The Healer

by Antti Tuomainen

  I got up and thanked him, but he’d already turned toward his monitor and become absorbed in his typing, as if he’d wished he were someplace else the whole time.

  Johanna’s workstation was easy to find on the right side of the large, open office. A picture of me led me to it.

  Something lurched inside me when I saw the old snapshot and imagined Johanna looking at it. Could she see the same difference in my eyes that I saw?

  In spite of the large stacks of paper, her desk was well organized. Her closed laptop lay in the middle of the table. I sat down and looked around. There were a dozen or more workstations, which the reporters called clovers, in the open office space, with four desks at each station. Johanna’s desk was on the window side and had a direct view into Lassi’s office. Or rather, the upper section of his office—cardboard was stacked against the lower half of the glass walls. The view from the window wasn’t much to look at. The Kiasma art museum with its frequently patched copper roof loomed like a gigantic shipwreck in the rain—black, tattered, run aground.

  The top of the desk was cool to the touch but quickly grew damp under my hand. I glanced toward Lassi Uutela’s office and then looked around. The place was deserted. I slid Johanna’s computer into my bag.

  There were dozens of sticky notes on the desk. Some of them simply had a phone number or a name and address; a few were complete notes written in Johanna’s precise, delicate hand.

  I looked through them one by one. There was one in the most recent batch that caught my attention: “H—West–East/ North–South” then two lists of neighborhoods—“Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari” and “Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Kluuvi, Punavuori”—with dates next to them.

  “H” must mean the Healer. I shoved the note in my pocket.

  Next I went through the piles of papers. Most of them were about pieces Johanna had already written: articles about the alleged closing of Russia’s nuclear power plants, the dwindling Finnish tax base, the collapse in food quality.

  One pile was entirely about the Healer. It included printed copies of all his e-mails. Johanna had written her own notes on the printouts, so many on some that they nearly obscured the original text. I crammed the whole stack into my bag without reading them, got up, and stood looking at the abandoned desk. It was like any other desk, impersonal and indistinguishable from a million others. Still, I hoped it would tell me something, reveal what had happened. I waited a moment, but the desk was still just a desk.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, Johanna had sat here.

  And she would still be sitting here, if something hadn’t happened to her.

  I couldn’t explain why I was so sure of it. It was as hard to define as the connection between us. I knew that Johanna would call me, if only she could.

  I took a step away from the desk, unable at first to take my eyes off her papers, her handwriting, the little objects on the table. Then I remembered something.

  I went back to the door of Lassi Uutela’s office. He took no notice of me, so I knocked on the door frame. The plastic cracked against the back of my hand. I was surprised at the loud, hollow sound it made. Lassi stopped his hurriedly typing fingers and left his hands waiting in the air as he turned his head. The irritation in his red-rimmed eyes didn’t seem to have diminished.

  I asked which photographer had been on the job with Johanna, although I had already guessed who it was.

  “Gromov,” Lassi growled.

  I knew him, of course. I’d even met him. Tall, dark, and handsome. Something of a ladies’ man, according to Johanna, obsessive when it came to his work, and apparently in everything else as well. Johanna respected Vasili Gromov’s skill at his job and liked working with him. They had spent a lot of time together on jobs in Finland and abroad. If anyone had any information about Johanna, it would be him.

  I asked Lassi if he’d seen Gromov. He understood immediately what I meant. He picked up his telephone, leaned his head against the headrest on his chair, and aimed his gaze at the ceiling, either toward the air conditioner duct or toward heaven.

  “This world’s a fucking mess,” he said quietly.

  4

  As I made my way home, Lassi’s questions about why I was still writing poetry rose up in my mind again. I hadn’t told him what I was thinking. I didn’t want to. Lassi wasn’t a person you confided in or trusted any more than you had to. But what would I have said, what reason would I have given, for keeping at something that had no future? I would have told him the truth.

  To keep writing was to keep living. And I didn’t keep living or writing to find readers. People were trying to survive from one day to the next, and poetry didn’t have much to do with it. My reasons for writing were completely selfish.

  Writing gave my days a shape, a routine. The words, the sentences, the short lines, brought an order to my life that had disappeared all around me. Writing meant that the fragile thread between yesterday, today, and tomorrow was still unbroken.

  I tried to read Johanna’s papers, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything because of the clatter of beer cans and other trash on the bus. They were thrown there by drunken teenagers who were no real danger to the other passengers, but it was still annoying. The late-night routes were another matter, especially the ones without security guards.

  I got off the bus at the Herttoniemi metro station. I gave a wide berth to a gang of drunken skinheads—a dozen bald scalps that shone with rain and tattoos—avoided the persistent panhandlers patrolling in front of the shops, and headed toward home in the dark evening. There was a break in the rain, and the strong, gusting wind couldn’t decide which direction to blow. It lunged here and there, grabbing onto everything with its strong hands, including the brightly lit security lights on the walls of the buildings, which made it look as if the houses themselves were swaying in the evening darkness. I walked briskly past the day care that had first been abandoned by children, then scrawled on by random passersby, and finally set on fire. The church at the other side of the intersection had an emergency shelter for the homeless, and it looked like it was full to the brim—the previously bright vestibule was halfdim with people. A few minutes later I turned onto the path to our apartment building.

  The roof of the building opposite had been torn off in an autumn storm and still hadn’t been repaired, and the top-floor apartments were dark. Soon we would be facing the same thing, like people in a thousand other buildings. They weren’t designed for continuous high winds and rain for half the year, and by the time people realized that the wind and rain were here to stay it was too late. Besides, no one had the money or the interest to keep up a building where power and water outages made living unpleasant and probably eventually impossible.

  The lock on the street door recognized my card, and the door opened. When the power was out we used the old cut key. Keys like that should have been unnecessary, should have been history, but like many other objects and ideas once considered relics, they managed to do what the newer ones couldn’t: they worked.

  I tried the lights in the stairwell, but the switch was out of order again. I climbed to the second story in the dark, using the stair railing as a guide, arrived at our door, opened both safety locks and the ordinary lock, turned off the alarm, and, instinctively, breathed in.

  The smell of the place had everything in it: morning coffee, a hurried spritz of perfume, the pine soap from washing the rugs the summer before, the long Christmas holidays, the armchair we bought together, every night spent with the person you love. It was all there in that smell, and it was all connected together in my mind, although the place had been aired out a thousand times. The smell was so familiar that I was just about to announce that I was home, automatically. But there was no one there to hear me.

  I carried my bag into the kitchen, took out the papers and the laptop, and put them on the table. I warmed up the vegetable casserole Johanna had made over the weekend and sat down to eat. Somewhere a couple of floors up lived some devot
ed music lovers. The beat was so low, steady, and repetitive that it was easy to believe it would carry on forever—nothing short of massive intervention would ever stop its progress.

  Everything I saw on the table and tasted in my mouth and thought in my head confirmed my fear that something bad had happened. An outsized lump rose in my throat and made it difficult to swallow, and I felt a squeezing around my chest and abdomen that suddenly forced me to concentrate entirely on breathing.

  I pushed my plate aside and turned on Johanna’s computer. The hum of the machine and the glow of the screen filled the kitchen. The very first thing I saw was the desktop image: Johanna and I on our honeymoon ten years ago.

  More swallowing.

  The two of us in the foreground, younger in many ways, above us an almost palpably blue southern European sky, behind us Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, beside us a patch of the uneven, ancient wall of a house and the gilded sign of a riverside café, half illegible from the dazzle of sunlight.

  I looked at Johanna’s laughing eyes, aimed straight ahead—reflecting green as well as blue in the bright light of April—her slightly wide mouth, her even, white teeth, the very beginnings of tiny wrinkles, and the short, curly hair that bordered her face like spring petals.

  I opened the folders on the computer desktop.

  In the folder marked “New” I found a subfolder “H.” I realized I had guessed correctly: “H” was for Healer. I went through the documents. Most of them were Johanna’s text files, some were news videos, links, and articles from other papers. The most recent text file was from yesterday. I clicked it open.

  The piece was nearly finished. Johanna would certainly be using most of it in her final article. As soon as she writes it, I reminded myself.

  It began with a description of the multiple murder in Tapiola. A family of five had been killed in the early morning hours, and someone using the pseudonym “the Healer” had announced himself as the perpetrator. According to the police investigation, the father of the family was the last to die: the CEO of a large food company and an advocate for the meat processing industry, he’d had to look on, with his hands and feet tied and his mouth taped, as his wife and three small children were each cold-bloodedly executed with a gunshot to the head. He was murdered last, with a single bullet to the center of his forehead.

  Johanna had interviewed the police investigator, the interior minister, and a representative of a private security company. The piece ended with an extended plea from Johanna, directed as much at the police and the public as it was at the Healer himself.

  I also found a map of Helsinki and a chart Johanna had made of the date and location of each murder, the times she received the e-mails, and the main contents of the messages. This had to do with the sticky note I’d found. I looked at it again: West–East or North–South. The map clearly showed that the murders had progressed chronologically, first from west to east, then from north to south.

  Based on Johanna’s summaries of the contents of the messages, the e-mails had grown darker as the murders reached the south side of the city. Some of the messages also had a surprisingly personal tone: Johanna was addressed using her first name and praised for her “truthful and uncompromising” journalism. The writer even seemed to believe that she would understand the necessity for this kind of extreme action.

  The second-to-last message had come the day after the murders in Punavuori. A family of four—a father who owned and operated a large chain of car dealerships, his wife, and their two sons, aged ten and twelve—were found dead in their home. Without the e-mail message, the deaths would probably have been classified as another of the murder-suicides that were occurring weekly. The suicide theory was supported by the fact that the large-caliber weapon the murders were committed with was found in the father’s hand, as if he were handing it to the police as proof.

  Then the Healer’s message arrived. The address was given in the e-mail—Kapteenikatu 14—with an admonition to investigate the matter more thoroughly.

  This was duly done, and it became clear that although the gun had been in the father’s hand, someone else had helped him aim and shoot. So he had felt each shot in his hand and body and seen and heard his own children die from bullets that came from a gun he was holding.

  The last message was hastily and poorly written—stilted in both grammar and content. It didn’t defend the crimes in any way.

  I got up from the table, walked to the balcony, and stood there for a long time. I breathed in the cool air, trying to blow away the invisible stone on my chest. The stone lightened, but it didn’t roll away completely.

  We’d moved into our place almost immediately after we married. The apartment had become a home and the home had become dear to us; it was our place in the world—a world that was completely different ten years ago. Of course it was easy to say afterward that all the warning signs were already visible then—the summer stretching out long and dry into autumn, rainy winters, increasingly high winds, news about hundreds of millions of people wandering the world, and exotic insects appearing in our own yards, on our own skin, spreading Lyme disease, malaria, sandfly fever, encephalitis.

  Our building was on a high hill in Herttoniemi, and on a clear day you could see across the bay from the living room and balcony all the way to Arabianranta, where most of the houses were continuously flooded. Like many other neighborhoods that suffered from flooding, Arabianranta was often dark. They didn’t dare let electricity in because of the water that remained in the badly damaged buildings. With the naked eye, from two and a half kilometers away, I could see dozens of fires along the shore. From where I stood they looked small and delicate, like just-lit matches that could easily be blown out. The reality was otherwise. The fires were as much as a meter and a half in diameter. People used all kinds of things they found on the shore and in abandoned buildings as fuel. There were rumors that they used dead animals, even people.

  It was strange how I’d got used to seeing the fires. I couldn’t have told you when the first ones appeared or when the evening ribbon of flames they formed became a daily sight.

  Farther off, beyond the silhouette of the buildings on the shore, were the modern towers of Pasila, and the blaze and glow to the left told me where the city center was. Over it all lay a dark, boundless night sky that held the whole world in its cold, sure grip.

  I realized that I was looking for connections between what I’d just read and what I was now seeing.

  Johanna.

  Out there somewhere.

  Like I’d told Lassi, there was no point in my going to the police. If they didn’t have the time or the resources to look for the murderer of these families, how would they have the time to look for a woman missing for twenty-four hours, one of thousands of missing people?

  The Healer.

  West–East or North–South.

  The night didn’t seem to hold any answers. The music thumped upstairs. The wind moved through the trees on the slope of the ridge below, singing through the bare branches as well as it could but able to prevail against the barrier of human and machine-made sound only for brief moments. The cold of the balcony’s cement floor on the soles of my feet prompted me to seek warmth.

  I returned to the kitchen table, read through all of Johanna’s documents on the Healer one more time, made some coffee, and tried to call her again. It was no surprise when the number could not be reached. It was also no surprise that a hint of panic and desperation was beginning to splash through my worried mind.

  There was one thing I could be sure of: Johanna had disappeared on a job investigating something connected with the Healer.

  I pushed all other thoughts aside, drank my coffee, and read the printouts of the e-mails the Healer had sent to Johanna, in the order they were received. As I read them, I sorted them into two piles. In the first, I put messages where the necessity of the crimes was defended, sometimes at great length, and Johanna’s previous articles were mentioned, sometimes with the implic
ation that her work was something like the Healer’s—to uncover lies and to liberate. The other pile contained the messages that directly stated where the murder victims could be found and contained only a few hastily and poorly written lines.

  I leafed through the piles again and came to the same conclusion that I had the first time. There were two authors. At least in theory. At least that’s what I thought.

  I opened the map Johanna had made again. It was like a pocket guide to hell. I moved through the red points marking the murders, went through the dates and Johanna’s figures. There were two or three days between the murders. Johanna had added a question mark to each of the four points of the compass and calculated possible locations of future murders.

  As I stared at the map, the icon for Johanna’s e-mail program caught my eye. I hesitated. Reading another person’s e-mail is undoubtedly wrong. But maybe this situation was an exception. Besides, we didn’t have any secrets from each other, did we? I decided that I would open her e-mail only if the situation absolutely demanded it. In the meantime I would get by strictly on what related directly to the article Johanna was working on now.

  I remembered the phone call I’d recorded, turned on my own laptop, and plugged my phone into it.

  I copied the last conversation I’d had with Johanna onto the computer, searched a moment for the right program, downloaded it, and opened the audio file with it. The audio editing software was easy to use. I separated the sounds, removed my and Johanna’s voices, and listened. I could hear the noise of cars, a rumble, and the same murmuring sound I’d heard before. I listened to it again and again, then separated out the rumble and the sound of cars until I was able to make out the tone of the murmur by itself. With a hopeful feeling I seemed to hear something regularly repeating, not wind or the brush of coat sleeves but something with a much more even rhythm: waves. I played the file again and shut my eyes, trying to listen and remember at the same time.

  Was it the sound of waves, or was I just hearing what I wanted to hear?