Copper Heart

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Almost forty years. He started at sixteen and retired on disability at fifty-three. They said smoking caused his lung cancer,” Kivinen said, his voice breaking.

  The electric light shining from behind him cast his shadow far ahead of us, making it look strangely warped. I wondered whether sheer sentimentality could be the driving force behind this enormous undertaking after all, a desire to somehow compensate a father who had toiled his life away in the mine and to honor all the men who had sacrificed themselves. Perhaps money wasn’t his only motivation.

  I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised by Kivinen’s desire to prove himself. Plenty of my friends had the same desire, a yearning to return as conquering heroes to this oppressive little town. And when Kivinen was young, the town had been even more hierarchical than when we were in school. Even in the late seventies there had been a strict caste system. At the top were the lords of the mining company, the managers and engineers. After them came the academic professionals, the doctors, teachers, and priests. Apparently in the teachers’ lounge at school, the wives of the engineers had considered themselves slightly above the rest.

  On the lowest rung were the children of the miners, the untouchables. No one really expected them to succeed in school—they wouldn’t even go on to high school. Clearly, expecting them to learn foreign languages was out of the question, so the Swedish teacher didn’t even try. What would a wage slave do with a second language anyway?

  By the end of the seventies, when the mine was forced to cut back operations and the city started looking for replacement industries, the caste system began to break down. Still, it was clear that Kivinen had accomplished a small miracle by rising from the bottom of the barrel up to a status on par with the mayor and governor.

  The Museum of Mining tunnel ended at a large vault with chairs and a screen for a slideshow. Kivinen asked if I wanted to watch it, but I said no.

  “Would you like to go farther down in the elevator?”

  I didn’t, remembering all too well the darkness and damp silence below. But I also remembered Meritta’s paintings and the shades of color rising out of the black background. So I nodded yes.

  “Let’s take a couple of lights along. Dragging ordinary tourists down into the mine would be too cumbersome, but I have to tell you that you really can’t get a feeling for it up here.” With that, Kivinen led me through a heavy iron door to another vaulted chamber that ended at a yellow-walled elevator that could accommodate about ten people at a time. As we descended I could see the shaft from out the window and a rusted ladder that led up the wall.

  “Emergency exit,” Kivinen said. “Back in the fifties, the elevator broke about once a year, and my dad and your uncle Pena had to climb up that ladder at least twice. How is Pena doing, by the way?” he asked just as the creaky elevator jolted to a halt in the middle of the darkness.

  “Worse again. He’s on a respirator.”

  Holding the door open, Kivinen showed the way with a powerful flashlight. Reluctantly I stepped into the cone of light, and then Kivinen handed me a flashlight as well. I turned it on and with its beam scanned the black, glistening walls. I remembered what Matti had said about phosphorus. The tunnel led down, looking as if it might branch in two directions a little farther off. Pins had been driven into the walls for attaching ropes. I hoped Kivinen’s flashlights had good batteries. The light of the elevator quickly fell behind as we started walking down the corridor. It wasn’t going to go back up without us, was it?

  Kivinen told me that we were about three hundred feet below sea level, moving north toward the sports field and the health center. This tunnel had been one of the first ore bodies they had begun mining in the 1910s. Although Kivinen spoke softly, his voice echoed off the walls. Moisture began creeping through my clothing, and I was happy I was wearing cotton pants and a long-sleeved blazer. There were no large puddles in the tunnel, so my feet stayed dry.

  We came to where the tunnel branched, and Kivinen motioned to the right. “That leads to the edge of the subsidence zone. We need to stay away from there.”

  With that he started walking down the left tunnel until I asked a question that stopped him short. “Is that where Meritta painted?”

  Kivinen’s face was in shadow, but his tone was one of irritation. “Yes. She just had to barge her way into the most dangerous spot. Meritta was interested in a deep pond on the edge of the cave-in. She wanted to paint the way light moves through the water and reflects on the walls. But it was insane. No one should go down there under any circumstances.”

  “Then why did you let her go?”

  “I didn’t know she was going to go so far! I specifically told her not to! No one has been able to go there for thirty years.”

  There was something in the right tunnel that drew me toward it. Its opening seemed narrow, turning ever more sharply to the right. It was a place where darkness and silence lived, a place where everything in the world above ceased to exist. From somewhere in its depths came the quiet, purposeful sound of dripping water.

  Kivinen’s footsteps had stopped. Turning my flashlight toward him, I couldn’t find him at first since he had switched off his own. A cold drop of water fell from the ceiling onto my cheek, and I shuddered. In my beam of light I saw Kivinen struggling with his own flashlight. Eventually it lit up only to go out again.

  “Of course this damn thing would choose right now to act up.” For the first time I heard the gliding Savo-Karelian note in his voice. “I guess I’ll have to use the small one.”

  I turned to follow him, and a moment later the thin, flickering beam of a small flashlight appeared in front of me. This new tunnel we entered branched to the left and was narrow but level and significantly drier than the previous one. In the cold of the mine, I could feel Kivinen’s warmth next to me. Being in this darkness with a perfect stranger was odd.

  “Sometimes Meritta and I would meet down here,” he said suddenly, illuminating a narrow bench carved into the wall. “Meritta wanted to sit there. In the dark.”

  “Strange thing to want,” I said emphatically.

  “Are you afraid of the dark?” Kivinen’s voice contained a challenge, and his eyes glittered with amusement in the weak light.

  “Of course not,” I said and doused my flashlight. Kivinen laughed and then clicked off his own.

  I was used to being able to see in the dark after a few seconds. Even on a moonless, snowless night in November you could start to make out light and shadow in the forest, the shapes of rocks and the motion of tree branches. But now—nothing. Only the weight of the rock above us, the sound of water trickling in the distance, and Kivinen’s breath a few feet away. Then there was a strange scratching sound and a wild blaze from a match head that lit a candle flame.

  “Meritta brought this down with her once,” Kivinen said, indicating the stub of candle flickering in an old-fashioned copper holder. “I should take it away.”

  Marching single file behind the candle, we turned and went back up the tunnel the way we came, as silent as a funeral procession. After a while, Kivinen’s dramatics started irritating me, and I turned on my flashlight. Its light was so bright that I could clearly differentiate the gray and brown colors of the rocks, the glistening of the water on the walls, the yellow grains of sand on the floor. The elevator shone like a cheerful lighthouse at the far end of the tunnel.

  “When did you and Meritta last meet up?” I asked once the elevator began rattling toward the top.

  “As I’ve said several times, our relationship ended months ago!” Kivinen said, acting put-upon. “We parted on good terms. I didn’t want to lose my family, and Meritta already had a new man—Johnny Miettinen—in her sights. I guess I was a little jealous when Meritta was able to give me up so easily for Miettinen.” Kivinen smiled, as if mocking himself.

  Who wouldn’t have chosen Johnny? Perhaps someone who valued the power of money more than anything else. But Meritta wasn’t one of those people. Of course Kivinen was perfect
ly handsome in his own way. He had medium-brown hair cut in a jaunty, youthful style; he clearly took care of his body; and his smile seemed to stretch all the way to his toffee-colored eyes. But compared to Johnny, Kivinen was average.

  Although the misty clouds hung so low they nearly touched the top of the Tower, the air outside still felt dry and crisp after the tunnels of the mine. Filling my lungs, I devoured the radiant green of the birch trees as I listened to the sounds of the city echoing from the base of the hill.

  Kivinen smiled. “It always feels the same, coming up. My dad said that. Every single day the same feeling of liberation…I hope you’re hungry. Let’s go to the restaurant.”

  With that, Kivinen led us to a private room where a vaguely familiar-looking woman in a blue dress was already waiting for us.

  “My wife wanted to meet you too,” Kivinen said.

  The woman extended her hand. “Barbro.”

  Apparently she had already adopted the local first-name rule too.

  I had heard that Barbro Kivinen was from an old Swedish-speaking industrial family. Her demeanor was one of assured sophistication, which made me want to double-check whether I had chosen the proper fork for the shrimp cocktail. Barbro inquired about my work and education, saying that she herself had studied at the Hanken School of Economics and now acted as chairman of the board to a couple of the family’s other businesses. The family’s two sons were in school, one at the Helsinki School of Economics and the other in the United States, also studying business. I was telling them about Antti’s postdoctoral fellowship in Chicago when the server brought the veal escalope. I declined any wine, as I was on duty and the Kivinens weren’t drinking either. After the main course, Kivinen made his apologies, explaining that his next meeting was waiting, and left me with his wife to enjoy our cappuccinos.

  “Cappuccino in Arpikylä. Unbelievable,” I said, smiling at Barbro. “Fifteen years ago you couldn’t even get artificial sweetener in your coffee here. So how have you been settling in?”

  “I have to admit it is quite strange, having lived my whole life in Helsinki. I do visit there almost weekly though. Our son Mikael lives in our apartment downtown, so I always have a place to stay. Especially last winter I found myself longing for the theater and the opera, and decent places to eat lunch.”

  “Not Tokmanni?”

  Barbro laughed. She knew what I meant. That spring a new discount big-box store had come to the county. Tokmanni was a sort of doggerel of the storied Stockmann department store and its café that stood at the center of cultural life in Helsinki. Somehow this captured perfectly the difference between Helsinki and Arpikylä.

  The foam decorating the cappuccino left a mustache on my upper lip, which I tried to lick off quickly. Why wasn’t Barbro Kivinen having the same problem?

  “But life here is just as dramatic as in a big city, even without any murders,” Mrs. Kivinen continued. “How is the investigation progressing, by the way?”

  “Bit by bit. We still don’t really know whether it was an accident or a homicide.”

  “I met Ms. Flöjt several times, since she painted at the mine quite often. A very unique woman, very determined.” Barbro gave a tight-lipped smile, and I wondered whether her husband had been able to keep his relationship with Meritta a secret after all. I was sure that Barbro Kivinen was a determined woman too. But would she be prepared to murder to keep her husband to herself?

  After coffee I wandered over to the ticket booth, but there was no sign of Jaska, so I stopped to look at souvenirs—forged copper miniatures of the Tower and small copper hearts. Where had I seen a copper heart like that?

  On impulse, I picked up the dime-size earring, turning it over in my palm. Its color was warm, almost the same color as my hair.

  “Copper is the metal of love,” the salesgirl said. “The hooks are gold though, so they won’t turn your ears green. Genuine Arpikylä artisan craftsmanship.”

  I decided to buy a pair of earrings and send one to Antti. Maybe it was sappy, but I didn’t care.

  By the time I left work for Joensuu, it had started to rain. The Lada’s windshield wipers worked well enough, but the back window fogged up almost instantly. After trying the heater, I finally opened the front windows and within a few miles I could see behind me again.

  I had always hated the Joensuu Central Hospital. Whereas the Arpikylä Tower watched over the surrounding landscape mysterious and castle-like, this building was simply cold and sterile. When I was fourteen, I had my tonsils removed, but the wound refused to heal. I lay in a bed on the eighth floor of the hospital for nearly two weeks before the doctors managed to patch my throat back together properly. The taste of blood in my mouth still unnerved me, making me imagine that my scars had reopened and I would have to be hooked up to all those tubes again.

  Uncle Pena was lying in his bed with his eyes closed. He looked completely different from how I remembered him. My dad was waiting for me, but Mom had already left to see her baby grandson. Pena’s room was filled with various machines, one of which monitored his heart. The wave pattern was beautifully regular. An oxygen machine pumped air into his lungs and a tube connected to his arm provided a nutrient solution. Presumably the blanket concealed a catheter. The paralyzed side of his mouth was strangely twisted.

  Looking at my uncle, suddenly I had an almost uncontrollable desire to rip out all the tubes and end his life once and for all. Maybe that’s what he wanted. But I had seen the bright expression in his unparalyzed eye when he had been conscious and had seen how his healthy hand moved as if in a petting motion when I talked to him about his cat. How could I know for sure what he wanted?

  “Just before you came he was awake for a few minutes,” my father said.

  “Did you tell him that Mikko caught two mice?”

  “No, I forgot. Look at that bouquet of flowers. From the town council.”

  The white roses and blue irises were elegantly arranged, vaguely reminiscent of a Finnish flag dotted with splashes of bright yellow. It would have been perfect as a funeral arrangement; all it needed was a ribbon with an appropriate patriotic line from “Oh Dear Finland, Precious Fatherland.” The vase was too small for the bouquet, making it look as though it might tip off the narrow table onto the floor.

  “That reminds me. Who will take Meritta’s seat on the city council? Do you know?” I asked.

  My father’s brow furrowed. “As I remember, the Greens only had three candidates in that race, including Meritta, who received almost all the votes for the party. The others I remember were Matti Virtanen and a recent high school graduate who doesn’t even live in town anymore. I think he moved to Helsinki. So I guess it would be Matti, seeing as he’s the only person on the Green party list in town.”

  I didn’t think a seat on the town council could be sufficient incentive to murder someone, and imagining Matti wanting it that badly was beyond impossible. But now I had one more important reason for interviewing the Virtanens. I really couldn’t put it off past tomorrow.

  We waited for a while, but Uncle Pena didn’t wake up. A nurse came by on her rounds and assured us all was well, so well in fact that they were even considering taking him off assisted breathing. She looked at me a little funny when I asked her to tell him about the mice Mikko had caught, but she promised she would.

  “Pena and Meritta did have some scheme in the works before his stroke,” my dad said thoughtfully as we drove toward my sister’s house. “I don’t know whether Meritta was trying to get the Dems on board with one of her environmental issues or what, but they were talking a lot. Sometimes I would even see them at the Copper Cup together.”

  “Meritta was working on a series of paintings of the mine, so maybe she wanted Pena to tell her about what it was like to work down there,” I suggested.

  “Maybe. I think Pena was a little infatuated with her too. I’m sure that did him good. He was always a little afraid of women. Our eternal bachelor.”

  I had always gotten along
great with my uncle, but growing up Eeva and Helena were a little shy around him. Perhaps Uncle Pena had put them in the “women” category but hadn’t done the same with me. I had always been willing to cut hay and listen to his stories even longer than my aunt’s sons who were about the same age as me.

  At my sister’s place I played cars with Saku for an hour until he started getting hungry. While the others tried to feed him—it seemed as though food ended up everywhere but in the little man’s stomach—I tried to call Koivu. At his home no one answered, and the police station said he was at the hospital questioning Somalis and skinheads. Judging from that, Anita’s birthday probably hadn’t panned out too well. For a second I considered whether I could stand going back to the antisepticsmelling hospital, but I decided I couldn’t bother Koivu while he was doing work.

  As I drove back through the rain-drenched forests, I thought of Uncle Pena. What if I tried to smuggle Mikko into the hospital? Maybe feeling his cat’s smooth coat one more time would do him good. Bryan Adams’ voice pouring out of the radio as he bleated about forgiveness didn’t do anything to improve my mood.

  The single, small copper heart dangling from my earlobe was strangely heavy. I had mailed Antti’s heart immediately, knowing I would hesitate if I didn’t act on my romantic impulse right then. Touching my own heart earring, I remembered where I had seen one just like it—on Meritta’s ear. But one of her earrings was also missing. Had the killer taken it?

  10

  As I went out to retrieve the newspaper from the mailbox, I discovered a giant puddle at the foot of the front stairs when my foot squelched into an ankle-deep mixture of mud and water. It had been raining all night. After my morning coffee, I pulled on some rubber boots and set out into the yard to see whether I could do anything about the new pond in front of the house. With the heel of my boot, I started scraping a shallow trench in the dirt to the yard drain thirty feet away.

  Mikko appeared on the steps as if pondering whether to go out in the rain at all. In the end, he jumped off the side of the stairs and in a streak of gray bounded under the sauna, where apparently a family of voles had nested.