The Beggar and the Hare by Tuomas Kyrö Page B

other hand, investor types like the man who was standing in front of him were usually picked up at Kittilä Airport by his taxi-driver brother who then drove them around the mining zones past, present and future. If you wanted a decent tip you had to supply them with an Internet connection, a teardrop-shaped bottle of mineral water and a phone charger with a bunch of different USB connectors.
    Mikko Maukas asked Vatanescu which car on the car transporter was his. Was it the Volvo XC90, the thing that looked like a heffalump, quite unsuitable for city driving, with a ride height far too low to be a real off-roader ? But then, if he had the money to boost his ego with something like that, why not?
    No, berries. So I can buy football boots.
    Mikko Maukas drove the silver-coloured SUV into the car park, left the engine running and got Vatanescu to sign the delivery form. Vatanescu said nothing. He got into the driver’s seat.
    Under the seat were settings for lumbar, posterior and soul. The radio played gentle noonday classical music, and the logbook of the vehicle’s real owner was in the glove compartment. Thomas Weissbier of Gothenburg. This meant that Vatanescu would soon have international crime, the Finnish police and the Swedish upper middle class on his heels.
    For a moment he studied the automatic gearbox, then found D and drove the vehicle out of the car park. It would be more than an hour before Thomas Weissbier was woken in his sleeping compartment on the train.

    V atanescu drove along the quiet road in the big vehicle, surveying the low houses, the sparsely inhabited neighbourhoods. Absolutely everywhere in this country – in the cities, the medium-sized towns, the villages – grocery stores faced you in twos, one on each side of the street. The name of one began with an S, the other with a K, the difference in prices visible in the way the customers were dressed. Fur coats for the K, windcheaters and rubber boots for the S. The only exceptions were the agricultural workers, who patronised the K, for which they supplied most of the produce. The service stations were marked by towers as tall as minarets, and the cars that stopped at the petrol pumps were, surprisingly, tough old Japanese ones. However, just at that moment Vatanescu’s Swedish Volvo passed a queue of German luxury cars that were being tested in these northern conditions. When the Swedish satnav told him he had travelled
åttiosju kilometer
(eighty-seven kilometres) a police car came along in the opposite direction. It didn’t stop, but Vatanescu had the impression that it at least slowed down, and heads turned round.
    I’m not a thief.
    I’m a berry-picker.

Chapter Six
    In which Vatanescu takes a sauna and drinks with Harri Pykström
    V atanescu’s example had encouraged the remaining beggars to defend their rights, or rather develop them for themselves. Under Balthazar’s leadership they rose up in revolt against the low pay and poor working conditions. Yegor Kugar knew how to put down a revolt in a crisis zone or in fledgling democracies, but in a Nordic state where the rule of law prevailed it was impossible to use weapons, hooded men or even waterboarding.
    The balance of power was reversed. That always comes as a happy surprise to the subordinates and as a shock to whoever has been giving the orders and doing the subordinating. Yegor’s astonishment is expressed very well in his own words:
    ‘A) How can people be so ugly? B) How can people be so unpleasant? C) How can people be so stupid? D) How the devil can I be even more stupid?
    ‘Begging. A major flop. I’d have made more money if I’d stood on a street corner strumming “Smoke on the Water” on a balalaika.
    ‘The gypsy campers grumbled, played tricks, failed to declare their earnings, started claiming mileage allowances. Some of them went back home, and each of those quite definitely left their debts unpaid. To the bunch that remained Vatanescu hadbecome a kind of Che