The Bodyguard (4 page)

“Norway, eh? That’s a surprise.” His voice was angrier than in the voice mail I’d received. “It’s about your employer, Anita Nuutinen. When was the last time you saw her?”

In principle I always spoke the truth; you had to lie eventually, anyway.

“My
former
employer, sir. I resigned. The last time I saw her was in Moscow on Monday afternoon. Why are you asking?”

“Where exactly did you see her?”

I gave him the details and complained about the line breaking up. Laitio wanted to know how I had gotten to Norway all the way from Moscow. I claimed I had simply hopped off the train in Kouvola, near the Russian border, where I had met my girlfriend, and together we’d taken the train up to Joensuu. There we had rented a car and driven all night to reach Norway. I asked again what the call was about, but Laitio continued his lynx and mouse game.

“You were Anita Nuutinen’s bodyguard. Who was threatening her?”

“It was less about protecting her life than protecting her property, sir. She had some issues with her former business partner, Valentin Paskevich, but I’d thought by now that was ancient history.”

“So you didn’t think that Nuutinen was in immediate danger when you resigned?”

“Sir, what is this about? Has something happened to Anita? I haven’t called her back because I don’t want her screaming to ruin my holiday with my girlfriend. And I have to save my battery here in the wilderness. If you don’t mind me asking, why all the questions?”

Although Laitio talked to me as if I were his peer, I chose to be more formal to keep him at a distance. He asked whether I had plans to return to Helsinki and I said I didn’t know. After all, I was a free woman now.

“Well, you better come back quickly. Anita Nuutinen was found dead two nights ago in Moscow.”

I made a show of being shocked and enjoyed the performance. I just had to be careful not to overdo it—I was a security professional, after all, and not some high-strung teenager. I told Laitio I would talk to my partner about our plans and would get in touch with him. I hung up while he was in midsentence.

I’d given Paskevich’s name to Laitio—he’d find out about him soon, anyway. I also didn’t think that Anita had been as afraid of Paskevich recently as she’d tried to make me believe. I had reasons to suspect that in addition to Paskevich, there was also a Finn after Anita.

She had been renting her properties to Finnish business travelers who needed a place to stay in Moscow. I had heard her argue over the phone in Finnish; apparently a renter had wanted to pay her off the books, and Anita had refused. She sternly told the person on the phone that he was in no position to demand that she skirt the law for his benefit, and that if this information become public, it would be the end of him. I didn’t ask Anita who she had been talking to, nor did I think she would have told me, but I could find his identity in the list of renters. All of them could have been subletting the condos, especially if they were eager to hide their identities, like Anita’s customer was. I doubt Anita had blackmailed him, though.

I had fed Laitio a lie about having a girlfriend, though I did have some experience with women. While I was in New York I did all sorts of things, but I had never wanted a serious relationship. A love affair was the most dangerous form of human interaction, as I had learned as a child. Uncle Jari did just fine living on his own and it was working for me, too. Even the lynx pair up only during mating season, and afterward the female chases the male away. Then she takes care of her cubs for a year, unless she ends up like Frida’s mother.

I decided to go check whether the Hakkarainens had an Internet connection these days; I assumed farmers had to fill in all sorts of electronic forms for the EU. I could read the Russian news from there. I packed my dictionary and hopped in the rowboat. Matti had bought a new fiberglass boat to replace Uncle Jari’s old-fashioned wooden boat. I preferred this new model. The old one brought up bad memories, and I heard it had been burned one summer in a bonfire. The fiberglass boat was designed to be propelled by a motor rather than oars, but once I got the hang of it, I was able to steer it just fine. It was only about a half mile across the lake to the Hakkarainens’. I hadn’t rowed a boat since my time in Queens when we rowed down the East River all the way to the Statue of Liberty, a feat that could not be repeated with today’s heightened security. There was nobody on the lake except an old seagull that hovered over me until it realized I wasn’t there to fish.

The Hakkarainen house seemed quiet. There was a horse in the nearby field; a clumsy filly galloped playfully around it. Maija might have gone to pick berries and Matti could be taking his daily nap. The tractor was in the yard with the plow still attached. The summer harvest was over, and now they were working on the fields before the frost would set in. I had spent many summers helping out during the harvest time alongside Uncle Jari and the other neighbors.

I knocked on the door, but nobody answered. Pushing the handle down, I knew it would be open because, out in the country, nobody locked their doors. I stepped in and looked around. Since my last visit, they had upgraded their furniture to brown leather. I called out to Matti and Maija, then made my way to the back room where the office used to be. Back then the books for dairy farms were kept in brown cardboard folders—now there was a computer. It was a desktop model, a few years old. Luckily they hadn’t set up a password, so I was able to log in right away. I’d need to educate them a bit about security. I opened a browser window.

First I checked the Finnish daily papers, but they just repeated the same information I’d already seen on TV. The worst rag in Moscow, however, was having a field day, as I learned with the help of my dictionary. It claimed Anita had been an enormously rich businesswoman who was overcharging the Russians for villas. I clicked on the accompanying link. I hadn’t been prepared for the shock of seeing Anita lying on her side in the street, a grotesque halo of blood around her head. The paper had had the decency to put a black bar over her eyes, but she was still recognizable. Looking at the picture, I saw that the gunman hadn’t settled for just one well-placed shot; instead, Anita had been fired at multiple times, as if at random, and her new lynx coat was a bloody mess. The lynx had been slaughtered twice: once for the fur, and then again for the body it was draped over.

I stared at the image for a long time. It was horrifying. I was sure I could kill another human—it was, after all, part of my training. But would I ever have been able to slaughter Anita like that? I still couldn’t remember what had happened that night. Although it hadn’t been my gun that was used to kill her, I couldn’t claim to be innocent just yet, not even after receiving that threatening call. Proving to Chief Constable Laitio that I was innocent wasn’t enough; I had to prove it to myself, as well.

4

I turned the computer off and walked back into the living room, where I waited for the Hakkarainens for another thirty minutes. When no one showed up, I left and greeted the horse and her filly, who hobbled over to me and sucked on my fingers as if I were her mother. While I had been living here I had ridden Cutey, but she had been a work horse and not a plaything, and she didn’t like wearing a saddle.

After a short chat with the horses, I started to row back to Hevonpersiinsaari. I honestly felt a bit lost without an Internet connection. I had never set it up on my phone, partly because I was worried I’d be easier to track that way. The academy had taught me that you should leave as little trace of yourself as possible if you wanted to be invisible. Neither Laitio nor Paskevich would be able to find me if I changed my service providers and SIM cards often enough and just kept on the move.

Unfortunately, it looked like Anita had been shot right after I had resigned. I almost felt bad that I hadn’t struck a deal with Valentin Paskevich, but it didn’t seem like I’d be of much use to him. His hit men must have been after us in Moscow for days; one of them must have been tailing me and seen me get on the Helsinki-bound train. Maybe it had been one of the men who drugged me. The train had been almost empty, so it would have been easy for my tracker to start following me if he had a Finnish visa.

My palms had blistered from rowing, which made me feel like an overly sensitive city slicker. I walked to the forest to pick a few cups of lingonberries, which was easy, as they were so plentiful this year. Back in the cabin, I did my best to clear my head with meditation, but my thoughts kept intruding; none of the techniques I had learned were working. I knew that people who were drunk and drugged were very unpredictable and capable of doing something they wouldn’t even dare to dream about when they were sober. I had been angry at Anita, and if she had been pushing my buttons, who knows what I might have done.

I stayed in the area until Saturday. It rained almost the entire time, so my hiking boots and rain gear came in handy when I went out to pick mushrooms. Laitio kept trying to reach me, but I didn’t call him back. I had dinner once with the Hakkarainens. Matti reported seeing Seppo Holopainen over in Maarianvaara; it looked like his Thai mail-order bride had run away with a man from Kuopio. That explained why Seppo had been seen buying a case of moonshine from Erkki Karhu, who had been making quality liquor for fifty years.

Seppo Holopainen was the last person I had ever been truly afraid of. Even now, when I knew I could best him in both physical and verbal sparring, the memory of that fear stirred up my hatred anew. I guess I should have been grateful to him: he was the reason I signed up for self-defense classes, guard training, and, finally, the army. By the age of fifteen, I had learned that Uncle Jari wouldn’t be there to save me from all the Seppos in this world.

It was an evening in November, so Uncle Jari was out hunting elk. Holopainen had been banned from the hunting club after he had shot the city council vice president in the foot during a hare hunt. The hunting club had been in real trouble, trying to hide what had happened from the police, the health care center staff, and the wife of the injured man. They claimed that there had been an unknown poacher in the forest whose stray bullet had hit the vice president, but his wife was certain that he had just screwed up and shot himself in the foot. She made some pretty nasty remarks about her husband and his incompetence as a shooter. Annoyed, the vice president ensured that Holopainen was no longer a welcome hunting buddy.

That evening, the music I was blasting muffled the sound of the approaching tractor. To Holopainen it was okay to hop behind the wheel of a tractor when drunk because it wasn’t technically a vehicle. He’d decided to pay his dear friend Jari a visit with a bottle of homemade vodka, but all he found was me.

Johanna Susi had recorded a Madonna tape for me. All the girls in our class adored the singer. I’d done my best to comb my hair like hers, slightly puffed up. I was only wearing a beige bra and purple panty hose, on top of which I had layered a makeshift skirt that I had made out of a crocheted shawl. To finish it off, I’d donned the red shoes I had found in the attic. The heels were so tall that I was almost six foot two in them. I used a broom as my microphone. “Like a Virgin” was playing when Holopainen entered the cabin. We had stopped locking the door now that we didn’t need to hide Frida anymore.

“What are you doing? Is your uncle home?”

When I told him he wasn’t, he didn’t take it as a cue to leave, but instead sat down at the table.

“You’ve grown into a real woman. Great tits and all. Come over here and take a swig,” Holopainen said. He dug for the bottle in his breast pocket and handed it over to me. I didn’t move. I was sweaty from dancing and now I started shivering. In order to cover up, I would have to walk past Holopainen to get some clothes from my room. When I tried, he grabbed me and pulled me into his lap. He weighed at least two hundred pounds. His fat stomach kept me wedged between his body and the table. Its edge dug painfully into my back.

“Your mom used to wear those shoes to tease all the men in town. Looks like you’re taking after her.” Holopainen groped my breasts so forcefully that they popped out of the bra. Then he ripped off the shawl. Although I had always been able to defend myself, I was paralyzed and unable to breathe. He tried shoving his hand into my underwear, but the tight panty hose were in his way, so he pushed me onto the floor. I could feel his large stomach. A sluglike piece of meat hardened between our bodies. I was expecting to die at any moment. I knew that if women didn’t do what men wanted, they’d end up dead.

Maybe I would’ve died, choked under Holopainen’s weight, if Uncle Jari hadn’t walked in. He was already angry; he’d been blamed for losing an elk, even though it wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t happy to see Holopainen’s tractor out front. The guy had always been a bully, and he was the one who’d shot Frida’s mother.

When we talked about it later, Uncle said it was a good thing that he had grabbed my microphone broom instead of an axe. Holopainen got away with bruises. He would pretend not to remember a thing, but I could tell by the way he looked at me that he did. We really should have filed a police report, but I guess Uncle Jari had been worried that I would be taken away from him. I was so shell-shocked that I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. Uncle took me to the sauna, where I scrubbed my skin bloody. We burned all the clothes, except for my mother’s shoes. Holopainen’s tractor caught fire a couple of nights later, and they never found out who did it. I was the only one who had smelled the gasoline on Uncle that night.

For years I couldn’t listen to Madonna, until I was in New York and forced myself to go to her concert. While dancing to “Like a Virgin
,
” I imagined what I could do to Holopainen if I ever saw him again. I could throw him to the ground a couple of times to break his bones or point my Glock at him and make him dance until he pissed his pants and begged for mercy.

By now, I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. I had already beaten him in my mind, just like I would beat Paskevich and Laitio. I told Matti to tell Seppo hello from me, when in reality I couldn’t have cared less if he’d drunk himself to death. It was a shame that he was still living when my uncle wasn’t.

The Hakkarainens treated me like an old friend; they were a link to a past I thought was long gone. I had not kept in touch with anyone from high school—I hated that they knew all my secrets. Once I had taken my final exams, I moved three hundred miles away from home to Vantaa, a suburb of Helsinki, for guard training and then worked in various other cities. I joined the army as soon as they opened it up to women. It was an easy transition. I’d shared a house with a man all my life, and I was used to guns as household tools. The first women in the Finnish army were closely monitored, but I didn’t mind being a pioneer.

During my time in the army, I had heard about the academy in Queens, a two-year program specializing in security. I was tempted to run away to New York, where nobody knew about my background. The only problem was the money, which I didn’t have: the training cost 20,000 Finnish markkas, the equivalent of roughly 3,000 euros per year, and it didn’t cover room, board, or travel costs.

After I finished my army service, I took on three jobs, which was crazy because most of my income went to pay taxes. While working as a guard, I would deliver free newspapers and moonlighted as a cleaner when I had the time. At first I hid my grand plans from my uncle; he already had a hard time with me living so far away in Vantaa, even though he understood why I had made the choice—there were no jobs in Kaavi. Maybe he’d secretly hoped I would have married some mama’s boy from a nearby village and become a farmer’s wife, but he must have realized that such a life would never work for me.

Because of my jobs I couldn’t visit Uncle Jari for a while, so one day I received a call from him: if the mountain couldn’t come to Mohammed, then he had no choice but to come to the mountain. Uncle felt uncomfortable in the city. He tried to avoid looking like a country bumpkin by buying a new pair of jeans, getting a professional haircut, and using pine soap because he was convinced it smelled better than most colognes.

He was surprised at how exhausted I was. Although after some begging, a coworker had agreed to take one of my shifts, I still needed to make my early-morning newspaper deliveries. When I told Uncle about all my jobs, he got upset.

“Is it really that expensive to live in the city? Isn’t one job enough to support a single person?”

This was the perfect moment to bring up my dream, although I knew he wouldn’t like it. After all, New York was across the ocean. He sat in silence for a while, then began pacing around the apartment like Frida trapped in the shed.

“But you have all that money in the bank,” he finally said. “Your grandmother’s. Fifty thousand markkas. I’ve kept it safe, in case, you know, you fell for a criminal, like when your mother—” Uncle Jari stopped short. He had almost brought up the unmentionable.

I felt dizzy. I had money? I could buy a car or travel around the world! Grandmother’s will stipulated that unless I had my uncle’s consent, I couldn’t withdraw the money until I turned twenty-four. As soon as he relented, I left for New York.

My only goal was to graduate from the security academy with honors. With its strict policies and cameraderie, being in the academy was like being in the army again, although this time the group consisted of people from a multitude of backgrounds. The whole experience was as different from Hevonpersiinsaari as it could have been, but I never forgot where I came from.

On Saturday I stopped reminiscing and faced reality. It was time to take responsibility for what I had done in Moscow. As I drove back to Joensuu, I thought about how leaving Anita alone in Moscow had been the biggest mistake of my life, and I would carry that guilt forever. In Joensuu I got on the train and called Laitio to tell him that I was going to be in Helsinki soon. One of the silly teenage girls in front of me started laughing loudly, and I could feel Laitio’s embarrassment over the phone when I growled at her, “You think this is funny, do you?” I got up from my seat and went to the far end of the car to talk.

“So you’re on the train,” said Laitio. He must have noticed the change in acoustics. “What time are you due in Pasila?”

When I told him, he said he’d come to pick me up. I didn’t feel like mentioning that the train stopped in Tikkurila as well, where the National Bureau of Investigation offices were. Let him drive around if he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.

“I’ll wait for you at the top of the escalators. I won’t be wearing a uniform, but I’ll recognize you from the pictures I have from the registry.”

That sounded ominous. Luckily I’d have hours on the train to prepare myself mentally for our meeting. I was innocent, so I had nothing to worry about. I’d need to adopt that attitude if I wanted to convince him. I started feeling sleepy as I did my best to relax, and soon my thoughts drifted back to Anita and the past few days. Who had she been meeting at Frunzenskaya?

It was difficult to explain the fight over a lynx fur coat to anyone who hadn’t met Frida. She had been more than a pet to me; she had been my sister. Although partly tame, like all wild animals, Frida had still been unpredictable. She was guided by her instincts, and could suddenly view Uncle Jari and me as her enemies. She never attacked us—her angry growl would let us know to stay away and not escalate the situation.

When I was truly relaxed, I became a lynx. I felt the fur coat growing out of my skin; tufted ears appeared on my head. My short tail waved from side to side for balance. The snow felt soft under my paws, and if I hit ice, I could always use my claws for a better grip. I saw a hare and went after it. I was a hunter, not the hunted.

I held on to that feeling when I got off the train in Pasila, where the rain was so heavy that even people standing under the awning were getting soaked. I spotted Laitio in an instant: he was the grumpy-looking man at the top of the escalator. Although short for a cop, his posture—simultaneously alert and relaxed—was a dead giveaway. With his dark-blue pea coat and a brimmed hat, he’d taken his fashion cues from American movies, and his substantial mustache took him back to the ’70s. I cursed myself for not wearing high heels—most men couldn’t take down a woman who was taller than them.

“Hello, Hilja Kanerva Ilveskero. It is Ilveskero now, right, and not Suurluoto?” Laitio wanted me to know that he had done his homework. I was a lynx and he was the hare; he could escape my grasp but was in no position to make threats. He led me to his car, a dark-blue Volvo that he apparently owned. No way the Bureau could afford such nice cars. I took the backseat as if I were getting into a cab, and I met Laitio’s surprised glare in the rearview mirror. He paid me back by driving away from the offices toward Töölö instead.