James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

Pitkanen. The minister of the interior’s axman. I spared Osmo Ahtiainen’s life and this is the thanks I get. Maybe he doesn’t know his man is waging war on me. I start to call him but think better of it. It would tip him that I have someone inside, and as head of the secret police, he could run phone records checks and know who it is in about two and a half minutes.

Impressed and a little shocked, Milo asks, “Were you really going to go after Moore’s family?”

“Of course not,” I say, “but my track record left him uncertain about it. I didn’t think he would take the risk, and I was right.”

“We need to have a meeting,” Milo says.

Milo has changed. Before, he had a needy side to him. A need to impress. A need for recognition. A need for approval. All that seems gone now, replaced by self-possession and confidence. Being shot and cut, maimed and disabled, has tempered his steel. Suffering made him grow up.

We check the bedrooms. All the girls, including Anu, are asleep. I put the sauna on to ensure our privacy. We sit in silence in the living room and think our private thoughts while it warms. Sweetness, of course, breaks out more alcohol. I unwrap my knee and inspect it. It’s more swollen than it should be, but not oozing pus, and considering the abuse I’ve put it through, I suppose it’s OK.

We crack beers, hose ourselves down with the shower, and sit down in the sauna. Milo throws three dippers of water on the stones without asking. I’ve been to sauna with him before and he has the young-man, sauna-is-a-contest mentality. I was the same in my twenties. Now, in early middle age-and I’ve noticed most men get like me-I want to work up a good sweat without scalding myself. When it gets so hot that it burns the inside of my nose, I get out, shower in cold water, and cool down before going back in.

“Take it easy on me,” I say. “And sauna etiquette dictates that I should sit in the corner and toss the water.”

Milo is too thin. If he turned sideways and stuck his tongue out, he would look like a zipper. I once asked him if those were his legs or if he was riding a chicken, and it got under his skin. He’s by no means weak, though, just skinny and covered in ropy muscle.

He ignores the rebuke and gets down to the meat of the situation. “Who lives and who dies?”

The Gandhi pacifist life may not be working out for me, because of necessity, but I just don’t want to hurt anyone else. “We could begin by looking for a way out of this where nobody dies.”

Sweetness turns his beer upside down with his thumb covering the top, to cool down the neck so he can drink out of it without burning himself. “Sorry, pomo , not possible. My baby died.”

I don’t point out that it would have been aborted anyway. I suppose he doesn’t want to face it.

“And besides,” he says, “we have so many enemies, how can we ever make peace with them all?”

Milo ticks them off. “Veikko Saukko, and if Moore doesn’t kill them, the two Corsicans, the minister of the interior, the national chief of police, the Russian diplomats you’re trying to nail for human trafficking. Every fucking one of them is above the law and has people that do their dirty work for them.”

I let out a hopeless sigh. “And don’t forget Roope Malinen.”

He got his seat in parliament, but we hurt the extreme right and fucked up his hate agenda by exposing their drug pushing.

“I have another goal as well,” I say. “Those spreadsheets are all about human trafficking. I want those girls helped, especially Loviise Tamm.”

Milo and Sweetness nod agreement. “The men that brought her feel they own her now,” I say. “She needs protection.”

“Her mother called me,” Sweetness says. “She made arrangements for them to live in the countryside where they can hide and Loviise will be forgotten.” He swills beer. “I know you want Kate to see Loviise to prove something to her. But, pomo , I don’t want you to be disappointed if it doesn’t make everything right between you and your wife. It won’t.”

I built it up in my mind as if it would, but he’s right and I’m aware of it. “I think maybe we should all go stay at my house in Porvoo for a while. The windows are bulletproofed and the river runs in front of it, which is one less angle we can be easily attacked from. Plus, it’s bigger. This place is too small for five adults, a baby and a cat to live in.”

I inherited the house from Arvid Lahtinen. His wife of fifty years was in agony from bone cancer. He helped her die. I helped him cover it up. We became close friends. He was like a grandfather to me and made me his heir. Then, I suppose, feeling he had nothing left to live for, alone at age ninety, he blew his own brains out.

“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.