Authors: Harri Nykanen

Nights of Awe (30 page)

BOOK: Nights of Awe

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If she had decided to go in to work on her own after all, why hadn’t she bothered to call me?

I called information and asked them to connect me to the porter at the City Theatre. Vivica Mattsson hadn’t arrived at work yet.

I called Mattsson’s number again and pressed my ear to the mail slot. The phone either wasn’t in the apartment or it was turned off; otherwise I would have heard it ring.

I went downstairs and found the building manager’s number on the bulletin board. He answered immediately. I blew things shamelessly out of proportion to get him to hurry. He promised to be there in ten minutes.

I called Simolin and asked him to come to the apartment.

The manager arrived in eight minutes. We climbed up to the third floor together. I pulled out my gun and asked for the key.

He paled and handed it to me.

“You’d better go now.”

The guy backed down the stairs.

I unlocked the door and carefully cracked it open. When the gap was about an inch and a half wide, I peered in. No signs of anything unusual in the entryway. I started to creep farther into the apartment, but then I realized it was pointless. If someone was there, they would have heard me enter.

But I still held my gun at the ready.

I saw Mattsson’s dog first. It was lying dead on the plush carpet in the living room. The bedroom door was ajar. I pushed it wide with the tip of my shoe. By now it was no surprise to find Vivica Mattsson sprawled across the double bed. A bloody groove coiled around her neck. She was as dead as the dog in the front room.

I touched her hand. It was cool. I circled the body and saw her face. Her swollen tongue protruded from her mouth like some strange flower. I looked at her and felt at first guilt and then simply rage.

“I was sure there was no danger,” I explained, more to myself than the others.

Stenman, Simolin and Huovinen looked at me with sympathy.

“What a fucked-up situation,” Huovinen sighed, glancing at the body on the bed.

“Why did she let a stranger in if she was so afraid?” Stenman wondered.

I wondered that, too, and then I remembered something.

“It was a man and a woman who went to Hamid’s place. Maybe the woman rang the doorbell and she forgot to stay on her guard.”

Some critically relevant thought floated through my mind like a dying ember. I emptied my brain of everything else so I could follow the tiny, feeble trail that it left in its wake. Suddenly I caught hold of it.

“The dog!”

“Yeah, what about it?” Huovinen asked.

“I don’t mean Mattsson’s dog, I mean a woman I saw in the park.”

I told them about the woman who was walking the dog in Sibelius Park and my uncle’s warning.

“If the woman who rang the doorbell had a dog, then another dog person would definitely open the door.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about the woman?” Huovinen scolded.

“I didn’t believe my uncle.”

The CSI came over.

“The dog was shot with a twenty-two with a silencer; the woman was strangled, as you can see. It looks like there were two perpetrators, because it was all done so tidily.”

“Maybe they followed Mattsson and saw that she met you two and then they decided to kill her,” Huovinen suggested.

“Who’s they?” Simolin asked.

“Kaplan and his accomplice.”

“Why didn’t he just skip the country? What reason would he have for staying here and chasing down Mattsson? Something here is seriously out of whack,” I said.

Everyone looked at me, perplexed.

“What?”

“I know Kaplan and I know how smart he is. Why would he follow me in such a way that he’d be exposed, and then Mattsson in a way that he’d be exposed again.”

I remembered Dan’s call and how he had riled me up, just like when we were kids. I was better than him at table tennis, but he was the most irritating player I knew. It was like he read my thoughts and guessed my next move. If I rushed over to the right edge during a long rally to return the hit, he’d send it left. If I was expecting a backhand smash, he’d backspin me a drop shot that would barely clear the net. After that, it would take everything I had to keep from smacking the smirk off Dan’s face with my paddle.

Suddenly I realized what was going on. I was absolutely sure.

“When Kaplan called me, he reminded me that he had always been sharper than me. He wanted me to get worked up and focus all my attention on chasing him, so the others would have room to manoeuvre – the killers, the man and the woman.”

Huovinen started to say something, but changed his mind when the crime-scene investigator stepped into the doorway and raised a forefinger to his lips. We all looked at each other. The investigator gestured for me to come into the bedroom.

Huovinen followed me in. The investigator pointed at something underneath the window sill near the bed. We bent over to look. A small wireless radio transmitter had been attached to the bottom of it.

I would never doubt my uncle’s wisdom again.

Someone was listening in on Mattson’s apartment.

We went back into the entryway. Huovinen whispered: “What do we do?”

“Just continue as normal. I don’t think anyone’s listening to the place any more.”

“Maybe we could trace the tap.”

“Mika, get in touch with the experts at the phone company.”

Simolin nodded and exited into the corridor.

“Not your average case,” Huovinen said thoughtfully.

“No, even though someone’s trying to feed it to us as if it were one.”

“Who?” Huovinen asked.

I didn’t have time to answer before footsteps could be heard from the corridor. I glanced out and saw Sillanpää bounding towards us.

“I happened to be in the area,” he said. “Might be best if we hash things out.”

“Again? Is there something you want to tell us about your friendship with Ali Hamid?”

“I get that you’re pissed off, but so are we. I heard she’s dead.”

Sillanpää glanced around. The old lady who lived next door was snooping on us through her cracked-open front door.

“Let’s find a better spot,” Sillanpää said.

Sillanpää’s idea of a better spot was a van with tinted windows parked out in front of the building. The back of the van was filled with all kinds of equipment, tape recorders and laptops. There were two men in the vehicle. They were sitting in front of a monitor that looked like a GPS navigator; it was showing a map. Both men had headsets on, and one was talking into his: “
The target is turning from Tuusulantie onto Ring Road III and moving west
…”

Sillanpää looked at us and said: “The target is a van. We’re following it.”

“What’s in it?” Huovinen pressed.

“Two men and a woman and a plywood crate. I believe you’d be pretty interested to meet them.”

“Are Mattsson’s killers in the van?”

“So it would seem, and Hamid’s and his employee’s. We also believe that they rigged the Koivukylä bomb.”

“I know that Ali Hamid was your snitch,” I said.

“Source. It was thanks to him we picked up those guys’ trail.”

“A little too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ali Hamid called you shortly before he was killed. You went to the body shop and found the bodies.”

Sillanpää looked at me, assessing how much I knew.

“We have eyewitness and security-camera footage of the van.”

Sillanpää knew that I knew too much. He couldn’t play dumb, so he decided to meet me halfway.

“The operation would have been endangered if the bodies had been found that night. I can’t tell you any more than that.”

“No need to. You mean that Tagi might have called off the meeting on the bridge, and you and the Israelis wouldn’t have got the opportunity to bag Bakr and Saijed.”

Sillanpää didn’t respond.

“From the police’s perspective, that means that you’re suspected of aiding and abetting four murders and two homicides,” Huovinen stated coldly.

“Sometimes there’s a pretty goddamn huge gap between theory and practice. We live in a world where the intelligence agencies of democratic countries cooperate with each other as long as there’s a common enemy.”

“Your cooperation killed six people,” Huovinen continued.

“We realized too late that we were playing according to different rules, and we didn’t have time to stop them. Besides, we initially thought that Bakr and Saijed killed the Hamid cousins. We broke off cooperation as soon as we found out the truth, and now we’ll help you in every way possible.”

“Is Dan Kaplan in the vehicle?”

“No. We don’t know where he is, but we know he’s part of the same group.”

“Do you know where the van is headed?”

“I’m guessing the airport.”

“
The target is turning onto Airport Road…
”

“Pretty good guess, huh?”

“Why don’t you guess the rest while you’re at it,” Huovinen growled angrily.

“You’ll hear the whole story. But we’ll have to agree how things are going to be communicated. This stuff is international-level.”

“The lead investigator is responsible for communicating about the case,” Huovinen said.

“We have a few requests to make,” Sillanpää said.

“You can always make requests.”

Sillanpää’s story lasted about five minutes.

“The vehicle is outside the cargo terminal,” announced one of the men manning the phones.

“Want to head out there with us?” Sillanpää asked.

We didn’t turn him down.

Auschwitz and Treblinka. I had visited both as a young Inter-Railer. A million Jews had been killed like slaughter animals infected with a contagious disease. Something like that breeds an incomprehensible amount of agony, rage and fear, the combination of which had conditioned Jews to sensitivity in sniffing out hostility behind, before and within words. At times, anti-Semitism is detected where it doesn’t exist. It’s monitored like the weather: sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes conditions seem to be getting worse. Absolute zero is the winter backlash of the Holocaust, which is never reached but occasionally approached. That’s why you always had to be awake and alert.
Never again
was tattooed on the shoulder of every Jew.

One’s attitude towards the state of Israel was another eternally ticklish topic. Were all actions of the state of Israel acceptable simply because they were carried out by Israel and its politicians, leaders and soldiers?

By no means did all Jews approve of Israel’s power politics in the occupied territories, but on the other hand…

Many of us balanced like the milkman Tevye between traditions and patriotism. On the one hand… on the other hand…

When the Israeli army killed two Hamas leaders with missile strikes, a few colleagues asked what I thought about it. I had been forced to join that band of Jews who wavered between views.

But you always had to draw a line somewhere. A number of Israeli citizens had participated in a string of crimes that had already resulted in the deaths of eight people. Even though I was a Jew, I felt the line had been crossed, and it was easy for me to pick sides.

“Here they come!” Simolin said.

Simolin, Sillanpää and I were sitting in the international transit hall at Helsinki-Vantaa airport, trying to look inconspicuous. We gave a pretty credible impression of three mid-level businessmen travelling abroad to make mid-size deals.

I recognized the woman immediately, even though she was wearing an El Al flight attendant’s uniform. She was the same woman I had seen walking a dog in Sibelius Park.

She was accompanied by a thirty-year-old man in an El Al co-pilot’s uniform. He was carrying a black leather satchel. I closed my eyes, covered my face with my hand, and played the role of a dozing businessman. I could hear the woman’s heels click past. I waited for a second and cracked one eye open. They stopped at the gate to the El Al flight.

“Now,” Sillanpää said, and we jumped up. I could see the man trying to open the glass door giving onto the jetway, but it was locked. He said something to an airport attendant and noticed us at the same time.

He grabbed the door again and jerked ferociously. The door shuddered but didn’t open. The woman tried to help, but it was too late.

Sillanpää showed his police ID and informed them that they were both under arrest. The woman attempted a smile and asked what was going on.

“Please come with us. You’ll find out.”

BOOK: Nights of Awe

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