Aino glanced at her watch, surprised. "Oh. Yes."
"Shall I cut the hash into gram bags? Or will you take the brick?"
She blinked. "You don't have to cut it, Raffi. They can cut it at the bar."
Raf opened one of the sports bags and passed her a fat brick of dope neatly wrapped in a Copenhagen newspaper.
"You work in a bar? That's a good cover job," Starlitz said. "What kind of hash is that?"
"Something very new in Europe," Raf said. "It's Azerbaijani hash."
"Ex-Soviet hash isn't really very good," sniffed Aino. "They don't know how to do it right... . I don't like to sell hash. But if you sell people drugs, then they respect you. They won't talk about you when cops come. I hate cops. Cops are fascist torturers. They should all be shot. Do you need the car, Raf?"
"Take the car," Raf said.
Aino fetched her purse and left the safehouse.
"Interesting girl," commented Starlitz, in the sudden empty silence. "Never heard of any Finn terror groups before. Germans, French, Irish, Basques, Croats, Italians. Never Finns, though."
"They're a bit behind the times in this corner of Europe. She's one of the new breed. Very brave. Very determined. It's a hard life for terrorist women." Raf carefully sugared his coffee. "Women never get proper credit. Women kidnap ministers, women blow up trains -- women do very well at the work. But no one calls them 'armed revolutionaries.' They're always -- what does the press say? -- 'maladjusted female neurotics.' Or ugly hardened lesbians with a father-figure complex. Or cute little innocents, seduced and brain-washed by the wrong sort of man." He snorted.
"Why do you say that?" Starlitz said.
"I'm a man of my generation, you know." Raf sipped his coffee. "Once, I wasn't advanced in my feminist thinking. It was being close to Ulrike that raised my consciousness. Ulrike Meinhoff. A wonderful girl. Gifted journalist. Smart. Eloquent. Very ruthless. Quite good-looking. But Baader and that other one -- what was her name? They treated her so badly. Always yelling at her in the safehouse--calling her a gutless intellectual, spoilt child of the bourgeoisie and so forth. My God, aren't we all spoilt children of the bourgeoisie? If the bourgeoisie hadn't made a botch of us, we wouldn't need to kill them."
A car pulled up outside. The engine died and doors slammed.
Starlitz walked to the front window, peeked through the blind.
"It's the yuppies from next door," he said. "Looks like they're home early."
"We should introduce ourselves," Raf said. He began combing his hair.
"Uh-oh, scratch that," Starlitz said. "That's the guy who lives next door all right, but that's not the woman. He's got a different woman."
"A girlfriend?" Raf said with interest.
"Well, it's a much younger woman. In a wig, net hose and red high heels." The door in the next duplex opened and slammed. A stereo came on. It was playing a hot Cuban rhumba.
"This is a golden opportunity," said Raf, shoving his coffee mug aside. "Let's introduce ourselves now as his new neighbors. He'll be very embarrassed. He'll never look at us again. He'll never question us. Also, he'll keep his wife away from us."
"That's a good tactic," Starlitz said.
"All right. Let me do the talking." Raf went to the door.
"You still got that Makarov in the back of your belt, man."
"Oh yes. Sorry." Raf tossed the pistol onto the sleek Finnish couch.
Raf opened the front door. Then he back-stepped deftly back into the apartment and shut the door firmly. "There's a white rental car on the street."
"Yeah?"
"Two men inside it."
"Yeah?"
"Someone just shot them."
Starlitz hurried to the window. There were half a dozen people clustered across the street. Two of them had just murdered Khoklov's bodyguards, suddenly emptying silenced pistols through the closed glass of the windows. The street was not entirely deserted, but killing people with silenced pistols was a remarkably unobtrusive affair if done with brio and accuracy.
Four men began crossing the street. They wore jeans, jogging shoes, and, despite the heat, box-cut Giorgio Armani blazers. Two of them were carrying dainty little videocams. All of them were carrying guns.
"Zionists," Raf announced. Briskly, but without haste, he retreated to his arsenal on the kitchen floor. He slung an AK over his shoulder, propped a second assault rifle within easy reach, then knelt around the corner of the kitchen wall, giving himself a clear line of fire at the front door.
Starlitz quickly weighed various possibilities. He decided to keep watching the window.
With swift and deadly purpose, the hit-team marched to the adioining duplex. The door broke off its hinges as they kicked their way in. There were brief yelps of indignant surprise, and a quiet multiple stuttering. A burst of Uzi slugs pierced the adjoining wall and embedded themselves in the floor.
Raf rose to his feet, his plump face the picture of glee. He touched one finger to his lips.
Footsteps clomped rapidly up and down the stairs in the next apartment. Doors banged, drawers opened. A bedside telephone jangled as it was knocked from its table. In three minutes the hit-team was out the door.
Raf scurried to the window and knelt. He'd grabbed a small pocket Nikon from his sports bag. He clicked off a roll of snapshots as the hit squad retreated. "I'm so tempted to shoot them," he said, hitching the sling of his assault rifle, "but this is better. This is very funny."
"That was Mossad, right?"
"Yes. They thought I was the neighbor."
"They must have had a description of you and the girl. And they know you're here in Finland, man. That's not good news."
"Let's phone in a credit for their hit. The Helsinki police might catch them. That would be lovely. Where is that cellphone?"
"Look, we were extremely lucky just now. We'd better leave."
"I'm always lucky. We have plenty of time." Raf gazed at his arsenal and sighed. "I hate to abandon these guns, but we have no car to carry. them. Let's carry the guns next door, before we go! That should win us some nice press."
Starlitz met with Khoklov at two A.M. The midnight sun had given up its doomed attempt to sink and was now rising again in refulgent splendor. The two of them were strolling the spectrally abandoned streets of Helsinki, not too far from Khoklov's posh suite at the Arctia.
As European capitals went, Helsinki was a very young town. Most of it had been built since 1900, and quite a lot of that had been leveled by Russian bombers in the 1940s. Nevertheless the waterfront streets looked like stage-sets for the Pied Piper of Hamelin, all copper-gabled roofs and leaded glass and quaint window turrets.
"I miss my boys," Khoklov grumbled. "Why did they have to ice my boyst Stupidbastards."
"Lot of Russian Jews in Israel now. Israel's very hip to the Russian mafia scene. Maybe it was a message."'
"No. They're just out of practice. They thought my boys were guarding Raf. They thought that poor fat Finn was Raf. Raf makes them nervous. He's been on their hit-list since the Munich Olympics."
"How'd they know Raf was here?"
"It's those hackers at the bank. They've been talking too much. Three of our depositors are big Israeli arms dealers." Khoklov was tired. He'd been up all night explaining developments by phone to an anxious cabal of millionaire ex-Chekists in Petersburg.
"Since the word is out, we've got to move this into high gear, ace."
"I know that only too well." Khoklov opened a gunmetal pillbox and dry-swallowed a pink tab. "The Higher Circles in Organizatsiya-- they love the idea of black electronic cash, but they're old-fashioned and skeptical. They say they want quick results, and yet they give me trouble about financing."
"I never expected those nomenklatura cats to come through for us," Starlitz said. "They're all ex-KGB bureaucrats, as slow as hell. If the Japanese shakedown works, we'll have the capital all right. You say they want results? What kind of results exactly?"