Helsinki White Read online

  Un-moderated bloggers and social networking sites ran wild. Sterilize blacks and Arabs to prevent the dilution of Finnish blood. The mud people make mud babies. Tar babies. Burn mosques. Fuck Lisbet Söderlund, the dead nigger dick licker got what she deserved. Niggers destroy order, breed chaos.

  Finland roiled with hatred. Race crime threats abounded.

  In Joensuu, five neo-Nazis wearing bulletproof vests, presumably in case police shot them with rubber bullets to quell the riot, attacked a left-wing candidate and her supporters during a speech. The anonymity of social networking generated straight talk. Facebook pages sprang up and discussed the pros and cons of sending the niggers back to Africa versus feeding them to gas chambers and ovens. They discussed eliminating more politicians from the left with bullets.

  Plus, there were two more junkie suicides and one more pharmacy robbery.

  I got a call from SUPO. The country’s major newspapers had all received a fax. It appeared constructed in the same way as the note accompanying Lisbet Söderlund’s severed head. It read, “For every crime committed by blacks against whites, we will kill a nigger in retribution.”

  They sent me a scan. The angles at which the letters had been cut out looked like work by the same hand.

  Milo shook his head, disgusted. “You know, they brought a lot of this on themselves.”

  If I’d felt emotions, I don’t know if I would have been angry, or laughed at his ignorance, or both.

  “And why,” I asked, “do you think that might be?”

  “Because our Muslim immigrants breed like rats, and they make little or no attempt to assimilate. Suomen Islamilainen Puolue—the Muslim political party—calls for Sharia law. With the rise of political Islam, what many term Islamofascism, by which fundamentalist Muslims pervert their religion and attempt to build a worldwide caliphate and impose Sharia law on all of us, it’s our natural inclination to be opposed to it.”

  It had become our habit to speak English when Kate was present, out of politeness. Her ears perked up.

  Milo continued. “If they succeeded, they would take away all our freedoms, force us to change our way of life, take away our right to free speech and all the basic rights of women, such as education. Do you want Kate to be forced to wear a veil? Our criminal justice system would no longer include fair trials and our limbs would be amputated as punishments. Those possibilities scare a few people.”

  “And after a few generations,” Kate said, “all the little Finnish babies would be chocolate colored instead of Aryan snow-white.”

  Milo hesitated, he knew he couldn’t give a non-racist answer. “I like Finland as it is. Finnish people living the Finnish way.”

  “Milo,” Kate said, “for a bright guy, you can be a real fucking dipshit.”

  She turned on the radio so she could tune him out. I was glad she didn’t understand the words to the song that was playing. It was a hit from the early nineties, when Somali immigrants first began arriving, by Irwin Goodman. It was about getting rid of the mud people and licorice clowns.

  16

  The following day, Sweetness and I set out early and went to post offices to see if any postal workers remembered the person who mailed the box that contained Lisbet Söderlund’s head. The box was uninsured and required no receipt signature, so we knew only, from the ink stamp, that it was mailed in Helsinki. We began at the neighborhood post office that services Kuninkaantie 38 and so the Finnish Somalia Network. No luck.

  However, after receiving the pig’s head in the mail just before Christmas, a worker there invented a Finnish pseudonym and set up a Hotmail account. Fearing a more violent attack, she joined every anti-immigrant Facebook group she could find, including I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund, in order to gather evidence in the event that the Finnish Somalia Network was targeted again. She printed out all the posts daily. She made me copies of all of them. A valuable gift for the investigation. No criminal justice authorities had done the same.

  We moved on to the main post office downtown and got a copy of the work roster for March sixteenth, the day the package was mailed. The place is a madhouse, always busy. We interviewed every worker who had been on duty that day in person if they were on-site, or by telephone if they weren’t. Too many customers. Just faceless cattle in long lines. We got zilch.

  We stepped outside, I lit a smoke and my phone rang. The caller was Detective Sergeant Saska Lindgren, from Helsinki Homicide. He was at a crime scene investigating the murder of two black men. A note at the scene, the letters clipped and glued to a sheet of printing paper, read, “For Rami Sipilä,” the soldier whose throat had been cut the day before.

  I’d consulted with Saska before, and he’s sharp, considered one of the best policemen in the nation.

  The murder scene was in East Helsinki, a district with a bad reputation and a high immigrant population. Sweetness grew up there, and so knows the area like the back of his hand. We headed over. It was a little below zero, but we had twelve hours of sunlight a day now.

  We arrived at a single-family home with a yard. There weren’t many around here. The area is dominated by apartment buildings, most of them built in the 1970s, when functionality was the style and ugly was the result. The area was cordoned off. Television news vans and reporters lined the street. They waved microphones and shouted. Saska and I exchanged greetings and ignored them. I introduced Sweetness. He usually takes people aback because of his massive size, but Saska appeared not to notice. Half-Gypsy, he’s taken a lot of racial shit in his life, and I’ve noticed that he’s non-judgmental about people, or at least reserves judgment until given cause to form one. “Have a look,” he said.

  Two young black men had been poisoned in a makeshift gas chamber. They were taken to their garage and made to lie on the floor under the rear of a station wagon. A blanket was draped over the exhaust pipe, the bumper and the men. The engine was left running until they died of carbon monoxide poisoning and the car ran out of gas.

  “They’re brothers,” Saska said, “Dalmar and Korfa Farah. Somalis. They lived here with their mother and sister. Their father was killed in Somalia. I don’t know anything about them yet.”

  Milo, Saska and I went to the front lawn to smoke. Sweetness tagged along, looking back over his shoulder. Corpses have a strange effect on him. I notice he can’t stop staring at them. “I called you because of the note,” Saska said. “Some blacks and whites are playing tit for tat. White racists murdered Lisbet Sönderlund. Angry blacks stole rifles and murdered a soldier. The same racists probably killed these guys. It won’t stop here. Reprisals are inevitable. I’d like for us to stay in touch, share relevant information.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “let’s do that. This country is already in a hate frenzy. It could lead to places we never thought possible.”

  He ground out his cigarette. “That’s my fear.”

  “Where are the mother and sister?” I asked.

  “Hiding in the house. They’re afraid to come out. They were asleep, didn’t hear a thing.”

  “How’s the Saukko case going?” I ask.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. The case is a kidnap-murder involving Finland’s richest family. It went wrong. Almost a year has passed and it’s gone unsolved. A source of embarrassment. The case belongs to Saska.

  “It isn’t going,” he said. “I’m going to have to start from the beginning, re-read every document and report. I’ve missed something.”

  I tried to commiserate. “The Söderlund case isn’t going any better.”

  Of course, I’d been working on my case less than a week, and he was coming up on a year, but he knew I was just trying to be politic. “Let me know when you get some background on those guys, will you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Sweetness knocked reporters out of my way so I could get through them on crutches, and we left.

  17

  I went to physical therapy, got my knee tortured and went home. The surgery and therapy worked,
though. My knee hadn’t had this much mobility since I got shot, and its range of motion increased daily. Pretty soon, I could say good-bye to the crutches.

  Sweetness and I tossed Lisbet’s home and office. I went through her correspondence, looked for threatening letters. Her purse was missing, and her mobile as well. Her office was neat, orderly. It spoke of efficiency. I noted that there were no personal touches. No photographs. No awards or signs of achievement, and given her success, she must have received many. This told me she was private and modest.

  Having processed hundreds or thousands of crime scenes, I’ve been in countless Finnish homes, and what has always struck me the most is their similarity. Almost everyone uses the same styles of cups and saucers, furniture. Most homes are nearly interchangeable, and hers was the same. I noted that she liked plants. There were almost two dozen plants of various kinds throughout her apartment. And she had a large temperature-controlled fish tank. The fish looked exotic—no goldfish—so I assumed they brought her pleasure. I fed them, and made a note to have them removed and cared for.

  Her wardrobe was commonplace businesswoman boring. She had workout clothes. Shoes for aerobics and jogging. She took care of her physique. As with her office, she had few knickknacks or photos displayed. She believed in functionality.

  Once home, I got her phone records, called every person she had called or had called her for the past couple months. She was single, had no romantic interests. Her work dominated her life. She was well liked, hadn’t spoken of threats or enemies, other than the website that wished her dead. She didn’t take it seriously. I spoke to her colleagues. They told me the same. She was last seen leaving work on the day of her death at about six p.m.

  She used public transportation, owned no car. Officers were posted at the bus and tram stops she normally used. For several days, every person who used those stops would be queried and asked if they remembered seeing her. But if they didn’t, it meant nothing. Helsinki public transportation passengers seldom look around, avoid eye contact.

  Milo and I worked from our own apartments. There was no need for us to be in the same building. Our computers were networked, the database set up, and we had split up the files to sort through them. We could videoconference with webcams if needed. I sat for a long time, thinking about a practical way to search for her body. In this large, metropolitan area, I could think of none. I could only hope that it turned up in a Dumpster or some such thing. In Helsinki, at this time of year, anyone with half a brain would weigh her down and give her a burial at sea.

  “It’s good to see you being a detective again, instead of a thief,” Kate said.

  “I like it better, too,” I said. And I did. I had no moral problem with taking down dope dealers. I was just more at home in an old and comfortable role. I couldn’t focus on the mountain of material detailing every racist in Finland, though. Kate and Aino talked on the phone. Their friendship was deepening. I kept picturing Aino’s blue eyes and blond hair. The way her sweater accented her breasts. Thoughts of fucking her were far more interesting than those of Lisbet Söderlund’s decapitated head. I couldn’t work until Kate hung up the phone and ended their conversation.

  I sat at the table with my laptop for two more days. Katt slept in my lap or sat on my shoulder, dug his claws into my neck. The pain kept my mind from wandering. Yes, going through this morass of material, routine police investigation, and following up on hundreds of most likely possibilities would eventually lead to Lisbet’s murderer, but how long would it take? People were dying daily. Routine work wouldn’t do. I went through the Facebook pages given to me by the woman at the Finnish Somalia Network. I felt the answer lay inside them.

  I joined every Finnish social networking hate group I could find. One, Auttakaamme Maahanmuuttajarikolliset Takaisin Kotiin— Let’s Help Send the Immigrant Criminals Back Home—had over twenty-six thousand members. Another needle in a haystack. But the group on Facebook that directly threatened her, I Would Give Two Years of My Life to Kill Lisbet Söderlund, had a member with a user name and picture of Heinrich Himmler who on multiple occasions expressed a desire to send all of Finland’s black immigrants to the gas chamber. And now two brothers were dead, murdered in a homemade gas chamber. Many members of the group went by Nazi user names: Goering, Ilse Koch, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, but the tone of the rhetoric of the member that called himself Himmler told me he was the man I wanted to locate. If he hadn’t himself murdered Lisbet Söderlund, I thought he knew who did. But how would I find him?

  Saska Lindgren called me. The murdered young men were known low-level drug dealers. They sold everything from hashish to heroin. Their bank cards indicated they had taken a train to Turku on the day of their murder. Bought one-way tickets. They ate at McDonald’s in Turku. That was the last trace of them.

  I watched the news. Assaults and beatings, white and black youth gang clashes. Attacks on apostate Finnish white women, converted to Islam because of their marriages to Muslims. Their mixed-race babies spat upon in their carriages. Close-ups of tears streaming into veils. The media used to bury these stories, often not reporting gang fights. Police often broke up clashes but made no arrests. A concerted group effort to hide racial tensions. Now the media is minimalizing and downplaying them, reporting them in the most neutral of tones, but they can’t be ignored.

  On Friday night we pulled a heist, B&Eed both ends of a drug deal after the fact. It didn’t make sense to me, as we were in the public eye, but Jyri insisted, told me I’d be glad I did it. It was odd, though, because we were to steal over half a million euros, plus the drugs, then take them to another address and hide them in the apartment. We exercised extreme caution. Milo had their cars GPS tracked, their phones tapped. We drove around for an hour first, made sure we weren’t tailed. It went off without a hitch.

  We went for a drink after the heist, as had become our habit. As we sipped our beers, paranoia and mistrust finally boiled over. One gangster finally killed another, stabbed him to death and left him in the trunk of his car. Milo learned of it when the killer called his boss to tell him what he had done. If a mafia war started and Helsinki Homicide investigated, everything would unravel and the trail would lead back to us. I decided we had to dispose of the body in the morning.

  18

  We met outside my apartment building at seven a.m. The media had honored Jyri’s wishes that they deal with him, as I dealt with the investigation and matters of national security. There were no reporters outside my home, no tagalongs as we drove around the city. The only calls and e-mails were from news agencies outside Finland, and I ignored them.

  Body disposal fell into the category of subjects off-limits in front of Kate. My keen intuition told me she wouldn’t approve.

  The thermometer was on the plus side now, and I noted that the series of grimy icebergs lining the street was shrinking. Not the result of global warming, but of spring. The first tiny buds were appearing on the trees.

  We went to a kiosk around the corner and got coffee. A small high table meant for standing rather than sitting made for a good spot to converse, sotto voce.

  “Ideas?” I asked.

  “I ain’t cuttin’ up no fuckin’ bodies,” Sweetness said.

  Milo and I agreed. None of us had the stomach for something that disgusting.

  “The head and hands have to go,” Milo said. “I made a thermite bomb last night, and I have enough gunpowder from my reloading outfit to pack his mouth. We can put the bomb in his hands. It will burn at about three thousand degrees. His hands will disappear, along with most of the rest of him when the bomb goes off. When the gunpowder ignites, his teeth will be reduced to powder. The car will explode and there won’t be anything left but a smoking black frame.”

  “How did you make the bomb?” Sweetness asked.

  “It’s mostly just aluminum and iron oxides. Stuff you can get at hardware stores. I had some lying around.”

  “Isn’t there a less dramatic way to get rid of him?
” I asked. “We just need to make him disappear. No body, no murder.”

  Sweetness takes some nuuska and jams it into his gum. “Dad worked as a welder at the shipyards. He got me a job there one summer. They got barrels of acid in shipping containers. They’re for industry, like paper and nuclear factories. We could just stick him in one and seal him up.”

  Milo’s eyes sunk deeper into their black pits as he pondered. “Do you remember what kinds of acid?”

  “Hydrochloric and hydrofluoric are two that I remember.”

  Milo half grinned. The less-than-gentle giant knew such big words.

  I tried to sip my coffee. It was still too scalding to drink. “There are workers around the shipyard. And we have to dump out part of the barrel so he fits in it. So we need an empty barrel. And those barrels are big and heavy. We need something to pick it up with so we can tip the full barrel and pour part of the acid into the empty one. And we need protective clothing, head to toe, in case we slosh it and get it on us. The concept is right, but we can’t do all that at the shipyards.”

  Milo slapped the table, slopped everyone’s coffee and burned Sweetness’s fingers. “Goddamn it,” he said.

  Milo laughed. “I got it. Filippov Construction. Everything we need is there, and we have the privacy.”

  Filippov Construction had been closed since Arvid murdered its owner, Ivan Filippov, a few weeks ago, and his wife, Iisa Filippov, disappeared. The business specialized in industrial waste disposal. Work there had ceased, the site stood empty.

  “How do you know they have acid, and the right kind?” I asked.

  “I read their inventory.” He looked at Sweetness and, for the sake of one-upmanship, because Sweetness knew big words, said, “I remember almost everything I read. They have sulfuric acid. It’s not as effective as hydrochloric or hydrofluoric for our purposes. The body will take some weeks to dissolve. It will turn to goo, then viscous liquid, and eventually just be gone. Not even a trace of DNA will be left.”