Below the Surface

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Who’s he?” Rauha continued her tasks without any change in expression.

  “A Soviet soldier who disappeared from the Porkkala Naval Base in September 1955. He was a border guard from Leningrad. We found the latest version of Annukka Hackman’s manuscript. How did she get her hands on Viktor’s autobiography?”

  Rauha turned toward the kitchen with her bowl, and Koivu and I followed her. After dumping the flour from the bowl into the compost bin, she washed her hands. I let her finish before saying, “Let’s sit down around the table in the living room.” As I took Rauha’s arm, I felt tall next to her. Rauha calmly removed her arm from my grasp.

  “You don’t need to lead me around. I’m not going to run away.” She closed the kitchen door behind her, then took a seat at one end of the table. Koivu and I crawled onto one of the benches that ran along the sides. The snow had drifted halfway up the windows, and the fields were barely visible. The wind had reached a crescendo, howling plaintively and rocking the electric lines. Koivu fished the tape recorder out of his bag and was just turning it on when the living room door opened.

  Viktor Smeds was wearing a brown striped undershirt and thick woolen trousers with drooping suspenders. He wore two pairs of wool socks, so his feet looked abnormally large compared to his slender legs. His wispy hair stood up as if he’d just gotten out of bed, but his eyes were sharp. His hands were steady too. They held a hunting rifle, pointed straight at me.

  “Leave my wife alone,” he said in soft, singsong Finnish. “Back up. Leave this house.”

  Rauha had turned to look at Viktor. “Dear, what are you . . .”

  “You’ve always said you know what to do. Now it’s my turn to decide. Lock the kitchen door.”

  The door between the living room and kitchen had an old-fashioned lock with a long metal key. Rauha locked the door and put the key in a pocket in her apron. Viktor still aimed at me. I heard Koivu breathing heavily, and I could smell my own fear in my sweat. The last time anyone had threatened me with a gun was before my children were born. If Viktor shot me now, I’d never see Iida and Taneli again.

  “How many policemen are there in the house?” Viktor continued.

  “Six.”

  “Bring them down here, along with my son and daughter-in-law. The man can go get them. The lady policeman stays here. If you try anything, she dies.”

  I felt Koivu hesitate. The barrel of the hunting rifle was only a few feet from my heart, and I’d seen the damage a weapon like that could do at that distance.

  “Go,” I snapped. “Tell Airaksinen and Saastamoinen to remove their weapons. Come back in with your hands up.”

  I knew Viktor wouldn’t gain anything by shooting me, but was he able to grasp that too?

  “How long have you known?” I asked Viktor in Finnish, since I was so scared I couldn’t speak any language but my own.

  “I only know that you’ve come to get me,” Viktor managed to say before the door opened again. I turned my head as much as I dared and saw Heli and Andreas walk in with Koivu behind them.

  “Come closer, Heli and Andreas.” Now Viktor had switched to Swedish. “And you, Detective, get up off the bench and back up to my son.”

  I did as Viktor ordered, even though my legs were weak and standing up seemed to take an eternity. Slowly I backed up to where I imagined the living room door was. I caught the scent of Heli’s hair near me.

  “Stay there. Rauha, come over here.”

  Rauha stood up and obeyed. That would have been the right moment to attack, but we didn’t have time. Viktor wrapped his left arm around his wife and awkwardly held the rifle with his right. The barrel of the rifle touched Rauha’s chin. Andreas was breathing hard behind me.

  “Come in everyone, just don’t come too close,” Rauha said to the two patrol officers who were now apparently standing behind me at the living room door. “Andreas, do your parents one last service and make sure the police don’t have any guns. I’ve never been able to tolerate guns. All they are is trouble.”

  I wondered whether Koivu had called for backup while he was out of the room. Viktor Smeds didn’t seem to have any sense for modern police technology. Mira Saastamoinen took off her gun belt and threw it in the entryway, and Airaksinen wasn’t wearing one.

  “Mom, they don’t have any guns,” Andreas said after giving us all a cursory pat down. “What’s going on here? Neither of you could have had any reason to kill Annukka Hackman. And you were in the hospital when it happened.”

  “Your father was, but I wasn’t.” Rauha’s voice was steady, and she had a smudge of baking flour on her right eyebrow. She had wrapped one of her arms around Viktor and helped him support the rifle toward her own jaw.

  “But why? You couldn’t have done that for us . . .” Andreas’s voice faltered as he gestured toward Heli.

  “For your father. Your father wanted you and Sasha to know after he died. He wrote his story before his heart surgery and left it in a drawer with the family history. On the envelope he wrote, ‘To Alexander and Andreas, to open after my death.’ And of course that thieving woman found it! Oh, Viktor,” Rauha said, smiling gently. “If only you could have been a little more careful. I would have told the boys everything.”

  Puustjärvi shifted behind me, and the dog scratched at the door. Someone’s phone rang, but no one answered. The windowpanes tinkled as the wind threw snow against them. The rest of the world was out there beyond the snow, but here, in this world, there were only ten people.

  “Mom, what did Annukka find?” Andreas’s voice was as tremulous as a small boy suddenly confronted by some incomprehensible and upsetting claim by people older than himself.

  “Your father’s biography, which reveals that he isn’t my second cousin from Kokkola but rather Viktor Rylov, a Russian deserter, who’s been living in Finland with false papers for nearly fifty years. Annukka said we’d committed a lot of crimes—falsifying documents, lying under oath, illegal immigration, and desertion in time of war. What a great story, she said. ‘Rally hero’s father expelled from country.’ These kinds of revelations didn’t come along every day.”

  “Did she tell you she’d found the papers?” I ventured to talk for the first time, and my voice sounded strangely hoarse and hard.

  “She came here one day in September and handed me Viktor’s envelope. We didn’t even know it was missing.” Rauha’s nostrils flared like a cat smelling something suspicious. Hackman had returned Viktor’s autobiography like any book borrowed from the library and thanked them for the interesting material, which she had copied and was currently translating into Finnish.

  “I promised her everything, the moon and the stars, a million euros, but she only laughed and said that the truth was more important than money and that our crimes had to be exposed. I said that it was also illegal to invade a person’s home and take their property without permission, but she just said that money and the right lawyer could solve that, unlike what we had done. According to Annukka, Viktor didn’t belong in Finland. As if he had anything to do with Russia anymore!”

  Rauha moved and the barrel of the gun brushed her jaw, but she seemed to ignore it. Viktor stroked her cheek with his left hand. Heli had wrapped her arms around herself as if for comfort. I felt the warmth of Koivu’s body behind me.

  “When do we rush them?” he whispered, but Viktor heard him.

  “No tricks! Andreas has to hear how it all happened, and Heli can tell Sasha. After that it will be time for silence.”

  Rauha continued her story.

  “I told Annukka that Viktor was in poor health, that he was living on borrowed time, that the surgery had failed. She had no mercy. I couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from Viktor, of not being able to sleep next to him. For forty years we’ve only slept apart on the nights I was in the hospital giving birth to the boys. When Viktor had his surgery, I slept next to his bed. We don’t have much time left. I didn’t want to sacrifice a second of that.”

  Hel
i sniffed.

  Viktor coughed, which made the rifle give a loud click, and we all jumped.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he said, and the words sounded like a prayer. Rauha lifted her left hand and wiped the sweat from her face.

  “Of course I didn’t want to kill her, but there was no other way,” she continued. “She enjoyed making me beg. I intended to go to her house in Espoo and ask her one more time to keep quiet. I tried to call her from the hospital, but she didn’t answer. I called her again from the public phone at the Kirkkonummi station. She only laughed and said that she was on Gesterby Road going to Lake Humaljärvi to see what it was like to swim for her life in the frigid water. It was just a game to her. I decided to go after her and drove like a madwoman. I don’t know where I left the car. When I arrived at the shore, she was already in the water. I saw her purse and knew that there was a pistol inside. I only fired once, and that was enough.”

  Andreas groaned. I saw him place his hands on Heli’s shoulders, but she didn’t even try to take them.

  “Where did you throw the gun?” I asked.

  “I drove to the Vårnäs Bridge and threw the gun, Annukka’s phone, and her keys into the water. I didn’t think it would occur to anyone to look in the reeds there. Now you’ve heard everything there is to hear. You can leave now. We want to die together, just the two of us.”

  No one budged.

  “And what about Hannu Kervinen?” I asked.

  “Who?” Rauha’s expression was genuinely confused. “Oh, the pathologist? I didn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “Didn’t you?” I asked, then thought of the message Kervinen had left behind. “The one who killed Annukka is going to kill me too.” A violent death led to others. Some people preferred to die than to live without each other.

  “I never even met the man,” Rauha said grimly.

  “He died because he couldn’t live without Annukka,” I said. “He was the same as you. He wouldn’t give up the person he loved for any price. He thought Annukka Hackman was worth a love that great.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Heli jerk Andreas’s hands off her shoulders and shake her head. Andreas looked back at her like a person bereft of hope.

  “Father,” he said. “Put down the gun. I don’t want to lose you too.”

  “There’s no way they’re going to send you back to Russia any time soon,” I added. “And they probably never will.”

  How thin my voice sounded, and how little impact it had. I remembered the last time I’d tried to talk a gun out of a shooter’s hand. I’d failed.

  I wondered if it would help if one of us tried to rush outside. We could shoot through the window and wound Viktor, but he would be likely to kill Rauha, making him a murderer too. We had to try to talk our way out of this. I tried to catch Andreas’s gaze. Perhaps he’d know what to say. I saw Puupponen fiddling with his phone behind Koivu’s broad back. The dog whimpered outside the door.

  “Andreas. I love you and Sasha so much. We both do. Try to clean up your mess,” Rauha said quietly. “I love you, Viktor. Now.”

  Viktor pulled the trigger. It clicked. By the time he pulled it again, Koivu, Andreas, and I had already jumped on the couple. Andreas made it to the gun first, and I grabbed Rauha’s hands.

  “Nje zarjožena, nje zarjožena,” Viktor said.

  I heard Heli laughing hysterically and saying, “Sweet Jesus, I took the bullets out of the magazine the night before last! I was afraid Andreas would do something to himself and took the bullets out!” She was on the floor kneeling, and Mira Saastamoinen bent over her.

  It wasn’t until we had Viktor and Rauha in handcuffs that I started shaking. The Smedses still held each other’s hands, and I was secretly happy I wouldn’t be the one who had to separate them from each other when they reached Holding. Viktor had to be detained as well, since it was unclear when he’d learned about the murder. The list of charges against each of them would be long and complicated.

  The snow had nearly buried the police cars. Someone had let Ronja inside and she walked from person to person whimpering strangely. She kept smelling the handcuffs and trying to lick them off Rauha’s wrists. I asked Rauha if she wanted to take off her apron and thought of the misshapen bread that had now risen too much and that someone would have to throw in the compost.

  “Let’s get moving,” Puustjärvi said to Viktor, and Mira Saastamoinen took Rauha by the arm.

  “May I at least stop at the door to the barn?” Rauha asked, and I nodded. Viktor followed behind her, and for a moment they stood in silence at the barn door.

  “Let them ride in the same car, Mira,” I said to Saastamoinen. I swallowed when Rauha turned to say good-bye for the second time in her life to the home she thought she would never see again.

  23

  “Can I ask you for a ride somewhere again?” Heli asked once the patrol car had disappeared beyond the hill. She’d wept aloud as she hugged her mother- and father-in-law good-bye, and her face was still wet. Ronja had tried in vain to force her way into the cruiser with the old couple.

  “Yeah, there’s room in my car.” I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, since I was still shaking. I’d gone in the kitchen to drink some juice and made Heli and Andreas drink something too.

  “It’s better for Andreas to stay here. He can manage alone with the animals for a few days. And this is his home, not mine. I’m going to the hospital to tell Sasha before the media finds out, then I’ll go somewhere. It doesn’t matter where. I’ll just get my suitcase.”

  I didn’t see Heli and Andreas’s good-bye, but the fresh tears on Heli’s face told the story. I sent the others off in the second car because I thought Heli might need someone to talk to. For the first part of the drive she was quiet, and I retreated into my routines, planning our after-action review and the press conference. We’d have to send Forensics to Vårnäs Bridge first thing in the morning. I’d also have to talk to Ursula, regardless of her sick leave. Her failure when it came to Rauha’s alibi was inexcusable. And all the leaks—which I was certain she’d been the source of—had caused an inordinate amount of trouble for the investigation.

  “It’s strange,” Heli said at the Degerby intersection. “This is the first time I’ve realized it. At first I always thought it was nice when Sasha came home or we met up abroad, but then it started to feel forgettable. Last spring I was driving back from the airport and felt so happy and light like I was floating half a meter off the ground. It was so nice to get home, to get away from the rally world. But I was right here when I realized that the real reason I wanted to get home was because Andreas was waiting there for me. Last spring was like a drug. I couldn’t keep away from Andreas, and he couldn’t keep his hands off me. But now it’s November and there’s no escape from this emptiness.”

  “Thanks to you, at least one person’s life was saved.”

  “No, it had nothing to do with me. It was just random luck. I took the bullets because I was afraid for Andreas.”

  “Does it really matter who you saved by doing it?”

  “Just before Viktor pulled the trigger, I was planning to try to grab the rifle from him. I was afraid that Andreas would attack him, and I wanted to get there first. But in the end I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to die after all.”

  I left Heli shivering in the snow at a taxi stand in downtown Espoo. I asked her to give her contact information to the police, and after a moment’s hesitation I encouraged her to call if the darkness started to feel overwhelming. Because Heli wasn’t a suspect anymore, I went ahead and hugged her good-bye.

  Dodging snowplows, I drove to the police station. Bryan Ferry’s “A Fool for Love” was playing on the radio, and listening to it finally brought the tears. I sat in my office for a few minutes before going to the after-action review. I’d have to talk to a therapist. It was pointless thinking I could get over being threatened with a gun by myself. I didn’t feel any triumph or relief now that we’d solved the crime. All I fe
lt was sorrow.

  Maybe love made people crazy or maybe it made them see everything in a new way. Sometimes it made things brighter, sometimes it distorted the world. People did insane things for love. They broke laws and hurt the people closest to them. They killed each other. They killed themselves. But would it be better not to love or was even the most hopeless love better than no love at all? Wasn’t the ability to love what made us human?

  I didn’t know.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2011 Tomas Whitehouse

  Leena Lehtolainen was born in Vesanto, Finland, to parents who taught language and literature. A keen reader, she made up stories in her head before she could even write. At the age of ten, she began her first book—a young adult novel—and published it two years later. She released her second book at the age of seventeen. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the 1997 Vuoden Johtolanka (Clue) Award (for the best Finnish crime novel) for Luminainen (The Snow Woman) and the Great Finnish Book Club prize in 2000. Her work has been published in twenty-nine languages.

  Besides writing, Leena enjoys classical singing, her beloved cats, and—her greatest passion—figure skating. Her nonfiction book about the sport, Taitoluistelun lumo (The Enchantment of Figure Skating), was chosen as the Sport Book of the Year 2011 in Finland. Leena lives in Finland with her husband and two sons.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2015 Aaron Turley

  Owen F. Witesman is a professional literary translator with a master’s in Finnish and Estonian-area studies and a PhD in public affairs from Indiana University. He has translated more than thirty Finnish books into English, including novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction. His recent translations include the first seven novels in the Maria Kallio series, the locked-room mystery Cruel is the Night by Karo Hämäläinen, and the dark family drama Norma by Sofi Oksanen. He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife, three daughters, one son, two dogs, a cat, six chickens, and twenty-nine fruit trees.