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Norton makes the guy open his mouth so his teeth are against the curb, and then he stomps on his head and it mushes like a melon?”
    Their eyes go wide with panic.
    “Let’s do that,” Sweetness says.
    They don’t move. Sweetness twists Skinny’s arm behind his back, jerks up and dislocates his shoulder, then throws him onto the asphalt. The two bikers exchange a look that says,
We’re helpless, we’re better off taking our chances than having this ogre keep wrecking our bodies one piece at a time.
They crawl to the curb, put their arms at their sides, open their mouths and suck concrete.
    Sweetness looks at me. I shake my head no. Sweetness stands over them, stomps a combat boot as hard as he can on the pavement between their heads. Skinny recoils, lifts his head and drops it again, knocks his own front teeth out. Sweetness finds this funny, chuckles and says, “Dumbfuck.”
    “Boys,” I say, “you fucked with my family. You come back and we’ll hurt you a lot worse than this. I’ll kill you both slow. I don’t want to see your faces again. My suggestion is that you vacate Helsinki. Do you understand me?”
    They’re both too fucked up to speak.
    “I asked you a question.”
    They each manage to spit out, “Yes, sir.”
    “Tell your police buddy I’ll be paying him a visit.” I gesture to Sweetness to come with me, and we leave them where they lie.

11

    T he woman still waits on my stoop. “Are you Inspector Kari Vaara?” she asks. Her accent is thick and hard for me to understand.
    She’s fortyish, has salt-and-pepper hair done up in a bun. She looks older than her years, has the look of hard work and a difficult life that changes people’s faces. She has on a plain dress and shoes that speak of a limited income. I expect a complaint for beating people to jelly on the street on this fine summer morning. “Why do you ask?”
    “Need help.” Her accent is Estonian-Russian, her Finnish broken.
    Sweetness tells her in Russian that he can translate for her if she likes. A nasty little piece of history is that during the Soviet occupation of Estonia during the Second World War, Stalin had tens of thousands of Estonians shipped off to Siberia. Russians were brought in to repopulate. Most of the forcibly emigrated Estonians froze and starved to death. Part of the population now speaks Russian as a first language.
    I remember that the U.S. had a crisis over busing children as a form of integration. I think Boston had the biggest shakeup over it. I think of Stalin and his form of integration policies with gulags and the deaths of millions. American problems often seem paltry to me. Maybe because they’ve never been invaded and forced to fight a nation bent on subjugating them, while Europe has been awash in blood and terror since the Pax Romana. I don’t count their civil war, a mess of their own making.
    She nods and rambles for a minute, nervous.
    Sweetness translates. “Her daughter has disappeared from Tallinn. She thinks men brought her here. She says she has friends here, and they told her you’re sympathetic to foreigners, that you might help her.”
    “Tell her to go to the police, explain whatever it is that makes her think her daughter is here, and file a missing person’s report.”
    They exchange a few words. “She’s done that,” Sweetness says, “and she got the distinct impression that nobody gave a damn.”
    She says something else.
    “The bikers we just stomped the shit out of. She asked if that’s what you do to bad people.”
    “Tell her yes, if I think circumstances warrant it.”
    Sweetness translates. She answers.
    “She says, ‘Good. Please do something like that or worse to whoever took my daughter.’”
    I give in. She’s won me over. “Ask her to come upstairs with us.”
    Once inside my apartment, I tell her to make herself comfortable and offer her coffee. I ask Mirjami where Jenna is. She went to lie down, wasn’t feeling well. I ask Mirjami for a few minutes