The Winter of the Lions

by Jan Costin Wagner

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘You’re bleeding. I scratched a little too hard.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I’ll clean it up. Do you have any disinfectant?’

  ‘Hm …’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll go and shower. Take this.’

  He took the towel she handed him.

  ‘You must hold it against the cut. It’s only a scratch, looks worse than it is.’

  He nodded and watched her going to the bathroom. He lay on the floor beside the sofa. The rushing of the shower. Water. An unseen audience. He picked up the remote control and muted the sound. He could taste blood at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘I’d like to ask you something,’ he said when she came back.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘You’re lying on the floor and the towel you’re holding to your face is turning red.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ he said.

  She sat down cross-legged beside him.

  ‘I’d like to ask you something,’ he said again.

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said.

  ‘What was the most wonderful experience you ever had?’

  She did not reply.

  ‘Is that so hard to answer?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’d be telling you a lie.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sat up and tried to meet her eyes.

  ‘Go ahead, then,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d like to hear your lies.’

  She still said nothing.

  ‘How old are you? What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty-two. Larissa.’

  ‘I’d like to …’

  ‘We always take a bit off our age, but never more than three years at the most.’

  Then she got to her feet.

  ‘Don’t come in until the scratch has stopped bleeding, please, there are clean sheets on the bed,’ she said as she left the room. She opened the bedroom door and closed it almost without a sound.

  26

  KAI-PETTERI HÄMÄLÄINEN WAS watching Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen, and already he felt a little better.

  ‘It’s only just begun,’ said Irene. She gave him a kiss on the cheek, sat down again on the sofa and watched her husband on television.

  ‘Today that girl was on the show, wasn’t she?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, the girlfriend of the gunman who ran amok,’ said Hämäläinen.

  He went into the bathroom, washed his hands and splashed a little water on his face. Then he went back to the living room, sat down beside Irene and put an arm round her.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Irene.

  ‘Fine,’ said Hämäläinen.

  On the screen, the girl kept her head lowered as she concentrated on finding words to describe something beyond description.

  Yes, it had really gone very well.

  He had steadied himself again. He had sat on his chair, seen his face in the mirror, thinking about ideas that were difficult to grasp, and Tuula had come along and said, yet again, that there wasn’t much time, the recording was beginning and the girl seemed silent and unsure of herself. He had nodded, stood up, and went to interview the girl. He had talked, the girl had listened. His voice had filled the studio, and the girl had nodded gravely, and then his powers had returned to him. When the recording began he was still feeling a little dizzy, but he couldn’t quite remember what had really disturbed him.

  Lords of life and death, he had thought, and the girl had talked about her boyfriend, a gentle, affectionate young man, a model student, who had killed three people and then turned the gun on himself. He had nodded, and at every answer the girl gave, he knew what to ask next. Together with the girl he had swum in a river of words. His words, her words. A steadily flowing current.

  The girl had concentrated on what she was saying, had not felt unsure of herself. Tuula had been wrong there, and anyway Hämäläinen was inclined to doubt Tuula’s judgement. How the hell could she have come up with the idea of getting him to interview, on two successive evenings, women who had lost their men? The Tango King’s widow, the girlfriend of the gunman who had run amok.

  He looked at the TV screen and felt Irene’s hand tickling the nape of his neck. It gave him a tingling sensation. He closed his eyes and listened to the girl’s voice coming from the TV set.

  ‘I won’t forget him,’ she was saying. ‘He’s always with me.’

  His own voice putting a question. Calm, controlled, warm and understanding, yet also sceptical and with a touch of admonition. Lords of life and death, Tuula had said. There was something about that remark that he couldn’t get out of his head.

  ‘The one thing I can’t forgive him is that he never really talked to me,’ said the girl. Then another voice, croaking slightly. The psychologist sitting in the audience whose job it had been to contribute a scientific comment from time to time. Then he heard his own voice asking a question. A question that now hovered in the air.

  ‘If I’d known, I’d have kept him from doing it. I could have done that,’ said the girl.

  A moment of silence.

  ‘I could have kept him from doing it,’ said the girl again.

  Irene’s hand at the nape of his neck. Hämäläinen opened his eyes. He saw himself on the screen, nodding thoughtfully. Then there was long applause.

  ‘Good,’ said Irene. It sounded curiously toneless.

  ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘Good. I mean you were good today,’ said Irene. She caressed the back of his neck, and he felt tired.

  ‘How are those two little imps of ours?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said Irene.

  ‘When did they get to sleep?’

  ‘Late. Just before you came in.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Lotta has her first race with the school cross-country skiing team at the weekend. She was all excited, so then of course Minna didn’t want to go to sleep either.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Terrible,’ she said, and he said, ‘Goodnight, stay with us,’ but that was on the screen. The credits came up, and Irene said, yet again, ‘Terrible.’

  ‘What …’

  ‘That girl. She seemed to be … concentrating so hard. You too, both of you.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I never felt you were concentrating so hard as in this particular show,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s hardly two weeks ago, and people have already stopped talking about it. They hardly even remember how many people that boy shot.’

  ‘Three,’ said Hämäläinen. ‘And five wounded. You’re right, we weren’t …’ But he didn’t finish his sentence. That interview wasn’t so topical any longer, he had been going to say. It hadn’t been easy; first they had tried inviting the gunman’s parents or relations of his victims on to the show, and after fruitless efforts in those quarters they had finally got hold of the boy’s girlfriend. Not so topical, but relevant to the subject all the same. The girl had made a good guest.

  Irene massaged the nape of his neck and his back. The children were asleep.

  ‘Let’s hope the girl can leave it all behind her one day and carry on with her life,’ said Irene.

  28 DECEMBER

  27

  SUNDSTRÖM HELD A well-attended press conference in the morning. Tuomas Heinonen looked pale as he stared at his computer.

  Petri Grönholm asked Joentaa a question that irritated him. ‘Who’s this Ari Pekka Sorajärvi, then?’

  Joentaa looked at him blankly. Ari Pekka … names don’t matter, he thought vaguely. Grönholm held up a card and said, ‘Ari Pekka Sorajärvi. His driving licence was lying on the floor under your desk.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Is it important in some way?’

  �
�No, but thanks,’ said Joentaa, taking the card. A round face, a self-confident expression. Joentaa imagined what the man would look like with a plaster on his nose.

  ‘No, nothing important,’ he said again.

  They went downstairs to the large hall where the press conference was being held. Heinonen did not react when Grönholm asked whether he was coming too. He never took his eyes off his computer screen. Grönholm raised an eyebrow, and Kimmo Joentaa wondered what sporting events took place first thing in the morning.

  Nurmela the police chief was in charge of the press conference. The hall was packed. The death of Laukkanen had been something of a sensation in Turku, the death of Mäkelä was sensational all over Finland, for it was he who, as his colleague in Helsinki aptly put it, had always been a semi-celebrity.

  And the connection with the appearance of both men on Hämäläinen’s chat show had already been established. A reporter from Illansanomat, a tabloid with a wide circulation, asked what that connection meant, and Sundström said, with his own brand of disarming honesty, that he had no idea. The journalist, taken aback, said no more, and Sundström added, ‘We’re only at the start of this investigation. We suspect that the two victims stayed in touch after their appearance on the TV programme, and that the motive for the murders derives from this contact between them, but we don’t yet know what that motive was.’

  Sundström answered the questions that followed calmly and factually. Joentaa thought of Heinonen. No one, he noticed in passing, asked the question that was beginning to take shape in his mind, although he hadn’t been able to express it earlier. A funeral the wrong way round, Larissa had said. Something about it had disturbed her. Petri Grönholm and Tuomas Heinonen, on the other hand, had thought the TV interview informative and entertaining. It had left Sundström cold and entirely indifferent. Patrik Laukkanen had been happy, and Kai-Petteri Hämäläinen had called them good guests.

  Sundström closed the press conference and left the platform. The journalists got to their feet and pushed past Joentaa on their way to the door. Some of them looked serious and already seemed to be concentrating on the columns they were going to write. Others were laughing quietly. The reporter from Illansanomat wondered aloud what the world was coming to if not even people who took corpses apart and people who made models of them had a right to life.

  He went upstairs. Tuomas Heinonen was sitting at his computer. He looked as if he hadn’t moved since Kimmo and Petri Grönholm had left the room.

  ‘Tuomas?’

  Heinonen looked away from his screen.

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked Joentaa.

  ‘Yes … fine,’ said Heinonen.

  Joentaa stood indecisively in the doorway, then pushed himself away from it and went over to Heinonen’s desk. On the screen, under the curving logo of an online gambling site, he saw a long list of results. Heinonen had a notebook on the desk beside him, its pages scribbled all over with crosses and numbers. Presumably combination bets, attempts to classify things that only Tuomas Heinonen understood.

  ‘Can I have a word with you?’ said Kimmo Joentaa.

  Heinonen looked up and smiled faintly.

  ‘About the gambling,’ said Joentaa.

  Heinonen nodded.

  ‘It’s like this: the Manchester versus Arsenal match ended in a draw, so you lost. So it’s over.’

  Heinonen nodded.

  ‘I really do think you should stop it. At once,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Of course I should,’ said Heinonen.

  ‘But you still go on.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Heinonen.

  Joentaa was silent for a while. ‘How high are the stakes?’ he finally asked.

  ‘High,’ said Heinonen.

  ‘You said Paulina knows …’ he said.

  Heinonen nodded.

  ‘Then she’ll be able to keep you from gambling your money and hers away,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘Yes,’ said Heinonen. He had turned back to the screen, and was now examining the pairings and rates and results.

  ‘Meaning that you …’

  ‘Paulina makes sure I can’t touch our joint account,’ said Heinonen.

  ‘That … that’s good.’

  ‘I suggested it myself. I gave her sole control of it,’ said Heinonen. ‘Paulina was grateful for that, and we’re getting on well again.’

  Joentaa nodded. ‘Well, that’s …’

  ‘My parents left me a three-room apartment. In Hämeenlinna. Quite far from here. I recently sold it. Half the money’s already gone, the rest is hidden between two books in my study.’

  Joentaa did not comment. He was trying to think in figures. Three rooms. Hämeenlinna. Half the money gone. Heinonen seemed to have read his thoughts.

  ‘Want to hear the figures?’ he asked.

  Joentaa waited.

  ‘73,457 euros.’

  Joentaa nodded.

  ‘That’s the exact figure. I’ve been keeping accounts. Would you be interested to know that I won at first? The very first time. Wigan versus Chelsea, huge odds. Chelsea playing with a B team because it was only the FA Cup and there were any number of other important games. A combination of three with two favourites winning, factor 22, a thousand euros grew to 22,400. Do you understand that?’

  Joentaa nodded, although he did not understand at all.

  ‘It started really well,’ said Heinonen.

  Joentaa thought of Sanna, and her forced smile when he had gambled their holiday money away. The feeling of helplessness, failure, and then a sense of liberation because they had understood that it didn’t matter. Because there were more important things in life.

  Heinonen let his eyes move over the sequences of digits in his notebook.

  ‘You have to stop,’ said Joentaa.

  ‘I know,’ said Heinonen, without raising his head again.

  28

  KAI-PETTERI HÄMÄLÄINEN WOKE up with the feeling that he had slept a dreamless sleep. He went downstairs, and he could already hear the clear voices of Lotta and Minna. They were sitting at the table shovelling cornflakes into their mouths. Irene stood beside the table, smiling.

  He showered, shaved, dressed and kissed Irene’s cheek before he drove off to start the new day. The big glass box in the bright light of winter. He took the lift up to the twelfth floor. Tuula came to meet him along the broad, grey-and-blue corridor, with a wide smile, and called out that their interview had won out over the Tango King.

  A collision with an elk, he thought. Bloody bad luck. Bloody stupid, dumb bad luck.

  ‘Forty per cent,’ said Tuula. ‘That girl was the lucky find.’

  He nodded.

  ‘The best value since Niskanen,’ said Tuula.

  He nodded. Niskanen, the Finnish cross-country skier who had emerged from the snow-covered forest into the TV picture with a ski broken in two places under his arm. Bloody awful, dumb bad luck. A ski broken in two places during the world championships. Three days later Niskanen was found guilty of doping and had said, in a curiously toneless, indifferent voice that he had broken the ski himself in the forest, at a place where the TV camera showed a gap in the trees. So that he could retire from the race and avoid taking a doping test. However, analysis of a sample he had already given before the world championship event had proved Niskanen guilty all the same.

  Almost every other person in Finland had watched the final appearance of the best Finnish cross-country skier on the Hämäläinen show. Hämäläinen couldn’t remember now just what had been said during the interview, all he knew was that he had taken Niskanen’s hesitant reluctance to talk as a provocation. The critics had been kind. They had chalked it up to his credit that he had not given Niskanen any chance to talk his way out of the hole he was in. He had been relentless and, as he thought, strictly impartial in his approach to the fallen hero. A little like a judge in a criminal case, Irene had said that evening, and he had felt that she was right, but did not say so, and let her remark hover in the air. />
  ‘You were good,’ said Tuula.

  He nodded.

  ‘Better than you’ve been for a long time.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and went into his office, a glass box within the glass box. Above him hung the wintry blue sky, down below little people scurried around on toy streets. He looked down at them for a while and thought of Niskanen. What was he doing these days? Did he still live in the beautiful house that the Finnish government had given him for outstanding sporting achievement? Or had the gift been taken back when Niskanen was found guilty of doping? He couldn’t remember. He did know that there had been a public discussion of the question, and it had been a point of significance in his interview of Niskanen. If he recollected correctly, he had suggested that Niskanen ought to give the house back. He had asked a number of leading questions, and a good many rhetorical questions as well, and he also recollected the way the sweat had broken out on Niskanen’s forehead. An assistant had to keep coming on to mop it off his face. He felt a vague impulse to find out what Niskanen was doing now. Where he was living. How he was living.

  He moved away from the wall of glass and left the room. He walked along the corridors of the open-plan office to the lift. To left and right of him his colleagues on the TV station sat in front of humming computers. He went down. The cafeteria was still almost empty, as usual between first thing in the morning and midday. He got himself a large white coffee and sat down at one of the tables. A little way from him, two young women from the news desk were trying to outdo each other in giggling. Otherwise there wasn’t much to be heard.

  Outside lay the snow-covered park. He looked at the meticulously clean, pale surface of the table, and tipped a little more sugar into his cup. He drank. Niskanen. Was Niskanen still skiing? Through snowy forests.

  Behind him the young news editors giggled and whispered, and after a while he wondered if they were laughing at him. Presumably not. Presumably it was the opposite, and they wanted to attract his attention. He turned to look at them and smiled. Their faces froze rigid with awe.