“I’m living here?” Milo asks.
I throw water on the stones. Steam rises and hisses. “I think we all have to stay together. The easiest way to get us is to cut us out of the herd and take us down one at a time.”
“Killing cops is a huge deal,” Milo says. “We take care of our own. If you and I or our families were killed, Helsinki Homicide would pursue it to the ends of the earth, never let the case die.”
I finally understand what has happened. It comes as a revelation, and with it, I see the inevitable outcome. There are certain men in this world who refuse to succumb to pressure, who will see things to the end of the line no matter the cost. Such men are shunned by society as dangers, and feared by the powerful. Such men are begging to be killed.
Milo, Sweetness and I are three such men. Brothers in arms. Brothers in blood. Each of us bound to the others by the knowledge that only we can count on ourselves not to kill one another. We did our jobs too well, observed no limits, not even legal boundaries, and served justice instead of our masters. This, not theft or crime or deaths, was the infraction for which we must be punished.
I know where Milo’s thought train is headed. It’s insanity. Still, I need to let him articulate the plan he’s cooked up so I can punch holes in it. “You have an idea,” I say. “Let’s hear it.”
“Give me a minute to think. Let’s cool off.”
We step out of the sauna into the bathroom, take turns running cold water over ourselves, slurp long hits from the kossu bottle, and go back into the heat.
“OK,” I say, “tell us.”
“We massacre them all in one day.”
This idea is so typical of Milo that I almost laugh. “Spell out who all is included in ‘them.’”
“Veikko Saukko, the national chief of police, the minister of the interior, and Jan Pitkanen.”
“I like it,” Sweetness says.
Now the laughter bursts out of me. “You just talked about how the murder of a couple cops would spark an investigation that would never end without a prosecution,” I say. “You’re discussing a mass murder of historic proportion. We would never, ever, get away with it. Not to mention that it’s hard to justify murder at all, let alone such a bloodbath.”
I toss more water on the stones, fill the room with a satisfying blast of steam.
“Of course we wouldn’t,” Milo says. “Unless we had a fall guy.”
“A fall guy?”
“A lone gunman. With good luck, we could even end up investigating the murders ourselves.”
“A patsy, who more than likely would spend most or all of the remaining years of his life in a mental institution. Who would you condemn to that?”
“The man who deserves it: Roope Malinen.”
Malinen does deserve it. He got away with, among other crimes, accessory to murder. Because of him, Lisbet Soderlund was murdered and decapitated, her head mailed to a Somali political organization.
Soderlund was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and so white, politician belonging to the Swedish People’s Party. She dedicated her life to public service. After the 2007 elections she was chosen to be the new minister of immigration and European affairs. She became a tireless champion of immigrants’ rights. She was their foremost advocate in government, and so came to be the object of contempt and hatred of the extreme right and racists. For a time, until it was removed because of its criminality, a Facebook page existed named “I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Soderlund.” The page attracted some hundreds of members.
Prior to the parliamentary election, the Real Finns, a supposed party of the people, was and is officially headed by Topi Ruutio, a member of the European Parliament. Its unofficial second in command is Roope Malinen. He held no office at the time, but his blog is the most popular in Finland, sometimes generates fifty thousand hits per day. The Real Finns agenda was unclear, except that they were anti-immigration, anti-European Union and wanted Finland to leave it. They denied charges of racism and euphemistically called themselves “maahanmuuttokriitikot,” critics of immigrants. Malinen blamed immigrants for the majority of Finland’s social ills.
Malinen hated Soderlund. He made that perfectly clear in his blog. A rumor spread that whoever killed Lisbet Soderlund would get her job, but it was only that, a rumor, started by Roope Malinen. Although he had no authority to decide such matters, it was taken seriously. Malinen also associated with right-wing activists, including neo-Nazis who sold heroin. They distributed, on the street level, to blacks, in an effort, as Saukko put it, “to sedate the nigger population,” and to some extent, Malinen helped orchestrate it.
None of his followers would roll over on Malinen. None of this could be proven. Veikko Saukko’s daughter had been assassinated by a sniper a year earlier in the aftermath of a bogus kidnapping. Her brother, Antti, absconded with the ten million euros. His partners in crime killed the girl as payback. Antti tried to kill us. Sweetness shot him into dog food and we kept the ten million, recompense for pain and suffering, because Saukko is such an asshole, and because if we didn’t keep it, corrupt politicians would.
We recovered the rifle used to murder Saukko’s daughter, used transfer tape to put Malinen’s prints on it, and turned Malinen in to the detective handling the case. Malinen hadn’t taken part in that murder, but given his other crimes, for which we believed with reasonable certainly he wouldn’t be prosecuted, felt a frame-up was justified. We hid the rifle in Malinen’s summer cottage and told the detective where to find it. The Powers That Be found Malinen more useful as a nutcase parliamentarian than behind bars, had the rifle wiped clean and suppressed it. It disappeared from the investigation, never made it into evidence, and showed up in no report. And so Malinen got away with conspiring to murder Lisbet Soderlund.
Now my curiosity is piqued. I’m not prepared to condone Milo’s plan, but I want to hear it out. “Continue,” I say.
“I’m going to create a lone gunman out of Malinen that will make the JFK cover-up look like something concocted by schoolkids.”
He takes his characteristic moment for melodrama, flips his beer upside down to cool the neck, flips it upright again and drinks. Working with Milo has significantly improved my ability to exhibit patience. I note that the irritability that nagged at me for weeks has now passed. My brain chemistry and the effects of brain surgery are stabilizing. I say nothing, wait on him.
“I write a two-thousand-five-hundred-page manifesto detailing the reasons behind his heinous crime. It will be simple, as he’s written thousands of pages in his blog, much of which can be construed as the hate-mongering of a deranged madman. I combine it with the manifestos of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech, some others. With so much material to work from, and since it’s supposed to be the rambling, semi-coherent tract of a psychopath, it won’t take too long or be very hard.”
“Won’t you find it hard to type thousands of pages with only one working hand?” I ask.
“Nope. I’ll use dictation software. I’ll get it done faster than if I typed it.”
“Suppose you make Malinen the lone gunman. What if he has an alibi for the time of the killings?”
Milo’s look says I’m stupid. “Duh. His killing rampage has to end in suicide.”
“Of course, how silly of me. And we have enough firearms for an army, but we need guns that can be traced back to him.”
“We check the database, find someone who has what we need, and B amp;E them. To do it right, we’ll have to make some videos of me posing as Malinen firing the weapons and fly them on YouTube, and also the most humiliating sexual ones starring the minister of the interior and the national chief of police. Their depravity will draw some attention away from the killings themselves. Malinen is about my size. We steal some personal items to make videos of him firing the weapons-I’ll wear a balaclava-return the items, and they’ll turn up during the investigation, along with the guns, which he’ll fingerprint for us before his unfortunate demise. I think I’ll even force him to make a voice-over for the video.”