Helsinki White Read Free Page B

closer, pressed her body against mine. “Are you asking my permission?”
    “Yes,” I said, “I am, because I’ll break laws and it’s risky. And because if we’re going to live in this country, I think I have to. During the Filippov investigation, I gathered a lot of dirt on people in positions of power. I know too much. If I refuse, they’ll find a way to discredit and destroy me, to protect themselves. In a way, they’re offering to let me join their boys’ club. If you don’t want me to take the job, we should leave Finland and move to America. I want you to make the decision.”
    “Do you want this?” she asked.
    “Yes,” I said, “I do. I feel that for the first time in my life, I have a chance to do something that makes a true difference. Most likely, I’ll never have another opportunity like this again. But I don’t have to make a difference. If you want me to turn it down, I will, without hard feelings or regrets.”
    She sat for what seemed like a long time, quiet. I watched her, admiring. Kate is a lovely woman. A classic beauty. Pregnancy hadalmost no effect on her figure, other than that her breasts were larger. She remained slim. Her long cinnamon hair hung loose. Her dove-gray eyes were far away, lost in thought.
    “Take the job,” she said, “but I want you to go on sick leave starting today.”
    “OK,” I said, “but I want to play around a little bit starting up my new project, getting it functional, just to give myself something to do.”
    She nodded agreement, and at that moment, without realizing it, I became a dirty cop.

2
    O n Thursday morning, I had the biopsy. Jari used his superpowers as a highly respected neurologist and had the test results ramrodded through. I got an appointment with the surgeon who would remove my tumor the very next day. He was going to tell me whether I would live or die.
    I insisted that Kate come with me and listen while the surgeon gave me the prognosis. I wanted her to have no doubts that, if the news was bad, I hadn’t soft-pedaled it to spare her. It was January twenty-eighth, a bitter minus eighteen outside. The city sheathed in ice, snow banked up high by plows along every roadway.
    I found, to my surprise, that I was calm. The possibility of death didn’t frighten me as I thought it might. However, Kate’s nerves were a shambles. She shook, could barely speak. Waiting outside the surgeon’s office, she gripped the arms of the chair so hard that her knuckles turned bloodless white.
    The surgeon was businesslike. The news was good. I had a meningioma, about three by four centimeters, in my frontal lobe. He embellished on what Jari had told me about meningiomas.
    It might have been growing there for as long as fifteen years. It had probably been affecting my memory, concentration, cognition,and possibly my behavior all this time, without me noticing because it happened so slowly, and of course, I had nothing to compare it to. As brain tumors go, he said, I was lucky. I had an outstanding chance of survival, and a very good chance of going on to lead a normal life afterward. As Jari said, there would be no follow-up treatments. He would cut it out, and that would be it. I’d go back to my life as if it never happened. He asked about the frequency and duration of the headaches. I told him constant and described the severity. “You have an excellent headache,” he said, and smiled. His idea of a joke.
    Then he moved on to unpleasantries.
    After surgery, I might feel worse than I did then, but only for a short time. The intrusion would cause my brain to swell. I might possibly suffer dizziness, lack of coordination and motor difficulties, confusion, seizures, difficulty speaking, personality changes that could be quite severe, behavior that might baffle and even shock others. I might require therapy, but these effects should lessen over a time period he couldn’t predict. Could be days, could be months. If an effect lasted more than a year,