tell Kate he needs something done that requires a person with two working hands. I give her a hug and kiss good-bye, and suggest she turn off the television and watch no more of this madness. She doesn’t.
Milo has a bottle of kossu and beers set out for us, in a cabin with a TV. I think the media is playing them over and over, but he’s recorded them. He pours shots. “Tomorrow is Go Day,” he says. “You were right—Malinen posted his itinerary in his blog. He’s going to his summer cottage to write his magnum opus, something to do with a cultural justification of misanthropy.”
“You know,” I say, “once you let that first bullet fly, there’s no calling it back.”
He nods. “I know. Malinen acting tomorrow in sympathy with Breivik will seal the deal. The guns, the video, the manifesto. No one will look further than him. We’ll walk away scot-free.”
I agree. “Let’s drink to your success,” I say. We pour them down our necks and light cigarettes.
“If you hadn’t tackled him, Pitkänen would have killed us both,” he says.
“Yeah, he would have.”
Milo pours us another. “Thanks for that.”
Brothers in blood, brothers in arms. “What did you do with him?” I ask.
“Drove him out to the countryside, packed his mouth with Semtex to get rid of dental records, then duct-taped his hands to his face to blow off his fingers, the point of course being to destroy his prints. And then, well, you can imagine the result. I walked about ten kilometers through woods until I came to a road with a bus stop, so no one would recall me being in the vicinity.”
With practice, we’ve become quite good criminals.
He points at a cardboard box, taped up, addressed and ready for mailing. “You thought releasing the info on prostitution would take attention away from us. It’s too late in the day and a Friday. It has to wait until Monday. I can mail these and plaster all our related documentation on the Internet then. Also, I can fly all the sex- and murder-related recordings of the chief and the minister at the same time.”
“Check with me first. The situation has changed. After today, you don’t need anything to deflect attention from you. And the bad guys don’t have a chance to make any moves before the doors are busted in, and there will be no confusion about who is who. The prostitution ring and murder investigations will drain police manpower and create a media circus. Generate a lot of confusion. Let’s choose our moment carefully.”
“You’d better go,” Milo says. “I have to make some changes to the manifesto. Skim through Breivik’s, then make some changes to mine. Claim that Breivik and Malinen were in contact and belonged to the same neo-Templar organization. Little stuff like that.”
I stand, and we share a brotherly hug. “You’ll make it happen,” I say.
He smiles. “From your mouth to God’s ear.”
41
I wake up, feel immediate fear and trepidation. I force myself to put those things away and ask Kate if she’d like to go out for the day. Maybe antiquing. I don’t want to stay in the house. The temptation to stay glued to the television and watch events unfold will be too great.
She agrees. She loves the Mercedes SL we leased, and she finds any excuse to drive it a good idea. We go to a few places, make frequent stops to rest my leg and fortify myself with beer. People around us talk. We hear snippets of conversation about a bomb and disaster. Then, in early evening, I suggest we dine out. We make it home just before the ten o’clock news, and finally, I give myself permission to learn the aftermath of today.
Everything was recorded on security camera tapes. Veikko Saukko’s head exploded like a melon slammed against an invisible wall. The chief and the minister got out of their golf cart near the green on the ninth hole. They disappeared into molecules. Where once was a golf cart, there was only a smoking pit. Newspeople quote Malinen’s manifesto. Those on the scene at his summer cottage aren’t allowed inside, but say police have informed them that Malinen has committed gun suicide, placed a .50 caliber Barrett rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger with his toe. They don’t say it, but this means his corpse is headless.
There is no talk of conspiracy or frame-up, only conjecture about why a prominent figure, both a member of parliament and unofficial