The Lion of Justice (8 page)

I took Monika to a private hospital’s ER, and for the next couple of weeks, I thought only of her. I sat by Monika and held her hand, sometimes reading her sad Swedish books, where people felt disconnected and ended up in hopeless lives. It felt comforting at that time. I also took care of her errands and scouted potential properties for her restaurant. Monika’s lawyer helped me negotiate restaurant licenses, and I looked for a new apartment for us.

Then, at the end of May, we found out that Monika’s condition was nothing more than a persistent intestinal worm she’d most likely gotten from drinking dirty water in Mozambique. She was put on antibiotics and told to rest.

“I’m lucky,” Monika said and sighed. “I got to return to Finland and have the best treatment. Ordinary folks in Mozambique die of this. Little kids have no hope,” she said as we slowly walked through the Old Church Park, known as Plague Park by the locals.

“You can’t save the entire world,” I told her. “First you must heal yourself. Don’t try to be Florence Nightingale when you barely have the energy to walk up to the third floor.”

It was futile to try to change her. We were too similar. Working was our answer to sorrow. June turned from chilling winds to a heat wave as we went around Helsinki, looking for restaurant spaces. Monika didn’t want her restaurant in some fancy neighborhood. She wanted to be within walking distance of common folks and had to be realistic about locations that made sense. We finally found a spot on the bottom floor of a cubistic-looking office building in Salmisaari. A large IT company had taken over a small business venture and outsourced their services to India and Taiwan. Although we had quite a renovation ahead of us, the property was close to the subway station and bus stops in Ruoholahti.

In July, Laitio sent me a postcard from Italy of a lake surrounded by high mountains called Lago di Scanno. The text was blunt: “Wine is good and food is passable, but you can’t smoke anywhere. Old Lady Dolfini has taken a trip to the US. Cunning folk, these locals. You can’t get anything out of them. Greetings, T. Laitio.” He must’ve been pissed off for having followed my shitty lead.

Monika’s cousin was going to stay in India until the end of the fall, so finding an apartment became less of a priority. Monika had hired me as an assistant, but I was really a general handyman. Uncle Jari had been a competent carpenter and had a good command of other building-related work. He’d taught me a thing or two about the business and was often in my thoughts when I was tiling a floor, painting walls, or hammering kitchen cabinets into place. I’d been in Queens when Uncle had gone out on the lake in the late, chilly fall, checked his nets, and gotten tangled in them. He drowned. When I heard the news, I went into shock, and only later did it occur to me how odd it was that a seasoned fisherman could be so clumsy.

I waited until I had returned from the security academy in Queens to read the autopsy report. Uncle’s cause of death was hypothermia. There had been no reason to suspect foul play, so the investigation was vague and closed quickly. It wasn’t the first time a middle-aged fisherman had drowned. Uncle was never a big drinker, but the investigation found alcohol in his blood. Uncle Jari’s neighbor Matti Hakkarainen told me he’d seen Uncle suddenly grow pale and complain about nausea while they’d been chopping wood in the forest. Matti had assumed Uncle had heart problems. I’d left Uncle by himself because I ran from my problems to Vantaa and then all the way to New York. I neglected taking care of the one person who’d loved me and raised me. Had I been in Finland, I would’ve told Uncle to see a doctor immediately.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, so I put all my energy into taking care of Monika and making her restaurant dreams come true. She was still thinking about fusing cuisines from Hevonpersiinsaari and Mozambique, and I did my best to remember the cooks Uncle Jari used to like. Toward the end of August, Monika and I traveled together to Hevonpersiinsaari, where our old neighbor Maija Hakkarainen showed Monika the secrets of making traditional Karelian pastries and
kalakukko
, fish and fat baked inside a loaf of bread. This was the first time I’d brought a guest to my old haunts. I wasn’t ashamed of the simple rural house I grew up in. I was more worried about sharing my past with another person. I had hoped to one day swim with David in Rikkavesi, the lake, although David had told me he was done with swimming after freestyling for miles in the cold Baltic Sea after he blew up the boat.

Monika and I spent many warm and illuminated evenings outside in the gazebo, huddling in front of a fire pit, swatting mosquitoes, and cooking rutabaga stews and cubed turnips in the embers. Monika was going to build an old-timey baking oven in the restaurant, where the traditional Finnish dishes could be cooked to perfection. She got along with Maija, although Maija had felt awkward about Monika’s Swedish accent and tried to speak in a less regional dialect. While they cooked I helped Matti fix the pasture fence where a large animal had forced itself through. Matti wasn’t sure whether it had been a wolf or a lynx. Men in the village had suggested a neighborhood watch.

“Your uncle was never really into hunting,” Matti said. “He’d always come along, but I could tell he didn’t enjoy killing animals. Last winter there were lynx tracks in our yard multiple times, and I thought about bringing it up to the village boys. We’d get permits to hunt the big cat and stop it from scaring our cattle. And you may laugh, but the next night I had a dream about your uncle. He told me to leave the tuft-eared felines alone and just mend my fence.”

Matti made a cut in the wooden latch with his knife, looking embarrassed. Someone else would have taken that as a cue to hug him, but I just smiled and pulled the electric fence wire tighter.

On our last day in Hevonpersiinsaari, I watered the rose bush I had planted on Frida’s grave, and suddenly I felt David near me. I tried to drive him out of my mind. I planned to end this stupid celibacy as soon as I got back to Helsinki. I had nobody to be faithful to, and random sex would do my body good—maybe even my mind. I’d go for a man in a bar who had the signs of a hastily removed wedding ring. That kind of man wouldn’t cause any trouble.

The sun was disappearing behind the lake, and my thoughts turned to Uncle Jari again. He had been buried in the Kaavi churchyard because I hadn’t thought of cremating him. He belonged here, not under a rock. Then again, it didn’t really matter where the body’s final resting place was. Uncle Jari would always be in Hevonpersiinsaari, just like Frida.

I’d occasionally tried to reach Kassi for months. In July I stopped, thinking the number was no longer in use, but now I decided to give it one more try. If nobody answered, I’d let that one last connection to David disappear. I walked along the dock and called.

“This is Rytkönen.”

8

I hung up on him as quickly as I could and turned the phone off. Although I was using a burner phone, it could still be traced. What was Rytkönen’s game? Laitio considered him a pencil pusher, but Laitio wasn’t always right.

I walked back into the house where Monika was working on her laptop. I hadn’t brought mine with me and asked Monika if I could use hers after she was done. I was going to run some searches on Rytkönen. Laitio had called him Mara, so his full name was most likely Martti or Mauri or Markku. He had a connection to David, and Laitio didn’t know about it. I could feel sweat on my lower back, and my breathing become labored, like it always did when I began to panic. Monika noticed my attempts at calming my breathing.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No.” I grabbed a beer from the fridge, and the Olvi bottle made a familiar hissing sound when I opened it against the edge of the counter. Uncle Jari had taught me this nifty trick well before I’d reached legal drinking age.

Monika knew I was lying, but she didn’t ask any questions. It was one of the reasons I liked her. She listened to me and didn’t assume she had to know everything about me.

“Maija’s
sultsinas
will definitely be on the menu,” Monika said as she got up. “I’ve rarely had such a treat. I just thought they came from farther east, from Russian Karelia.”

“Didn’t Maija tell you that her mother was evacuated from Salmi? That’s where her sultsinas, Karelian pastries, and mushroom dishes come from,” I said before turning to her computer. “Let me check something before we go to bed.”

Monika had bought a company van, but she didn’t like driving it, so I was often her chauffeur. I was glad we had only one beer in case we needed to leave in a hurry. Monika went to Uncle Jari’s old bedroom to read, and I began searching for information. First I tried Mauri Rytkönen, but there were no relevant results. Martti Rytkönen, however, brought up something interesting: “ ‘Although we should be mindful of escalating security threats, it bears repeating that it’s now easier than ever for international criminals to become active in Finland,’ comments Officer Martti Rytkönen from the National Bureau of Investigation’s foreign department.”

A couple of clicks more and there he was, winning a bodybuilding competition for the police department. A link took me to his bio. Rytkönen, Martti Kullervo, licentiate of law, born 1975 in Iisalmi. Currently employed by the National Bureau of Investigation’s foreign department, previously worked under Europol in Brussels between 2003 and 2009. Likes bodybuilding and karate. No mention of a family or an address, which was understandable. I called the white pages for his personal number, but all they could give me was his work number.

Obviously I couldn’t start stalking Rytkönen, but Reiska might be able to do it. I’d try the old-fashioned approach once I got to Helsinki. But why was Rytkönen called Kassi in David’s contact list? All the other code names had been animals, so I was sure the Estonian word for
cat
would have been used for someone from David’s home country, maybe Brother Gianni. Once again I was proved wrong. And why did Kassi Rytkönen pick up the phone now, after months of silence?

Before bed I put my small gun case into my equipment bag. Monika didn’t need to see the gun, and once I got to Yrjö Street, I’d get a lock for the closet where I was going to keep the locker. When I had some free time, I’d set up a fake wall in the closet and practice at the shooting range. I was a real liability with my rusty skills.

Back in Helsinki we were greeted by an uptight building inspector who claimed our blueprints weren’t up to code. Monika filled me in on his reputation among restaurateurs; he was known to accept payoffs from larger chains who wanted to keep out competition. The next few days we had to clarify our blueprints and do our best to convince the inspector that our restaurant would serve traditional food, not an ethnically confused lunch buffet. There were a few times I thought of bringing Reiska out to school the stickler, but Monika would never have approved.

I did end up using Reiska when I needed to call Kassi. I’d practice speaking in Reiska’s unintelligible, raspy, stuttering voice. So far nobody had questioned the speaker’s sex, but I was treading on more dangerous ground now that I used Reiska to create a voice that sounded like David.

Whenever I was alone in Helsinki, I tried out his voice, but there weren’t many opportunities. The safest places were the jogging tracks in Hietaniemi Park and Kaivopuisto Park. My next three calls to Kassi came up empty; the number could not be reached. Most likely Rytkönen only picked up when he was in a safe place.

We’d been in Helsinki for ten days when I finally got through. I was walking along the seashore, just about to pass the rock club Nosturi. As soon as I switched my voice to a muddled tenor, I began to swagger like Reiska, too.

“This is Rytkönen. And don’t hang up this time, goddamn it.” The Savonian dialect was completely absent from his voice. Perhaps he thought a foreigner like David wouldn’t understand it. “Are you back in Finland?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, although this lie would be very short-lived. I could just imagine him grinding his teeth. Was he surprised or fearful to hear from David? The other guy in David’s contact list, Cavallo, had been snuffed. Was Rytkönen aware that a phone call from David might mean danger?

“You’re only supposed to call this number when you’re in Finland. Where are you?”

“I followed Cavallo.”

“Cavallo? Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“You don’t know Cavallo? Who is this?” I demanded.

“Seriously, what are you on? Did you forget our agreement? If you have nothing to say, then let’s hang up. Or is your burden becoming too heavy?”

I hoped Rytkönen would address me by name. He had already revealed who he was, but anonymity for the other caller didn’t give me any clues, so I had to risk it.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” I began to cough, and I wasn’t faking it. Making my voice this raspy was beginning to take its toll.

“Stop messing with me, Stahl,” Rytkönen said.

“Phones can be stolen, you know. And isn’t it strange that I’m speaking fluent Finnish, with no Estonian accent?”

The other end went quiet. My mind was racing. Maybe Rytkönen wasn’t Kassi. Phones could indeed be stolen. People could find out unlisted numbers, and then use them for new phones. I needed to quickly come up with a plan that would confuse Rytkönen even more.

“I have Stahl’s phone,” I continued. “Unfortunately, he’s unable to talk right now. You better find him before he loses something more valuable.”

Rytkönen hung up. I turned the phone off and removed the phone card with my gloved hands. I crushed the card under my heel and tossed it into the nearest trash can and buried it under some empty beer cases. I kept listening for police cars. Rytkönen wouldn’t take long to trace the call. I wore a baseball cap, large sunglasses, teal-colored yoga pants down to my knees, a tank top, and a fanny pack where I kept my keys, phone, money, and gloves. I didn’t look like a man who had just called Rytkönen.

I spotted the first police car as I turned on Tehdas Street to head back downtown. A coincidence, or were they after me? Had there been CCTVs around, recording me making the call? I was hoping Rytkönen wasn’t that smart and was looking for David, or at least a man. My cap and sunglasses had hidden my face pretty well, and I’d maintained Reiska-like body language the whole time. If Laitio saw the CCTV images, I wouldn’t be fooling him.

The police car passed me near the corner of St. John’s Church. I hopped on the tram, feeling bad about destroying David’s phone; it was my last trace of him. Still I expected to find a message from him every time I received a new text or when I checked my e-mail. I gave Mrs. Voutilainen a hopeful call every now and then to check if I’d gotten any mail. Her voice grew more pitiful each time she said no.

When I hadn’t heard anything from Laitio, I called to see how he was doing. He didn’t say anything about Rytkönen getting calls from someone pretending to be David Stahl. Information didn’t seem to travel well within the Bureau, or at least not between Rytkönen and Laitio. I hadn’t yet come up with a good plan to talk to Rytkönen without revealing my identity. I wrote to Brother Gianni, but all I got back was a postcard of Sant’Antimo’s monastery in the mist, with a deflating note: “Dear Hilja, I have nothing new to tell you. You just need to accept it.”

When Monika was out one evening visiting family, I took the kaleidoscope and broke the bottom. First, all I saw were shards of glass spread on the table in bits of white, purple, pink, and violet. The next layer contained yellow, green, and black. The spy novels I’d read as a girl came to mind, thinking of enormously valuable jewels within pieces of glass, so I started scrutinizing each piece. Although I had planned on buying a microscope after I’d graduated from Queens, I never followed through. A magnifying glass would suffice, and I could also use it for the classic glass-scratching test to find valuable pieces.

There were a few hundred pieces, and nothing stood out. When I brought the kaleidoscope to my eye, all I saw was a reflection from the mirror inside. There was some room between the mirror and the brass casing, but I didn’t know how to get to it. I could try melting it, but that would destroy the contents. I had to find someone who knew how the thing was constructed. I didn’t believe in seven years of bad luck from breaking a mirror, but I still didn’t feel comfortable breaking it. The object was so masterfully made that breaking it seemed wrong. Still, I needed answers, so it had to be done.

The broken mirror revealed a rolled-up piece of paper, and I opened it. The message was short and in Swedish, and it made me curse out loud: “Dear Hilja, I know you too well. I hope you’ve figured out the meaning behind the map and the ring. David.”

If I hadn’t already broken the kaleidoscope, I’d have thrown it out the window. What was this childish treasure hunt? As if David were laughing at me from afar, maybe even beyond the grave. For a moment I hated him.

I didn’t want to look at the ring, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. There was something familiar about it. Was it a ring we’d both looked at in a shop window? I couldn’t recall that happening, especially because I’d only worn jewelry as a front. I’d never dreamed of an engagement ring like some other girls who had plans of how many diamonds they wanted. The image of my mother’s severed hand with gleaming rings on her fingers had destroyed any notion I had of a safe marriage.

At Riikka’s wedding I got wasted and almost had sex with the groom’s barely legal cousin. Luckily I had had my wits about me and backed out. I would have only hurt the young man, and he would have become a nuisance. I had a moral hangover for two days afterward.

Luckily starting a restaurant didn’t allow me time to dwell on things. Our staff was almost ready. The chef who prepped cold foods and two of the waiters who’d originally worked at Chez Monique had been planning on leaving their current jobs, and Monika had been clear about the new restaurant being quite different from Chez Monique.

We were trying to come up with a name for the restaurant one evening while screwing handles onto the cupboards.

“We can’t have a nameless restaurant forever,” I said after we’d come up with one ridiculous suggestion after another.

Monika stopped. “Nameless . . . that’s actually a pretty good name! Just think about it. We’re serving dishes that have no names—there’s no beef Wellington or Sacher cake. We have foods developed by regular people over hundreds of years, treats for unknown, everyday people. Chez Monique had always been about my personality, a stupid brand. This should be the opposite. The person who cooks doesn’t matter. It’s the taste and the origin of the food that’s important.”

“You do know what
nameless
means in Finnish, right? Panties,” I reminded her. She laughed.

“It’s a bonus if the name is slightly playful. Besides, nobody uses euphemisms to talk about underwear when most clothing stores display it in their windows,” Monika said.

“But Nameless doesn’t sound convincing. What would it be in French?” I asked.

“
Sans Nom
,” Monika said, pondering. “Kind of in the same vein as Chez Monique. Its opposite.”

That’s how the restaurant became Nameless in French. Monika demanded that the grand opening had to be on October 8, the date for Hilja’s name day in the Finnish calendar. Before that we’d go to a food convention in Turku to advertise our concept. I tried to convince Monika not to, because conventions were terrible from a security standpoint, but she wouldn’t budge. At first she had refused to set up CTTVs and burglar alarms in Sans Nom, but she changed her mind in early September.

When we arrived at the restaurant on a rainy Wednesday morning, we saw that the large window next to the entrance was broken. I couldn’t tell what the burglars had been looking for; the restaurant was barely furnished, and none of the alcohol had been brought in from storage. There were muddy footprints and broken glass. The prints were everywhere, even in the untiled restrooms and the break room. The lock for the back door had some scratches on it that weren’t there the day before. These burglars weren’t very experienced.

“Should we call the police?” Monika asked.

I didn’t know what to tell them. Maybe whoever broke in was just looking for a place to stay the night, something to eat. The back patio often hosted a group of drunks, and I knew some of them had been living out of the Dumpster. They may have been looking for warmth on a damp night. I told Monika I’d go talk to them, but I couldn’t find them. So I called the police, but they didn’t care. They didn’t even check for fingerprints, just told us to fix the window and get security cameras. They said there had been similar break-ins recently, and they’d get in touch with us if they found anything.