Moreau directs us to a shop, La Cuisine, in downtown Turku. It specializes in French food: Chaource and époisses de Bourgogne cheeses, patés, fine fruit preserves, game and ham, beef from Charolais cattle, Géline fowl. Moreau claimed he hadn’t been to Finland for many years, but his explicit directions indicate either that he has the proverbial memory of an elephant, or lied.
The store has no customers at the moment. Two men recognize him, and their pleasure at seeing him is evident. They greet him with smiles and kisses on both cheeks, and the three of them converse in French for a bit.
Moreau introduces them to us as Marcel Blanc and Thierry Girard. They greet us in Finnish with accents much like Moreau’s. The three of them entered the French Foreign Legion together. Blanc and Girard gave up military life after ten years, and after their careers as Legionnaires came here and opened this shop together.
The store’s interior is attractive, obviously designed by a talented interior decorator. Soft new-age music plays. Sounds of chimes and rippling water. The proprietors are middle-aged, dress preppy. Marcel wears Nantucket Reds and a Lacoste shirt. Thierry, a button-down oxford cloth shirt and an argyle sweater. I picture the business model. They pretend to be French and a touch effete. Customers think maybe they’re a couple. Gays and bored, rich housewives come in for the tony eats and to chat with the high-brow owners. They sell foie gras, reveal their heterosexuality, act surprised that the women thought otherwise, and bang the boredom out of the hausfraus. Not a bad racket.
“Ten years,” I say. “Why didn’t you re-up, stick it out and draw your pensions.”
Marcel has black muzzle scorch scars on the left side of his face. Got a little too close to the barrel of a blazing machine gun. I wonder how he explains them to said fraus. “The Legion,” he says, “is all about marching. I must have marched enough to circle the planet. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”
Thierry takes a couple steps to show me. “The marching wore out the cartilage in my knees. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So we came back here and retired. It’s not a bad life.”
Moreau unzips his backpack, takes out two plastic bags of white powder identical to the one he gave to me at my party. “It’s already cut to fifty percent pure. Don’t step on it. That’s all you get for a while. I won’t be back to Mexico. I suspect the next will come from Afghanistan.”
Marcel and Thierry eye me with fear and suspicion.
“Don’t worry,” Moreau says, “he won’t arrest you. But I promised him that in return, you would answer some questions he has for you.”
Moreau turns to me. “As former Legionnaires, they live pleasant lives here, but the boredom hurts them, so sometimes they play at crime. I supply them with heroin, out of friendship.”
The two young black men, known drug dealers, on the day they were executed by carbon monoxide poisoning, came to Turku. Jussi Kosonen, kidnapper of Kaarina and Antti Saukko, was executed with a bullet in the back of his head, on the riverbank here in Turku. And now here I stand, in a shop with a kilo of heroin lying on the counter, in Turku. Hmm.
I snap open the lion’s mouth on my cane, let the razor teeth press into the flesh of my fingers. “And what questions am I supposed to ask them?”
“Ask them who they sell heroin to and who they know.”
I don’t bother to repeat it.
Marcel says, “By far our biggest clients are neo-Nazis. We wholesale to them. We also sell Ecstasy from a source in Amsterdam, but have a different customer base for it.”