The Bodyguard (6 page)

“Hey, what do you want?” I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t Finnish. “These girls here are not for sale, you know.”

“I’m not after girls.”

“What, boys then? We don’t have them, but give me a fifty and I’ll give you a good lead.”

“I only want one: a Russian painter guy. He sold an old lady a nice painting, and now I’d like to get my hands on one, too. Do you know him—Yuri Trankov? Drives a garbage truck, paints nature scenes?”

“I don’t know any painters,” he said. “But I can ask around if you want. Give me your number and a smoke, if you have one.”

I handed him a cigarette, which he took with a funny look on his face. I could only smoke lights—otherwise I’d choke. Lights were also cheapest, which suited Reiska’s persona as a cheapskate. The man didn’t care that we were indoors and lit up while Reiska scribbled down one of my phone numbers for him; I’d need to remember to turn on my prepaid line. He seemed a bit too helpful, so Reiska moved on to the station bar to look for other potential informants. He ordered a beer so he wouldn’t look suspicious.

Being Reiska was a challenge when it was time to visit the men’s room. I had learned to pee standing up and to simulate the noises men made while relieving themselves, but it hadn’t been easy. Urinals were out of the question, and a man who used a stall just to go number one was downright weird, especially someone who looked liked Reiska. So Reiska would need to take it easy with the beer—who knows how long he’d be hanging around the station.

It would be a stroke of luck if someone not only knew Trankov but decided to tell Reiska about him. And I didn’t even know whether Trankov had sold his paintings to anyone but my neighbor, so asking around may get her into trouble, as well. The bloody image of Anita, slumped on the street in her soiled fur coat, appeared to me again. Elli Voutilainen’s nephew lived in the small mill town of Loimaa in Western Finland. I doubted anyone would go after him, even if they did try to trace Reiska.

It was an average Sunday evening at the train station: students coming back from visiting their parents; soldiers hopping on the northbound train to nearby Hämeenlinna, where they’d continue on to the Parolannummi military base; country folk leaving the city after their weekend visits. Once Reiska finished his beer, he started doing his rounds. The police wouldn’t pay attention to a guy like him, but security guards would shoo him away to loiter elsewhere.

Reiska hung around the station until midnight without any luck. The Russian he’d talked to earlier had left around ten, and some younger kids joined the group; they didn’t seem to be concerned about having to go to school in the morning. Reiska drank a cup of tea at a café that only allowed paying customers to use their private restroom. He checked his phone—no calls. He went to catch a bus home.

One of the last buses of the night was almost empty, which is why the two young men in leather jackets sitting in the back caught Reiska’s attention. He didn’t hear what language they spoke, and they looked like they could have been Finns or Eastern Europeans. Reiska relaxed, but inside I was on alert.

The two men got off at Reiska’s stop. Everything was quiet except for the lone cab that ambled down the street. Reiska walked confidently and didn’t glance back. Young men like him were the least afraid of getting mugged, although statistically speaking they were the ones most likely to be targeted. He wasn’t drunk, and I didn’t want to put on an act. I wasn’t comfortable with going straight home, so I walked over to my neighborhood place, Käpygrilli. I knew it closed at nine on Sundays, but I did my best to look like a man trying to find a bar somewhere nearby that would still let him in. A man just standing around is looking to be messed with.

“Hey man, give us one.” The leather jacket duo was now next to me. The speaker used Finnish without a foreign accent. They were even younger than I had originally thought, barely in their teens. I pulled out my pack of cigarettes, and they lit up in silence.

“What are you looking for, old man? Booze?” the more talkative one asked. His pockmarked face was already ashen from smoking too much.

“Me, naw, I’m not looking for anything. Just thought I’d see if this bar was still open. I’m visitin’ my cousin here in the city.” Reiska started to walk away in the opposite direction from home. I hadn’t brought any kind of weapon with me, and I didn’t want to get into a fistfight, either. Unlike Hilja, Reiska didn’t know judo, and I wasn’t ready to break character unless my life was at stake. Plus, such close contact might reveal my sex, and and it was hard to know what their attitude toward cross-dressing might be.

“Hillbilly!” yelled the talkative one after me. “Fucking yokel!”

Reiska the Eastern Finn would have taken offense and paid these little bums back, but Hilja the Bodyguard didn’t want to take any risks. Reiska turned the corner to a familiar apartment courtyard and hid in the shadows of the communal clothesline. The men had started to come in his direction, but weren’t interested in him—they walked past. Reiska waited a good fifteen minutes before he took a detour home.

There were no lights on in our kitchen window or in my roommates’ bedrooms. Still, I didn’t want to barge in dressed up as Reiska; instead, I used our storage space in the basement to remove the wig and the mustache. Once I reached our bathroom, I washed off all the makeup and showered, despite the fact that the noise could potentially wake up my roomies—I just needed to get rid of Reiska’s smell. It reminded me of Uncle Jari and how sad I had been when his smell had slowly disappeared from the hunting jacket I had kept. I went to bed, trying to remember that smell. Falling asleep in the comfort it provided had always been easy.

My breakfast the next morning was a large bowl of buckwheat porridge and half a carton of tomato juice. My phone hadn’t made a sound. After breakfast I hopped on the tram toward Hakaniemi to pay a visit to the unemployment office. No matter how often I went there, the experience was always unpleasant. At least this time I had thought to bring along a book, a water bottle, and two bananas. Nearly two hours later, I was finally face-to-face with a clerk. She was ready to move on to retirement: her eyes, enlarged by strong prescription lenses, were dull with apathy. I told her my name, social security number, and employment history.

“And the reason for termination?”

“Disagreement with the employer.”

“Did you receive proof of employment from the employer?”

“No.”

She clucked her tongue.

“You better get one. Otherwise it’s hard to be employed again. Guards need to have proof that they can be trusted.”

“Well, I can’t get one now—my former employer is dead.”

I immediately regretted saying this. Why hadn’t I forged a document praising my work? Chief Constable Laitio, that’s why. Like an idiot I had told him my reason for quitting. Laitio wouldn’t have access to the unemployment office records, but it was in my nature not to lie—why risk getting caught?—unless the lie was absolutely necessary.

“Dead?” The rep perked up visibly. “What do you mean, dead?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I signed the forms stating that I was ready to take advantage of their services. They offered me a cleaning job that would begin right away and I said I’d consider it—once my bank balance dropped to three digits. Regardless, it was important to show up at the unemployment office. This way, whoever was after me would assume my only concern was finding a new job. Such a person would have no business going back to Moscow to solve Anita’s murder by herself. Not that I would dare to go back there. I’d conduct my investigation from Finland. Even if I would never find out who really was responsible for Anita’s murder, I wanted some proof that it hadn’t been me. But what if the evidence didn’t absolve me?

I went back to the apartment to pack up my stuff. It all fit into a large backpack. My bus began the hour-long westward crawl along the coast, heading to Torbacka and my cabin in Degerby.

Once there, I heard more Swedish than Finnish. This made me think about Monika again. My cabin didn’t have an Internet connection—I would need to go to the Degerby community center, and it was only open once a week. I’d purposefully steered clear of my neighbors in Degerby. Even the brother of the owners in the cabin next door had left me alone after I’d put him off a few times.

My bike was still in front of the local bank in Degerby; it was a piece of junk that no thief would want. I bought some tomatoes and beer from the grocery store and started riding toward the coast; it would take me about fifteen minutes. The potholes in the gravel road made my backpack bump up and down, requiring all of my effort to stay balanced. It was a real challenge to ride up the last hill on a bike with no gears. I pedaled slowly, cursing all the way, but I didn’t give up.

Once I reached the cabin, I walked around it and peered inside for any signs of intruders. Everything seemed to be exactly as I had left it three weeks earlier before the trip to Moscow. Before I went in I deactivated the burglar alarm, then tossed my backpack to the middle of the floor. I plugged in the fridge and put my beer in it. Then I went to the shed to find a shovel.

Anita had given me the papers in early summer. Supposedly she still had the originals in her safety deposit box, but she wanted me to have the copies. She was sure I’d know a secure place for them.

The plot of land was pebbly and wide, and someone had marked a path through it with mounds of small rocks. I had added to it by piling up rocks at a spot that had more soil and grass. After removing the rocks I began to dig, and soon the shovel hit metal. Anita’s box. Actually, it was more like a miniature safe. There was just one problem: I had no idea what the combination for the lock was.

6

I had warned Anita not to use a combination that could be guessed easily. Never use birth dates, phone numbers, or, especially, numbers that correspond to the letters in the alphabet to spell the safe owner’s name. A random string of numbers was the only option. It would have eight numbers, each up to two digits. I didn’t even want to calculate the number of possible combinations.

There was a crowbar in the shed. I placed the small safe on a rock and started banging on it. Despite the noise I barely managed to scratch it.

“It is usually better to use your wits than your muscles,” Mike Virtue had once advised me, and it looked like he was right. I carried the safe indoors and decided to regroup before going at it again. I opened one of the beers and plopped onto the couch. My thoughts took me back to Hevonpersiinsaari, when I had tried to figure out who may have known that I had left Anita by herself. This would mean that we’d been followed the entire time we were in Moscow, and I had been a lousy bodyguard for not noticing. Or both of us had been tagged with a tracking device that I had not found despite my frequent checks.

Just the thought of it made me shiver. A tracker. Although I hadn’t detected any marks on me besides some small bruising, which could have been caused by a simple fall, I began to worry. Maybe I had been drugged not to hurt or scare me, but to insert a tracker. My entire body suddenly felt like it was buzzing, as if I’d sat on an ant hill. I quickly stripped off my clothes and took the largest mirror off the wall. Then, with the aid of it and a hand mirror, I inspected my body inch by inch. No new scars or bumps. I combed my hair multiple times, felt my scalp, and probed everywhere with the metal detector, even in my mouth where I checked each tooth. I put on surgical gloves and felt for the strings of my IUD—everything seemed normal.

I checked the stuff I’d had with me in Bar Svoboda. My leather jacket made the metal detector beep, but only because of the zipper and the studs. I felt the seams for anything unusual and then ripped the fabric open at the elbow when I detected a weird bump. It turned out to be just an extra button that had somehow slipped between the leather and the lining. Nevertheless, I dumped the button in the trash, although I felt like an idiot for doing it.

There was no way I believed that a homeless drunk had murdered Anita, but I didn’t want to give in to paranoia, either. It could very well be that no one had bribed the militia. Maybe someone had just decided that there was no need to investigate further now that there was a logical explanation. They were all overworked, and some screaming cop from Finland or our smiling foreign minister wouldn’t change anyone’s mind.

My frequent trips to Russia had taught me that it was a complicated place, and what was true or false wasn’t always clear. However, most of the Russians I’d met were extremely friendly, and a couple of words of Russian were all that was needed to melt their hearts. Still, there were some topics that were off-limits if there were Russians within earshot. They believed that Finns should be grateful to them—without Russia, Finland would be Sweden’s forgotten backcountry. At least Soviet Russia had given Finns independence.

Then there had been the confusion when I tried to explain to my American classmates in New York why Finland had sided with Germany during the Second World War. I tried to make them understand that we had had two options: Hitler or Stalin. It was pretty crazy to claim that Hitler had been the right choice, but that’s how it was. If we’d chosen Stalin, we would have been under Russia’s thumb for decades, like our neighbors in the Baltic countries.

I turned the TV on. It belonged to my landlord, like the rest of the furniture. I’d only brought the basics when I first came here; I didn’t want anyone to be able to trace the cabin back to me. The landlord took care of the cable, too. I switched from one channel to another until I saw a familiar face.

Representative Helena Lehmusvuo had been a regular at Chez Monique and she frequently helped with Monika’s food project in Mozambique. Lehmusvuo specialized in human rights and freedom of speech. When the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been murdered, our leading politicians had told Lehmusvuo to stop talking to the press after she’d proclaimed that Politkovskaya was murdered at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s behest. Now Lehmusvuo was on TV, commenting on Russia’s promise to pull their troops out of Georgia and on Prime Minister Putin’s statement that the Soviet Union’s fall had been a geopolitical tragedy. Lehmusvuo was a staunch opponent of nuclear power, so she criticized the way Finns were dependent on energy produced by the Russians, such as nuclear power and natural gas. She spoke with the usual bombast of a politician, but I didn’t switch the channel. Instead, I listened to what she had to say.

“Finland has no other alternative than to stop relying on imported energy, which means that inevitably our energy consumption must be reduced.”

The reporter began to grill her about national competitiveness and the looming economic downturn, but at that moment I got a text message. It was from Mrs. Voutilainen. I hastily read her report. She thought she’d seen Yuri Trankov walking along Koskela Road, near our building, but she wasn’t sure.

My mind filled slowly with dread. They wouldn’t go after my roommates, would they? If they’d figured out my address, they’d know that I didn’t live alone. Sicilians scared their targets with horse heads, but I’d had to settle for a painting of a lynx.

I shoved my half-empty beer in the fridge, hid the safe under a pile of chopped wood in the sauna, and climbed up a nearby cliff high enough to see the ocean. In the slow drizzle, it was calm and gray like a wolf’s fur. A flock of geese honked overhead; it was migration time. I could have easily pretended to be a mushroom enthusiast, or, if I’d grabbed the binoculars from the cabin, an ornithologist. Thanks to Uncle Jari, I knew my mushrooms—he’d made an effort to teach me what he’s considered the most important life skills.

Thinking of him brought me back to the time in second grade when we were almost torn apart. My teacher had started a PE club for kids after school on Thursdays, but I couldn’t join because I had no way of getting home after the school bus had left. The teacher lived about a mile from school and offered to drive me home afterward. She probably took pity on me, a motherless girl with mismatched socks. One day I did stay after school and we practiced cartwheels and climbing rope, both of which I mastered. Afterward the teacher drove me home, pulling up right in front of our yard. Clearly she was waiting to be invited in. I really wanted to introduce her to my pet, Frida, but I had a feeling that Uncle Jari wouldn’t approve. So I just thanked her for the ride and showed her the best spot to turn around the car. Then I ran inside and called for Frida.

Frida wasn’t there—just Uncle Jari. I had never seen him look that angry before. His face was the shade of a ripe lingonberry and when he yelled at me, his mustache shook.

“What the hell is going on? Why was your teacher here?”

“I told you about the PE club. She brought me home. I thought you were still at the Karttunen construction sit
e . . .
” I was about to cry. Uncle shouldn’t have been that upset.

“We ran out of materials; that’s why I’m home. And good thing I was! I barely got Frida inside before you two showed up. Don’t you understand that the lynx is our secret? You can’t tell anyone about her! They’ll take her away to a zoo, or even worse—they’ll kill her.”

Now I was crying. Of course I didn’t want to give up Frida.

“I’ll never go to PE club again, I promise,” I sobbed. Uncle Jari calmed down quickly, but reminded me numerous times that evening that Frida needed to remain our secret.

The following Thursday my teacher asked if I was going to stay after school for the club, and I said I couldn’t.

“Why not, sweetie? I can always take you home.”

“I just can’t. It’s a secret.”

“A secret?” A frown appeared on her face. “You can share your secret with me.”

“I can’t! It’s a secret between me and my uncle Jari!”

The teacher gasped and covered her mouth. “Dear child, a secret between you two? You should be able to talk about secrets. When was the last time you saw the school nurse? Oh, no, what should I do now?”

Her visible distress puzzled me, but when she asked, “Does the secret begin with the letter ‘p’?” I got worried that she knew about Frida. She was practically hyperventilating now. “Oh my goodness, how would you know such a word, how should I put thi
s . . .
”

“Actually, it does begin with a ‘p’!” After all, why wouldn’t I know about the paws that I saw scratching at the door every day? “But that’s all I can say!” I’d already said too much, and Uncle Jari would be mad. “Gotta catch my bus, bye!”

Frida had scratched me a couple of times, enough to draw blood but not bad enough to show the nurse. The nurse came to our school every Tuesday, and although this year we didn’t need any vaccinations, we were all still afraid of her. She had cold hands and smelled funny. When I was older, I realized that the source of the odor was probably the stale flowery perfume she bought at our local department store.

When the nurse appeared at school on Friday, all of us students got worried. She’d come on the wrong day only once before, and that was when Hannu Hakkarainen had lice and we all had to be inspected. That was in first grade. Now the school nurse demanded that I follow her out of the classroom. I could hear the other kids whispering behind my back. She took me into her office, which doubled as a storage room for maps and teaching equipment. A stuffed pygmy owl stared at me from the top shelf.

“So, about this secret between you and your uncle,” she asked awkwardly. “Does the secret hurt?”

I stared at her.

“No, it doesn’t hurt, it’s nice. And cute, too! I mean, sometimes it scratches, but not that badly. See, the scab is almost gone!” I lifted my shirtsleeve to display Frida’s scratch on my elbow from the previous week.

“Scratche
s . . .
Listen, Hilja, you’ll need to take all your clothes off.” The nurse pulled a folding screen in front of the door and set a paper sheet on an old bed that was used as an examination table.

“Why?” I didn’t understand what right she had to barge in to class and demand that I take off my clothes. Nothing was wrong. My throat wasn’t hurting and I wasn’t coughing at all.

“Just take all of them off.” She sounded even more rattled than before. I’d heard from sixth graders that fifth graders would get a weiner inspection, but that was only for the boys.

I took my clothes off slowly in the cold storage room. First I pulled off my sweater and shirt, then my pants. I wore thick red leggings under my jeans and pink panties that were fraying around one of the leg openings. I left the panties on. The nurse inspected my skin and asked how I had gotten so scratched up.

“Our cat is a bit wild,” I said. A lynx was a cat, after all.

“A cat, eh? Quite large claws she has, your cat.” The nurse’s throat made odd movements, as if she had an Adam’s apple like a man. “Come now, take off the panties as well and hop up on the bed.” Then she muttered to herself, “Without a proper examination table, how on earth am I going to—yes, now just lift up your legs and spread them.”

I did as I was told. Then, without a warning, something cold and metallic was shoved into me and I screamed and kicked her in the mouth. She dropped the cold metal. I pulled it out and kept on screaming. When she tried to touch me again, I hissed and bit, and my cries turned into the kind of low growl that I had heard emanating from Frida. The nurse told me to get dressed again and follow her back to the classroom, where the other kids were already having lunch. She didn’t let me go inside—instead, she fetched the teacher and we all stood in the hallway.

“She wouldn’t let me examine her; she behaved like a lunatic. She even bit me! Which isn’t a surprise, really, with her genes. Is she dangerous to the other children?”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“I’ll have a doctor take a look at her at the health care center, where they have beds with straps. Would you be able to drive her there?”

“The grade-schoolers are done at one on Mondays and Fridays.”

“Next Monday it is then. I’ll take care of it. There’s something fishy going on, with the way she went berserk. I’ll need to ask a social worker to come with us. Wasn’t Pirjo Koistinen on the Ilveskero case?” Her upper lip was swollen where I’d kicked her, and she was pressing it down with her hand. My teacher had a strange expression on her face when she led me back to class.

The kids had already finished eating, but I managed to scrape up a huge portion of scalloped potatoes from what was left in the pot. My friends asked me what the nurse had wanted, but I didn’t tell them. I didn’t mention it to Uncle Jari, either; I was so ashamed of what the nurse had done. Uncle had always told me that whatever was between my legs was my business and mine alone, and nobody else should touch me there. He’d never told me why, but I believed him. Nonetheless, I was proud that I hadn’t let him down by sharing our secret, even though the nurse had been so nasty to me. It served her right to get a fat lip for trying to hurt me. I hadn’t focused on what she’d said about jeans. What did she mean by that? What was wrong with the pair I was wearing?

Over the weekend I managed to forget about what had happened at school. Uncle Jari and I spent both days ice fishing. Afterward, he baked perch inside a loaf of bread and made fish soup, while Frida played with her gift, a perch that was still alive. It wasn’t until Monday that I remembered about having to see a doctor. Before I headed out to the school bus, I petted Frida and promised I wouldn’t say a word about her, no matter what the doctor said. When I got to the bus, my resolve started to falter. I remembered reading in a Donald Duck comic about a truth serum; maybe they would give me a shot and then all I could do was tell the truth. I would make sure they didn’t inject me with anything.