His smile was warm. I saw that he liked Kate, and that she found him charming, heroin or not.
“I have jumped from airplanes eighty-seven times. On my thirty-seventh jump, my parachute failed to open. I thought I was a dead man, but it unfurled at about four hundred feet from the ground. I hit the ground like a rock, but was unscathed. I feared it was an augury of things to come. I felt that I needed protection afterward, so I took the wings of Icarus. As long as I don’t fly too close to the sun, I am now safe.”
As the others filed back into the living room, I asked him what he wanted for his heroin.
“At the behest of the French government, my goals are to find the son, recover the money and discredit the Real Finns Party. Were they to take power, Finland might leave the EU and upset the balance of things. Share information with me. Take me along when you conduct interrogations as you prosecute your murder investigation. I want nothing more.”
“Agreed,” I said, but felt certain that he did indeed want something more from me.
He cocked his head, inquisitive. “What did you do with all the drugs you stole?”
“I kept some for blackmail or unforeseen circumstances when I might need it. But we tossed most of it in Dumpsters.”
He tut-tutted me. “Such a waste.”
We took our places with the others again, and Kate was opening her gifts. She held up a pair of shoes. She giggled like a little girl. “Manolo Blahnik Nepala pumps,” she said. She slipped them on and they fit her perfectly, meaning they were tight and painful, as Manolos are meant to be. She looked at Milo. “Did Kari tell you my size?”
Moreau said, “He has an IQ of one seventy-two and an advanced sense of spatial relations. He also knows your bra size and, if you smile, the length of your teeth to a fraction of a millimeter.”
Milo turned red. Moreau had made his point. He knew things.
Kate then opened a package with a Gucci ‘marrakech’ evening bag with woven leather trim and tassels, and finally a bottle of Clive Christian No.1 perfume. She was in heaven.
“The bottle is handmade lead crystal with a thirty-three-carat diamond in the neck,” Milo said. “Its ingredients include Madagascar ylang ylang, vanilla, orris, natural gum resin, sandalwood and bergamot. It was weird. I went to boutiques to find this stuff and the salespeople all spoke Russian instead of Finnish. Russian tourists buy them here and Finns can’t afford them.”
Kate brought Anu to see her gift: a huge Steiff teddy bear. She loved it, kept petting the soft brown fur and wouldn’t stop. Arvid had fallen asleep in my chair. Sweetness was also sleeping. A flask of kossu—Finnish vodka—and half a cake had done him in.
“The last is for you,” Milo said, and handed me a long and heavy package. I ripped off the wrapping and gawked at it, astonished. It appealed to my childish like-or-don’t-like instinct, and I liked it very much. It was a cane, cudgel-thick. The handle was a massive lion’s head made from several ounces of gold. I had gone to so much work to become anonymous, and this would make me stand out in any crowd. I didn’t care. I loved it. I would carry it.
“Let me show you how it works,” Milo said. “Gadget canes were once very popular. They were made with just about every device imaginable. Bang down on the floor with the tip. It spring-loads the lion’s mouth and it snaps open. The teeth are steel razors. Sharp contact, like swinging the mouth against something, makes it clamp shut and bite with about three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure, the same as a Rottweiler’s jaws. Pressing the eyes—one is a ruby, the other is emerald—disengages the spring and the mouth lets go. Unscrew the shaft, and there’s a twenty-inch sword inside.”