I limp through the snow toward my Saab. It’s parked near the taxi stand on Helsinginkatu. The street is nicknamed Raate Road, after the scene of a decisive and bloody battle in the Winter War, for the same reason that Vaasankatu is called Hunting Knife Boulevard. It has a bad reputation from bygone days, but not much real wickedness goes on here anymore. It’s true that Kallio has its fair share of the permanently unemployed that live on welfare and spend their days in rakalat -snot bars, as they’re called-drinking cheap beer, but most towns in Finland have their welfare drunks and dives for them to booze in.
I hear shouting down the street. As I close in, I see a man in front of Ebeneser School, a special-needs place for kids with dysphasia. The students there have speech disorders of one kind or another, difficulties with language comprehension or production, most often the result of varying degrees of brain damage. Some can speak but not write, others write but don’t speak. Very occasionally, a child will be able to sing but not speak.
The school is a beautiful off-peach Art Nouveau building constructed around the turn of the twentieth century, fronted by a chain-link fence interlaced with a growth of decades-old ivy, now wreathed in frost. I get closer and see that the screaming comes from a young man waving a half-empty bottle of Finlandia vodka. His rant is biblical and apocryphal in nature, and he has a bad speech impediment.
“Thpawns of Thatan, damned at biddth, you have fawen fwom da Towew of Babel. Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!”
I get up close to him and look through the fence. Four little bundled-up children stand on the other side of it, terror-stricken but fascinated. I see no supervising adult. It pisses me off. “Listen kids,” I say to them, “I’m a policeman. Would you please go inside.”
The guy bellows an incoherent howl and screams again. “Bettew dat you had nevew been bodn!”
They don’t move. I make shooing motions with my hands. “Run along now,” I say.
They scramble toward the front door. The guy isn’t making any noise now, but he flails his arms, makes frantic gestures, waves the bottle and claws at his face.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“My name is Weejun. Away fwom me, thpawn of hell.”
“Well, Mr. Legion, why were you scaring those kids?”
He gulps a drink from the bottle, wraps his arms around himself, rolls his head back and forth and shakes. He’s coming apart at the seams. He shrieks like a hurt animal, then manages a shrill, understandable utterance. “To save deir souws! Dey awe damned unwess I thave dem!”
I’m tempted to ask him why, if his name is Legion, aka Satan, he wants to save the children rather than see them spend eternity in hell. Then I decide I’m not interested in the logic of the insane. My head throbs-hate boils up in me.
I grab Legion by the neck, smack his face against the snowcovered fence. It gives me a modicum of satisfaction, so I do it again. He’s a skinny little bastard, maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds. I’ve been working out hard for most of the past year, since we moved to Helsinki. It takes my mind off the headaches. I bench-press more than twice his weight. He starts to cry, his knees start to give way. I grab him by the neck with one hand, hold him up by his head so that his feet barely graze the ground and look close at him. He’s in his mid-twenties and has a bad, close-cropped haircut that looks like a home job. His longish beard is unkempt. His coat, pants and shoes are neat and clean though. I’m guessing his parents take care of him.
His left eyebrow is cut, blood runs into his eye. His nose bleeds. My satisfaction from banging his face off the fence dissipates. He’s crazy as a shithouse rat. I ask myself what to do with him. A final lesson and punishment for his treatment of defenseless children seems appropriate. “You like vodka,” I say. “Enjoy yourself to the max.”