James Thompson - Helsinki Blood

Soderlund was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and so white, politician belonging to the Swedish People’s Party. She dedicated her life to public service. After the 2007 elections she was chosen to be the new minister of immigration and European affairs. She became a tireless champion of immigrants’ rights. She was their foremost advocate in government, and so came to be the object of contempt and hatred of the extreme right and racists. For a time, until it was removed because of its criminality, a Facebook page existed named “I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Soderlund.” The page attracted some hundreds of members.

Prior to the parliamentary election, the Real Finns, a supposed party of the people, was and is officially headed by Topi Ruutio, a member of the European Parliament. Its unofficial second in command is Roope Malinen. He held no office at the time, but his blog is the most popular in Finland, sometimes generates fifty thousand hits per day. The Real Finns agenda was unclear, except that they were anti-immigration, anti-European Union and wanted Finland to leave it. They denied charges of racism and euphemistically called themselves “maahanmuuttokriitikot,” critics of immigrants. Malinen blamed immigrants for the majority of Finland’s social ills.

Malinen hated Soderlund. He made that perfectly clear in his blog. A rumor spread that whoever killed Lisbet Soderlund would get her job, but it was only that, a rumor, started by Roope Malinen. Although he had no authority to decide such matters, it was taken seriously. Malinen also associated with right-wing activists, including neo-Nazis who sold heroin. They distributed, on the street level, to blacks, in an effort, as Saukko put it, “to sedate the nigger population,” and to some extent, Malinen helped orchestrate it.

None of his followers would roll over on Malinen. None of this could be proven. Veikko Saukko’s daughter had been assassinated by a sniper a year earlier in the aftermath of a bogus kidnapping. Her brother, Antti, absconded with the ten million euros. His partners in crime killed the girl as payback. Antti tried to kill us. Sweetness shot him into dog food and we kept the ten million, recompense for pain and suffering, because Saukko is such an asshole, and because if we didn’t keep it, corrupt politicians would.

We recovered the rifle used to murder Saukko’s daughter, used transfer tape to put Malinen’s prints on it, and turned Malinen in to the detective handling the case. Malinen hadn’t taken part in that murder, but given his other crimes, for which we believed with reasonable certainly he wouldn’t be prosecuted, felt a frame-up was justified. We hid the rifle in Malinen’s summer cottage and told the detective where to find it. The Powers That Be found Malinen more useful as a nutcase parliamentarian than behind bars, had the rifle wiped clean and suppressed it. It disappeared from the investigation, never made it into evidence, and showed up in no report. And so Malinen got away with conspiring to murder Lisbet Soderlund.

Now my curiosity is piqued. I’m not prepared to condone Milo’s plan, but I want to hear it out. “Continue,” I say.

“I’m going to create a lone gunman out of Malinen that will make the JFK cover-up look like something concocted by schoolkids.”

He takes his characteristic moment for melodrama, flips his beer upside down to cool the neck, flips it upright again and drinks. Working with Milo has significantly improved my ability to exhibit patience. I note that the irritability that nagged at me for weeks has now passed. My brain chemistry and the effects of brain surgery are stabilizing. I say nothing, wait on him.

“I write a two-thousand-five-hundred-page manifesto detailing the reasons behind his heinous crime. It will be simple, as he’s written thousands of pages in his blog, much of which can be construed as the hate-mongering of a deranged madman. I combine it with the manifestos of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Tech, some others. With so much material to work from, and since it’s supposed to be the rambling, semi-coherent tract of a psychopath, it won’t take too long or be very hard.”

“Won’t you find it hard to type thousands of pages with only one working hand?” I ask.

“Nope. I’ll use dictation software. I’ll get it done faster than if I typed it.”

“Suppose you make Malinen the lone gunman. What if he has an alibi for the time of the killings?”

Milo’s look says I’m stupid. “Duh. His killing rampage has to end in suicide.”

“Of course, how silly of me. And we have enough firearms for an army, but we need guns that can be traced back to him.”

“We check the database, find someone who has what we need, and B amp;E them. To do it right, we’ll have to make some videos of me posing as Malinen firing the weapons and fly them on YouTube, and also the most humiliating sexual ones starring the minister of the interior and the national chief of police. Their depravity will draw some attention away from the killings themselves. Malinen is about my size. We steal some personal items to make videos of him firing the weapons-I’ll wear a balaclava-return the items, and they’ll turn up during the investigation, along with the guns, which he’ll fingerprint for us before his unfortunate demise. I think I’ll even force him to make a voice-over for the video.”

“And his ‘unfortunate demise’ will take place how?”

“In his summer cottage, which is a short trip from my summer cottage by boat. We either lure him there, make him believe he’s meeting someone, or take him there by force. It doesn’t matter much, just so long as we get him there alone, without his family.”

Milo has all the bases covered except one. “How do you plan to get all those people in one place?”

His smile is knowing. “I don’t. You stole all of their phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads. They contain their calendars. We know where they’ll be and when. If they’re too spread out for us to shoot them all in one day, we plant bombs.”

“Bombs. So you’re not concerned about collateral damage?”

“If I wire them up so that a cell phone completes the circuit-Iraq jihad style-we can do it in line of sight and ensure no innocents are injured. There are three of us, after all. We choose which of us kills who, with time intervals to support the lone-gunman theory, and it should work out.”

“And where will you get the explosives?”

“Helsinki is expanding at a tremendous rate. Because of geography, we can’t grow outward, and nobody wants skyscrapers here, and so we’re building downward instead of up. Underneath the city, there’s an ever-expanding warren of tunnels. And those tunnels are created with explosives. It won’t be hard to liberate a small amount for our purposes. There must be tons down there.”

“And what if Moore doesn’t kill the Corsican father and son who intend to wipe out everyone on Saukko’s Shit List?”

“We either murder them too, or the money disappears from the safe-deposit box-I’m not sure how to pull that off yet, but I’ll work it out-and their deal is off. According to Moore, there’s nearly a million in it. I wouldn’t mind to heist it. Let’s see what comes of it.”

“Let me think about this,” I say, and step out for some cold water and kossu . It doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.

I sit back down in the sauna. I’m cold from the shower, splash some water on the stones to warm me up. “No,” I say.

Milo’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean no. I don’t want to murder all those people.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. They want to murder you and your family, and I’m sure mine and Sweetness’s along with them. You think they knew Mirjami and Jenna were going to be in the Audi when it blew? They assumed it would be Kate.”