He moves to Antti’s girlfriend. “If you do not tell me where the money is, I will kill your baby.”
She screams and covers her belly with her hands. “I don’t know, he never told me.”
“You have ten seconds,” he says.
She cries, begs, pleads. He counts. I open the bindle, pour some heroin on my thumbnail and snort it. The pain melts away. Relief makes me sigh. I’m not opiate naive. I used narcotics to combat my headaches. I remain coherent.
He counts to zero and fires at an angle through the side of her belly. The bullet exits the other side of her stomach. The baby, if not dead, soon will die. She only moans and weeps silent tears. Her man, her dream, her child. She’s lost everything.
“We now have a time constraint,” Moreau says. “If she does not receive medical attention, she will die of internal bleeding.”
Kate makes not a sound, but on her face she wears a scream of terror and clutches Anu tight.
He kneels beside her. “You need not fear me. You remind me very much of someone so close to me that I would die myself rather than harm you. She is gone, but as long as you exist, in a way she does as well.”
He walks back over to me. “Yes, there was a rumor that whoever killed Lisbet Soderlund would get her job, but it was just that, a rumor, started by Roope Malinen. In truth, my Foreign Legion colleagues murdered her by agreement with Malinen, who promised them a permanent, lucrative, and competition-free concession in the Finnish heroin market. Malinen lied. He had no authority to promise anything in return for the assassination of Soderlund. He hated her and made a false promise concerning a heroin concession in the hopes that he could make good on it later, simply because he wanted her dead. You have gone a long way toward seeing that promise kept. They cut her head off with a meat saw in their food shop. I’m sure, if you live through today, you can find plenty of DNA from the saw and blood-spatter specks around their kitchen to prove it. Saukko demanded a spectacle of dedication to hate, which they gave him. Saukko said quit bullshitting around on the Internet and do something, hinting that it might change his mind about his campaign donation. Word went down the line via Malinen that Saukko wanted a display. Marcel and Thierry did it for political reasons, in the hopes that Saukko would then honor his million-euro campaign commitment. Saukko welshed anyway.
Kate finds her voice. “Why would you let us live? We know who you are.”
“I assure you that you do not. I do indeed work for the French government, but I have a stack of various identifications two inches thick. They will tell you that I work for them one day, then deny it the next.”
“Have you considered that we don’t know where the money is and you’re killing us all for nothing?” she asks.
“I recognize it as a possibility.”
“You’re an ugly human being,” she says.
“As I once told your husband, I am a peacekeeper. Sometimes, keeping the peace requires extreme measures. Giving me the ten million euros will restore harmony to all our lives.”
“For such an altruist, you seem quite concerned with wealth.”
“In fact, I have no interests other than my work, and my tastes are frugal. My wealth is symbolic. In darker moments of doubt, I tally my accounts, and the sum figure serves as proof and reassures me that I have followed the career that was my destiny. There is little more to it than that.”
“But still, you would kill us all to acquire it?”
“Oh yes, with the exception of you.”
He walks over to Milo, flicks open his stiletto, and lops off Milo’s right ear. Blood slops down his neck. “You are the weakest. I believe you will talk first. This is also a matter of time. If you wait too long, it cannot be sewn back on. The next time you get a turn, I’ll sharpen a stick, pop out your eye and perform a makeshift lobotomy on you. Instead of calculating ineffable permutations with your big, big brain, you’ll spend your life being pushed around in a wheelchair with a drool cup strapped to your chin. It’s remarkably easy to do. The man who popularized the procedure sometimes performed hundreds in a single day, divided the brains of whole institutions full of mental patients.”
Milo doesn’t make a sound. Not even the look on his face changes. The ear looks like an odd mushroom lying on a rock in the sun.
Moreau continues his explanation. “Antti kept the children at the summer cottage-which the family had not used in years-while he disappeared during the kidnapping. When he left with the money, he abandoned them. With their father dead, there was little to be done. Marcel and Thierry overdosed them with heroin hot shots in their sleep.”
“And you don’t think they’ll try to hunt you down and kill you after you’ve stolen their hard-earned fortune?”
“They were no longer required and a hindrance. I saw no reason to share the ten million with them after they bungled their own mission and called upon me to fix it. My purpose here is manifold. One is to control the drug trade. Another is to squelch the racist movement that seems to be veering out of control in Finland. These upset the order of things. My mission for my employers is, succinctly put, to restore order when situations require it. The heroin you watched me give to my former comrades had some parts of it, near the bottom of the bag, poisoned, in order to confuse matters and hide the poisoning for a time. Notice that the heroin I gave you was pure, not cut. And so they sold strychnine-laced heroin to racist elements, who in turn sold it to dealers who primarily deal with blacks in the name of, as they put it, ‘nigger sedation.’ Unfortunately, this will lead to some deaths, but the trail will lead back to the white supremacists. It will, however, result in the incarceration of these racist drug dealers, while at the same time rousing sympathy for their immigrant victims. My comrades became liabilities. If you live through today, you’ll discover that I’ve made it easy for you to solve your cases and, once again, shine as a hero. Albeit, a crippled one. It might make you feel better to know that, after all the unnecessary pain they caused-mostly out of enjoyment, I might add-they died badly indeed.”
Kate says, “Milo is in agony. Would you let me give him some heroin and put his ear in the shade so maybe it can be saved? It’s cooking on that rock.”
“For you,” he says, “anything.”
He hands her a bindle and she walks to the other side of the clearing to tend to Milo. Kate picks his ear up and moves it to the shade, to keep it cooler and slow decomposition.
Moreau strides over to Sweetness. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground. His flask is in his hand. He sucks at it.
“Wise move,” Moreau says. “Breaking you, big man, requires forethought. How to torture an elephant? I have a feeling you can endure a great deal, but you are a romantic and feel much affection for the others. That’s why I hurt them first.”
His back is to Kate. Milo wears his leather jacket with the specially made holster to make his sawed-off invisible. Apparently, Milo never showed it off to Moreau. Kate sets Anu on the ground, slides out the shotgun and points it at Moreau. It looks huge in her hands. It’s hard for her, but she puts a thumb on each hammer, pulls with all her might, and slowly they ease back and click into place.
Moreau doesn’t have to look, doesn’t even turn to face her. He knows the sound.
“And after all the nice things I just said about you.”
She says, “Don’t move.”
He doesn’t.
She keeps the barrels straight although she’s shaking hard and the gun is heavy. When she gets to within about four feet of him, she pulls both triggers. The gun roars, flames and smoke leap out of the barrels. Milo was supposed to have the gun loaded with rock salt. Instead, the ammo was razor-sharp flechettes. The blast cuts Moreau near in half, along his midsection. Not much holds the two pieces of him together. His blood and guts, bone chips, gore, spray out and onto Sweetness. Moreau falls, yet he still lives. I see him blink. His jacket is on fire. The flames spread.