“It reached a crisis level so acute that the U.S. would soon have to invade Mexico, the drug trade truly would be halted, or at least severely damaged, and the economies of the two countries along with it. What made the situation unique is that the vast majority of the drugs pass through a tiny area, the border crossing of the twin cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas. Through this funnel-which, ironically, the U.S. supposedly created as part of its War Against Drugs-dope passes into the States. Money and weapons pass into Mexico. To control this crossing is to control the drug trade.
“The answer, of course, was for one side to win the war and halt the killing. Some colleagues and I analyzed the situation and decided Joaquin Guzman Loera’s Sinaloa cartel was the best candidate, having exported more than two hundred tons of cocaine and a vast amount of heroin into the United States over the past decade. Their army was killing many people, but the wrong ones. We assisted them in killing the appropriate rivals, and trained their best soldiers, bringing them up to Special Forces standards. Sinaloa won the war, the death toll dropped significantly, and the economies of both countries remain intact. Mission accomplished.”
“So you were an assassin,” I say.
“In Spanish, an assassin is an asesino. Not a person of importance. I held the title of sicario, an executioner.”
“What’s the difference?”
He scoffed. I was a babe in the woods. “The number of zeros in my monthly pay.”
“As a French advisor, Guzman paid you as well?”
He grimaced, losing patience with me. “Of course I doubledipped. He also gave me the heroin I gave to you. A parting gesture of thanks. He was most grateful. He made last year’s list of the world’s top billionaires.”
We entered Turku. I changed the subject. “Can you acquire false passports for me?”
“Of course, but does ‘false’ mean fake or registered in the country of identity?”
Kate, Anu, myself, Milo, Sweetness, and then I think: Jenna. Sweetness might refuse to leave without her in a romantic hissy fit. “Six, registered, and preferably diplomatic.”
He laughed. “My friend, you may be overestimating my capabilities.”
“I doubt it.”
“That you realize you may need them increases my estimation of you. Let us make an agreement. As regards the passports, when our business is concluded, if I am satisfied, I will see to it that you are also satisfied. They will not be diplomatic, but from a country with a predominantly white population, so that you do not stand out.”
Good enough. The passports will bring us one step closer to safety.
31
We enter Turku. I call Kate. They just arrived in the town square. We park and walk down a long row of stalls, flowers on the right side, fresh vegetables on the left, the cathedral looming in front of us. The temperature is brisk, but the sun warming. All of the big cities in the countries east of Russia in this part of the world seem the same to me. Helsinki, Turku, Tallinn, Stockholm, are almost interchangeable. There’s always an old town, a market square, and malls and shopping centers with exactly the same chain stores in them. Tourists uber alles.
I take Anu and put her in the carryall in front of me. We get lunch straightaway. More like brunch. It’s not even ten thirty yet. The girls have plenty of time to wander around while we go about our business. From a stall specializing in grease, Mirjami, Jenna, Milo and Sweetness get lihapiirakka. Bread dough filled with a pork paste, I suspect oinks and assholes, and deep-fried. Sweetness eats three. Kate, Moreau and I get smoked fish on rye bread. We all have soft vanilla ice cream in cones for dessert. Even Moreau. I’ve wondered if he wears a permanent facade, or if what I see is his true self. Ice cream helps answer the question. His “too cool for school” demeanor is his natural deportment.
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 Toolo, 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.
I say, “I’d like to discuss the murders of Kaarina Saukko and Lisbet Soderlund with you. And I’d like to talk about a website called I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Soderlund. She’s dead. That same group had a member whose user name was Heinrich Himmler. This member discussed sending Finland’s blacks to the gas chamber. Two young black men were murdered in a makesh
ift gas chamber. I want Himmler’s identity.”
“I know nothing about any of those things why would I know anything about murders and threatening websites and their contributors.”
“Veikko Saukko promised to donate a million euros to Real Finns. He reneged. Shortly thereafter, his son and daughter were kidnapped and the daughter murdered. On your blog, you’ve slandered Lisbet Soderlund countless times, blamed her personally for Finland’s immigration policies and, after her death, implied that it was the best thing that has happened to our country in years. You see, I read all your blogs. I’m a big fan. And, as you’re so active in racial social networking on the Internet, I’m willing to bet that you were a member of that Facebook group, and that, beloved as you are by so many racists, and as a representative of the Real Finns party, you’re privy to a great deal of information, even if it’s just gossip and hearsay.”
He put his hand on his dog’s back, as if for comfort, or perhaps as if the dog was a kind of talisman for him. “As I have stated many times I am not a racist. I am maahanmuuttokriitikko-a critic of immigrants. In the words of ‘Martin Lucifer King,’ ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends,’ and so I write my thoughts because I love my country and other thinking people read those thoughts because they see the truth in them and the lies behind stinking ruiners of our race and nation like Lisbet Soderlund.”
“I’ve noticed that racists seem well-versed in the thoughts of Dr. King.”
“Know thy enemy. We’ll have a Muslim niggertown surrounding Helsinki and then they’ll burn their own homes down like the niggers in LA and like the niggers in Paris. And just the same when they start looting instead of stealing from their so-called oppressors downtown that own valuable merchandise they’ll knock out the front windows of stores in their own neighborhoods and steal flashy sneakers and flat-screen TVs and designer jeans and toaster ovens. That’s how much brains they have and that’s how much thanks they give us for bringing them here and saving their lives and letting them live on our dime. Fuck them. Send them home to face genocide by machete-wielding niggers just like themselves. And if it came to a national referendum, every nigger in Finland would be executed. They should never have been let out of their self-created hellholes in the first place. And fuck you and fuck Lisbet Soderlund that nigger-dick-sucker traitor. I’m glad she’s dead and get off of my property now.”
“I can’t. You still haven’t answered my questions.”
Malinen pets his dog. “Meet my dog Sparky. Sparky is special. He’s a Fila Brasileiro. A breed so aggressive that they’re outlawed in certain places, a hundred-twenty-pound monster and a trained attack dog and doesn’t like people who threaten me and I’ll turn Sparky loose and order him to kill you.”
“Go ahead,” I say.
Malinen shouts the command and the dog leaps. I swing my cane and the lion bites it in the loose skin on the side of its neck. I hold it at arm’s length and hit it on the snout full blast with my Taser. The dog falls to the ground and quivers. I zap it again.
“Milo,” I say, “amputate a leg off that thing,” and I drag it over to him with my cane.
I choose Milo because, with his fertile mind, he would get the point I was making, and would also know how to do it. He uses a zip-lock handcuff for a tourniquet and pulls it tight around the dog’s left hind leg at the hip.
Malinen shakes, starts to cry. “Why would you do that to poor Sparky?” he asks, apparently forgetting that he had ordered it to attack me.
“You mean amputate a leg instead of kill it?” Milo asks. “You said it was a special dog. You shouldn’t eat a special dog like that all at once, and believe me, you’re going to fucking eat it.”
I say, “The threat was to amputate Kaarina Saukko’s limbs when she was kidnapped. If it was good enough for her, it’s good enough for your pooch.” Then: “Somebody get this asshole on his knees.”
Sweetness whips out his steel sap, flicks his wrist and telescopes it to full length, and hits Malinen hard in the back of his thigh with it. He screams, falls down on all fours. “You may think you’re an important man,” I say, “but we’re all subservient to the laws of pain.”
He grovels something incomprehensible.
“Do I need to repeat my questions, or do you eat Sparky?” I ask.
Malinen breaks, starts rambling. He sits up, but is afraid to stand. He gives me five names of members of the Facebook group. Heinrich Himmler, who rambled about gas chambers for Somalis, was none other than Veikko Saukko. Malinen was himself a member. His user name was the same as commandant at Auschwitz. Rudolf Hoss.
Malinen rambles defenses. Neo-Nazis would like to firebomb mosques, but Real Finns keep them in check. With their numbers growing so rapidly, they’ll win a majority of seats in the 2011 parliamentary elections and maybe take the presidency in 2012. The right wing will take the country back through legitimate means and through the will of the people.
“Tell me everything,” I say, “so I don’t have to come back. Lisbet Soderlund. Who killed her?”
“I don’t know. A rumor started that whoever killed her would get enough support to guarantee winning a seat in Parliament and would take her place as minister of immigration. That wasn’t true. I’m going to be minister of immigration.”
“To take her place, the killer has to be known. Who is her murderer?”
“I swear I don’t know.”
“Who started the rumor?”
He doesn’t answer. I take this to mean he started it himself. That makes him accessory to murder.
“Kaarina and Antti Saukko. Who killed her? Where is he?”
His fear is passing. He grasped that answering my questions would truly stop the cruelty and beating. He looks up at me. “I don’t know those things. It’s true that Saukko lied to us but to my knowledge no one in our party had anything to do with it. I knew Antti. Topi Ruutio knows Saukko and introduced us. Saukko wanted to meet me because he likes my blog and I met Antti and I introduced him to other Real Finns and I know that through those other Real Finns he met neo-Nazis but that’s all I know except he hated his father.”
I hear a boat engine. His family is on their way home.
“More,” I say.
The sound of the engine instills panic. “The neo-Nazis sell drugs and they donate part of the profits to Real Finns. Please go now.”
We walk back out through the forest to the SUV. I take a last look back. He’s still on his knees, unable to move. He’s a piece of shit.
He finds his courage and calls after me. “I’ll get you for this!”
I answer. “If you do, I’ll burn down the cottage while your family is sleeping inside it.”
He has no recourse to “get me.” And I wouldn’t hurt his family. But it’s something for him to think about, to give him some nightmares, as he has done to so many immigrants with his hate tracts.
We get back in the SUV. “I’d like to conduct the business I told you I had to take care of now,” Moreau says. “You’re welcome to come along. In fact, that’s part of the point. I would appreciate it though, if you don’t arrest anyone you meet.”
“That’s fine. When we get back to Helsinki, I think I should meet Veikko Saukko. Could you arrange it? I get the impression he likes you.”
“I’d be happy to. I’ve killed many persons of color. I’m one of his favorite people.”
32
Moreau directs us to a shop, La Cuisine, in downtown Turku. It specializes in French food: Chaource and Epoisses de Bourgogne cheeses, pates, fine fruit preserves, game and ham, beef from Charolais cattle, Geline 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.
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.
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