The Bodyguard (2 page)

A couple other cabs were outside the hotel, so I hopped in one owned by a company I had used before. I told the driver to follow Shabalin’s car, and with a grunted
da
the driver took off. We drove along the Kremlin down to the site where the Rossiya Hotel had once stood, and then crossed the river, heading south. Apparently we were going toward the properties that Anita had managed to scam from Paskevich. Had she moved up her meeting with the property manager?

During the worst of the depression in the early ’90s, Anita had inherited hundreds of acres of shoreline and small islands in Eastern Finland’s Savitaipale region from her mother. Construction was nearly at a standstill at the time, and given the high unemployment rate, Anita was able to negotiate a favorable development deal with surprisingly little effort. The local council calculated that the construction would create jobs and the future vacationers in their new summer cabins would be a boon to local businesses. All Anita still needed was funds to begin building.

She had run into Paskevich in nearby Lappeenranta, where he was making inquiries about available villas for his Russian customers. Paskevich was a rising Russian oligarch, with connections to both the oil and natural gas industries. This was right after the economic upheavals in Russia; in that crazy environment, anyone without scruples could succeed. Anita’s husband had just disappeared, and, bereft, she was charmed by Paskevich. In her state of temporary insanity, swayed by his fortune, she joined him not only in bed but also in business. Paskevich and Anita began construction on three small summer cabin resorts and a couple magnificent island villas on Lake Saimaa. They assumed there would be plenty of rich Russians interested in the properties. Paskevich was also making money in Moscow with his real estate business, and Anita applied for an enormous loan for the privilege of becoming his partner. He predicted that the Finnish depression would eventually end, so it made sense to invest in Russia. For a couple years, this strategy seemed to work: Anita’s investments in Finland and Moscow bore plentiful fruit, enough for her to pay off the loan at a pace that stunned the loan officer.

One evening, Anita arrived at their Moscow penthouse unannounced and found Paskevich in bed with two barely legal models. It didn’t take long her for to discover that this wasn’t the first time these girls had visited him. Anita didn’t react. Instead, she walked out of the room and then returned with a bottle of champagne and four glasses. After pouring them each a drink, she said she understood—after all, she had grown bored of Mr. Nuutinen after ten years of marriage. Paskevich swore that he was not tired of Anita; he just couldn’t commit to one woman.

After that, Anita let Paskevich have his little adventures, because he always came back to her. In the meantime, she undertook an escapade of her own. It began a couple of years before I started working for her. I didn’t know all the details, but as a result of her machinations, Anita managed to own outright a summer cabin resort and two single-family houses along the Moscow River. I suspected that she must have drugged Paskevich, or he had been clueless about the content of the papers he was signing. The signatures were nevertheless legally binding, so Anita had the law on her side.

After discovering Anita’s work, Paskevich put out a hit on her, so she stayed within Finnish borders for the next couple of years. But she did not completely trust her Moscow property manager, and she had needed to visit more often. Her previous bodyguard had been forced to quit; he had severed his Achilles tendon and was never going to run again. Anita didn’t buy his story about an after-hours accident—she suspected that he had either been bribed or attacked. The man had since moved to Florida to run a gym.

I saw Shabalin pull up to a familiar building. My cab stopped close behind his. My driver asked what our next move should be, and I told him in English that we would wait and see. Shabalin watched and made sure that Anita got into the building after entering the door code. He then made a risky U-turn, which led to a lot of honking from oncoming traffic.

The building had a bar downstairs called Bar Svoboda. I decided to get a window seat so that I could see when Shabalin came back for Anita. I paid for the cab and realized that I had only fifty rubles left. But it would be enough for at least one drink in this nondescript, harshly lit, and nearly empty bar.

Although the decor was limited to the wooden tables and tall, plastic bar chairs, everything seemed to be saturated with cigarette smoke. I had no problem finding an empty window seat. I ordered a beer and made sure the cap hadn’t been tampered with before the bartender opened it for me. Obviously insulted, he glared at me but didn’t say a word. I took the beer to my seat and began the waiting game. It was half past eight.

Within fifteen minutes a group of men came to the bar. Regulars, judging by the way they greeted the bartender. I didn’t recognize any of them. I could keep an eye on the bar from its reflection in the window, so I witnessed a full bottle of vodka being brought out and the men doling out shots. A plate of pickles and containers of honey and sour cream also appeared from somewhere. The guys were loud and offered the waiter a shot, as well. He obliged. No one paid any attention to me. At first.

There was hardly any activity outside. It was one of those upper-middle-class residential streets, where the only businesses were the bar and a small grocery store. Though not luxurious, the condos Anita owned were still out of reach for a working-class resident of Moscow. Each unit had its own private Finnish-style sauna, which only added to its value. I looked again at the distorted tableau in the glass and noticed a man staring at me. When I saw him get up and approach me for a chat, I took a sip of my beer and let my hand rest right next to it. He offered me a smoke, but I declined by shaking my head. He started babbling in a Russian dialect that may as well have been Greek, so I didn’t even need to pretend that I couldn’t speak Russian. Another man appeared next to me—I was now wedged between the two of them. I didn’t feel like provoking a fight because I had some waiting to do. Maybe I could get Anita to give me a decent reference after all.

Now a third man appeared, in an attempt to stop the other two from bothering me. It was rude to decline a cigarette in Russia, but I honestly could not have cared less what these strange men thought of me. Then, through the window, I saw Anita walk out the front door. She stared at the empty street, looking flabbergasted. I guess she had been expecting Shabalin to wait for her.

When she walked back in, most likely to call Shabalin, I drained my beer and walked out on the three men without a word. There was no time for a bathroom break, either. I hated having to grovel and I knew Anita would not let me off easily. Reluctantly I walked out to wait for her so we might resolve our differences. The building door was solid wood, without a peephole. There were no cars on the street, just a single dog running between the houses.

Next thing I knew, I woke up in an unfamiliar room with a strange woman yelling at me. I had a headache, everything smelled of vomit, and I had somehow lost over twelve hours of my life.

2

The woman yelling at me worked at the front desk. Apparently I was supposed to have checked out more than two and a half hours ago, so I needed to pay extra, both for the time and for the cleaners who had to deal with the mess I’d made. Just to get rid of her, I promised to leave by six and to pay for everything. I was dizzy and nauseated, but there was nothing left in my stomach to throw up. When the woman finally left, muttering to herself about drunken Finnish tourists, I slowly got out of bed. I was terribly thirsty. The bottles of soda and sparkling water from the day before should have still been in my backpack. I scanned the room and found the backpack next to the wall. Was the rest of my gear intact? I had passed out with my clothes on, except for my shoes and jacket, which was crumpled on the floor. My cell phone was in the jacket pocket, and my wallet was in the breast pocket of my shirt, still containing whatever rubles I had left after buying the beer. My gun was under the blanket on the bed. So I had not been robbed.

I drank some sparkling water, took a pill for my nausea and two painkillers. I stripped off my clothes so I could get a good look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t show any signs of having been punched, though my ears were ringing. There were some scratches on my knees, so it looked like I had fallen over, even though the palms of my hands weren’t scraped up. I didn’t feel any pain or bruising in my groin, either, so I knew I hadn’t been raped.

I showered and thought back to what I’d previously ingested. If my dinner at the hotel had come with a drug-spiked beer, I would have felt the effect sooner. At the bar I had kept an eye on my drink as if it were my only child. Or had I? When Anita came out of the building, for a split second, my focus was solely on her. Did one of the three men slip something into my glass while I wasn’t looking? I cursed out loud and wrapped myself in a small towel that barely covered my torso. I closed the curtains and called Anita’s cell phone. She didn’t pick up.

Had I met her? Had we made up? How did I get to the hotel? I tried hard to remember. I called Anita’s hotel room, but nobody picked up there, either. The operator confirmed that Ms. Nuutinen was a guest there, but she could not give out any additional information.

Who would know what Anita was up to? Her assistant, Maya Petrova? The cab driver, Sergey Shabalin? I didn’t have Petrova’s number and Shabalin’s line was busy. The unbearable busy signal bore a hole in my head. I had to lie down again. I pulled the blanket over myself. It smelled as musty as my clothes; so much for cleaning up in the shower. Turning over, I felt something silky against my legs. It was Anita’s Gucci scarf. What was it doing here?

I started to panic. She would never have given me the scarf if we had parted ways amicably. I checked my gun—had it been used? There were no traces of gunpowder on it and the clip had the same amount of bullets in it as the last time I’d checked it. Then why were my ears ringing as if from a gunshot?

I had to get out of this disgusting room. My train didn’t leave for hours and I was starving. Rummaging around, I found my emergency energy bar and ate it slowly so I wouldn’t get sick. After showering again I got dressed and packed Anita’s scarf under my ammunition clips in my backpack. My Glock was safe in its holster under my arm. At the front desk I paid for the room and got my passport back. I took the subway to the train station and picked up my ticket. I kept trying to reach Anita and Shabalin, in vain. Although Shabalin’s phone was now ringing, he wasn’t picking up.

I didn’t want to lug my backpack around or leave it in the storage area, so I went to the station restaurant and ordered borscht and sparkling water. Fortified, I tried to recollect the events from the previous night, but it was hard to remember what had happened after I went outside to wait for Anita. Maybe we had met. Maybe she had refused to talk to me. Maybe she had absentmindedly dropped her scarf and I had picked it up, intending to return it later. Most drugs designed to knock out their target wiped the mind so clean that it was impossible to restore memories even with hypnosis or therapy. I assumed I hadn’t done anything stupid. Maybe I had just taken a cab on my own volition to pass out in my hotel room. Or so I hoped. Once I was able to log on to my online banking account, I would find out whether someone had paid for the cab with my card.

The soup revived my spirits, but only until I called Anita again. This time, an unknown man speaking Russian answered. Why did this strange man have Anita’s phone, a man who could now clearly see that Anita’s number had been called from my number? Shit. I hung up. Maybe those men at the bar had been Paskevich’s minions, along with the bartender. I didn’t want to take that theory any further. The truth was that someone had managed to elude all my security measures. And whoever it was hadn’t even bothered to make it look like I had been robbed, which is what scared me the most.

Once passengers were finally allowed to board the train, I found my compartment, and got comfortable on the smaller bed across from the bunk bed. I’d survive the night with my gun by my side, even if a Kyrgyzstani train robber decided to join me. Anita never took the train between Finland and Russia because the idea of sharing a restroom with who-knows-what-kind-of-people was out of the question. When I pointed out that she didn’t have exclusive access to the airplane’s facilities, she simply noted that lowlifes wouldn’t be allowed in the business class restrooms.

The conductor yelled outside, then there was a whistle and the train lurched forward. I lay down to wait for the ticket check. We would stop in Saint Petersburg to pick up more passengers, but until then I had the luxury of being alone in the cabin. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. I kept nodding off, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether the gunshot still echoing in my ears was a dream or a memory. I was woken up on both sides of the border—first by the passport inspectors, then the customs officer—but they appeared in a sleepy haze, and I couldn’t tell whether they were real or figments of my imagination.

Once I got to Helsinki, I took a tram to the Käpylä neighborhood where I kept most of my stuff in a shared apartment. With its lonely bed, small desk, and ergonomic chair, the dusty room felt foreign to me. The two students I shared the apartment with weren’t around. They were about ten years younger than me, and were not unhappy that I paid a third of the rent for the three-bedroom apartment I was hardly ever in. They knew I worked in security; I had made vague statements about delivering valuable objects and how it kept me out of the country for long periods of time. The roommates were blissfully unaware of the dangers that living with me entailed. I was happy with the arrangement. My official address was here at 7 Untamo Road and not the cabin I rented in Torbacka, in Degerby, where I spent most of my free time. There was no paper trail connecting me to the person I rented the cabin from, so it was safer than the apartment.

I worried that someone was still after me. Anita’s business practices had antagonized the Finns and the Russians who were both promised exclusive deals. The Russians considered a vacation home in the pristine Finnish landscape a status symbol, but the value of that purchase plummeted when tens of fellow Russians shared the experience. And the usually good-humored Slavs turned into paranoid Finns at the cabin resort, hiding behind their security fences and setting up barbed wire in the lake, making sure no suspicious character could get too close. Even if I had the money, there was no way I would have stayed in the vacation hell Anita created. Parts of Lake Saimaa’s shores had started to look uncannily like southern Europe’s crowded strip of kitschy beach hotels.

The kitchen cupboard in the apartment was pretty bare, but I found a packet of ramen that I ate while doing my laundry. It was a small load, just underwear and a couple of shirts. I had gotten my workout clothes from the hotel laundry the morning before so I hadn’t yet had a chance to use them. As I pulled noodles from the cup with my fork, I noticed a four-wheel-drive car parked on Koskela Road. With tinted windows and Russian plates.

Fuck. Someone
was
still after me, and this time neither my gun nor my black belt in judo would help. Paskevich’s men were experts. I had previously told Anita that he was a poor excuse for a Russian businessman, but he had shown he was no amateur.

I did my best to move through the apartment without drawing attention. The blinds in my bedroom were always down, but only a short curtain covered the top part of the kitchen window. Jenni’s door was already closed, and I shut the door to Riikka’s room, as well. I went to get my binoculars, but they were useless in seeing into the dark windows. Obviously I didn’t know all the hit men working in Finland, but I checked out the license plate and tried to recall any previously suspicious plates I had come across, scanning my memory for a match. A couple of mob guys I knew were so proud of their trade that they had easily recognizable vanity plates, in part to scare people.

The laundry was done, but there was no way I’d go out to the yard to hang it to dry on the clothesline. That would make me an easy target. I did own a Kevlar vest, but I didn’t have a helmet. Plus, walking around with a helmet on would definitely attract attention from the neighbors. I’d use the building’s dryer instead—it was fast. If my stalker was still out there when my clothes were dry, I could walk from one basement hallway to another, then leave through a different exit. Though an experienced hit man would have a copy of the building’s layout and would suspect I’d pull something like this.

I didn’t want to risk the hit man following me to my Degerby cabin, but there was no way I was going to stay here, either. No one would follow me to Hevonpersiinsaari, a small island near the town of Kaavi in Eastern Finland, only a couple hundred miles away from the Russian border. The name means “Horse’s Ass Island” in English, as I had explained to the great amusement of my fellow students at the Queens academy. I could rent a car in Joensuu. Or I could take a plane, which was safer than the train, but then again I could always get off a train if I needed to. I weighed my options while I waited for the laundry to dry in the basement.

After my mother died, I was raised by her brother, my uncle Jari. Only later did I appreciate how lucky I had been that the social workers had decided to hand a four-year-old kid over to a twenty-four-year-old man—but at that moment it had been the best option. My uncle lived on the border of North Karelia and Kuopio in a municipality called Kaavi, on the island of Hevonpersiinsaari. When he passed away, I inherited the cabin there, but I had no desire to go back. Our neighbor, Matti Hakkarainen, had been interested in buying it: the tip of the peninsula was stunning, and he thought he’d divide the land into plots for his five children. The plans had remained only plans, and Hevonpersiinsaari was still mostly uninhabited. I had a lifetime right to it—if nobody was staying in the cabin, I was always welcome to use it. I called Hakkarainen from Riikka’s landline. My roommates had wanted to get rid of the phone line ages ago, but so far I had been able to convince them otherwise. It was safer to use than my cell phone, even though I changed the SIM card frequently. When Matti Hakkarainen answered the phone, I could hear the howling of a chain saw in the background.

“Sure, go ahead,” he said when I asked about staying at the cabin. “The key is still in the old spot. I’ll remove the gate that’s blocking the road to the island—its lock is in the cabin. You can lock the gate again if you want,” he instructed. “By the way, there’s now electricity.”

“Really?”

“They’re building new cabins on the land owned by the Forest Administration, so they set up power lines for them. Nobody wants to stay in a cabin without electricity these days. I even installed a water pump in the sauna. Come and get some milk, bread, and eggs when you have a chance. Maija will make some pies, and the forest is full of lingonberries and mushrooms ready for picking,” Hakkarainen said.

I rented a car and bought and printed my train ticket off the Internet. The Russian four-wheeler was gone by the time I was done. Whoever was in the car may have just been playing with me, so to be safe I left the building through another exit. I hopped onto a bus on Mäkelä Street, switched to the number seven tram after a couple of stops, and got off at the Pasila train station, ready for my three-hundred-mile journey to Eastern Finland. Nobody seemed to be tailing me. My roommates wouldn’t even know I had been there, unless they were counting their ramen packages. Although Riikka and Jenni were poor students, I trusted them; they wouldn’t sell me out to Paskevich. Riikka studied theology and Jenni theater—both were into role-playing in their own ways. Jenni was a strict vegan and an actor, whereas Riikka had talked about joining the clergy. As I listened to their discussions, it occurred to me that they’d chosen characters who were meant to be seen, whereas mine was designed to be hidden.

The train was half empty and everybody on it seemed to ignore me, but that didn’t make me any less vigilant. I paid special attention to my surroundings at the stops closest to the Russian border—Kouvola, Lappeenranta, and Imatra. I had a small SUV waiting for me at a car rental office in Joensuu, about a three-hour train ride from Helsinki. The SUV would help me navigate the Hevonpersiinsaari road, roughed up by the late-summer thunderstorms. Also I felt safer in it than in a smaller car because I sat up higher and could see into the other vehicles on the road. After doing a quick check of the SUV with my explosives detector—I didn’t want to draw attention to myself—I drove to a large shopping center to get some groceries for my trip: potatoes, pasta, canned tuna, lamb sausages, savory pies, and a twelve pack of beer. Screw dieting; calories were more important right now. I dropped by the liquor store to pick up two bottles of rum. One of them was a gift for Matti Hakkarainen. His wife, Maija, would get marmalade candy instead.