We drive back to the Pasila station through a torrent of snow, get there at eleven thirty p.m.
Milo and I walk down the long corridor. I open the door to my office. The national chief of police, Jyri Ivalo, is sitting at my desk, in my chair. Milo gives me a look of quizzical respect and meanders down the hall toward his own office.
Jyri and I have spoken on the phone several times, but I haven’t seen him in person since 1996, when he decorated and promoted me for bravery after I was shot in the line of duty.
I was a beat cop in Helsinki and answered an armed robbery call at Tillander, the most expensive jewelry store in the city, on Aleksanterinkatu, in the heart of the downtown shopping district, in the middle of June. My partner and I arrived as two thieves exited the store carrying backpacks weighted down with jewelry. They pulled guns. One of them fired a shot at us, then they separated and ran. I chased the shooter down a street crowded with shoppers and tourists. The thief stopped, turned and fired. My pistol was in my hand, but he surprised me. I was running when the bullet hit me and blew out my left knee, which I had already wrecked playing hockey in high school. I fell hard to the pavement. The thief decided to kill me, but I got a shot off first and the bullet hit him in the side. He went down, but raised his pistol to fire again. I told him to lower his arm. He didn’t. I blew his head off.
Jyri looks snazzy in a tuxedo, holds an open flask in his hand. He’s mid-fiftyish and handsome, maybe a bit drunk. Judging by the scent, he’s sipping cognac. “Inspector Vaara,” he says. “Please come in.”
“How kind of you,” I say and enter.
“How’s your lovely American wife?” he asks. “I understand she’s pregnant.”
I know Jyri well enough to doubt he gives a damn, and I don’t want his false pleasantries. “Kate is fine. What brings you here?”
“We have business.” He looks around. “Your office furnishings are nonstandard. I’m not sure they comply with regulations. What did Arto say about it?”
He means my boss, Arto Tikkanen. The atmosphere of standardissue office junk suffocates me. I decorated with my own stuff, most of it from my office in Kittila, up in Lapland, from when I headed the police department there. A polished oak desk. A Persian rug. A reproduction of the painting December Day, by the nineteenthcentury Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt. A photo I took myself, of an ahma, an Arctic wolverine facing extinction, on the back of a reindeer, trying to get at its throat.
“I didn’t ask Arto,” I say, “so he didn’t have a chance to say no.”
Jyri doesn’t give a damn about office furniture. He’s just playing big dog/little dog, establishing his authority. He lets it go. “Go easy on Arto,” he says. “You and he share the same rank. Technically, that’s not supposed to happen. He may find it disconcerting.”
“Arto is a good guy. I don’t think my position here is a problem for him.” I’m less than certain about that.
He takes a sip from his flask. “I promised you this job in homicide. How’s it treating you?”
His tone implies I should thank him. He promised me this job a year ago, so Kate and I moved to Helsinki last March, and I expected to start in homicide right away. He stuck me in personnel and I pushed papers for all that time because, he said, I needed to wait until a position opened up. That was a lie. The Helsinki homicide team-murharyhma -was undermanned, they could have used me. “You fucked me on that deal,” I say. “You made me sit on my ass for eleven months.”
“I had reasons, some of them for your benefit. That’s an ugly scar on your jaw, by the way. Why didn’t you get it fixed?”