The Lion of Justice (18 page)

“Yes, I’ve met Jaan.”

“They treated Jaan so poorly. They can’t do the same to David. Can’t you help him?”

I was curious to know what she meant by the poor treatment, but I couldn’t ask. I would get in touch with Brother Gianni for details later.

“Listen, if you hear from David, anything at all, please get in touch with us. It might be important for his safety.” I wasn’t sure if giving my phone number to David’s mother was wise, but I quickly came up with a better option and told her Teppo Laitio’s number. I’d memorized it by now.

“This is my secretary’s number. He’s called Laitio. Tell him you have a message for Hilja. Remember to mention the first name, not just my last name, Karttunen,” I advised.

Eva Stahl repeated the number. I felt like we both hung on to the phone call as if it were the last shred of hope, although neither of us could give the other information that would make us less anxious.

“I know David’s been in sticky situations before. He would not have been able to tell you absolutely everything, and neither can I.” My lukewarm words sounded hollow, and by the time they reached Tartu, they’d turned cold.

I’d never seen pictures of David’s family—he never carried them around. If they were as careless as half of the Western world, I might find some images on the web or Facebook. I wanted to know whether David had his mother’s eyes, as Eva Stahl’s muffled voice betrayed the tears in them.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore. That police officer, Rytkönen, told me that David had violated his contract and some laws, and he was going to prison. An Italian one?” she asked.

“Rytkönen doesn’t know all the facts about this case. Call my secretary as soon as you hear from David. Good-bye.” I hung up.

For a minute I sat with my mouth open. Then I began to gather my thoughts. Rytkönen must have been incredibly arrogant or a goddamned moron if he didn’t think I would get in touch with the Stahls, too. There was only one way to find out. I browsed the Bureau’s secured pages for a while, then got dressed. It would be safe to make a phone call among the crowds in the railway station, and I’d still have time to get a new phone card from the kiosk.

Eva Stahl’s voice was still in my head when I walked down into the tunnel that went past Amos Anderson Art Museum. Eva and her husband had wanted to name their son after a benign king, but instead their offspring was a boy with multiple marks of Cain on his forehead. I recalled the desperate eyes of the statue of David. I wanted to believe that David Stahl had been forced to do the inevitable, but it was difficult.

There was a line at the kiosk, and the crowd gave my call the perfect protective layer. It took Rytkönen thirty seconds to answer. I tuned my voice all scratchy and unclear before I began to talk.

“Kassi, I think we should meet.”

17

I had no plans of meeting Rytkönen as myself. It was time for Reiska Räsänen to come out of the closet. I knew it was a hell of a risk, but I was ready to take it. To make sure I’d have time to prepare, I arranged to meet with Rytkönen on Sunday, at eleven.

Rytkönen didn’t seem stupid. Obviously he wanted to know how I’d found out his number, what my connection to David Stahl was, and how I knew his code name, Kassi. I promised to tell him. I wanted the meeting place to be perfect—poorly lit would be best. I ended up suggesting Ourit Island at the very end of the Hietaniemi beach. On a cold November Sunday evening, it shouldn’t be a popular place to jog.

As far as I knew, Rytkönen had only seen me once for a few minutes at Laitio’s apartment. Now he had probably seen pictures of me and maybe some camera footage. He’d maybe even studied the way I moved and walked. Or that’s what I would’ve done.

I started getting ready and evoked Reiska early in the morning and the darkest hours of the night. Monika had never met him, and now wasn’t the best time to explain why I needed to dress up as a man. I didn’t dare smoke in the apartment, so Reiska wouldn’t light up until he met Rytkönen.

I went through the Bureau files again. Rytkönen, Martti Kullervo was a lawyer from Iisalmi. He’d immediately recognize Reiska’s dialect. They might even bond over it if I was lucky, although I doubted whether the bond would be tight enough to make Rytkönen spill the beans about Stahl.

Then there was the chance that Rytkönen was David’s right-hand man and knew everything about me and my alter ego. In that case I had nothing to worry about.

I found Brother Gianni’s aka Jaan Rand’s contact information from the Sant’Antimo monastery website. I risked sending him an e-mail, although it could have been intercepted. If David was lying to me, why should I protect him? If I sent my message in Finnish, at least nobody else in the monastery would understand it. Although the website looked modern, I had a hard time imagining each monk having a computer in his little chamber.

Dear Brother Gianni, or Jaan Rand, It seems you forgot to mention that David had been in Finland only a couple of weeks before I arrived in Italy. David didn’t tell me this either, but I found out. He’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is. I also spoke with his mother. Sounds like there was a good reason for you to become a monk. Was it something to do with David? Best regards, Hilja Ilveskero

I drove Monika to work on Thursday in the pouring rain. We were fully staffed again, and everything ran like clockwork. On our way to the restaurant, Monika asked if I was satisfied with my life. I didn’t know what to tell her.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I finally said. “Are you satisfied?”

“I don’t know. I keep thinking about all sorts of stupid stuff. Like how empty the restaurant felt when Jouni was sick for days,” Monika said and sighed.

“Are you obsessed with men whose names begin with Jo? First Joau, now Jouni. Who’s next? Please don’t tell me you’re going to hire someone named Jorma.”

“Shut up! I know Jouni is living with his girlfriend, who doesn’t like his long days at the restaurant one bit. I guess that’s why I’m interested in him—I can’t have him! How about you? Are you ready to move on from David yet?”

“I can find men in bars if I want to. Hey, how about you and me go out one night and pick up some guys? I can go to his place or get a room at Hotel Torni, and you can bring yours to the apartment. How about . . .” I was going to suggest Sunday evening because I had Monday off, but then I remembered my plans with Rytkönen. We turned into Sans Nom’s courtyard, and Jouni and Helinä were comforting Veikko, who was crying.

“What’s going on here?” I jumped out of the car with the motor running.

“It’s Ripa . . . he’s gone to meet his maker. He died in the cold, right there at the back door. I wish he would’ve died in the warmth of the recycling container. Poor Ripa,” Veikko said.

I turned to look at the back door, where an unrecognizable lump had been covered in a tablecloth under the marquee. I walked over and yanked off the colorful cloth. It looked like Veikko’s friend had convulsed and choked on his own vomit. I grabbed his wrist and checked for a pulse, but it looked like he’d been dead for hours. It was strange that nobody in the apartments above had spotted the body. Maybe the marquee had hidden it. The office parking spaces were in front of the house, so the workers wouldn’t have seen him when they arrived.

“I don’t even know when he left the box. He must’ve felt sick and didn’t want to puke in our bed. Wish he’d at least woken me up. I feel like I’m having a heart attack,” Veikko said.

“Did you call the police?” I asked.

“What’s the use? He died of booze like all of us.” Veikko had now gone pale and was holding his chest. “Looks like it might be my time to go, too.”

I immediately called the police and requested an ambulance. I moved the van out of the way and did some police work of my own. I checked the security cameras for clues of Ripa’s time of death. Around 3:00 a.m. someone moved in the yard, but all I could see were Ripa’s shoes. He didn’t walk all the way to the door. I checked the front-facing cameras, too. Ripa had been walking in front of the restaurant, and I could clearly see him at 3:06 a.m. The next image showed another man’s shoes, so Ripa had had company. I didn’t want to give this material to the police, because I needed to investigate whether the shoes matched those of the stalker in the backyard the other day, and I suspected it was Rytkönen. It wasn’t private property; anyone had the right to walk there, even in the middle of the night. That was no crime. Offering someone poisoned liquor, however, was.

I heard the police car arrive so I hastily copied the images to a USB stick. I couldn’t hide the information from the police, nor could I delete it—they’d find out what happened. I just had to cross my fingers that the police didn’t think of asking about the cameras.

The policeman named Miettinen was nearing retirement age, and the other one, Keronen, looked young enough to be a rookie. He tried to hide the nausea building up as he observed the body, whereas Miettinen seemed tired of alkies.

“Was the deceased very ill?” Miettinen asked Veikko, who was still clutching his chest. Where was the ambulance?

“His internal organs were shot to hell,” Veikko said. “His doctor had told him to lay off the drinking because if he didn’t, Ripa wouldn’t live for long. And sure enough, he didn’t. We had plans to go to rehab over Christmas.”

“And the deceased’s name is?”

“Risto Antero Haapala.”

“Do you remember his date of birth?”

“He was born in midsummer. You know, the
real
midsummer. I can’t remember the year. He was over sixty.”

“Any close relatives?” Miettinen managed to ask before the ambulance screeched in with its siren on.

Veikko went even paler when he saw the ambulance.

While the first responders took care of Veikko, other paramedics loaded Ripa into the ambulance. I was hoping the police would take off without further investigation. When the ambulance took Veikko away, I wondered if I’d ever see him again. And who would arrange Ripa’s funeral? Did he have an estranged wife and a couple of kids who were ashamed of him? And would they be happy he’d taken a job in the great air force in the sky? I might never know.

I asked the police if they knew Veikko’s last name, and they cursed simultaneously. In all that commotion they’d forgotten to ask. Nobody in the restaurant knew, either. The police would find it out from the hospital. They wrote down information about Sans Nom’s staff and asked them routine questions about the kind of life the homeless alcoholics were leading in the recycling container out back. Even if Ripa’s autopsy showed signs of poisonous booze, only Veikko would be interrogated. If he had bought that bottle for his friend he could be accused of manslaughter.

“If you find it out, could you let us know Veikko’s last name? I just feel so bad for the poor guy. I want to know what happens to him,” Monika said as the police were leaving. Jouni had already gone back into the kitchen.

“Are you a relative?”

“No, just a friend.”

“Well, that’s not enough,” Miettinen said. Keronen scratched his ear and didn’t say a word, just looked down at his notepad where he’d scribbled Monika’s phone number. Later in the afternoon Monika told me that Veikko’s last name was Vuorinen and that he was recovering from a heart attack. He still needed immediate surgery. That’s all Keronen had found out.

Now that we were all running behind schedule, I didn’t have a chance to look more closely at the CCTV images until later in the afternoon. I compared the shots of the weird character Ripa had reported lurking about and the man who had been with Ripa the night before. The shoes weren’t the same, and although the pant legs seemed to match, there were probably thousands of pairs of dark wool pants in the city. The creep was short, although Ripa was not tall, and his knees were much higher than the mystery man’s. Whoever it was hadn’t bothered to change his walking style, either. The man in both of the camera shots moved in a bit of a waddle, like someone with really thick thighs. It seemed to point to Rytkönen, making me even more curious to meet him. Maybe he had found out that the raspy voice on the other end of the line was me. Still, it didn’t make sense for him to sneak around my place and the restaurant when he could have just picked me up in a police car and taken me to headquarters for interrogation. Maybe Rytkönen knew David’s phone had been in Carlo Dolfini’s pocket. I tried not to panic. When Dolfini’s body had emerged from the marsh in Maremma, it meant someone hadn’t done their job well.

Jouni went to see Veikko at the hospital the next day. Veikko was going to be taken to a rehab clinic in Ridasjärvi, where he could take time to heal from his bypass surgery.

“He was pretty shaken up, and I’m not surprised. He’s a man who’s used to freedom. He did say he had already spent a few winters in Ridasjärvi with Ripa and then left the clinic when summer rolled around to roam the shores of Helsinki, boozing. Looks like Veikko has to give up those summers now,” Jouni said.

I had never had such a romanticized view of the life of a homeless alcoholic. Working as a security guard, I’d seen enough of them going from one bottle to another. Some of my colleagues had considered them less than human, and they used all possible chances to humiliate them and beat them up. The homeless men wouldn’t talk to the police. I’d followed the antics of Veikko and Ripa the entire summer when we were fixing up the restaurant, and suddenly it was strange to not see them peeking out of the recycling container or drinking at the shore. Because the cause of death seemed obvious, the police probably weren’t in a hurry to do Ripa’s autopsy. Maybe there were only two of us in this world who wanted to see the report: I, who suspected foul play, and the person who had committed the crime and hoped nobody would ever find out.

I took all week to prepare for my role as Reiska. Petter had decided to take his sister to the Haikko spa on Sunday night, saying that Monika was overworked and in need of some pampering. This suited me fine; I got to be home alone, and I had plenty of time to transform into Reiska. On my way to the Ourit Island, I could smoke a couple of cigarettes to shroud myself in Reiska’s usual scent.

Reiska wasn’t an attention seeker. He dressed like an average Finnish man, except the T-shirt thanking Winter War veterans usually drew some attention. This late in the year, it wasn’t warm enough, so I left it at home. I wore thermal underwear under the jeans and stuffed the crotch with a hair roller. Reiska’s worn-out combat boots were a size too large for me, but a thick pair of wool socks helped them feel tighter. Reiska wore a checked collared shirt and a wool shirt from the Prisma market under his brown leather jacket. He decided to wear a baseball cap to hide the eyes.

Reiska Räsänen didn’t have a license to carry a gun, unlike Hilja Ilveskero, so the gun had to stay behind. I wasn’t planning on getting shot by a police officer. Reiska didn’t carry much in his wallet. He had an old library card for Kaavi library that even a grade-schooler could’ve forged, a couple of business cards, and a photo I had found at a secondhand store. It was taken in the early 1980s, and the mustachioed man holding a baby boy dressed in colorful terry-cloth coveralls could have easily been Reiska’s dad. I looked a couple of years older as a man than as a woman, which Reiska had to remember when he chatted with other men in bars about Finland’s greatest accomplishments, such as winning the hockey world championship or Mika Häkkinen’s victories on the racetrack.

I fumbled around with the fake mustache for a while—I hadn’t practiced enough. The mustache was made by a costume assistant at a theater in New York. She’d wanted to know whether my father had had a mustache, but all I had been able to tell her was that his hair was light brown. I didn’t recall seeing Keijo Suurluoto with a mustache or a beard, and I had no clue whether his body hair was thick and black or wispy and light, like Uncle Jari’s. I was glad I had forgotten. Reiska’s mustache was slightly lighter than his hair, which was a wig. It made sense to let the impostor hair poke out from underneath his baseball cap.

As a medium-sized man, I was less noticeable than as a tall woman. Unfortunately, I was more susceptible to getting into fights in the wee hours at a hot dog stand or a cab station. Women in the same situations would have to just fend off unwanted attention. Reiska did his best to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble, although this meeting with Rytkönen wasn’t a careful gig.