Copper Heart

by Leena Lehtolainen

  We were approaching the edge of the subsidence zone.

  “Stop! I don’t want this thing coming down on our heads…at least not yet,” Kivinen said to me, laughing. Did he know how much he was acting like a B-movie villain? All he was missing was the black cowboy hat. Or did he think he was Lee Marvin? I tried to peer into the corner where Meritta had painted the small, greedy flame, but I couldn’t see anything.

  “Today something very unfortunate is going to happen. Unfortunate for all of Arpikylä, but especially unfortunate for me. Sometime during the nineteen fifties, a large number of explosives was left in the subsidence zone. Now they are going to explode, unexpectedly. After all, you never know when forty-year-old dynamite might go off by itself. The most likely cause of the explosion will be Sheriff Maria Kallio’s failed attempt to arrest Johnny Miettinen at the edge of the zone, suspecting him of a double homicide. Perhaps the fuse caught from a spark made by the pistol Johnny had with him. What on earth could they have been doing underground? We may never know, since they were both blown to kingdom come. The explosion will also destroy a significant part of the Old Mine buildings so continuing business will be impossible.”

  It sounded as if Kivinen was reading from a screenplay. But how would he fit himself into the script? Kivinen turned his head toward the corner where the flame burned in Meritta’s painting. Johnny groaned next to me when the light on Kivinen’s helmet revealed a pile of explosives there.

  So that was what Meritta saw. Rumors had been circulating for decades that the mining company had left behind tons of explosives in the subsidence zone that they couldn’t be bothered to clear away. But according to the rumors, they were supposed to be deeper underground. Had Kivinen’s father told him the precise location of the explosives and had Kivinen brought them up here?

  “Will the Tower come down?” I asked, surprised to hear how firm and calm my voice sounded.

  “Doubtful. It might shake a little. Of course the explosion may unfortunately also claim the lives of a few tourists. But I could never have predicted that. I’ve never even visited the cave-in. It was the mining company who excavated this and then left dangerous explosives down here. If anyone has to pay reparations, it will be them—”

  “Maria, I didn’t kill them. You have to believe me!” Johnny yelled, cutting off Kivinen.

  “Of course not. Kivinen did.” Something had started boiling inside me and no matter how I tried to calm myself, I couldn’t stop the rage that burst out of me. “You goddamn fucking fuckhead!” I screamed, even though no amount of cursing could vent all the anger I felt. “This whole Old Mine thing was just one big fucking load of bullshit, wasn’t it? Did you plan to blow the whole pile of shit sky-high from the very beginning? I’ve seen Pena and Meritta’s notes. They suspected you were attempting bankruptcy fraud right from the get-go and that you were funneling the money through your wife’s companies to offshore accounts. And, of course, the debt falls on the city’s head!”

  Compulsively my sweaty right hand slid toward my left side and the holster concealed there. I had never felt such a strong desire to kill. But Kivinen’s pistol was still pointed at Johnny’s head.

  “What went wrong, Kivinen?” I continued in a more controlled tone. “Wasn’t your plan cunning enough for Meritta? Or did you ask her to come with you to live in the lap of luxury after it was all over?”

  “That bitch was just a spy. She was just trying to get information about me. In love with me, my ass! She had some kind of plan with that uncle of yours. Finally the whore barged in here and saw the explosives. Luckily for me she was an idealist. She wanted to save all the jobs I had created, so she didn’t expose me immediately.”

  Click.

  Finally everything fell into place. So Meritta had suspected something from the beginning. She hadn’t been acting against her principles by leaving Kivinen for Johnny because she was never in love with Kivinen. Now I understood Uncle Pena and Meritta’s phone conversation too. The rest of the city council might have fallen for Kivinen’s con, but the two of them had been suspicious. Instead of believing in fairy tales, they started digging into the big investor’s background.

  “You pulled off a world-class scam, and the city fathers swallowed it hook, line, and sinker because they had been waiting for a savior like you to descend from on high. And what about my uncle? Did you cause his first stroke somehow?”

  “I just stopped by to have a little chat with him the day before his stroke. Who can say what caused it?”

  “But Pena knows everything! As soon as he gets better, you’re done for!”

  “Gets better?” Kivinen laughed again, its hollow echo joining in. “Do you really think he’s going to survive after hearing about the explosion?”

  The holster was getting heavy again. Johnny’s drowsy eyes flashed in the dark. Kivinen obviously intended to shoot us both before he set off the explosives. He probably intended to flee up the tunnel that had forked to the left. That meant he had calculated the fuse to burn slowly enough to allow him time to escape. But did Kivinen really know how long the fuse would burn or how powerful the blast would be?

  “Why did you kill Jaska?”

  “That damn snooping drunk! I wish I knew when he managed to grab Meritta’s purse from off her body. He was probably still slinking around after Meritta fell and he might have even seen me. He didn’t even know anything, but he could have turned into a real pain in my ass. Have I satisfied your curiosity now? And Johnny must know by now why he has to die. I thought for sure he saw me on the hill the night Meritta died, but I was wrong. He’s been a great scapegoat though.”

  “I only saw Meritta,” said Johnny, his voice raspy. “I didn’t see you. Just Meritta lying there twisted and dead.”

  I would have liked to ask Johnny why he didn’t notify the police immediately and how Kivinen had taken him prisoner. But now was no time for private conversations. Again I turned to look at Kivinen, whose soiled copper-colored suit glinted under his helmet headlamp.

  “Why are you doing this? Just for the money? Or do you really want to destroy our whole town?”

  “It serves the shithole right!” Kivinen shouted, and gravel fell from the ceiling right in his face. “Everybody’s all ‘yes sir, no sir’ when you have money. It was different in the sixties though. Back then a miner wasn’t even human. Did the mining company pay when my dad got lung cancer? The fuck they did! It had nothing to do with the conditions he worked in, they said. And the bastards in city hall just lined up to grovel in front of them. Being a kid here was a living hell. But what would you know about that? Your parents were teachers.”

  Scar Town. Maybe his desire to prove something to the city that rejected him had spurred him on, but he failed to see that in order to succeed he was ripping his scars open again and again, until they had no way to heal.

  “Now it’s time for some fireworks. Maria, stay there!” Forcing Johnny closer to the pile of explosives, Kivinen handed him a cigarette lighter. “That fuse on the left. Light it.”

  A strange elation flashed in Kivinen’s eyes, and the hand holding his pistol trembled as Johnny set his flashlight on the floor and lit the fuse. When it caught, it gave off a strange, sulfuric smell.

  Then I made my move.

  Pulling out my gun, I shot at Kivinen’s hand, hitting him in the wrist. His own gun went off, and I heard Johnny howl as Kivinen’s bullet appeared to graze his left ankle.

  Kivinen lay on the ground moaning. As he fell, the glass of the helmet headlamp had shattered, slicing open his face and leaving it a bloody mess. The gun in my hand itched to fire again, its barrel pointed at Kivinen’s chest. His pistol had landed at my feet. Still keeping a bead on him, I crouched to pick it up. After putting the safety on, I clumsily released the clip, all in the dark. The fuse continued hissing in the corner, and I didn’t know if I would be able to put it out. The flame was already too large to simply stomp out with a shoe. And I didn’t even have my knife with me! Cursing, I thre
w Kivinen’s gun far out into the black, bottomless pit of the cave-in.

  “Johnny?” Picking up the flashlight, I shined it on Johnny and saw his face was a pallid green. “Come on.”

  “My leg…”

  “Can you walk? This place is going to explode.”

  As I talked, I pulled Johnny upright, seeing that the gouge in his ankle was deeper than a light graze, exposing a piece of his bone. Shoving my shoulder under Johnny’s right arm, we started a running hobble back up the corridor. Kivinen shouted something after us, but I didn’t give a damn about him anymore. Johnny and I had to get out before the bang.

  Alone I would have been able to run the half mile to the elevator in under four minutes. With Johnny limping, it took at least twice as long. He tried his best to jump on his right leg, but his breathing was becoming progressively labored. The blood from his other leg smelled warm and sickly sweet.

  “Maria, I can’t. It hurts so bad.”

  “You have to. Rest for a second.”

  Ripping a strip of cloth from my shirttail, I tied it around Johnny’s leg as best I could and hoped that would help. Johnny moaned in pain when pieces of bone pressed against the skin, and his blood was sticky on my fingers.

  When we reached the fork in the tunnel, I stopped to think for a second. I didn’t know enough about old explosive compounds to know whether we should move up or head to the left, whether explosions carry more force upward or outward. Maybe it would be better to try and go up, so we continued down the tunnel leading back to the Old Mine.

  Then my flashlight went out. As we stood for a moment in the infinite darkness, I heard the terrified thumping of my heart and felt the warm weight of Johnny’s body next to me. We had to continue more slowly. The whole time I expected the explosion at any moment, and I kept thinking I could hear Kivinen’s steps behind us.

  How badly was Kivinen wounded? Had I left him to die? I wouldn’t have been able to make it out in time with him and Johnny, and I wasn’t sure if I could’ve prevented the explosives from going off if I had stayed behind to help.

  Then around a bend in the tunnel the greenish light of the elevator came into view. Seeing it put new momentum into Johnny’s hopping. I knew that so long as we could get up and out the door of the mine, we would probably be safe.

  Setting Johnny down, I fired one round into the lock. The impact blew it to smithereens, and a hole appeared in the wall of the elevator as well. Dragging Johnny into the cage, full of hope, I pressed the Up button.

  Nothing.

  I pressed again, but the result was the same. Seeing the horror on Johnny’s face, I knew it would require too great an effort to escape through the other tunnel. At least ten minutes had passed already, and the explosion could come at any second.

  Then I remembered the ladder sunk into the wall of the elevator shaft. I could climb up it easily enough, but what about Johnny? How long would it take him to climb one hundred yards?

  “Johnny, we have to try the ladder. You go first so I can push.”

  Johnny was as pale as quartz. I wondered when he had last eaten or at least drunk some water, and what drugs had Kivinen pumped into him.

  “I can’t. I’m too tired, and we won’t make it in time anyway,” he said in a voice that revealed no desire to fight.

  But I couldn’t leave him sitting there on the floor of the elevator waiting for the explosion. “Yes we will. You can get on my back.” Again I was surprised to hear how calm my voice was, even though I was having a hard time getting any sound out of my throat. Leaning forward, I pulled Johnny’s arms around my neck. “Don’t worry. You just hold on tight.”

  Only the green light on the ceiling of the elevator illuminated the narrow, damp shaft. The ladder was cold and badly rusted, instantly tearing at my hands. I forced myself to climb deliberately, envisioning in my mind’s eye a fuse somewhere half a mile away growing shorter by the second. Johnny hung on to my back, a 180-pound sobbing heap. The tears on his cheek mingled with my own. I was beyond afraid. One false move and we would plunge into the depths. Trying to keep myself composed, I counted the rungs. There couldn’t be more than three hundred of them.

  At rung 120 we encountered a narrow platform, presumably intended as a resting place. There I was able to get Johnny’s weight off my back momentarily. My panting reverberated off the walls of the six-foot-wide shaft, and Johnny’s voice came as a low rumble when he whispered, “I didn’t tell you I saw Meritta because I thought she jumped off the Tower…because of me. Our relationship was done, even though she didn’t want it to be. And then when they said it was murder—”

  “Don’t waste your energy talking!”

  “I ran into Kivinen last night. He said he knew they were looking for me and that he would help. He probably slipped something into my beer.”

  I tried not to listen to Johnny as we continued our climb; the blood was pounding in my head and my legs felt heavy as copper.

  “I want you to know before we die,” Johnny blubbered as he wrapped his arms around me again. “I was on the rebound with Meritta. I really would have wanted to try again…with you. That was what I was going back to tell Meritta that night.”

  For a moment I hated the man hanging on my back. Why was he making pathetic confessions instead of fighting for his life? Apparently he also thought I was there for the taking.

  I forced myself to go on and breathe calmly through my mouth so I wouldn’t smell the revolting stench of blood from Johnny’s leg.

  At around rung 200, I was sure we would never make it to the top. The rough steel had left my hands raw and bleeding, and my muscles were pumped full of lactic acid. Then Johnny perked up and started pushing on the rungs with his healthy leg, which helped a bit. In an excited burst of adrenaline, I started rushing, and one of my feet slipped. Fortunately, Johnny reacted faster than I did, gripping one rung firmly with one hand and me with the other while I regained my equilibrium. I felt as though my heart would explode with fear before the explosion came. Even though the light in the shaft was growing dimmer, I could see we had only thirty feet left to go.

  The intervals between the rungs were long, clearly not intended for someone my size. My thighs burned and I could barely lift my legs as sweat and tears stung my eyes. Johnny tried to use his one good leg, but that almost made me lose my balance again. Our cries ricocheted off the black walls of the shaft, and then a booming sound began. Somewhere below, the earth started to shake.

  Somehow we managed to haul ourselves up those final yards to the elevator platform, where we lay sobbing in darkness. The rock beneath us trembled, and hysterical screams came from the other side of the thick steel door. Taking Johnny by the hand, I thought grimly that dying next to him wasn’t as romantic as I once imagined it to be.

  There was a sudden final bang from the tunnels, powerful even at a distance, and the gleam of the elevator light far below disappeared. From somewhere deep in the darkness came the sound of an enormous collapse. Gravel coming loose from the ceiling rained down on us, making us one with the copper-scented stone.

  16

  Standing atop the Tower, I gazed down over the city. Birch trees veiled the buildings with their green leaves, and the main road wound through the city empty of cars or people. The church was just as ugly as ever, and to the west the burgundy water of the Sump pond still shimmered. The evening was already growing dark, and a round yellow late-summer moon was climbing in the sky behind the Tower. Behind the nearest trees was an opening in the ground where Kivinen’s explosives had ripped the previous sinkhole even wider and deeper.

  One decaying house on the edge of the subsidence zone had collapsed, but no one had died or even been seriously injured. Kivinen assumed his explosives would be about three times more powerful than they were. He had said himself you never can tell about forty-year-old dynamite.

  Even he had lived. Before the blast, he had regained his senses enough to flee nearly half a mile up the left-hand passageway. After the explosion,
a rescue party had gone down the tunnel through the ore mill entrance and found him still breathing. His left hand was shattered and a shard of glass had left him blind in one eye. Now he was in the county jail awaiting trial.

  The copper sand of the Sump glistened in the setting sun; behind it were endless forests, their gray ribbons of road winding out to the rest of the world. Great silver lakes gleamed to the northeast. Everything was the same as before—everything except the sinkhole, the middle of which was now a gray-brown festering wound after the explosion.

  I had saved Johnny, but not the city. Some heroine. Old Mine Tourism Ltd had been ripe for bankruptcy since its inception. Kivinen had managed to hustle an enormous amount in business subsidies, successfully hiding most of it in Central European banks. Using front companies registered in his wife’s name as subcontractors, he had managed to sink four times more money into the project than was really spent. Lawyers for the city and the Ministry of Trade and Industry were currently in the process of determining how to recover what Kivinen had swindled and invested elsewhere, but things looked bad. The case would drag on for at least several years. In the meantime, the loans Kivinen had taken out would most likely fall to the city to repay. I had heard rumors that Barbro Kivinen would be willing to continue her husband’s business provided the city could ensure sufficient capital, but I was afraid that would be too much even for the most gullible wishful thinkers on the town council.

  Below, on the flat top of the mine hill, a campfire flared to life. With summer over, the art camp was having its closing party. In the calm air, the smoke rose straight up, bringing the scent of burning pine to my nose. Bending down to see better, I noticed Koivu waving a wine bottle up at me.

  “That’s enough brooding already!”