Ethel’s self-control began to crumble, but I had to press on. The previous question had laid the foundation for the one I wanted to ask next. “What if he had been forced to fund criminal activity for the very reason that he wouldn’t have been able to manage the loans otherwise?”
“Oh, things weren’t that tight for us. And he meant to take out a new loan from a Finnish bank and pay off the old one. He said he’d had a better loan offer.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago.”
“Where did the old loan come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t? But you worked for the company, too, didn’t you, in accounting?”
Tears were streaming down Ethel’s cheeks, and she didn’t even try to wipe them away.
“Do you know what the worst thing is, Ariel? We parted in strife. I gave him a piece of my mind this morning… But how could I have known, you never know… which is why you should always part as friends. When we started dating, we agreed that we would never go to bed until we had settled any arguments…”
I gave her a minute to calm down and repeated: “You also worked for the company. Shouldn’t you have known about the loan, too?”
“All I know is that the loan was brokered by Samuel’s friend and the money came from Estonia, but from which bank, I couldn’t tell you. The broker held on to the paperwork.”
“Why didn’t he take out a loan from a Finnish bank?”
“He said you could get a loan from Estonia at a lower interest rate. I didn’t argue, because I knew the broker. You know him pretty well yourself.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Oxbaum. He represents the Estonian bank here in Finland.”
“Max Oxbaum?”
“Yes.”
Max Oxbaum was a well-known attorney, my second cousin and my brother Eli’s business partner. Together they owned a law firm named Kafka & Oxbaum.
2
By now at the latest I could have excused myself from the case, and with good cause. But I didn’t want to. No matter what was revealed during the investigation, my brother would answer for his deeds. If a collision with my brother’s actions looked inevitable, I would step aside at the last minute and, if necessary, hand anything involving him over to another investigator.
Eli was a successful corporate lawyer and had married into money, too. There had been a time when I had been almost envious of my brother, who, along with a good wife, had two sharp kids, a swanky apartment in Eira, a German luxury vehicle, a summer villa the size of a manor and a position of respect in the Jewish congregation. I had none of the above. On the other hand, my brother was four years older and three inches shorter than me, and ran to fat. Plus there was a bald spot on his head where his hair had just begun to thin.
I knew from before that Eli and Max’s law office brokered their clients’ loans from an Estonian company, Baltic Invest. Baltic Invest was owned by an Israeli businessman named Benjamin Hararin. I had heard all of this from my childhood friend Dan just before his death. According to Dan, who had worked for the Mossad, Hararin’s affairs were being investigated in Israel because he was suspected of laundering money for the Russian mafia. Dan had also hinted that Hararin was in possession of sensitive video material starring Eli and Max.
I had reported my intelligence to the financial crimes division of the National Bureau of Investigation. The NBI had requested further information from the Israeli police, but received no response — not even confirmation of the investigation’s existence.
I had looked into the matter myself using my own sources and the Internet. I discovered that Hararin, himself a millionaire, was considered a frontman for a businessman named Amos Jakov. Jakov was among those 140,000 Jews who had emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in the ’70s. Upon his arrival in 1973, at the age of twenty-two, Jakov initially enlisted in the Israeli army and then the Mossad, where he gained a tough reputation and rose to the middle ranks. Through contacts he apparently acquired during his stint with the Mossad and money that came from Russia, he got into real estate and then expanded into energy. He had particularly good connections in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, both of which were rich in oil, gas and minerals. He was considered a good friend of the president of Kazakhstan, and when he acquired a Kazakh chromium mine in the 1990s, it was rumoured that the deal coincided with the transfer of 100 million dollars into the president’s Swiss bank accounts. Plenty had been written about Jakov in the international financial press.
In contrast, information on Jakov’s mafia contacts was scarce, but some anonymous sources indicated that he had belonged to a local criminal gang in his birth city of Minsk and had been sentenced to prison for assault and robbery. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Minsk became the capital of Belarus, Jakov was able to exploit his old contacts, some of whom later moved to Israel, others to the United States. I found a New York Times article that linked FBI investigations of money laundering to Jakov.
Time passed and nothing happened; I had already forgotten about both Eli and Max’s business dealings as well as Jakov and Hararin. Now I was faced with the whole mess again. It felt like I had been slapped in the face with a wet rag, and for good reason.
When I stepped out of the Jacobsons’ house, Simolin was talking with one of the CSIs in the yard. I joined them.
“Three shells were recovered, and so were two bullets, one in pretty good shape. Dug out of a porch pillar;.22 calibre,” Simolin reported.
“What else?” I asked the investigator.
“The shooter must have stayed on the paving, because there aren’t any footprints. The shots were fired from within three feet, so there aren’t even any traces of contact. We’ve combed over the entire property but haven’t found a thing. There are no tyre marks, either. So basically what we have is a whole lot of nothing. The bullets and shells will tell us the manufacturer and make of the weapon, assuming we find it.”
Simolin was doubtful. “Not likely.”
“We’ll have to talk to the people living along the vehicle’s escape route. Someone might have seen something. I’ll call in some more support,” I said.
“This is when we could use that famous dog-walker who saw the whole thing,” Simolin jibed, without the slightest trace of humour.
I stepped aside to phone in the request for more patrols. In the middle of the call, I saw my subordinate Arja Stenman arrive. She looked as classy as ever. To be honest, she looked too classy for rough-and-tumble police work. She would have fit right in as the trophy wife of a middle-ranking CEO. In a way, she had been pretty close. She was divorced, but her ex-husband owned, or had owned, a construction equipment rental company. He had sold it in the nick of time before the police and the tax authorities caught up with him. Stolen machinery had been found in the company’s warehouses. In any case, Arja Stenman had been accustomed to a life where you didn’t have to worry about whether the money would stretch till payday. She had clear skin, freckles and a straight nose. I couldn’t deny it: she was easy on the eyes.