“Damn,” Milo said, “that was a good story. I didn’t know you can fuck in the snow.”
“Milo,” I said, “you can fuck in the burning sands of the Sahara. People always fuck. Always find a way.”
“Got any more stories?”
A failed experiment. I took no pleasure whatsoever in relating a sexual adventure. “Yeah, but you only get the one. Now it’s your turn.”
He grips the wheel with his knees to steer while he cracks his window and lights a smoke. “I would if I had any. I don’t have that much experience. I’ve had two semi-long-term relationships, three or four short-term, and no one-night stands. I have the feeling I’m a lousy fuck, just don’t know what I’m doing.”
Moreau says, “It’s hard to be a lousy fuck, unless you have a problem with premature ejaculation or are impotent. Let’s face the facts. Sex consists of heat, lubrication and friction. If those things are all in order, your sexual performance is probably at least adequate.”
“You’re a man of the world,” Milo says to him. “You must have some good stories.”
“I haven’t had a girlfriend for more than twenty years. I have sex exclusively with prostitutes. And never the same woman twice.”
This intrigues both Milo and Sweetness. Their heads turn toward him. “Why?” Milo asks.
“Relationships and the emotions they entail are time-consuming and a distraction from weightier matters. However, like most men, I enjoy sex. A business transaction has no complications, and I have no concerns such as yours. The experience is solely about my pleasure. And why never the same woman twice? It guards against ennui. I never sleep with African women, because the AIDS rate is so high. I most prefer Southeast Asian woman. They tend to be beautiful, accommodating, and I find their vaginas interesting, reminiscent of elephant skin. There’s something both exotic and erotic about it. I seldom engage prostitutes there anymore, either, though, for the same reason. AIDS is a danger.”
There’s something exotic about Moreau himself. He’s a strange man. I’ve never met anyone quite like him.
“Sweetness, that leaves you,” Milo says.
Sweetness reddens and takes a long pull from his flask. “I don’t have any stories.”
We’re all quiet for a moment. We take his meaning and don’t want to embarrass him further. Not even Milo.
“I’m between a rock and a hard spot,” Sweetness says. “I’m in love with Jenna. I don’t want to be with anyone but her, but I can’t do anything about it. She’s my third cousin once removed.”
Milo and Moreau burst with laughter. I bury my face in my hands in disbelief. Milo loses control of himself, has to pull the car over to the side of the road.
Sweetness drinks more, fights back tears. His face is the color of strawberry jam.
I reach over the seat and put a hand on his shoulder. “If she’s that distant a cousin, it’s not incest. There’s no danger of a genetic-related birth defect.”
He looks back at me, blinks, unbelieving, afraid I’m teasing him. “Really?”
“If I fucked Mirjami,” Milo says, “my aunt’s daughter, our child might have eight arms and three heads. But you have no worries.”
He takes this in for a while. “Still, she’s only sixteen.”
“She’s of legal age,” I say, “and you’re only twenty-two. That’s between you and her, and you and your conscience.”
“For what it’s worth,” Milo says, “cousin or not, I would fuck the daylights out of Mirjami if she let me. That’s why God made birth control.”
“I wonder if Jenna has feelings for me too,” Sweetness asks.
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you,” I say. “I think it’s safe to say that she does.”
He looks at me, imploring, looking to me for truth, wisdom and certainty. “Are you sure?”
I nod. “Pretty sure. I think you can count on it.”
His laughter diminishes to a chuckle, and Milo pulls out onto the highway again. I get a mental image of tiny Jenna and huge Sweetness. They take off their clothes. He must have a dick that would put Moby Penis to shame. She flees naked into the night, terrified.
The oddity strikes me. My killer, my Luca Brasi, and I have just had our first father-and-son talk.
“May I see your cane?” Moreau asks.
I hand it to him. He turns it over in his hands, examines it, admires it. “It is quite unique. At least, I have never seen such a thing. It must have been made for a very rich man, most likely royalty. The lion’s-head handle must be close to a half pound of gold, plus the jewels are large and high-quality, and it is the work of a master craftsman. How does it function?”
He hands it back to me. I smack the bottom tip of the cane hard against the car floor. The lion’s mouth snaps open to near a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle. Sometimes I carry it with the mouth open because it offers more surface area to hold on to, and also because I like the feel of the razors against the skin of my fingers. Of course, I can’t shift my grip without drawing blood.
“The teeth are daggers and the edges razors on both sides. The two canine fangs aren’t for cutting. They’re spring releases. When pushed backward and depressed, the springs engage and the mouth clamps shut. So when swung like a baseball bat, the canines hit the target and the lion bites.”
“Ingenious,” Moreau says.
I’m curious about him, and suspicious of his motives. He’s a spook for another government. He likely has an agenda that I haven’t even guessed at. “Tell me about Mexico,” I say.
“It is a miserable shithole.”
I feign the practiced smile. “I meant about what you did there.”
“As I said, as with all commodities, narcotics distribution is a global enterprise and delicately balanced. Many nations depend on drugs for the economic stability of their countries. The U.S. and Mexico among them. The balance was disturbed in Mexico and many thousands died in a war for control of the trade between the Sinaloa cartel and the Juárez gang.
“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 Juárez 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 Joaquín Guzmán 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, Guzmán 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. Sweetn
ess 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 über 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 façade, 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 Töölö, 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 Söderlund with you. And I’d like to talk about a website called I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund. 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 Söderlund 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 Söderlund.”
“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 h
ow 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 Söderlund 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.
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