June 25
I head into town to buy a ferry ticket to Stockholm. It’s the first part of my exit strategy from Finland, which involves a complex series of interconnecting trains, ferries, and buses all the way to Paris. I discover there are two ferry companies to choose from: Viking and Silja. I don’t know what the difference is, so I opt for Silja because I prefer its white-painted ferries to Viking’s red-painted ones. There’s something unseaworthy about that red color, I decide.
After I buy the ticket, I ride my bike to Kulosaari just for the heck of it. Kulosaari is a leafy island suburb of Helsinki. There’s an old seaside hotel out there; a big white pile with copper mansards that was once the Kulosaari Beach Hotel. When it was built in 1917, the owners hoped to attract well-to-do tourists from St. Petersburg, but then the Russian Revolution nixed those plans.
Some time in the 1960’s, the old hotel became the headquarters for The Wihuri Group. I look it up. “The Wihuri Story is a history of accomplishment, conglomeration, and commitment,” the website says. There’s stuff about “support solutions” and “technical trade,” but I can’t figure out what they actually do. It’s suspicious. Like maybe I’ve stumbled across some James Bond-style super villain and the Kulosaari Beach Hotel is his villainous lair. The kind of place that Bond, disguised as an insurance salesman or a building inspector, tries to sneak into. He knocks on the front door. Dr. Wihuri’s beautiful-but-deadly assistant answers. The lobby is decorated with taxidermied animals. Lions and tigers mounted on the walls, baring their teeth.
“These are Dr. Wihuri’s trophies,” she explains. ‘The doctor is a man who enjoys the pursuit of… dangerous prey.”
I follow the twisty lanes of Kulsaari to another secret lair: the old Iraqi embassy. It’s a Modernist glass box designed by Saddam Hussein’s favorite architect, a guy named Dinkha Latchin. From what I can tell, Latchin designed a few Iraqi embassies and did the interior decorating for Hussein’s multiple luxury yachts. I read that Latchin was proud of his embassy in Helsinki, but I’m feeling less generous. It’s got gold-tinted mirrored windows and looks kind of sleazy. Dictator Chic. A place where guys in cheap suits smoked unfiltered cigarettes while shuffling through passport photos of political dissidents.
The embassy was abandoned during the Iraq War in 2003. I pull up to the fence and stare at the place, looking for some kind of explanation for the last 10 years: America’s idiotic decision to invade Iraq, and all the death and destruction that followed. But there’s only so much an abandoned embassy in the suburbs of Helsinki can tell you.