Fatal Headwind Page 4

  “Even if I can’t sing myself, I can enjoy the songs of the birds. Especially early in the summer, nights in Finland are remarkable. The nightingales along the shore . . . Luckily the road construction hasn’t destroyed all the nesting trees.”

  A new love interest is also at Holma’s side, Riikka Merivaara, a twenty-year-old university student. Holma is mysterious when he says that when he met Riikka, he literally had to step into the role of a hero, but he refuses to say anything more about the incident.

  “Our age difference doesn’t bother me. Riikka is a very wise young woman. She’s taught me a lot and made me think more about my life, for example about the importance of proper nutrition in a person’s overall health and well-being. We’ve been trying to figure out if there might be some sort of alternative therapy for my voice problems. And even if I don’t get my voice back, life still feels worth living. Every day you can hear the song of a bird, even if it’s just a seagull or a crow,” Holma says.

  In the photo accompanying the article, Holma looked out at the sea through binoculars. There was a slight smile on his lips: all his trials hadn’t robbed the valiant baritone of his faith in life.

  “That’s quite a story,” I said to my mother-in-law as she spooned raspberry-blueberry porridge into Iida’s mouth. “They could practically write a whole libretto about Holma.”

  Antti laughed irreverently as he skimmed the story and then asked whether I wanted to see his old Rödskär slides after Iida went down. Of course I did, and I noticed a strange tinge of something in my mind when Antti said he probably also had a few pictures from his voyage on the schooner Astrid with Mikke Sjöberg.

  The September evening was dark before ten o’clock. Antti set up the screen and turned on the projector. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. “I need a little fortification. We still have some whiskey. Do you want some?”

  Antti probably hadn’t looked at these pictures since the death of Tommi, his friend and sailing partner. We had met five years earlier when I was investigating Tommi’s death. As inconceivable as it now felt, Antti had been one of the suspects.

  “Just pour me a little.”

  Antti brought the whole bottle, and I found myself pouring more than a little. The pictures were what I expected: Antti ten years younger with short hair, standing beside a blond, tanned Tommi, the two of them grinning next to Rödskär’s “Military Area: NO TRESPASSING” sign, fooling around in the lighthouse, and drinking Captain Morgan on the cliffs. The buildings on the island looked more run-down than now, and there was trash littered about.

  Deep in thought, I looked at the boys’ lighthearted adventures and thought of Tommi and Harri, who had died too young. What had Harri’s thirty-four years consisted of? Anything but birds? Who was I to judge the richness of anyone else’s life, though? Maybe spotting a black-crowned night heron was just as fulfilling for him as an Olympic victory or winning the jackpot in the lottery would be for someone else.

  “There are only a few pictures here from the Astrid. I didn’t have my own camera with me. This is me climbing the mast.”

  At seventeen Antti looked enthusiastic and innocent. In the next picture he was intently swabbing the deck. The entire crew of the schooner had gathered for the final picture.

  “Mikke Sjöberg is on the left in the back row.” As a teenager, Mikke had had bad acne, but it didn’t prevent him from grinning at the camera.

  Apparently someone had told a good joke, because the whole group was laughing.

  “If someone had told me then I would end up married to a police lieutenant, I never would have believed it. We hated cops.”

  “Don’t start with that again,” I said and hit Antti with a pillow.

  On our return trip from Rödskär he had asked me what I would do if he and Iida joined the squatters protesting the construction of the new freeway. Would I let my cronies drag them off to the slammer or would I intervene?

  “You can go and squat in ten houses if you want, but find Iida a babysitter,” I had said.

  “But it’s for Iida’s sake that I’d protest. If development keeps up like this, all of Espoo will be covered in asphalt by the time Iida is our age. Even when we elect people who say they oppose building new roads, it never helps,” Antti had said and sighed.

  “Don’t look at me! I don’t know the answer,” I had said and then ended the conversation with a kiss that contained a pinch of guilt.

  That night I dreamed about Rödskär, but the man I had kissed in my dream wasn’t Antti, or even Harri. Instead it was someone with sunburned eyebrows and breath that smelled of pipe smoke.

  On Sunday we went for a bike ride along the shore. The algae that had been choking the beaches in floating mats had dispersed with the August winds, and dogs and people were enjoying the refreshing water once again. On the ride back, as we passed a McDonald’s, I noticed two police vans surrounded by a crowd that looked like a demonstration. This immediately piqued my curiosity.

  “What’s going on over there? I’m going to go have a look. You stay on this side of the road so Iida doesn’t wake up,” I said to Antti.

  I left my bike and helmet in the parking lot of the Esso service station next door. It really did look like a demonstration. A group of about thirty young people had occupied the drive-through and surrounded the restaurant. Their placards said things like “You kill the rain forest. AR—Animal Revolution” and “Meat is Murder—Animal Revolution.” They weren’t chanting slogans, but one of the boys was beating an African drum that thumped out over the noise of the traffic.

  Two teams from Patrol Division were on scene. One was locked in an intense negotiation with the protesters, so I marched over to the other team, Officers Akkila and Yliaho.

  “Look who it is,” Yliaho said. “I heard you were back at work. OK, so now that you’re the big lieutenant, tell us what we’re supposed to do. These brats didn’t file for a permit for this little shindig of theirs.”

  The McDonald’s shift manager had called the police when members of Animal Revolution surrounded the restaurant and covered the windows with their antihamburger signs. It was a Sunday afternoon: Mickey D’s was packed with families who wanted an easy lunch, and there was a birthday party for a five-year-old with twenty tiny guests scheduled for four o’clock.

  “This isn’t my area,” I said evasively. The law said that an illegal protest should be broken up if it was bothering bystanders. I didn’t know how I felt, though. I certainly had the occasional hamburger. But dragging Antti into a McDonald’s was impossible. As bad as the food was, he found the ideology it represented even more repulsive.

  “The staff is pretty hot under the collar,” said Akkila, the department kickboxing expert, who never minded mixing work with pleasure.

  An energetic-looking young man in a uniform shirt and tie came out of the restaurant. The protesters’ reaction was immediate: no one made a sound, but they all turned as a united front to stare at the man, and the drumbeat intensified. The McDonald’s employee hesitated for at least ten seconds before he started walking toward us again.

  “Can you please tell these idiots to get out of here? They’re bothering our customers,” huffed the young man. His badge said “Jimi, Shift Manager.”

  “Our colleagues are negotiating with them. We’re going to try to handle this as civilly as possible,” Yliaho said calmly.

  “Civilly? They aren’t acting civilly!”

  “I doubt it would be in the restaurant’s best interests for the police to use force,” Yliaho continued.

  “But there’s no talking sense to these people! I tried, but they just started swearing at me,” Jimi said, increasingly exasperated.

  The negotiation seemed to end, and the other two officers walked toward us. I knew both of them. One was Liisa Rasilainen, one of the longest-serving women on the force.

  “Well?” Yliaho asked.

  Rasilainen shook her head.

  “They won’t leave voluntarily. I think they want us
to attack them. We’ll probably have to call for backup. Then take it carefully.”

  “I say we just give them what they want!” Akkila said, patting his nightstick.

  I looked at the protesters in their anoraks, blue jeans, batik dresses, and dyed hair. They looked more or less like me and my friends at the peace rallies we used to attend. We thought we could change the world too. We would have thought it was great if the pigs had arrested us, because it would have proven how dangerous our ideas were.

  “Who’s in charge of this operation?” I asked Rasilainen.

  “Sergeant Hannula. He’s inbound.”

  Hannula was a calm type, so maybe he would be able to keep the situation from getting out of hand. I should probably be on my way. Looking across the street, I expected to see Antti, but he was gone. He had probably realized that I had shifted from citizen to police officer, so he took Iida home.

  The situation felt unreal. The protesters didn’t shout or wave their signs. They simply stood surrounding the restaurant windows and let their signs do the talking as the drum continued its menacing beat. People arriving for a hamburger didn’t know what to do. No one was preventing them from entering, but the sight of the aggressive crowd was enough to turn most people away.

  Backup arrived, and Sergeant Hannula climbed out of one of the patrol cars.

  “Take down everybody’s names, but no arrests if they stay calm,” he said. Then he took out a megaphone and urged the protesters to disband. I headed off, relieved that things seemed peaceful and that I didn’t have to get involved. I was already at the service station when the sound of shattering glass made me turn back. Someone had thrown a rock through the window of the restaurant.

  Until then most of the protesters had seemed like they might be eventually willing to leave. But when the police grabbed the girl who had thrown the rock, the crowd came alive. They started screaming objections and swinging their signs at the officers. A green-haired boy started dragging Yliaho and Rasilainen off the girl, which prompted Akkila to grab him by the neck. There were four times as many protesters as police. I had to go back. I cursed under my breath as I ran. As Akkila violently dragged the green-haired boy away, the kid bit him in the arm. Akkila kicked the boy straight in the stomach, and he collapsed to the asphalt. That was when I connected the green hair to Jiri Merivaara. To my relief he was still able to get up off the ground. He lunged at Akkila again, but the handcuffs were already out. Jiri tried to grab them, but there was no hope against a taller opponent trained in martial arts.

  Two officers continued taking the names of the peaceful protesters. I hung my badge around my neck and joined the party, allowing one of the officers to join the fray. Rasilainen and Yliaho had managed to get the rock-thrower into a van, and now it was time to get the others loaded up. Jiri was dragged to the next van despite struggling with all his might and screaming that Akkila was a fascist thug. The rest of the crowd members gave their names and addresses and then slipped away, the drummer still defiantly drumming. The youngest protesters were maybe thirteen, and they looked tiny and harmless next to the brawny police officers.

  “Effing kids,” Hannula said with a sigh as he climbed into the same van Jiri was in. “Four arrests, and we’re just lucky none of the restaurant patrons was hit by that glass. Do you need a ride?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got my bike.”

  Halfway home I caught up to Antti and Iida and reported what had kept me.

  “Ah, so it was a jackboots-and-billy-clubs day, was it?” said Antti, who was clearly on the protesters’ side.

  “Throwing that rock was really stupid! Glass flew everywhere. Just think if someone Iida’s size had been sitting under it!”

  “No, things like that don’t help the cause,” Antti admitted. We tried to imagine how the media was going to react, and by that evening all of the television channels had indeed interviewed the shift manager and one of the protesters. Neither said anything revolutionary. Their worldviews were so far removed from each other that it was pointless for the reporters to try to help them reconcile. Of course the restaurant demanded compensation for the broken window and loss of business.

  And I wasn’t done with the McDonald’s incident either. On Monday a message was waiting on my desk, saying that Jiri Merivaara had filed a complaint against Officer Akkila for excessive use of force. Which meant it was now my unit’s problem.

  3

  “There aren’t going to be any charges filed against Officer Akkila,” I told Jiri Merivaara. Anne Merivaara was present at the interview to support her son. I almost didn’t recognize her when she walked in the room. The fragile, tanned woman I had met on Rödskär had disappeared, and instead there was a businesswoman in a stern gray suit with expensive gold-rimmed glasses and a no-nonsense gaze to match.

  “And why not? He kicked me so hard it left a bruise. Look!” Jiri lifted his loose black T-shirt.

  His ribs on one side were nasty shades of blue and green, but I made a point of appearing neutral.

  “You are going to be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. The prosecutor will probably see Officer Akkila’s behavior as a result of your provocation,” I explained. I knew the prosecutor assigned to the case, and I was sure he wouldn’t charge Akkila. Whether he was right was a different matter. I knew from experience that Akkila’s use of force was frequently over the top. If he had been my subordinate, I would have sent him home without pay for a few days to think.

  “So the police don’t decide whether to press charges?” Anne Merivaara asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  It would have been easier if the investigation into the McDonald’s incident had gone to the National Bureau of Investigation, but the complaint Jiri had filed was considered insignificant enough that the powers that be had decided to handle the matter in house. But yesterday, Anne Merivaara had called me directly, as if I were her personal police officer. I didn’t like that setup. Patrol Division had interviewed Jiri after his arrest and then released him that same night. Jiri’s father had objected to filing the complaint. Juha thought Jiri should be ashamed, that the son of an entrepreneur should understand that interfering with other people’s livelihoods and violently resisting the police weren’t acceptable.

  “Juha thinks that if Jiri wants to change fast-food culture, he should start from the opposite side by getting a job at McDonald’s and trying to rise to a leadership position. That would be the best way to influence the company’s practices. Of course that would take decades, but Juha thinks that changing internal business structures is the only good way to change the world for the better. That’s what he did,” she had said on the phone.

  Even though I had better things to do than listen to the Merivaara family’s ideological arguments, Anne worried that the charges against Jiri would hurt the reputation of the family business. A company that sold eco-friendly boat paint might not gain much favor with the Sunday boating set when it came out that one of the heirs to the business was a promising young environmental terrorist.

  I had agreed I would meet Jiri and Anne. Although I had decided to handle the preliminary investigation myself, Anu Wang was serving as my witness in Interrogation Room 2.

  “As far as I’m concerned, we can wrap up this conversation,” I said once we had spent a while belaboring the point of who made the first move, Jiri or Officer Akkila. Each blamed the other, and I was ready to believe them both. Jiri Merivaara seemed like just the kind of kid who would try to be a hero by attacking a cop. “I’ll send the record of these proceedings for your signature in a couple of days, and then they’ll go to the prosecutor.”

  “So you and the other pigs don’t have any say over whether that shit who kicked me gets charged? Ha, ha, ha! We know how it is. Cops protect their own. Including you, you fucking pâté-eating bitch . . .” Jiri grumbled.

  I couldn’t help laughing at such an odd epithet. In the hall, Anne Merivaara and I had a moment alone while Jiri disappeared int
o the restroom.

  “Someone needs to talk sense into that boy. Riikka and I have tried, but it’s no use. He doesn’t have any real contact with his father, and he just calls Tapio an opera clown. Mikke is the only one Jiri might listen too, but he’s in Estonia sailing.”

  “Is Mikke Sjöberg related to you?”

  “He’s Juha’s half brother, but he has his mother’s name.”

  Just then Jiri marched past me without a word. Anne Merivaara ran after him, waving a rushed good-bye. As I quickly assembled the pretrial report, I hoped this would be the last time I was mixed up in the Merivaara family’s affairs.

  No charges were filed against Officer Akkila. Jiri Merivaara received a fine of seven hundred marks for resisting arrest, and the girl who threw the rock through the McDonald’s window was sentenced to fines totaling ten thousand marks plus damages, which she refused to pay.

  Autumn appeared in Espoo suddenly, and it was like a crisp-smelling blackout curtain had been drawn. I settled into my work routines and got to know my new colleagues in the unit, Anu Wang and Petri Puustjärvi. Puustjärvi had transferred from Kirkkonummi, the next police district west. He was a solidly built blond of about forty who played Go and tied flies. Gradually I got used to organizing investigations and making assignments, and I found that I could shorten management meetings by a third if I stepped in and interrupted the other unit commanders’ hunting stories and asked them to get to business.

  I missing working with my old boss, Jyrki Taskinen. We made a habit of having lunch together on Mondays and Fridays, and by the end of September, there were already rumors floating around whose sources weren’t difficult to guess. Ström claimed that I had made it into this new job by way of our boss’s loins. And it was true there was a certain electricity between Taskinen and me, but it was almost entirely unexpressed: only the occasional straightening of a tie or the brushing of a dried leaf from the hair. Although there could be plenty of energy in that too.