Helsinki Blood

40

Kate and I pass the week in quiet solitude. I don’t want to touch a gun right now. I tell Kate I’m tired of fishing and sleep late with her in the mornings. We read, watch movies, eat well. There is no talk of the past or future. We live squarely in the present.

On Friday, July 22, we watch the evening news. In Norway, a man named Anders Behring Breivik has gone on a politically motivated killing rampage. About three thirty in the afternoon, he detonated a bomb in Oslo, destroying or damaging government buildings. From there, he went to the island of Utoya, where a gathering of the Workers’ Youth League, affiliated with the Labor Party, was taking place. He went on a shooting spree. The body count is uncertain, but he killed between sixty and eighty people, mostly teenagers.

An hour and a half before embarking on mass murder, he released his manifesto via the Internet, well over a thousand pages, to hundreds if not thousands of e-mail addresses, titled A European Declaration of Independence. It explains his political views. Among many other beliefs, he calls for white nationalism and for the deportation or annihilation of Muslims in the Western nations, to preserve European Christendom. He wants to launch a counter-jihad in the spirit of the Knights Templar, and even claims to belong to a neo-Templar organization, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici, an anti-jihad organization sworn to fight Islam.

Most interesting, from the perspective of our agenda, is that he cites the writings of Roope Malinen as having influenced his own writing and thinking.

There’s footage from the destruction of buildings. Several people died in the blast. Some people on Utoya recorded the attack with cell phones and video cameras. Some clips make the news. We watch children being gunned down and dying. It’s heartbreaking. Kate cries. I can barely watch it myself.

Milo calls and asks me to come over to his boat. I 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, Pitkanen 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.”