Sunset Grove was a sad sight, downright heart-breaking. They had seen ruination of all sorts of during wartime and vividly remembered the February 1944 bombing of Helsinki, yet the construction site yawning before them struck them as ghastlier than any of their memories. The lobby was dark and cold; evidently the electricity had been cut off for quite some time. Walls had been ripped open, the ends of wires and various coloured pipes stuck out everywhere, and the floor was strewn with bags of cement, a cement mixer, ladders and all manner of construction material scattered haphazardly about. A pair of men with black beards and safety vests were leaning against the wall, smoking cheap cigarettes, as calm as you like.
‘That’s a familiar smell,’ Irma said, as they walked past the men.
They had to advance carefully because the floor was treacherous, littered with mines they might trip over. Not real mines, of course, which they’d also had to pick their way through during their lifetimes, but, nevertheless, the floor was full of traps. The elevator didn’t work, which meant they had to brave the stairwell.
‘Halt!’ a shaky, slightly hoarse voice rasped from the landing opposite.
They squinted at the voice in the gloom and recognized a familiar figure. Tauno was standing there in his cap, eternally hunched, flailing his arms more furiously than normal. Apparently, he didn’t recognize them, and was defending his fortress from enemy attacks with those tactics still available to him.
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! Tauno, it’s just us, Irma and Siiri!’
Irma’s password sufficed. Tauno was visibly happy to see old friends among the hunks of concrete. He reached for his hat and tipped it politely.
‘My dear girls! You’re still alive!’
He bobbed his way over to Irma and Siiri as quickly as he could, gave them both awkward hugs, and started babbling like a pot of boiling beans. He hadn’t had anyone to talk to for weeks, and that wasn’t even the saddest thing about his life amid the annihilation of Sunset Grove.
‘This is no normal plumbing retrofit,’ Tauno said, with a shake of his head. He had conducted scouting expeditions around the entirety of Sunset Grove and discovered walls between units being knocked down, entire kitchens demolished, doors carried out to dumpsters. Floors had been jackhammered up and balconies removed. Director Sinikka Sundström had fled to India to care for orphaned children with funds she had raised during a campaign she had organized at Sunset Grove. He had seen neither hide nor hair of Jerry Siilinpää since September, when the worst of the destruction had begun.
‘So he wasn’t fired?’ Irma asked.
‘No, although he should have been.’
‘So where are you living?’ Siiri asked, horrified, as it seemed all the flats had been demolished in the name of the renovation.
‘And what happened to our belongings?’ Irma shouted.
They rushed to their hallway with Tauno at their heels, and there was no need for them to dig around for their keys, because there was no door to their apartments. Their homes had been emptied. Every plastic-wrapped item of furniture and decorative object was gone, as were the moving boxes in which they had packed their dearest and most prized possessions. They gaped at the unrecognizable wastes of construction debris that had once been their homes. The kitchens and living rooms had been turned into one big room; the cupboards and fixtures had been torn out. The room looked oddly small; it was hard to imagine all the things it should have contained fitting in it. There was no longer a hole in the bathroom wall, because the entire wall had disappeared. Their bathrooms had been melted into one big cement cave with pipe-ends jutting oddly out of the walls.
‘Is this . . . are they turning these two apartments into one big one?’ Irma asked slowly, as she wandered around in the darkness, perplexed.
Tauno continued his incessant jabbering, as for him the sight was nothing new. He told them he had moved his scant belongings from one room to the next as the construction work advanced. He had two old suitcases and a mattress, that was all, so a camp life had been more or less manageable.
‘But now I’m staying in the last room at the end of the corridor. If they don’t finish the first apartments soon, I’ll be out on the street. That pathologist spends all her days at the Ukko-Munkki and sleeps wherever she can find a spot to lay her head. Who knows, maybe she’s made it into some hospital, thanks to her connections? I haven’t seen the old cow in a while, and I can’t say that I’ve missed her, either.’
Siiri quietly corrected Tauno: ‘She’s a medical examiner, not a pathologist.’
‘Heavens to Betsy!’ Irma exclaimed. She was standing in the middle of her apartment, next to a heap of broken bathroom tile. ‘Shouldn’t they have . . . How can they just . . . Was this announced somewhere, that our apartments are going to be emptied?’
‘On the Internet, apparently,’ Tauno said. ‘But since I don’t have any way of accessing that magical world, I’ve been scouting around with my senses on high alert. I rescued this box from your room.’ He dug into the old backpack he was hauling around and handed Siiri Anna-Liisa’s jewellery box. ‘I thought it might be valuable, or have sentimental value. Aren’t women sentimental about jewellery?’
Irma and Siiri looked at the box in Tauno’s hand, stunned. How could it be here in Sunset Grove when they had seen it in Hakaniemi just a short while ago in September? The day the two phony police had come sniffing around for it and Anna-Liisa had found the enormous wad of cash inside.
‘Thank you, Tauno,’ Siiri said finally, accepting the box. It wouldn’t fit in the handbag she had brought, but she had the strength to carry it back to Hakaniemi.
Tauno wanted to show them his current foxhole, and they dejectedly followed him down the deserted hallway. The same annihilation had afflicted every apartment, as if they had been bombed.
‘At least most of the walls are still standing,’ Tauno said. ‘Bombs usually take out the whole building.’
In the last flat, the plastic flooring was still in place, but the toilet, shower stall, shower and sink had been torn out of the bathroom, and the kitchen cabinets had vanished. The pipes jutted out of the wall and the lights didn’t work. Tauno had dragged his dusty mattress over to the windows; he claimed it was still bright enough to read there during the daytime, even though the building was wrapped in plastic and this time of year there weren’t more than a few odd hours of sunlight anyway. Tauno’s pair of old cardboard suitcases looked like artefacts from a museum. They contained his clothes, winter boots, a hunting knife, a water bottle and a copy of Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier. He read it to himself every day, although he already knew it by heart.
‘I’m holding the line here, the last man. What would have happened at the Battle of Ihantala if everyone had abandoned their comrades and run off? You’ll never make a deserter out of me,’ he said proudly, and Irma and Siiri gathered that he took heart from the notion that he’d ended up in World War Three.
‘Tauno,’ Irma said in a serious voice, taking hold of the hunchbacked man’s perpetually swinging hands. She held them for a moment and looked Tauno in the eye, then glanced at his field gear. Tauno had an old green canvas backpack, the kind Siiri’s sons had had back in the fifties when they went camping as scouts. Siiri was relatively sure Tauno had packed it with a camp stove, a mess kit, matches, a flashlight, rope and other necessities for survival.
‘Tauno dear, you can’t stay here. You’re coming to Hakaniemi with us. There’s room for you, and you won’t need to drag that filthy mattress around any more. We have so many clean sheets that we need a room bigger than this apartment to store them in.’
But Tauno refused. He reminded them that Finland wouldn’t be an independent country if everyone had jumped on the milk train home at the first sign of trouble. He opened his backpack and showed them everything Siiri had predicted was in there, along with hard tack and enough dehydrated food for weeks – or so he claimed. Irma started talking about the delicious meals Siiri prepared every day, what a fancy whirlpo
ol tub they had in their spa, and how lovely it would be to be able to warm up the sauna and sweat out the grime and stench of the renovation.
‘Thank you, Irma, but I can’t leave,’ Tauno said. He lowered his voice and started sharing secrets with them: how he’d delved into the operations of Fix ’n’ Finish, eavesdropped and spied on the construction workers, and discovered a thing or two. Most of Tauno’s revelations were familiar, as he had already divulged them to Irma.
‘I speak Russian, you know,’ he whispered, continuing his tale. Fix ’n’ Finish was owned by a prominent Finnish civil servant who’d had shady business dealings in former Soviet countries for years. ‘They’re based on contacts he made during his career; apparently, he worked in many Warsaw Pact countries.’ Tauno was sure the possessions of Sunset Grove’s residents had been sold, and their bank accounts had in all likelihood been emptied, too. He had seen the construction workers exchanging thick wads of cash, and he firmly believed that drug dealing and money laundering were somehow involved. Siiri started wondering if Tauno was all there.
‘But there aren’t any drugs here any more, because there aren’t any old people,’ Irma said. She didn’t seem to believe all of Tauno’s ranting either.
‘Mark my words, the taps are flowing,’ Tauno said, looking enigmatic.
‘There’s not a single tap that works in the entire building!’ Irma cried in vexation.
‘The taps of illicit drugs. Of illicit money. Any tap you can think of,’ Tauno said, still enigmatically, whirling his arms as if he were trying to take off in flight.
‘This can’t go on forever,’ Siiri said. ‘The renovation was supposed to last four months and so far it has lasted – how long has it been?’
‘Five months, two weeks and six days,’ Tauno stated. He tightened the straps on his backpack, fastened the leather loops, and, handling it as tenderly as a kitten, lowered it to his miserable excuse for a mattress. ‘It’s lasted longer than the Winter War. But I’ve lived through two wars, from the first trench to the final battle, and I’m not about to surrender now.’ He asked Irma and Siiri to leave and laboriously laid himself down on his mattress.
Siiri and Irma sat in silence for the whole ride back to Hakaniemi, at first on the number 4, then the number 9. Irma clutched her handbag in her lap as if it were the last thing on earth she owned, and Siiri clenched Anna-Liisa’s mahogany jewellery box.
Chapter 24
Anna-Liisa looked at the jewellery box and sighed. It was on the bar, lid open. Inside were three pieces of jewellery – two pearl necklaces and one cameo brooch – as well as a wad of cash. The rest of the jewellery had been lost or stolen, stolen and sold on the black market.
‘Tauno was right, women place a lot of sentimental value on jewellery,’ Irma said, trying to sound chipper. She placed a hand on Anna-Liisa’s shoulder and gave it a consoling pat.
‘Could you please refrain from pawing me,’ Anna-Liisa said. ‘This has nothing to do with sentiment. What we have here is a crime, and not your average robbery, either, but something bigger. Why on earth is my jewellery box being used to transport money?’
Irma flinched and pulled her hand away. She looked in alarm at Siiri, who started making coffee. Siiri had learned from one experienced hospice nurse that making coffee was the most effective ritual in the world. When the nurse visited the homes of the dying, where the loved ones sat around, too stunned to speak, everyone instantly felt better when she started making coffee. And this wasn’t even a matter of life or death, but of one jewellery box.
‘No, this is a much more significant affair. My jewellery box is but a tiny detail that symbolizes a bigger mystery. The mystery of the Sunset Grove renovation,’ Anna-Liisa said, her voice trembling.
Irma popped into the kitchenette to lend Siiri a hand, although the coffee machine was perfectly capable of brewing the coffee on its own. She and Siiri opened cupboards, peered into the fridge, closed drawers the other one had opened, and bumped into each other. Siiri felt like whispering to Irma to move out of the way, but she didn’t want to get into it.
‘Did someone say death?’ Margit peered out from her bedroom, her hair a fright. She had slept until noon again, gone for a dip in the whirlpool tub, and after that dragged herself back into bed to read princess stories in her Swedish women’s magazine. She whiled away an unbelievable number of days in this manner, never mind that in the spring she had been more active than the rest of them put together.
‘It would be inaccurate to say we were discussing death, although the word was uttered,’ Anna-Liisa reported, casting a critical eye over Margit, who had emerged in nothing but a ratty pair of pyjama pants and a black bra.
‘Oh. That’s too bad.’ Margit paid no attention to the jewellery box. She scratched herself drowsily, turned her back on Anna-Liisa, and hauled herself into the kitchenette. ‘I so wanted to talk about death.’
‘Döden, döden, döden.’
Irma was trying to lighten the mood, but she herself realized the inappropriateness of her slogan at this moment. The final utterance died on her lips, and she coughed loudly, so the unfortunate fade-out would sound like a mistake.
‘Margit, could you please arrange these cookies prettily on a plate? We’re going to have a little afternoon coffee,’ Siiri said. Margit took the packet of cookies but remained standing there, as stout and still as Viipuri Castle.
‘Isn’t there anyone here but us? Not a single immigrant or in-home caregiver?’
‘Anna-Liisa, where’s the Ambass— Onni?’
‘Oh, he’s . . . Onni had a meeting in town, business. He’s very conscientious about his affairs, as you might have noticed.’
‘Right. Do you have any idea what those affairs might be?’ Irma continued inquisitively and, in Siiri’s opinion, a little too boldly. Presumably Anna-Liisa wasn’t 100 per cent up to speed on her husband’s activities – or else she didn’t want to talk about them. She picked up the wad of cash and started briskly counting the money. This time they were yellow two-hundred-euro bills.
‘I suppose I should look into Onni’s affairs,’ she said reflectively. ‘As you know, we don’t have a prenuptial agreement. That’s the way Onni wanted it. So this curious apartment is my property, too, isn’t it?’
‘But that means you could do a little digging and find out what that Hasan who lived here before us was up to!’ Irma exclaimed. Margit was still holding the cookie packet and didn’t seem to grasp what the others were talking about.
‘Absolutely not. I trust my husband, and it would be an incredible affront if I started digging through this apartment’s – previous uses. Or his personal finances; I have no need to do anything of the sort. Nevertheless, I find myself rather surprised that this matter of much greater consequence, namely, the mysterious wanderings of my jewellery box and the altogether questionable renovation of Sunset Grove, have not sparked greater inquisitiveness in the two of you. This is fifteen thousand euros in two-hundred-euro bills.’
Margit looked at the money and dropped the packet of cookies to the floor. Siiri picked it up, took a plate from the cupboard, spread a poppy-print napkin across it, and placed the cookies in an even ring around it with excessive reverence. The situation was very odd. Anna-Liisa gave no clue as to whether or not she knew anything about the Ambassador’s business affairs. Margit, on the other hand, was fixated on euthanasia again and appeared more depressed than ever, downright apathetic, in fact. Irma was hustling and bustling about without actually getting anything done. And on top of everything else, Siiri was fretting about Tauno, who was at Sunset Grove alone, sleeping on the floor on his filthy mattress.
‘There’s enough money here for me to take Eino to Switzerland or the Netherlands,’ Margit said, fingering the bills in Anna-Liisa’s hands. The more she fingered them, the tighter Anna-Liisa’s grip grew, until her knuckles were white and her mouth an impervious line.
‘As if anyone had the time to travel,’ Anna-Liisa said finally. She yanked the bi
lls back, shoved them into the box, snapped the lid shut, and carried the token of criminal activity off to her room. ‘It’s been over a year since Onni and I went to the spas in Estonia on a veterans’ organization trip. Oh, what lovely times those were!’
Irma poured coffee for all of them and managed to seat Margit on one of the stools. This was no simple task, with the stool being as wobbly as it was, and Margit’s backside so immense. Before long Anna-Liisa returned; she reported that she had hidden the jewellery box in a safe place, and none of them dared ask where. After drinking a big mug of coffee, Irma suddenly remembered her beloved green flaptop, pulled it out of her bag, and set it on the table.
‘I’ll just have a look and see what my trusty friend knows about the company doing the renovation work at Sunset Grove. What was it called again? Kling and Klang?’
‘Don’t be silly, those are the policemen from Pippi Long-stocking,’ Siiri said. But she couldn’t remember the name of the company either.
‘So they are! That was so funny when Pippi didn’t want to go to the orphanage and the police chased her up to the roof. Or when they went round and round on the carousel so many times that they got dizzy and everyone thought they were drunk. I read Pippi to my darlings all the time, even though my mother and many of my friends thought she was a bad example. And then later we watched the Swedish television series, which was so nicely done. Do you remember, there was that one episode where nothing else happened except Pippi danced around the attic and there was this horrible, atonal harpsichord playing in the background? My darlings always watched it, spellbound. I don’t suppose a show like that would catch the attention of these restless computer kids. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if it was my children or grandchildren whom I watched it with. Didn’t the series start until the 1970s? Shuffle and cut, now I know! The name of the construction company was Skweekee Kleen, wasn’t it?’
They put their heads together and racked their brains. Everyone remembered one funny name or combination of words, but none of them were right. Irma lost interest and started playing Sudoku. Anna-Liisa also grew tired and took the Swedish-language crossword from the sideboard, but Margit perked up visibly after loudly slurping down three mugs of coffee. That was another thing Siiri found annoying about Margit: she ate and drank loudly, smacked her lips, belched, and talked with her mouth full. Crumbs flew across the table, and she never bothered to wipe up after herself. They were lucky if she remembered to take her dishes to the sink. From where, of course, they always loaded themselves into the dishwasher.
Escape from Sunset Grove Page 20