The Mine

by Antti Tuomainen

  It was a quarter to five in the evening. Judging by the dark forecourt, the illuminated red-wooden church and the emptiness around me, you might have thought it was later. Hutrila, our editor-in-chief, would call me within the hour. I knew this, though we hadn’t agreed anything beforehand. Hutrila had recently remarried and had become a father again, and he liked to clear his desk early in the evening. This habit annoyed people. Members of our team said he was always in a rush and called him Hurrila, which certainly didn’t do anything to lighten the general mood in the editorial department of a paper that was already beset with financial woes.

  Snow crunched beneath the tyres as I slowly pulled out of the hotel drive. The red light of the petrol dial was staring at me furiously. I didn’t know why I bothered flashing the indicator as I accelerated and turned into the main street. Illuminated windows here and there; signs of life.

  The lights of the petrol station flickered in the distance. Two pumps, a roof above them and a mechanic’s workshop. Only as I pulled up to the pump did I notice what looked like a small bar or café to the right of the forecourt – two large windows from which a gentle light spilled on to the even, unploughed snow outside. I filled the tank. The pump’s handle was so cold, it ate into my hand, gnawed my fingers to shreds and then spat them out, numb. I closed the fuel cap and walked up to the door.

  There was a thin line between the café and the drivers’ break room. Where did one end and the other begin? The distinguishing features of the break room were its general shabbiness and the belongings left lying around: a manly power drill with a set of bits on a table; two people’s plates, cutlery, napkins and glasses of dried milk on another. A third table was empty, but it was wobbly. At the café end of the space was a tall counter complete with pots of coffee and a vitrine displaying pastries, and behind that you could see a section of the kitchen, flooded with fluorescent light. Directly in front of me, opposite the front door, was the door into the toilets. The blackness of the area around the handle revealed this was in heavy use.

  The man sitting at the wobbly table looked up.

  ‘You paying for petrol?’ he asked, and scratched his chin.

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Over there,’ the man nodded.

  I looked at the unmanned counter. ‘Okay.’

  Once I had reached the cash register the man stood up, the legs of his chair screeching across the floor, walked behind me and round to the other side of the counter.

  ‘Pump number one. A hundred and eight euros and thirty cents. Anything else?’

  I glanced at the pastries on display, then at the coffee pot. Five minutes. It might perk me up. I could phone around for a hotel room. I added a coffee and bun to my bill, carried them over to the table with the power drill and sat down to sort myself out.

  My phone wouldn’t work; there was no signal. The coffee stung my gums; the bun felt scratchy and dry. The drill was pointing towards my stomach and it was snowing again.

  I turned to the man. ‘Sorry, can I bother you for a minute?’

  The man looked up as though he’d been reading a paper. Except the table was empty.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘My phone won’t work. I’m looking for a hotel…’

  ‘Opposite the church.’

  ‘It’s fully booked. Is there another…?’

  ‘No. But if you drive a bit further, you’ll find something.’

  ‘Which direction?’

  ‘You go that way, turn right and drive about seven kilometres until you reach the sign for Koitaniemi; take the turning and drive a few kilometres and you’ll find the Casino in Varpainen.’

  ‘Casino?’

  ‘It’s a summer place. They call it the Casino. These days it’s open in the winter too. Because of this mining business.’

  ‘Talking of the mine … I’m a reporter. Janne Vuori, Helsinki Today.’

  A new expression spread across the man’s pocked face. Perhaps it was curiosity. ‘Something to do with those activists, is it?’

  My face must have been just inquisitive enough. The angular, fifty-year-old man leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I mean, they were from Helsinki too. Pulled up here, filled their tank, ordered a cup of tea and sat here eating their own packed lunch even though we had hot pot out the back. I listened to them while they were talking; made me think it won’t be long before things start happening round here.’

  ‘Before what starts happening?’

  ‘Something they were cooking up together. You know, the way they were talking about the mine.’

  ‘What way were they talking?’

  The man glanced outside and I instinctively did the same. The lights in the forecourt turned the snow yellow.

  ‘The way these people usually talk. They say a lot but they don’t know what they’re talking about. And I recognised one of them – from his picture in the paper. Blue hair. What kind of man has blue hair, eh? Environmental activist or not.’

  ‘When was this?’ I asked.

  ‘A week ago, week and a half, maybe.’

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘One woman, three men. I’d better not tell you what I thought of them.’

  ‘How old were they?’

  ‘In their thirties. Seems that’s why you’re here, after all.’

  The man might have been right. I’d be sent a tip-off and I was following it.

  ‘I’m writing an article about the mine,’ I said, trying to change the subject.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  The man tilted his head. ‘Is that what you lot live off down south? Traipse round the country, talking a lot of waffle? It doesn’t seem right in the head to me. You got family?’

  ‘A wife and daughter.’

  ‘Proud of you, are they?’

  The garage owner’s estimate of seven kilometres was about right. The signpost appeared just as the man had said, and I turned off towards Koitaniemi. The road narrowed, the verges of snow piled either side growing taller. Fortunately, there were no cars coming from the other direction. My phone still couldn’t find a signal. I switched the thing off and booted it up again.

  I thought of the words that the garage owner had used.

  The blue-haired environmental activist was someone I’d seen in the media.

  Like thousands of others, I’d watched a YouTube video showing the activist’s now infamous stunt: Santtu Leikola, a thirty-year-old man with hair dyed a bright, electric blue, who had become disillusioned and rescinded his membership of Greenpeace, stared at the camera and told the world what he was about to do and why. The image was effective in its simplicity: Leikola’s pale, pocked, badly lit face; his blue, scruffy hair jutting out here and there against the black wall.

  Through a series of crude, amateurish cuts, the camera followed him as he packed his equipment: a long steel pole, which could be extended and retracted like a telescope and fitted into his rucksack; a flag four metres by eight in size; a length of rope; a number of distress flares; and other associated paraphernalia. Leikola’s voice was that of a fanatic: clearly agitated and utterly humourless. I couldn’t remember his exact words but the frankness with which he made his threats and the names of those he mentioned had stayed with me. Once Leikola had shrugged the bag on to his back, the picture jumped again.

  Next the viewer was in the Töölö neighbourhood, behind the Parliament House.

  The camera moved jerkily as the activists (for there must have been at least two of them) climbed on to the roof of the Parliament. Once they were there, the image stabilised. In the background, the winter sun hung in the cloudless sky above the city. Leikola took a power drill from his rucksack and attached the telescopic flagpole to the ventilation shaft with a set of long steel screws. The pole was attached firmly, and, from watching his movements thus far, you could tell Leikola was quick and strong, and good with his hands. The flag was hoisted up the pole, fluttering in the brisk south-eastern wi
nd, and then Leikola began to prepare the flares.

  Again the picture jumped suddenly, and the next time we saw Leikola and the flag, the angle was completely different.

  Now we were standing in the sloping garden outside the Music Centre across the street from the Parliament. The bright-yellow flag billowed and the distress flares glowed blood-red in the skies above Helsinki. NUCLEAR WASTE – SHUT AWAY FOR 1,000,000 YEARS, read the flag as, at that moment, parliament voted on commissioning the country’s fifth nuclear plant. The stunt garnered lots of publicity and earned Leikola a fine. But the most important element was the video itself: rough, punchy and produced with a sense of earnest. Then there were the threats it contained. Leikola’s comment about ‘rather two hundred dead MPs than a million dead, innocent civilians’ had caught on – a macabre slogan that had been twisted into numerous memes.

  It was almost exactly a year since the stunt took place.

  Before I realised I’d arrived in Varpainen, the headlights hit the sign outside the Casino.

  BEACH – CASINO – HOTEL

  HOLIDAY FUN FOR ALL THE FAMILY

  GAMES, EVENTS, THEME PARK, MASSAGE

  A few minutes later I could just make out the contours of the faintly lit building through the darkness.

  This wasn’t exactly Las Vegas.

  The Casino had been built by knocking together – from left to right – a detached house, a roadside motel and a spa complex, all from different decades. The lakeshore probably lay behind this mess. The ground floor of the detached house looked like it must be the reception; in front of it was the parking lot, where a few cars stood partially covered in snow. I took my bag from the back seat.

  The woman in her sixties standing behind the reception desk looked as though she was expecting me.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ she smiled when I said I needed a room. ‘We’ve got one left.’

  I’d just parked in an almost deserted car park.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We’ve been really busy these last few months. Breakfast is from six till ten. The sauna is on until eleven. You can stay in there until twelve but the stove will be cooling down.’

  ‘Any chance of food this evening?’

  ‘There’s game stew with mashed potatoes and lingonberry jam at the bar.’

  I thanked her, took my key and went up half a flight of stairs to the motel wing. Room 16 was at the end of a long corridor.

  I placed my laptop on the desk next to the old TV and started my writing routine. First, the essentials: I wrote down everyone I’d talked to, copied their comments from my notepad and got down the basic information. Then I added atmosphere and first impressions: snowfall, the village, the distances. Though my article still didn’t have a focus, I knew some of this material would come in useful at a later stage.

  I wrote for an hour and a half, read through what I’d written and thought for a moment.

  Helsinki Today was going through tough times. We were the last daily newspaper of our type in the country – serious but also populist. We had to fight our shrinking corner. I’d told Hutrila, that there might well be the beginnings of a big article up north. What I’d written didn’t yet amount to much.

  We didn’t have the resources of a larger news corporation. So we had to do something the other media outlets weren’t doing. We had to get to stories first, look more closely, find our own angle and dig at it until we reached the heart of the matter – whether that was a story, a person or both. We had to be faster, more inventive, more persistent and determined. And I knew only too well that my own angle on this story was something right in front of my eyes. It was always like this. Something obvious that wasn’t obvious at all.

  I wrote for another thirty minutes, shaped the text into some kind of coherent whole and sent it to Hutrila – if nothing else, as proof I’d actually been here.

  I switched off the computer and thought how much I deserved a cold beer.

  The bar was an oblong room with a low roof and three booths at one end, each with a view down towards the lake, presumably. Though not in the dark. Or in the winter. The pallid light from the outdoor lamps was enough to show it had stopped snowing. Along the left-hand wall was a long bar, and to the right was a low stage. I was one of three customers: the couple sitting on tall bar stools by the door and leaning the full weight of their upper bodies against the bar sounded exceedingly drunk and very tired. I sat down at the other end of the bar, ordered a beer and was about to raise it to my lips when I heard a man’s voice.

  ‘Hey, you.’

  I turned just enough to see the couple. The woman leaned back then forwards again. The man stopped her leaning any further. He tried to focus his eyes on me. In his forties, thick arms, a weary face.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied.

  ‘Aren’t you on night-shift tonight?’

  ‘I am on night-shift,’ I said and raised my pint.

  ‘You’re full of it. That shit won’t disappear by itself.’

  The man appeared to be deadly serious.

  ‘What shit?’ I asked as neutrally as I could. ‘Where?’

  The man craned his head forward, apparently to try once again to focus properly.

  ‘Is that Nieminen?’ he asked.

  I got up and walked towards him. Up close he seemed even more intoxicated than I’d thought. I looked him in the eye.

  ‘What shit is supposed to disappear?’

  The man returned my stare for a few long seconds before his gaze slid to the side, first to the woman and eventually to the bar.

  ‘I thought you were someone else,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s nothing.’

  I remembered what the woman with orange hair at the reception had said. The place was full and I’d got the last room. And yet the car park had been all but empty.

  ‘You going to finish that drink, Tomi?’ the woman asked. ‘I can help you if you can’t manage it.’

  I looked at her and saw decades of thirst in her eyes. I fetched my own pint and placed it in front of her.

  ‘All yours.’

  The woman gripped the glass. The man cast her an angry look. Soon he would doubtless blame her for talking to strangers. The dynamics between alcoholic couples were the same the world over. I didn’t hang around to witness the argument that was already brewing in the air, but strode briskly back to my room.

  Jacket, gloves, hat.

  Snow crackled beneath my shoes as I walked out to the car.

  4

  He followed people. Not right now, and not all the time, but it was an essential part of his work and, therefore, of his life. The matter sprang to mind again as he walked along the gravelled pavement on Töölöntorinkatu, arrived at Töölöntori and saw windows lit on all four sides of the square.

  How many lives had he stepped into? How many apartments, homes, summer cottages, villas and hotel rooms, to watch the way people lived and behaved? He had come across tidy homes that looked as if nobody lived in them, where it seemed not a single object belonged to someone, where nothing gave him a clue about how the people living there survived the changing of the seasons or the course of a day. The other extreme was every bit as mysterious: people who lived surrounded by ingrained filth and piles of rubbish, their floors disappearing beneath layers of trash.

  The more he saw, the quicker he became.

  The hallway generally told him everything he needed to know: shoes and jackets – their brands and condition, their quality and quantity; the state of the rug, any stains or marks; or no rug at all; the scent or, in some cases, smells or stenches; how in a matter of seconds all of the above came together to give him an overall image of what and what not to expect.

  People thought their homes were private, that they were safe and secure.

  He knew they were neither. Sometimes he hurried through the door of an apartment block behind someone with a key, took the lift to the upper floors, listened and watched as people chatted to one another, fiddled with their phones, cleared their throats,
muttered something about the weather or simply stood quietly, allowing him to identify the nuances of their breathing, the weight of fatigue, a shimmer of impatience. What he always noticed was people’s need to claim a space for themselves, no matter how small or fleeting it might be.

  The square’s cobbles, slippery beneath a light covering of snow. The illuminated windows around him, people in their homes. People in the street, on their way home. Today he walked past them, and it reminded him of what he did: his job, his life.

  He followed people. Then he killed them.

  5

  Half an hour of dark road, the glare growing stronger by the minute, until finally, as the thick forest receded in front of me, the mining complex opened up like a landscape on the moon. I turned on to the road leading towards it. The car park was nearly full. I drove along a line of vehicles and found a place at one end. If I turned off the motor the cold would work its way inside in minutes. If I kept the motor running someone was bound to notice. Getting a permit at the command tower wouldn’t be any easier than it had been earlier that day, I imagined. If anything, it would only be more difficult. I was in the wrong place.

  I pulled out of the car park and returned to the road leading to the mine. Just before the intersection with the highway there was a crossroads: narrow lanes covered in fresh snow lead off in both directions. The lane to the right appeared to follow the outer limits of the mining complex. I turned on to it. The snow felt soft beneath my tyres. I drove slowly. The lane curved gently to the right. Trees, snow-covered verges. Eventually I came to a clearing. I switched off the lights.

  The clearing grew wider until I found myself staring at an endless, open expanse divided into square sections. In a section at one end, near the forest edge, I saw movement. It was so far away, the two enormous diggers, illuminated by arc lights, and the men working around them – around eight in total – looked like busy ants. A moment later I realised that the sheer, square sections in front of me were in fact tanks full of industrial sewage. Their surfaces had frozen and the snow hid them from view, camouflaging them in the landscape.