Nights of Awe (27 page)
Authors: Harri Nykanen
“Do you remember any words?”
“I’d been drinking a little that day and I had just woken up. My head’s like a Swiss cheese when that happens. The guys got out of the car and drove away, and I didn’t give the whole thing any more thought. I went to Teboil, and when I got back, I had a couple of beers to take the edge off and then I cracked open the vodka. The Passat showed up almost right after. There were two men in it. I saw them go into the shop. While they were in there, I headed around back to take a leak, and when they came out I heard one of them saying fuck and shit over and over and call someone. He was looking around, but luckily there weren’t any lights on in my RV, and he didn’t see me.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that Ali was dead and asked what they should do. Whoever was at the other end must have said something, I guess, because he answered that there are only two options. Then he said they needed to meet that night and rethink the whole thing. That was it. The guys got in the car and drove off.”
“What did you do?” Stenman asked.
“Got tanked and didn’t wake up until you came knocking on my door.”
“I don’t know anything about my husband’s money. He worked hard and was frugal; he saved every mark.”
Hamid’s wife had already got over the worst of her shock. She had been forced to. Even though her husband was dead, she still had four children who required her attention. The children were at school and the apartment was quiet. Hamid’s photograph was on the living-room table; a candle burnt in front of it.
“The body shop cost sixty-thousand euros,” Stenman pointed out.
“Maybe he borrowed the money from one of his friends… He didn’t get it from the bank… I would have known about that.”
“Did you have a joint bank account?”
“No. I have my own account, and my husband gave me money when I needed it.”
“Do you know how much money is in your husband’s account?”
“Yes. The bank sends the statements here.”
“Could we have them?”
Hamid’s widow walked over to the living-room bookcase and pulled out a black plastic folder from the bottom drawer.
“All of the statements and company papers are here. You can take it with you.”
“What will you do with the company?”
“I will try to sell it.”
“Who handles the company’s books?”
“I don’t remember her name, but it’s in the papers.”
The woman suddenly looked anguished and tired.
“How have you been managing? Is there anything we could help you with?” Stenman asked.
“No thank you. I will be fine. I have to be strong for the children.”
“Has anything new come to mind that might be of interest to us?”
“No…”
Then she appeared to remember something.
“There is one thing. Two days before Ali’s death, a Finnish man called here asking for him. He didn’t tell me his name. I asked him to call Ali’s mobile phone or the shop, but the man said that no one was answering at either. The man left a message for Ali and asked me to tell him that it was about the rental car.”
“Did he leave his number?”
“He just asked Ali to call.”
“Could the caller have been one of the customers from the body shop?”
“No, Ali didn’t give out our home number to them. It was unlisted.”
“What did he say when you mentioned it to him?”
“Nothing, but he went immediately into the other room and called from there with his mobile.”
“Did you hear what he was talking about?”
“I heard him say that he didn’t want to get mixed up in it any deeper. That he just wanted to warn him, but that he couldn’t help out any more. Then he hung up.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about the call earlier?” I asked.
The woman looked frightened.
“Did I make a mistake? I’m sorry… the caller was Finnish, and you just asked about his friends and a man who spoke English and Arabic.”
“Did you know that your husband’s cousin Tagi used drugs?”
“Yes, my husband told me, he was afraid… he was afraid that Tagi would get caught and he would drag his relatives into it.”
“Did your husband know where he got the drugs from?”
“No, he said that he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He believed that using drugs was against the Koran.”
Stenman drove and I studied Hamid’s papers. According to the last statement, there had been slightly over fourteen thousand euros in Hamid’s account. The withdrawals and deposits appeared normal.
I looked through the company papers, but I couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary in them either. I couldn’t find any loan papers, nor was there anything else that would have explained where the money necessary to buy the body shop would have come from. Among the papers was a copy of the power of attorney granted to the bookkeeping company. I called information and asked for the bookkeeper’s number and called her. She was suspicious and called back through the police switchboard. The firm had one fifty-thousand-euro loan that had been taken out from an Estonian finance company.
“The name of the company?”
“Baltic Invest.”
“Are there any names on the loan papers?”
“The usual ones. The CFO of the company and so on, in other words the party granting the loan… and here are the names of the Finnish intermediary company and contact person.”
“You mind giving them to me?”
“Kafka & Oxbaum, Attorneys at Law. Evidently Eli Kafka, Esq., has acted as the contact person.”
“As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t disqualify you, but let’s let Simolin look into any matters related to the company,” Huovinen said from the window. Whenever faced with a difficult decision, he would stand up, conduct a visual inventory of the room’s furnishings, and go stare out the window.
“The bureau’s white-collar-crime unit has good contacts in Estonia, the police and the tax authorities. If there’s anything fishy about the company, it’ll come out.”
“How could Hamid have known about Baltic Invest?” I asked, mostly rhetorically.
“Word probably gets passed around the immigrant community. Maybe he couldn’t get a loan here and decided to get one from Estonia.”
“The wife didn’t know anything about the loan. And Hamid didn’t have any collateral.”
“I think that’s normal in that culture. And maybe the company and its inventory covered the collateral. The loan’s not very big. Or else some friend of Hamid backed it.”
My conception of the Hamid cousins, especially Ali, had already gone through the wringer several times. At first he was an upstanding family man, Muslim, and a hard-working entrepreneur, then he turned into a drug peddler and a SUPO snitch. I remembered what Hussein Mahmed had said about him: Hamid was a dangerous man.
If Klein, as head of security at the Israeli embassy, hadn’t so conveniently joined in the chorus, I would have been sure this was just an everyday case of drug-related crime.
19
My uncle’s apartment occupied a third of his building’s top floor. The living room gave onto the sea, and through the trees you could make out the rowing stadium and the marina, which was buzzing with autumnal activity. In 1992, it had got down to seventeen degrees below freezing on the night of 15 October, and the shoreline had frozen. Boaters were a long-memoried lot; they hadn’t forgotten. They wanted to get their boats onto dry land and up for the winter in plenty of time.
There was a fireplace in the living room, in front of it a cigarette table and two well-worn club chairs, the kind inhabited by gentlemen in smoking jackets and silk scarves in old-fashioned advertisements. The chairs smelt of cigars, even though my uncle had stopped smoking years ago, when his asthma started getting bad. Maybe he allowed his guests to smoke so he could catch just a tiny whiff of the pleasure he had lost.
I was sitting in one of the chairs, waiting for my uncle to get ready.
“Which one would you choose?”
My uncle showed me two ties. One was burgundy, the other one dark grey.
“The red one.”
My uncle put on the burgundy tie and flashed himself a smile so broad that his gold-bound ivories winked in the mirror.
“Ready.”
When I rose from the chair, it made a hissing noise as the leather, freed from the pressure, sucked in air.
I helped my uncle on with his overcoat.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this case of yours, but all I can say is that it’s about something major. What you told me about your brother came as no surprise. I had heard about his affairs. Yet the fact that one of the men who was killed was a client of his is still a shock.”
“To me too. And an exceptionally unpleasant one.”
“You can rest assured that your brother doesn’t have anything to do with the murder. He wouldn’t dare to be involved in anything like that.”
“I believe that, but he might not have any idea of what he’s involved in.”
“It’ll provide a nice topic of conversation for this evening, anyway,” my uncle grunted. “Sorry to joke about such a serious matter, but Eli and murder don’t really add up.”
I agreed. But I still wasn’t amused.
By the time we arrived at Eli’s, the other guests were already there. Eli’s wife Silja received us, hugging my uncle first and then me.
“It’s wonderful you could make it, even though you’re so busy at work.”
If I had a line-up of middle-aged women in front of me that included one millionaire, Silja wouldn’t have been the first one I would have pegged. She was a big-boned brunette who at first glance called to mind a farmer’s wife. But if you looked closely, you could find small, subtle hints of wealth. When a woman could devote infinite attentions to her wellbeing, it had to show somewhere. In addition to everything external, she possessed the unassuming confidence that old money conferred.
I had always liked Silja. She was friendly and had a good sense of humour and a mind of her own.
Eli’s well-bred children Ethel and Leo, my godson, also came out to greet us.
Eli introduced Max to our uncle.
“You remember Max Oxbaum, don’t you, Uncle Dennis?”
“Do you think I’m losing my memory?”
“Of course not.”
I knew that my uncle didn’t care for Max. I wasn’t sure why, maybe for the simple reason that Max was arrogant, smug and loud. Any one of those traits would annoy most people, and Max had them all in one package. The combination, especially when bolstered by considerable financial success, was tough to stomach.
Max was so wound up that his tiny wife Ruth found it almost impossible to step out from behind her husband.
I considered Ruth a freak of nature. Nothing else could explain her unstinting admiration for Max, no matter what he did. Ruth treated Max like a mother would a son, not like a wife would a husband. Even if Max had been caught at the scene of a murder holding a smoking gun, Ruth would instantly believe that sweet little Max had been framed. Or if she had surprised him on top of a whore, she would have insisted that Max had simply slipped and fallen with his zipper down.
Eli poured us all a drink and then walked up to me.
“Would you come here for a minute?”
He took me by the shoulder and dragged me into his office.
“As your older brother, I’d like to give you some advice. You probably don’t understand how much bad blood your behaviour has aroused.”
“What do you mean?”
“Silberstein was so outraged that he’s going to write about you in the congregation newspaper… according to him, by refusing to cooperate and withholding information, you’ve endangered the entire synagogue. In addition, the Israeli ambassador has lodged an unofficial complaint with us about the behaviour of the Finnish police, and by that he means you.”
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