The scram was one of Irma’s joke words, something one of her darlings had made up when they were little, along with calling a housefly a flouse-lie. But she was right. It was something Siiri had thought about ever since the mentally ill lab assistant had mentioned it in her sermon on rats and Prime Minister Lipponen. Why didn’t the trams go to Töölö? All the trams took the same route straight down Mannerheimintie. Why didn’t some of them go down Mechelininkatu or Topeliuksenkatu?
‘You’re not from Helsinki, are you?’ Irma asked the driver while she searched her handbag for her wallet. Her pill counter, lace handkerchief, wristwatch, spare tights, two pairs of glasses and a small bottle of whisky were already lying on the back seat.
‘No.’
‘Where are you from? Vaasa?’
Now Irma’s blood-sugar meter, wallet and the sticky note with 7245 written on it in large numbers were also on the seat.
‘I’m from Azerbaijan,’ the man answered.
Irma paid with a fifty-euro note, but the driver refused to take it because he had no change and no way to check that the bill was genuine. He tried to get her to pay with a credit card but then her strange intuition reminded her that she’d been given change at the Sunset Grove info desk when they’d called the taxi. She handed the driver a bill and told him to bite it to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit. Siiri was starting to feel weak from the bad air and the peculiar mood in the car.
‘Why did you think he was from Vaasa?’ Siiri asked when they’d got out of the cab and were standing in front of the Lehtovaara breathing the fresh air.
‘His Finnish was as bad as it is in Vaasa. But where on God’s green earth is Azerbaijan? And how can someone from there pass a Helsinki taxi driver’s test?’ Irma wondered, just as the two of them noticed that the Lehtovaara was closed.
Now they were really in a pickle. There were no taxi stands nearby, and no tram stops. How were they going to get off Mechelininkatu? Siiri was afraid they might have to resort to using Irma’s mobile phone.
‘Wait! I’ve just finessed it! We’ll go to the library!’
It was a wonderful idea. They both loved the Töölö library, Aarne Ervi’s most beautiful building, which made the modernist utopia of Tapiola look like a concrete suburb by comparison. The Töölö library was one of those rare buildings that were beautiful both inside and out. Some buildings are only beautiful on the inside, like the Opera House – which was an awful pile of tiles until you took the time to go inside. Siiri and Irma walked through the library and admired the railings, the stairs, the windows, the light and the view. Finally a friendly librarian came up to them and asked if she could help them.
‘ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A SPECIFIC BOOK? HAVE YOU LOST SOMETHING?’ she enquired in a loud voice, speaking slowly and moving the muscles of her face so vigorously that Irma and Siiri started to laugh.
‘No, thank you. We need a taxi. Could you call one for us?’ Irma said sweetly. The librarian was taken aback, but just for a moment, and then she called them a cab. She wouldn’t take any payment for this service, though calling a cab had to cost her just as much trouble and expense as it did at Sunset Grove.
The new taxi was driven by a young Finnish man who might even have been from Helsinki. He had a leather jacket and friendly blue eyes. As he opened the door for Siiri, he flashed a sweet smile at her and she felt as if she’d seen him before.
He recommended Restaurant Kämp. They were very happy because they hadn’t known it had opened again.
‘Sibelius used to go there regularly,’ Irma told the driver.
‘I don’t know about him, but it’s a good restaurant,’ he replied.
Suddenly he slammed on the brakes and cursed. Siiri rocked forward and hit her head on the front-seat headrest, then Irma fell on top of her and they flopped against the door.
‘Pardon me,’ Irma said as she lifted her head off Siiri’s lap, although it wasn’t her fault. They looked at each other, flabbergasted, saw that they were both still alive, and started to laugh. The driver didn’t even glance at them and seemed entirely unconcerned with what was happening in the back seat.
‘God damned tram! Is there any more stupid invention?’
It was clear the man didn’t like trams. Siiri felt uncomfortable and Irma grinned gleefully. The driver thought trams should be outlawed. They killed people, clogged traffic, derailed, and were expensive to maintain.
‘The trams are so heavy they break their own tracks. And so few people will fit in one! When was the last time you saw the metro collide with an automobile? When?’
The man looked at them in the rear-view mirror with his bright blue eyes. Where could they have met him? Siiri racked her brains, but no thoughts seemed to be coming to her; she couldn’t finesse it.
‘Never, because the metro is underground. They ought to send the trams straight to hell and replace them with metro trains. No shivering at the stop, no accidents, nobody run over. You two wouldn’t be sitting in a taxi if Helsinki had a decent metro. There wouldn’t be any need for taxis.’
‘But then you wouldn’t have a job,’ Irma said worriedly.
‘Well, no, but cooking is my actual profession.’
‘Cooking? Then you could come to work at Sunset Grove, since our cook died. Perhaps you know him. His name was Tero.’
Irma talked as if there were only one cook in the world and his name was Tero. Sometimes Irma was so silly that Siiri was ashamed of her.
‘Tero Lehtinen?’ the driver asked, turning to look at them. ‘At the Sunset Grove retirement home?’
Then Siiri remembered where she had seen him before. At Tero’s funeral! He had made a beautiful speech about angels and helped them up to the front, even picked up Siiri’s cushion, and he had given her that searching look, like he was doing now.
‘I think we’ve met before,’ Siiri said, and the driver nodded. He had recognized them but he’d thought they didn’t remember him.
‘We are old, but we do remember some things. Like pretty blue eyes,’ Siiri said, and immediately regretted flirting in such a manner when they should be talking about Tero. Irma was digging in her handbag for her mirror and comb. She found them and started to fix her mussed hairdo, now that she knew the driver wasn’t just a driver but someone they knew.
‘What do you know about Tero’s death? Anna-Liisa has all kinds of theories about it but I don’t quite believe her. You hear such wild rumours in a retirement home and Anna-Liisa is a bit of a grim sort of person. She lives at Sunset Grove, too, in A wing with us, although she just has a studio and we have nice, spacious one-bedroom complexes. Of course they stupidly combined the living room and kitchen, which I don’t like at all, being able to see the dishes from the sofa, but . . . of course that’s not important right now. You must not really be bald. You must just want to be bald, so you’ve shaved your hair off, right? Do you have to shave it every day like a beard? Tero’s hair was very long, and a lovely colour. Are you a good friend of his? He sometimes even wore his hair in a ponytail.’
They had come to Restaurant Kämp, on the pedestrian street side. The driver switched off the meter and the engine, turned to face them, and didn’t look at all like he wanted them to pay. He was talking about angels and for some reason he cursed every time he mentioned them, referring to them as ‘hell’s angels’, although he didn’t seem to particularly dislike them. In fact, he said that he was one himself. In any case, these angels had learned something about Sunset Grove and they hadn’t been at all happy about what they’d found out. And it all had something to do with Tero’s death. Siiri and Irma’s heads were spinning trying to understand the man’s story.
‘Tero couldn’t take it,’ he said at the end.
‘Was Tero an angel, too?’ Siiri asked.
‘No. He was too sensitive for that sort of thing. He’d rather mess around with bicycles. But he was a friend.’
‘So are these bad angels some sort of hardened police special forces?’ Irma asked earnestly, but the
man said, almost angrily, that the angels were anything but cops.
‘So they’re criminals, then?’ Irma asked, rather boldly, considering that the man had just said that he himself was one of these angels. He didn’t answer her question, just muttered an obscenity. They thought the conversation was over, and Irma got out her wallet to pay.
‘There are all sorts of things happening at Sunset Grove and the police couldn’t care less.’
They didn’t know what the police had to do with Sunset Grove and they weren’t sure if this seemingly kind man was, in fact, a criminal. But he definitely wanted to tell them something, so Irma suggested that he leave off driving for today and go with them to the Kämp for lunch. He looked surprised at first, but then thought it was a good idea.
‘I’m Irma Lännenleimu, and this is my friend Siiri Kettunen,’ Irma said as they stood on the street in front of the Kämp. The man said his name was Mika, which had that same, short sound as Pasi and Tero, like the stroke of an axe blade.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hear your last name, Mika,’ Irma said, squeezing his hand and not letting go until he’d introduced himself properly.
‘Korhonen. Mika Korhonen. But you can just call me Mika.’
‘Lunch will be my treat,’ Irma said, and they went into the Kämp, which was rather different to what Irma and Siiri had expected. Too much plastic and very no-frills. You could see that everything was new, not the genuine old stuff. But they were diplomatically silent about this so as not to offend their new friend, Mika Korhonen.
Irma and Siiri didn’t know what to eat because the menu was crammed with strange words they didn’t understand. Every dish had a tremendous quantity of fine print. That’s what food had come to. It wasn’t a means of sustenance any more, it was a hobby. It was different during the war, and afterwards. Back then you didn’t play with your food.
‘Do you cook these kinds of . . . unusual foods?’ Siiri asked Mika, who said he was more of a fan of basic food, but knew how to make stuffed cabbage, which was somewhat unusual. He had worked at the university cafeteria – the real one in the main building – until they’d outsourced the food service.
‘You can’t cook outside in Finland!’ Irma said with a bright laugh.
‘They changed to a restaurant company and I got fired. So I started driving a cab,’ Mika explained, and Siiri and Irma felt so sorry for him that they ordered some red wine. But Mika wouldn’t drink since he had the taxi waiting outside.
‘Illegally parked,’ he said, and flashed a beautiful smile.
‘Yes, you don’t like the police,’ Irma said, and they clinked their glasses – Mika with water and Irma and Siiri with wine, and Irma was already explaining that she never drank anything but red wine, and what a stroke of luck it was that they hadn’t taken the tram like Siiri had wanted and had taken a taxi instead.
‘You’ve got a homo mafia there at Sunset Grove,’ Mika said.
After that Irma and Siiri just listened.
They didn’t understand everything he said and they knew they would forget half of it, but they struggled valiantly to keep up. Mika was talking about their prescriptions but he seemed to have them mixed up with drugs. Siiri didn’t quite grasp how something a doctor prescribed to old people could be dangerous for young people or addle their heads.
‘Oh, that dope is rattling your brains, too. It’s just legal.’
‘I don’t take anything but my diabetes medication,’ Siiri hastened to say, so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea about her. Irma rummaged in her handbag for her pill counter and started to wonder what all her different-coloured tablets were.
‘This is my glucose tablet and this one helps you fall asleep – it’s very gentle, not a sleeping pill, but it does make you go to sleep in a snap. This is my Amaryl and that’s my blood-pressure lozenge, but I don’t know what these two are. Do you?’
Mika didn’t know. It seemed to Siiri that some new medications had appeared in Irma’s pill counter. Mika took one of each and said he would find out what they were. That felt good. It meant he wanted to help them. Either that or he was going to start selling Irma’s pills to some criminal acquaintance. But that wasn’t likely – he was such a pleasant young man, so peaceful, and charismatic in his own way. A large man who knew how to make stuffed cabbage. Siiri’s and Irma’s husbands had never cooked; they hadn’t even known how to make coffee in an automatic coffeemaker. Once, when Irma had a high fever, Veikko had tried to boil an egg, and they’d learned that you can, in fact, burn a boiled egg, by boiling it until it’s black on the outside and green on the inside. Irma’s vivid description of how poor Veikko couldn’t so much as boil an egg to keep body and soul together without nearly burning the house down even made Mika laugh.
‘You seem like a man with courage and a sense of humour,’ Siiri said. ‘Do you have enough courage and sense of humour to come and see us at Sunset Grove?’
Mika smiled kindly, thanked them for the invitation, and promised to visit. Irma and Siiri were exceedingly pleased and Irma paid the restaurant bill with two fifty-euro notes. She asked Siiri to calculate what it came to in marks but Siiri refused to tell her because Irma had said it was her treat, and it was poor form to quibble about the price afterwards.
‘That’s right! My class reunion!’ Irma shouted, and it was only then that Siiri remembered why they had started this adventure. The waiter was standing next to the table counting out their change and Irma explained that she needed to make a table reservation for two weeks from Wednesday at twelve o’clock.
‘We have our class get-together the first Wednesday of every month. None of the other class reunions have them as often. I was kept back four times in school and now that there are so few of us left I’m invited to all the reunions. But my graduating class is the most fun. The first Wednesday of the month is two weeks from now, isn’t it? Time goes by so quickly, don’t you agree?’
‘Yes,’ the waiter said, stupefied. ‘How many people are you reserving for?’
‘Well, I don’t really quite know!’ Irma said, grabbing him by the arm and laughing as if she’d said something amusing.
‘You don’t know how many people there will be?’
‘I don’t. Somebody dies every week. Döden, döden, döden. I’m ninety-two years old, but even I’m not wise enough to predict how many of my classmates will be alive two weeks from Wednesday. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Certainly,’ the waiter answered, and went to get the head waiter. In the end, Mika manfully handled this problem, too. He reserved a table for ten for Irma’s classmates on the first Wednesday of November, which was, in fact, only a week away.
‘Put it down as a partially posthumous reservation. That way the staff won’t be surprised if the group is a bit smaller,’ he told the head waiter with a wink, and when a large man says such a thing in a deep voice, head waiters listen.
Mika drove them back to Sunset Grove and on the way Irma and Siiri told him about Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s group portrait of the Symposium, and how Gallen-Kallela had used a turnip as a stand-in for Oskar Merikanto. Mika didn’t want any fare for the journey but Irma thought he should have some money and made him take a fifty-euro note.
‘How many of those fifty-euro notes do you have?’ Siiri asked when they got to their apartments and started digging through their handbags for their keys.
‘That was my last one,’ Irma said, unconcerned. ‘But I can get more of them from the hole in the wall if I haven’t lost my PIN. And when they run out, I can just have a little slightly spoiled liver casserole for dinner. What a fun day!’
Chapter 12
Siiri Kettunen, wearing nothing but her polka-dot nightgown, was on her way to Irma’s apartment for some crumb cake when she noticed a package on top of her postbox. Instead of letter boxes in their doors, like in a real apartment block, everyone at Sunset Grove had a large postbox in the hallway outside their apartment for receiving packages. Head Nurse Virpi Hiukkanen had explained that thi
s, too, was done to promote safety and respect for privacy. Siiri was surprised by the package. She never got letters, or even postcards. Just junk mail. Besides, it was only 9 a.m., and the post wasn’t delivered this early. She picked up the package and went to Irma’s place.
‘Don’t open it,’ Irma said. She hadn’t got dressed yet, either. She was sitting in her rose-printed armchair in her dressing gown, reading the newspaper. She looked at the package suspiciously. ‘It doesn’t even have the sender’s name on it.’
She was right. In fact, even Siiri’s name wasn’t on it, so it was impossible to know if it was meant for her. What if someone had just set it down on her postbox and forgotten it? Or maybe it was from someone at Sunset Grove?
‘Aha! What if you have an admirer?’ Irma said excitedly, throwing the newspaper on the floor. ‘Who could it be, now that Reino is in the closed unit? He always did try to flatter you, “The prettiest girl at Sunset Grove”.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense!’
‘Maybe your admirer is Margit Partanen’s husband,’ Irma continued. She thought it was fun to think about these silly sorts of things. ‘Margit is so gruff all the time, and her husband is clearly very virile; we can hear that every afternoon in the hallway. He was looking at you an awful lot at Tero’s funeral.’
Then she got up to boil some water and put some pea soup in the microwave and took a slightly eaten chocolate cake, left over from the day before when one of her darlings had come to visit, out of the refrigerator. Siiri thought it was odd that her darlings never invited her to their houses, or out to a restaurant, but instead always came to eat at Irma’s table as if they were still little children. The cake and soup went exceptionally well with the instant coffee.
The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency: Death in Sunset Grove Page 7