When Celestine and Otto got back home a few hours later the social worker lady was still there. She was talking with Harriet who nodded exaggeratedly and mumbled, “Yes,” and, “Sure.” Otto had started to freeze. And cry. There was nothing else to do but go home. Harriet met them by the door.
—Take the boy and stay away! she cried. You have already caused enough problems!
She did as she was told and brought Otto to the snowdrift which was so big that year that it reached up above the roof of the parking lot. There the kids, including herself, had dug tunnels like crazy all winter long. She took one of the shovels tossed on the ground and started working the snow but couldn’t drive away the anxiety that crept into her body. Harriet and social workers. It was never a good combination. God only knew what Mom might think up to say to them. She would just run her mouth, making up one glib lie after another that only made things worse. They had already seen everything. There was no point in making promises and lying anymore. She took a quick look at Otto. He was sitting deep inside the snow tunnel sucking on a piece of ice. For a moment she hesitated. Then she said:
—Otto. Wait here for a bit.
And she walked off.
Inside the kitchen she had to sit on a chair and answer questions. She had been given a glass of juice. She had nodded and looked up into the social worker lady’s face with big eyes. Then Harriet had sent her away again. Celestine’s steps were lighter when she returned. It was all going to be okay, they had said. And she called loudly for Otto.
No answer. She hurried up. Ran a little. Saw from a distance the car that had driven into the snow mound, and her legs started moving on their own. The man who had been driving was vaguely familiar. He lived in one of the small, charming, wooden villas a little ways from there and used to take the short cut through their area, by way of the bar. He stumbled out of the car and fell on his face, cursing, too drunk to stay on his feet. Celestine got there and was on top of the snowdrift in one leap. The system of tunnels and caves had collapsed. Where Otto had been sitting a few minutes before was now a solid wall of icy snow. The fender of the car had ploughed deeply into the hole where he was hiding. She plunged her fingers deep into the frozen snow and started digging.
The hole she is digging in the snow mound that the small, yellow snowplows have been piling up for weeks is getting deeper.
People like Carin doesn’t deserve to have children, Celestine thinks while she digs. People who see their children as an accessory. Who exhibit them in their egocentric blogs, completely unprepared for the unexpected. So cluelessly lost in their almighty safety that they leave their doors wide open for anyone to walk uninvited into their cozy, warm lives. It’s just a question of time before something happens. Carin should be glad that what happened was just me.
She’s sniffling. He’ll be fine for a long time in the snow. Until it’s time to go back and get him. After the worst excitement has passed. She’s going to lay low for a few weeks somewhere else and then take him to Harriet’s in Lovisa. She’s going to say that they have to hide. That Anders has been violent for quite a long time. That she worries for the safety of the child. Harriet will understand. She won’t question it. And then everything will be just like it was before.
—Just look at you, Celestine says when she lifts Gabriel out of the carriage. Carin is supposed to be the perfect mother. But here you are.
He whimpers in his sleep. His mouth is moving and the pacifier begins to bounce up and down with a smacking sound. He is waving his hands, dressed in thick blue mittens, in front of him. She carefully lowers the sleeping child into the hole and covers him up with snow.
When she leaves the spot, gripping the handle of the carriage firmly, large snowflakes are already falling, covering up her tracks. She pushes the carriage into a thick spruce bower and walks home.
* * *
That whole evening blue lights are blinking in the area. They knock on every door, including hers. She becomes one of them, the good and splendid ones. The ones who see and hear everything. Blond and fine with rosy cheeks and cold fingertips, she pulls her shawl tighter around her shoulders and furrows her brow. Moans and groans. But no, she has seen nothing suspicious. Heard nothing at all. The policeman hardly looks at her. It’s just routine. She’s not among the suspects. They contact the border patrols, the coast guards. The harbor with its departing freighters is under especially careful observation. Celestine remembers how Carin fell on the staircase and howled. The sound floated above the row house area like a foghorn and Celestine shuddered. She hugged herself. It didn’t feel the way she had expected. Carin crawling down the driveway and then stopping on her knees where the carriage had been. It was like a scene in a dream. Not even the tracks from the wheels were left. Anders was gray in the face and pulled Carin by the arm but she pushed him away and he fell in the snow. Then he just sat there, panting. It was so raw. Much too primitive. Celestine wished she could shout out to them that they didn’t need to worry. That Gabriel was fine. That he was warm and safe and almost certainly still sleeping. But she just swallowed hard and, confused, pulled away from the window to an armchair to wait out the night.
* * *
The next day she reads about it in the papers. It’s a big spread, takes up several pages. Baby Found in a Snowdrift. He’d been there for four hours. They had found him in the nick of time. The press speculates about who, where, how, and why. “When,” they pretty much knew. Carin insisted she had checked on the baby just ten minutes earlier.
Sadly enough for Carin, Fredriksson’s Anita had seen her disappear down along Lilla Ullholmsvägen with Gabriel in the carriage right about then. They had even said hello to each other. Anders could say nothing; he had not been at home. The state-appointed psychologist who came to talk to him a few hours after his wife had been picked up—no handcuffs necessary, she didn’t resist—said that this kind of thing was more common than you would think. Carin had been pretty depressed right after the birth. She had generously shared all about that on her blog. No one could know when that sort of thing might get worse.
* * *
Three days later Anders brings Gabriel back from the hospital. He’s wrapped in a blanket. It’s exactly like the day when he came back from the birth clinic, but Anders is more fragile now and Carin is missing. His back is bent and his steps are slow. Celestine stands by her window looking at him.
He’s going to need all the help he can get, she thinks.
During the three days that have passed since the burial, she’s jumped at every little sound, convinced the police would come knocking at her door. But as the hours have multiplied, her anxiety has subsided. She has been able to follow all the main turns of events in the story of Baby Gabriel in the media. The press has not published any photos nor mentioned any names, in consideration of the family. Celestine is relieved. For a moment she feels a sting of conscience when she thinks of Carin, but it quickly passes. Celestine has always been the kind of person to put her foot into a door left ajar. So she dresses in her best push-up bra and leaves the top button of her blouse open, as she walks across the street toward the row houses to extend her most sincere sympathy to Anders Johansson.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Riikka Ala-Harja, born in 1967, is an author of novels, short stories, children’s books, and comic books. She has published six novels to date; Hole is her first collection of short stories. She lives in Helsinki.
Tapani Bagge has published over ninety books. He received the Clue Award from the Finnish Whodunnit Society in 2007 for his novel Musta taivas (Black Sky). In his seven Hämeenlinna Noir crime novels so far, Bagge depicts the cops and cons of his hometown. He has also written four historical crime novels featuring Detective Sergeant Mujunen.
Lone Thygesen Blecher (translator) is a prize-winning translator from Swedish and Danish into English. Her work includes translations of novels, plays, poems, children’s literature, and short fiction. She lives in New York State where she is also focusing
on a career in painting and pottery.
Karo Hämäläinen, born in 1976, has two passions: literature and the stock market. He works as a financial journalist and author and has combined his passions in his recent financial thrillers, including the short story “The Broker” in this anthology. Hämäläinen has studied both the humanities and economics. Following stints in Munich, Berlin, and Tampere, he now lives in Helsinki. In his spare time, Hämäläinen likes running; his record marathon time is 3:04:04.
Pekka Hiltunen published his debut thriller, Cold Courage, in 2011; it won three prizes in Finland, including the Clue Award for Best Crime Novel, and was nominated for the Scandinavian Glass Key Award. He is an award-winning journalist, and his novels have been translated into seven languages.
Johanna Holmström is a Helsinki-based author who was born and raised in Sipoo, on the partly Swedish-speaking southern coast of Finland. At the age of twenty-two, she made her literary debut with the story collection Inlåst och andra noveller, which was short-listed for the 2004 Swedish Radio Short Story Award. Her third story collection, Camera Obscura, was awarded the 2009 Svenska Dagbladet Literature Prize. Her second novel, Asfaltsänglar, has been translated into several languages.
Jesse Itkonen is a writer and filmmaker from Helsinki. He has worked as a columnist, film critic, director, and screenwriter. He lives with his wife and two cats, and is currently working on his first novel.
Teemu Kaskinen, born in 1976, has written novels, plays, and screenplays. He hates cops and other writers.
Leena Lehtolainen, born in 1964, is the most successful female crime author in Finland, with her titles consistently topping the country’s best-seller lists. More than two million copies of her books have been sold worldwide, and her works have been translated into twenty-nine languages. In addition to her career as an author, Lehtolainen has worked as a literary researcher, columnist, and critic. Her best-known character is the tough, down-to-earth, and emotionally intelligent police officer Maria Kallio.
Tuomas Lius got his first break in crime writing as a nine-year-old when a provincial newspaper began to publish his detective stories in a weekly series. His trilogy—Haka, Laittomat, and Härkäjuoksu—has received both critical and commercial success with its unique blend of suspense, action, and pitch-black humor. He is living in rural North Karelia where he schemes new and exciting crimes and capers on an almost daily basis.
Kristian London (translator) has translated several novels and over a dozen plays from Finnish into English. His translation of Nights of Awe by Harri Nykänen was named a notable translation of 2012 by World Literature Today. London divides his time between Helsinki and Seattle.
Joe L. Murr was born in Finland and has lived on every continent except Antarctica. His fiction has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, ChiZine, and Noir Nation. He currently divides his time between the Netherlands and Finland.
Jukka Petäjä, born in Helsinki in 1956, has been a staff writer in the leading Finnish daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, since 1988, serving mainly as a literary critic and essayist. He is the author of five novels and two nonfiction books. His latest crime novel, Hiidenhyrrä (Diabolo), is the first volume in a trilogy featuring the dry alcoholic detective inspector Pekka Suokko. He wrote his dissertation on American Jewish literature.
Douglas Robinson (translator), Dean of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, has been translating from Finnish into English since 1975, when he translated Aleksis Kivi’s Nummisuutarit (Heath Cobblers). His translation of When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. He has also written several books on translation including: The Translator’s Turn, Translation and Taboo, Becoming a Translator, Who Translates?, and Schleiermacher’s Icoses.
Lola Rogers (translator) is a Finnish to English translator living in Seattle. Her novel translations include works by Johanna Sinisalo, Sofi Oksanen, and Antti Tuomainen. She is also a regular contributor of translated fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to numerous journals and anthologies. Her translations of short fiction have been included in Best European Fiction 2014 and Words without Borders: The Best of the First Ten Years.
Jarkko Sipila, born in 1964, is a Finnish author and journalist. He has reported on Finnish crime for more than twenty years and has written seventeen crime novels. Five novels in his Helsinki Homicide Series have been published in English. Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall won the Finnish Crime Novel of the Year Award in 2009. Through realistic characters and story lines, he explores current topics surrounding life in contemporary Finland. Visit www.jarkkosipila.com for more information.
James Thompson has lived in Finland for over fifteen years and has proven himself to be one of the most popular representatives of Nordic noir, with his work being published in a dozen languages. Snow Angels, the first book in his acclaimed Kari Vaara series, was one of Booklist’s Best Crime Novel Debuts of the Year and was nominated for an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, and a Strand Critics Award. Helsinki Dead is the fifth and latest installment in the series.
Jill G. Timbers (translator) grew up in Pennsylvania. She has lived and studied in Finland (Helsinki and Tampere), working there first as a bike mechanic after college and later as a university librarian, among other roles. Her translations from Finnish into English have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She and her Finnish husband have three grown sons and currently live in Illinois.
Antti Tuomainen, born in 1971, was an award-winning copywriter before he made his literary debut in 2007 as a suspense author. In 2011, Tuomainen’s third novel, The Healer, was awarded the Clue Award for Best Crime Novel and has since been published in twenty-seven countries worldwide. In 2013 his fourth novel, Dark As My Heart, was published in Finland to great critical acclaim.
Owen F. Witesman (translator) is a professional literary translator with a master’s degree in Finnish and Estonian from Indiana University. He has translated more than thirty Finnish books into English from a wide range of genres. Among these are two crime novels by Pekka Hiltunen, Cold Courage and Black Noise, as well as four mystery novels by Leena Lehtolainen. He currently resides in Springville, Utah, with his wife and three daughters.
BONUS MATERIAL
USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series
Now available from Akashic Books
INTRODUCTION
WRITERS ON THE RUN
From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, edited by Johnny Temple
In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.
It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.
From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.
My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exposure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’
d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.
Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.
Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.
The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.
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