Helsinki Blood

25





We check the bedrooms. All the girls, including Anu, are asleep. I put the sauna on to ensure our privacy. We sit in silence in the living room and think our private thoughts while it warms. Sweetness, of course, breaks out more alcohol. I unwrap my knee and inspect it. It’s more swollen than it should be, but not oozing pus, and considering the abuse I’ve put it through, I suppose it’s OK.

We crack beers, hose ourselves down with the shower, and sit down in the sauna. Milo throws three dippers of water on the stones without asking. I’ve been to sauna with him before and he has the young-man, sauna-is-a-contest mentality. I was the same in my twenties. Now, in early middle age—and I’ve noticed most men get like me—I want to work up a good sweat without scalding myself. When it gets so hot that it burns the inside of my nose, I get out, shower in cold water, and cool down before going back in.

“Take it easy on me,” I say. “And sauna etiquette dictates that I should sit in the corner and toss the water.”

Milo is too thin. If he turned sideways and stuck his tongue out, he would look like a zipper. I once asked him if those were his legs or if he was riding a chicken, and it got under his skin. He’s by no means weak, though, just skinny and covered in ropy muscle.

He ignores the rebuke and gets down to the meat of the situation. “Who lives and who dies?”

The Gandhi pacifist life may not be working out for me, because of necessity, but I just don’t want to hurt anyone else. “We could begin by looking for a way out of this where nobody dies.”

Sweetness turns his beer upside down with his thumb covering the top, to cool down the neck so he can drink out of it without burning himself. “Sorry, pomo, not possible. My baby died.”

I don’t point out that it would have been aborted anyway. I suppose he doesn’t want to face it.

“And besides,” he says, “we have so many enemies, how can we ever make peace with them all?”

Milo ticks them off. “Veikko Saukko, and if Moore doesn’t kill them, the two Corsicans, the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, the Russian diplomats you’re trying to nail for human trafficking. Every f*cking one of them is above the law and has people that do their dirty work for them.”

I let out a hopeless sigh. “And don’t forget Roope Malinen.”

He got his seat in parliament, but we hurt the extreme right and f*cked up his hate agenda by exposing their drug pushing.

“I have another goal as well,” I say. “Those spreadsheets are all about human trafficking. I want those girls helped, especially Loviise Tamm.”

Milo and Sweetness nod agreement. “The men that brought her feel they own her now,” I say. “She needs protection.”

“Her mother called me,” Sweetness says. “She made arrangements for them to live in the countryside where they can hide and Loviise will be forgotten.” He swills beer. “I know you want Kate to see Loviise to prove something to her. But, pomo, I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t make everything right between you and your wife. It won’t.”

I built it up in my mind as if it would, but he’s right and I’m aware of it. “I think maybe we should all go stay at my house in Porvoo for a while. The windows are bulletproofed and the river runs in front of it, which is one less angle we can be easily attacked from. Plus, it’s bigger. This place is too small for five adults, a baby and a cat to live in.”

I inherited the house from Arvid Lahtinen. His wife of fifty years was in agony from bone cancer. He helped her die. I helped him cover it up. We became close friends. He was like a grandfather to me and made me his heir. Then, I suppose, feeling he had nothing left to live for, alone at age ninety, he blew his own brains out.

“I’m living here?” Milo asks.

I throw water on the stones. Steam rises and hisses. “I think we all have to stay together. The easiest way to get us is to cut us out of the herd and take us down one at a time.”

“Killing cops is a huge deal,” Milo says. “We take care of our own. If you and I or our families were killed, Helsinki Homicide would pursue it to the ends of the earth, never let the case die.”

I finally understand what has happened. It comes as a revelation, and with it, I see the inevitable outcome. There are certain men in this world who refuse to succumb to pressure, who will see things to the end of the line no matter the cost. Such men are shunned by society as dangers, and feared by the powerful. Such men are begging to be killed.

Milo, Sweetness and I are three such men. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood. Each of us bound to the others by the knowledge that only we can count on ourselves not to kill one another. We did our jobs too well, observed no limits, not even legal boundaries, and served justice instead of our masters. This, not theft or crime or deaths, was the infraction for which we must be punished.

I know where Milo’s thought train is headed. It’s insanity. Still, I need to let him articulate the plan he’s cooked up so I can punch holes in it. “You have an idea,” I say. “Let’s hear it.”

“Give me a minute to think. Let’s cool off.”

We step out of the sauna into the bathroom, take turns running cold water over ourselves, slurp long hits from the kossu bottle, and go back into the heat.

“OK,” I say, “tell us.”

“We massacre them all in one day.”

This idea is so typical of Milo that I almost laugh. “Spell out who all is included in ‘them.’”

“Veikko Saukko, the national chief of police, the minister of the interior, and Jan Pitkänen.”

“I like it,” Sweetness says.

Now the laughter bursts out of me. “You just talked about how the murder of a couple cops would spark an investigation that would never end without a prosecution,” I say. “You’re discussing a mass murder of historic proportion. We would never, ever, get away with it. Not to mention that it’s hard to justify murder at all, let alone such a bloodbath.”

I toss more water on the stones, fill the room with a satisfying blast of steam.

“Of course we wouldn’t,” Milo says. “Unless we had a fall guy.”

“A fall guy?”

“A lone gunman. With good luck, we could even end up investigating the murders ourselves.”

“A patsy, who more than likely would spend most or all of the remaining years of his life in a mental institution. Who would you condemn to that?”

“The man who deserves it: Roope Malinen.”

Malinen does deserve it. He got away with, among other crimes, accessory to murder. Because of him, Lisbet Söderlund was murdered and decapitated, her head mailed to a Somali political organization.

Söderlund was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and so white, politician belonging to the Swedish People’s Party. She dedicated her life to public service. After the 2007 elections she was chosen to be the new minister of immigration and European affairs. She became a tireless champion of immigrants’ rights. She was their foremost advocate in government, and so came to be the object of contempt and hatred of the extreme right and racists. For a time, until it was removed because of its criminality, a Facebook page existed named “I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund.” The page attracted some hundreds of members.

Prior to the parliamentary election, the Real Finns, a supposed party of the people, was and is officially headed by Topi Ruutio, a member of the European Parliament. Its unofficial second in command is Roope Malinen. He held no office at the time, but his blog is the most popular in Finland, sometimes generates fifty thousand hits per day. The Real Finns agenda was unclear, except that they were anti-immigration, anti–European Union and wanted Finland to leave it. They denied charges of racism and euphemistically called themselves “maahanmuuttokriitikot,” critics of immigrants. Malinen blamed immigrants for the majority of Finland’s social ills.

Malinen hated Söderlund. He made that perfectly clear in his blog. A rumor spread that whoever killed Lisbet Söderlund would get her job, but it was only that, a rumor, started by Roope Malinen. Although he had no authority to decide such matters, it was taken seriously. Malinen also associated with right-wing activists, including neo-Nazis who sold heroin. They distributed, on the street level, to blacks, in an effort, as Saukko put it, “to sedate the nigger population,” and to some extent, Malinen helped orchestrate it.

None of his followers would roll over on Malinen. None of this could be proven. Veikko Saukko’s daughter had been assassinated by a sniper a year earlier in the aftermath of a bogus kidnapping. Her brother, Antti, absconded with the ten million euros. His partners in crime killed the girl as payback. Antti tried to kill us. Sweetness shot him into dog food and we kept the ten million, recompense for pain and suffering, because Saukko is such an a*shole, and because if we didn’t keep it, corrupt politicians would.

We recovered the rifle used to murder Saukko’s daughter, used transfer tape to put Malinen’s prints on it, and turned Malinen in to the detective handling the case. Malinen hadn’t taken part in that murder, but given his other crimes, for which we believed with reasonable certainly he wouldn’t be prosecuted, felt a frame-up was justified. We hid the rifle in Malinen’s summer cottage and told the detective where to find it. The Powers That Be found Malinen more useful as a nutcase parliamentarian than behind bars, had the rifle wiped clean and suppressed it. It disappeared from the investigation, never made it into evidence, and showed up in no report. And so Malinen got away with conspiring to murder Lisbet Söderlund.

Now my curiosity is piqued. I’m not prepared to condone Milo’s plan, but I want to hear it out. “Continue,” I say.

“I’m going to create a lone gunman out of Malinen that will make the JFK cover-up look like something concocted by schoolkids.”

He takes his characteristic moment for melodrama, flips his beer upside down to cool the neck, flips it upright again and drinks. Working with Milo has significantly improved my ability to exhibit patience. I note that the irritability that nagged at me for weeks has now passed. My brain chemistry and the effects of brain surgery are stabilizing. I say nothing, wait on him.

“I write a two-thousand-five-hundred-page manifesto detailing the reasons behind his heinous crime. It will be simple, as he’s written thousands of pages in his blog, much of which can be construed as the hate-mongering of a deranged madman. I combine it with the manifestos of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech, some others. With so much material to work from, and since it’s supposed to be the rambling, semi-coherent tract of a psychopath, it won’t take too long or be very hard.”

“Won’t you find it hard to type thousands of pages with only one working hand?” I ask.

“Nope. I’ll use dictation software. I’ll get it done faster than if I typed it.”

“Suppose you make Malinen the lone gunman. What if he has an alibi for the time of the killings?”

Milo’s look says I’m stupid. “Duh. His killing rampage has to end in suicide.”

“Of course, how silly of me. And we have enough firearms for an army, but we need guns that can be traced back to him.”

“We check the database, find someone who has what we need, and B&E them. To do it right, we’ll have to make some videos of me posing as Malinen firing the weapons and fly them on YouTube, and also the most humiliating sexual ones starring the minister of the interior and the national chief of police. Their depravity will draw some attention away from the killings themselves. Malinen is about my size. We steal some personal items to make videos of him firing the weapons—I’ll wear a balaclava—return the items, and they’ll turn up during the investigation, along with the guns, which he’ll fingerprint for us before his unfortunate demise. I think I’ll even force him to make a voice-over for the video.”

“And his ‘unfortunate demise’ will take place how?”

“In his summer cottage, which is a short trip from my summer cottage by boat. We either lure him there, make him believe he’s meeting someone, or take him there by force. It doesn’t matter much, just so long as we get him there alone, without his family.”

Milo has all the bases covered except one. “How do you plan to get all those people in one place?”

His smile is knowing. “I don’t. You stole all of their phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads. They contain their calendars. We know where they’ll be and when. If they’re too spread out for us to shoot them all in one day, we plant bombs.”

“Bombs. So you’re not concerned about collateral damage?”

“If I wire them up so that a cell phone completes the circuit—Iraq jihad style—we can do it in line of sight and ensure no innocents are injured. There are three of us, after all. We choose which of us kills who, with time intervals to support the lone-gunman theory, and it should work out.”

“And where will you get the explosives?”

“Helsinki is expanding at a tremendous rate. Because of geography, we can’t grow outward, and nobody wants skyscrapers here, and so we’re building downward instead of up. Underneath the city, there’s an ever-expanding warren of tunnels. And those tunnels are created with explosives. It won’t be hard to liberate a small amount for our purposes. There must be tons down there.”

“And what if Moore doesn’t kill the Corsican father and son who intend to wipe out everyone on Saukko’s Shit List?”

“We either murder them too, or the money disappears from the safe-deposit box—I’m not sure how to pull that off yet, but I’ll work it out—and their deal is off. According to Moore, there’s nearly a million in it. I wouldn’t mind to heist it. Let’s see what comes of it.”

“Let me think about this,” I say, and step out for some cold water and kossu. It doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.

I sit back down in the sauna. I’m cold from the shower, splash some water on the stones to warm me up. “No,” I say.

Milo’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean no. I don’t want to murder all those people.”

“Jesus f*cking Christ. They want to murder you and your family, and I’m sure mine and Sweetness’s along with them. You think they knew Mirjami and Jenna were going to be in the Audi when it blew? They assumed it would be Kate.”

“Sorry,” I say, “I just can’t see us doing it.”

“Pomo,” Sweetness says, “I’m with Milo on this one.”

These two have never put me on the defensive before. “When did this become a democracy? Sweetness, you call me pomo—boss—doesn’t that imply I make all final decisions?”

Milo gulps beer, now hot and ruined, says “Yuck,” and goes out to get a cold one. He sits down beside me. “We don’t want to usurp your authority or make you angry, but you’re the boss in work-related matters. When it comes to protecting ourselves and the people we love, we get a say in what happens. I won’t ask you to participate if you’re dead set against it, but this is going to happen.”

I think of Kate. My extra-legal activities were the spark behind her emotional trauma. If she found out I murdered someone, or was even an accessory to murder—which, having heard the plan, I de facto am—it could end our marriage and make her even sicker. I have to balance this against stopping further attempts on her life. I explain this to the others.

Milo replies, “The manifesto, the guns and possibly explosives will take us a couple weeks to get together. You have time to think about it. And as far as Kate goes, if you decide to take part, just hide it from her. You would anyway.”

“Let’s let it go for now,” I say. “We’ll move to Arvid’s place, and in the meantime, keep me posted on the progress you make. Deal?”

“Deal,” he says.

“Anybody have any ideas about how to find Loviise Tamm?” I ask.

“The way I understand it,” Milo says, “she was snatched by Russian diplomats. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“So they probably either took her to the embassy or to another whorehouse. Another whorehouse seems way more likely to me.”

“Me too,” I say.

“And Russian diplomats are overseeing the operation?”

“Well, I think most aren’t really diplomats, but spies here with diplomatic passports for cover. With some hired help from a few Finns, according to the files we pulled out of their electronics.”

“Then we need to tail the people working at the embassy until they lead us to the right whorehouse. The problem, of course, is that there are twenty or thirty of them, and only three of us. It would be f*cking helpful if we had the manpower of the police department for this.”

I lean up against the wall and pull one knee up, let the bad one lie flat on the bench. The heat is easing the pain in both my knee and my jaw.

“Let me think about this,” Sweetness says, and fetches fresh beers for all of us.

He sits down and says, “I’m hesitant to suggest this, but I could call my cousin, Ai.”

“Ai,” Milo says, “as in what people yell when they’re in pain?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is he called Ai?” I ask.

“He’s my cousin, my dad’s sister’s kid, sixteen now. My aunt was a bad drunk and drug user, turned really mean when she was high. When Ai was about three, he tried to take a cookie or something, and she smashed his hand when he reached for it. She hit him hard with an iron skillet and broke bones in his hand and wrist. He screamed ‘Ai’ and started to cry, which made her madder. She said she’d give him something to really cry about, and she stuck his hand in a pot of boiling water and held it there. Dad went over there about three days later and Ai hadn’t been given any medical treatment. The skin peeled off like a glove almost to his elbow. Dad didn’t want his sister to go to jail, so he just took Ai home, put burn ointment on it and wrapped it up till it healed. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“His hand is withered and all the nerves in it are dead. Plus, it always looks worse than it is because he puts cigarettes out on it to impress people and make them think he’s tough. Which he is.”

“That still doesn’t explain why he’s called Ai,” Milo says.

“I told you his mom was f*cking mean. She started calling him that to make fun of him. She would actually tell the story when she was drunk and stoned, like it was funny, and the nickname stuck. Now he doesn’t like to be called anything else. Like it’s some kind of badge of honor.”

“You said ‘was’ mean. Where is she now?”

“Disappeared three years ago. Ai says she went out to score and never came back. I think the truth is he killed her. He’s meaner than she was. He’s like the f*cking devil, that’s why I hesitate to call him. She was on permanent disability because of her substance abuse, and Ai lives alone, has since she disappeared. I think nobody ever reported her as a missing person and he lives off her social security pension.”

“What about his father?” I ask.

“He doesn’t know who his father is.”

“And he can help us how?”

“He runs a gang in East Helsinki. They would follow the Russians for us, if the price was right.”

Jesus, what a story. “What the f*ck,” I say. “Give the kid a call. It might be interesting to do business with a teenage devil incarnate.”