“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.
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.”