February eighteenth, Thursday. Nine days since my brain tumor was removed. My luck was extreme. My headache disappeared. I suffered no common physical side effects. No weakness, motor control or problems with coordination. No difficulties with speech. No more seizures. No mental deficiencies. Quite the opposite. Each day, I felt that my powers of cognition and memory increased. I remained, however, emotionally flat.
I continued my one-month sick leave. It didn’t go as Kate and I had imagined: quiet time together, just us and our child. Milo and Sweetness were always underfoot. Arvid, though, knew how to make his presence unobtrusive. Kate liked him more and more over time. He mostly kept to himself, listened to music with his MP3 player, tended to Anu, grocery shopped and often cooked. He was an excellent chef, and taught Kate much about traditional Finnish cuisine. As a longtime world traveler, his English was good.
Sweetness played chauffeur, took me to physical therapy three times a week, stopped by to see if we needed anything approximately every ten minutes. At night, he surveilled politicos. He bought a good camera. He showed me his videotaped victories with pride. He had a close-up of Hanna Nykyri, head of the Social Democratic Party, with a dick in her mouth. A wider shot proved said dick didn’t belong to her husband. He had a picture of Daniel Solstrand, minister of foreign affairs, with a dick in his mouth. Owner of said dick appeared underage. Sweetness had pics of the national chief of police and the minister of the interior with a variety of woman, a veritable bevy of quail.
The minister, Osmo Ahtiainen, is an overweight pig not choosy about his quiff. A video showed the fat fuck minister in the saddle of a woman who looked like she might be the village blacksmith. She changed the TV channel with a remote control. The sound was off. He didn’t notice. He came, squealed and grunted. She fake came with him, gave him the “Oh, baby, you’re the best” patter.
One morning, while we were alone, I had a talk with Arvid. I asked him if he would like to be our bookkeeper, since Jyri wanted ledgers kept. “The murder you’re accused of falls under the National Security Act,” I said. “If I get caught, and you have the books, they can’t be used against me.”
“You won’t get caught for the simple reason that police corruption, at least in the public consciousness, is so rare here as to be non-existent, and you’re the most famous cop in the nation, so no one would believe it. It would be like trying to convince them that Jesus was a pedophile.”
It’s true. After being shot twice in the line of duty and being decorated for bravery both times—and especially since Milo and I stopped a school shooting and were glorified in the press for saving the lives of children—I’m a nationally respected figure.
“But sure, I’ll do it,” he said. “It will be fun. I’ll keep them in a code from the war and teach it to you, make it feel like the old days.”
Most of Arvid’s time in the war was spent in Valpo, our secret police during those years.
Then I brought up what I really wanted to talk about, and told Arvid about going flat and feeling no emotion. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep up the pretense, and it will cause me to wreck my marriage,” I said, “or it will cause me to make an error in judgment in my work and get somebody hurt.”
I had already told him about my black op, ripping off drug dealers, taking money.