“And why,” I asked, “do you think that might be?”
“Because our Muslim immigrants breed like rats, and they make little or no attempt to assimilate. Suomen Islamilainen Puolue—the Muslim political party—calls for Sharia law. With the rise of political Islam, what many term Islamofascism, by which fundamentalist Muslims pervert their religion and attempt to build a worldwide caliphate and impose Sharia law on all of us, it’s our natural inclination to be opposed to it.”
It had become our habit to speak English when Kate was present, out of politeness. Her ears perked up.
Milo continued. “If they succeeded, they would take away all our freedoms, force us to change our way of life, take away our right to free speech and all the basic rights of women, such as education. Do you want Kate to be forced to wear a veil? Our criminal justice system would no longer include fair trials and our limbs would be amputated as punishments. Those possibilities scare a few people.”
“And after a few generations,” Kate said, “all the little Finnish babies would be chocolate colored instead of Aryan snow-white.”
Milo hesitated, he knew he couldn’t give a non-racist answer. “I like Finland as it is. Finnish people living the Finnish way.”
“Milo,” Kate said, “for a bright guy, you can be a real fucking dipshit.”
She turned on the radio so she could tune him out. I was glad she didn’t understand the words to the song that was playing. It was a hit from the early nineties, when Somali immigrants first began arriving, by Irwin Goodman. It was about getting rid of the mud people and licorice clowns.
16
The following day, Sweetness and I set out early and went to post offices to see if any postal workers remembered the person who mailed the box that contained Lisbet S?derlund’s head. The box was uninsured and required no receipt signature, so we knew only, from the ink stamp, that it was mailed in Helsinki. We began at the neighborhood post office that services Kuninkaantie 38 and so the Finnish Somalia Network. No luck.
However, after receiving the pig’s head in the mail just before Christmas, a worker there invented a Finnish pseudonym and set up a Hotmail account. Fearing a more violent attack, she joined every anti-immigrant Facebook group she could find, including I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet S?derlund, in order to gather evidence in the event that the Finnish Somalia Network was targeted again. She printed out all the posts daily. She made me copies of all of them. A valuable gift for the investigation. No criminal justice authorities had done the same.
We moved on to the main post office downtown and got a copy of the work roster for March sixteenth, the day the package was mailed. The place is a madhouse, always busy. We interviewed every worker who had been on duty that day in person if they were on-site, or by telephone if they weren’t. Too many customers. Just faceless cattle in long lines. We got zilch.
We stepped outside, I lit a smoke and my phone rang. The caller was Detective Sergeant Saska Lindgren, from Helsinki Homicide. He was at a crime scene investigating the murder of two black men. A note at the scene, the letters clipped and glued to a sheet of printing paper, read, “For Rami Sipil?,” the soldier whose throat had been cut the day before.
I’d consulted with Saska before, and he’s sharp, considered one of the best policemen in the nation.