“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 makeshift 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.”