“Near the end of the war, Valpo saw trouble coming. We destroyed as much documentation as we could.”
I’m in over my head. I’m a detective, have no business in the political realm. “You’re asking me to relay a threat to blackmail the Finnish government into protecting you.”
“It’s not a threat. I am blackmailing them. Tell the interior minister that I’ll also discuss our treatment of POWs.”
“The death rate in our POW camps was high,” I say, “but be fair. We didn’t have food to adequately feed ourselves, let alone them.”
“We held sixty-five thousand POWs. About thirty percent died. That rate was surpassed in Europe only by Nazi Germany, with its death camps, and by the USSR. Stalin was just as bad as Hitler. The death rate here wasn’t so high until we decided to use already sick and starving POWs for forced labor. Then they started dropping like flies. And we could have made sacrifices, fed them better if we wanted to. We just didn’t want to.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think anyone will believe all of this, even from you.”
“Boy, you’re naive beyond words. We shared the Nazi vision. Expansionism and room for the nation to grow. An agrarian paradise populated by ethnic Finns. That dream lives on. Don’t you watch TV?”
“A bit.”
“Think about, for example, the Elovena ads. They’re not selling porridge, they’re selling Aryan propaganda. If Leni Riefenstahl had made those commercials, Hitler would have come in his pants. A hardworking beautiful blond mother in the countryside, surrounded by her adoring, content, and even blonder oatmeal-glomming children. Fields of grain ripple in the breeze. Like it or not, boy, that idyllic Nazi vision is alive and well in this country today.”
His cultural view is extreme, but his point is well taken. I think about Christmas Eve, and the beginning of the twenty-four hours of official Christmas Peace. At noon, in front of the town hall in Turku, a band plays Porilaisten marssi – March of the People from Pori -and the Christmas Peace song reminisces about covering the land in the blood of our enemies.
“You still haven’t told me how my great-grandpa and your father knew each other,” I say.
He gets up and brings me a package of meat out of his freezer. “As I said, you’re a good boy. I’ve decided I enjoy your company, so I’ll save that story. Come back tomorrow, we’ll eat and I’ll tell it to you. You’ll like it, it’s a good one. Ritva is tired. You better go now.”
I have a murder to solve, don’t have time to lounge around and listen to war stories, but I realize, to my surprise, that I don’t care. Somehow I need it, and I’m already looking forward to it. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
31
It’s time to pick up where Milo left off. I’ll tail Linda, maybe have a chat with her if the opportunity arises. I head southwest, from Porvoo toward Vantaa. Powerful winds gust and make the car shimmy. Snow drifts in fat flakes. The air currents shift, and for a couple minutes, the snow flies up toward the sky instead of down toward the ground. It amuses me, doesn’t happen often.
I ponder Arvid’s revelations. Part of me wants to believe him, because I feel some affection for him and Ritva. As a Finn, though, I want to dismiss all of it as a cheap scam designed to weasel out of trouble. The detective in me is skeptical. First, because he lied to me in the beginning and claimed he was never at Stalag 309. Second, because he may be jerking my emotions, using the grandpa angle, telling me to call him Ukki to make me let my guard down and use me as a patsy. I need to be wary of Arvid. I wonder, too, if he would really write a book intended to destroy the self-image of a country he worked so hard to protect.