IT’S AN HOUR AND HALF to Nauvo. No one speaks. Moreau and I aren’t talkers. Milo and Sweetness, I think, feel in their bones that something will happen. I can, too. Malinen will come on haughty. The lion will bite. Sweetness puts on Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. It soothes. We listen to it twice. We wait twenty minutes on the ferry, and then, once on the island, it takes another half hour to find Roope Malinen’s summer cottage.
We park a few minutes’ walk from his cottage and approach from the forest instead of direct on the dirt path. I check my belt and pockets. Knife. Sap. Taser. I screw the silencer onto the threaded barrel of my .45. The silencer is too fat to holster the pistol. I slip it into my jacket pocket. The others do the same. Malinen is out back, behind the cottage, about twenty yards from a little jetty that extends out over the sea.
He has family money, owns this cottage and a big, costly apartment in an upscale building in the district of T??l?, in Helsinki. Topi Ruutio may be the head of the Real Finns party, but Malinen is its unofficial spokesman and minister of propaganda. His blog is the most popular in Finland because he’s gifted in vocalizing hate while masking it as an academic voice of reason. Much like Nazi propaganda from its early years.
He’s a professor of anthropology at the university, and a self-professed genius who claims his unique understanding of our species is too far ahead of its time to be fully comprehended by lesser mortals. He’s a little man with apple red cheeks and thick glasses in black frames that calls to mind Jerry Lewis comic sketches. He squirts lighter fluid on the coals in his grill. He lights them with a long match and I see the flames leap and hear it go WHOOF. A massive dog sits beside him, implacable.
I step out of the tree line. “Hello, Roope,” I say.
My voice startles him. I walk up to within a couple meters of him, the grill between us.
“Have we met?” he asks.
“No.”
The others come out of the trees and stand in a line behind me. He sees a massive man with twin .45s visible, another with the wings of Icarus under stubble, the circles under Milo’s eyes like ink stains. My cudgel of a cane. Something has gone terribly awry. He doesn’t know what it is or why, and it visibly unnerves him.
He has a curt and run-on, rather absurd manner of speaking. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. “I don’t know what you want but you’re not welcome here and if you don’t leave right now and I mean right now I’m going to call the police.”
I show him my police card. “They’re already here, and they’d like you to answer some questions.”
“I have nothing to say to you and I want you off my property and I mean right now.”
I speak slow and calm. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. Where is your family at the moment?”
He picks up a spatula and points it at me like he’s holding me at bay with a Sten gun. “You have no right to be here or to ask me about my family and it’s none of your business where my family is get off of my property this instant or I’ll call people and they’ll make you sorry.”
“It would be better if you tell me where your family is. If your answers to my questions aren’t satisfactory, the situation could become a little…humiliating…and I would spare your wife and children having to witness it.”
I move closer and lean against a birch tree near the grill. It’s a nice grill, made by hand with stones that he probably gathered from the shoreline and cemented together. The others move in closer too, in formation. The dog eyes me. I’m too close to his master. I give my cane’s tip a bang on the ground and the lion’s mouth flips open.
“They’re out for a ride on the boat and I want you gone when they’re back and I have company coming and they will be witnesses to this. Witnesses.”
Moreau ambles into the cottage to look around. He comes back and nods. It’s empty.