.”
For once, Oksanen appeared to be as interested in his work as he was in his rally club.
“It was a lot of work, but I finally got it. I figured out what that guy meant by the colour of an old lady’s underwear. It’s a pretty rare colour, but still, over four hundred of them were imported to Finland. I didn’t get anything that way, or from Stockmann Auto either. Besides, the car might have changed owners after they sold it. The short plate number is what saved the day. Only six Ford Focuses in Uusimaa County had one. One was a foreigner, a Moroccan guy by the name of Murak Laya. Just to be sure, I checked out the others too. One was a vocational-school teacher, the second a prison guard, the third a computer operator, the fourth a physiotherapist and the fifth a daycare-centre director. The Moroccan is the only one where everything fits. It’s owned by an auto lot in Vantaa, but Laya holds the lease. He lives in Koivukylä. I put out a search on the vehicle, and fifteen minutes ago we got a call from Vantaa. A patrol found the car near Laya’s place. I told the patrol to sit on both.”
After finishing, Oksanen rewarded himself by biting off a hunk of pizza and washing it down with a swig of soda.
I asked: “Did you have time to find out what Laya does?”
“According to his application for a residence permit, he works at a paint plant in Vantaa. He has one suspended sentence for narcotics.”
“Get his information to Karvonen right away and tell him about the weapons we found at Hamid’s place. Let’s let the SWAT team bring this guy in.”
“You mean SWAT chief Karvonen?” Oksanen asked.
“Yeah. This guy might be dangerous. He must know Bakr, Saijed, or Hamid, or maybe all three…”
“I’m kinda busy… I thought…”
Oksanen’s phone rang. He shoved the slice of pizza into his mouth and dug his phone out from the pocket of his tyre-company coat. Next he placed the can of soda on the table and grabbed the pizza slice with his left hand. After completing this complex set of manoeuvres, he was finally able to answer.
He listened for a minute and swore: “Fuck, you’re not screwing with me, are you… don’t move a muscle, I’ll get some people over there right away.”
Everyone turned towards Oksanen, who looked like he had been struck by lightning.
“Some woman just entered Laya’s apartment and the place blew totally to shit.”
16
Oksanen’s description was more accurate than he could have imagined. By the time we arrived, fire and rescue were already gathering up their hoses. There were also two ambulances on the scene, and the Vantaa police had cordoned off the area.
I slipped under the tape and appraised the aftermath of the explosion. The building was a four-storey Seventies prefab. There was a car park, a sandpit and a swing, and a shed for dumpsters; a smattering of pine trees represented nature. A dozen windows were blown out, and glass shards and furniture were strewn across the yard. From the remains, it was easy to determine which apartment the explosion had occurred in. A scrap of fabric that looked like a bedspread hung from the pine tree standing in front of it, and a tongue of soot a few yards long licked upwards from the window. I went over to the fire marshal and introduced myself.
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