“Where do you live now?” I asked, for something to say.
“In Pasila.”
“You must have a short commute to work, then.”
“From the basement to the fourth floor.”
He smiled again, but his eyes weren’t along for the smile.
We passed Parliament House, which was surrounded by security barriers with twenty-four-hour floodlights on top. Their light looked feverish in the metallic gray of the morning.
“I meant what I said before,” Jaatinen said.
“What was that?” I asked.
“That I keep trying because I’m a cop. I’m not one of these unemployed cops working as a security guard, playing soldier. That’s why I didn’t answer right away when you asked about those guards with the “A” logo at the Sports Hall. It’s a new security company, as you probably guessed. The fastest growing one. Aggressive. Feared, in fact.”
He switched on his turn signal and changed lanes.
“These security companies are all the same, if you ask me. Most of the guards aren’t cut out for protecting the public and keeping order. More cut out for something entirely the opposite, in fact. We know of one security company that actually robs people and businesses instead of protecting them.”
Jaatinen dropped me off at the corner by the Forum. I got out of the car, and he eased back into traffic—with his signal on, of course. I dug my phone out of my pocket, looked at the photos I’d taken, clipped an image of the “A” logo and did an image search on it.
The company was called A-Secure. There was no specific information on it, no street address. The phone numbers online didn’t return any names when I searched for them. I looked at the logo again but still didn’t know what it was I expected it to tell me.
I crossed the street and headed toward Urho Kekkosen katu, for something to do.
13
“Do you think we’ll ever move again?” Johanna asked one night two or three weeks ago just as she was about to fall asleep.
I put down the book I was reading. Johanna pressed against me, the blanket rustling, and laid her head partly on the pillow, partly against my neck. The soft light of the reading lamp shone on the golden yellow of her skin. At a glance, her delicate arm lying across my stomach on the black-and-white blanket resembled a doll’s.
“Why do you ask that?”
“I was just thinking,” she said, and I could almost feel her lips against my neck as she spoke.
“Would you like to move?” I asked.
“I guess not.”
“What about just for pretend?”
“Maybe just for pretend.”
“Where would you move to, just for pretend?”
“That’s the thing,” she said, raising her head from the pillow and wrapping herself halfway around me. “There’s no place I’d like to move to, except for pretend.”
She braced herself on an elbow.
“I’ve been going around Helsinki the past few days working on this story. I went to a lot of places I haven’t seen for a long time, and I kept getting a really sad, wistful feeling.”
“A lot of places have changed quite a bit the past few years. Even right around here.”
“I guess so,” she said. “But when you see places where you used to live and you remember what they used to be like and all the things you did there and all the people you knew … friends, family, people like that.”
Thinking about this conversation later, I knew, of course, that I should have asked her where she had gone, why she went there, what she found there. But it was an ordinary evening and we were just lying in bed talking like we always did, like we always would.
“It also made me wonder,” she said, “whether people could have done something else, something more. Done things differently. But at the same time I know that they couldn’t.”
Everything she said that night had an insidious underlying meaning now: Pasi Tarkiainen. He was the snake that slipped into my thoughts through the smallest opening and poisoned all my memories. I shook him forcefully from my mind and saw Johanna before me again.
She raised her head and looked into my eyes from so close that it was difficult to clearly see the flecks of color in her irises, her hard, black pupils, or the expression behind their moist surface.
“On the one hand, we’ve got so much,” she said. “But at the same time, so much is already lost.”
I took her hand. She answered with a gentle squeeze.
“If I understand you correctly, we’re not moving.”
A dark shadow crossed her gaze quick as lightning, then vanished. She smiled.
“Let’s not,” she said quietly.
She heaved herself up, putting her hand on the pillow beside my ear and bending over to kiss me with warm, soft lips.
“Let’s not,” she said again.
* * *
A PIT HAD APPEARED at the intersection of Urho Kekkosen katu and Fredrikinkatu. Some men were crowded around it, and an excavator stood with its shovel raised on one side of it. Trucks from the electricity and water departments were lined up in front of the pit facing Fredrikinkatu as if waiting to drive into it. Traffic was driving up over the curb to get around it.
I stood on the corner, pulled my scarf tighter around my neck, zipped my parka all the way up, readjusted my stocking cap, and carefully pushed the cuffs of my gloves into the ends of my sleeves. When one of the workers from the water department, a red-faced man in winter coveralls, walked by me, I asked him what had happened. As you can see, he said, there’s been a cave-in. I couldn’t get any more information out of him, but then there was no reason I should.
I walked around the intersection and looked first at Temppeliaukio Church, then at Malminkatu, Fredrikinkatu, Urho Kekkosen katu, and then at the church again. Now and then I looked at the pit in the middle of the intersection. Since there was nothing in any direction to see but the pit, and since the wind seemed to be growing teeth, I gave up and headed toward Töölö, to Ahti and Elina’s house.
When is it time to admit that you don’t know someone as well as you thought you did a moment before?
I tried to gather the facts in my mind as neutrally as I could, to filter truth from imagination. I tried to separate my worst fears from what I could see with my own eyes to be true. It wasn’t easy, but it was for the woman I love. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t remember Johanna ever mentioning anything about Tarkiainen or ever saying a word about the house in Kivinokka. But then I couldn’t think of a reason why she would, either. She had no reason to. Who could have predicted that Tarkiainen’s and Johanna’s paths would cross again?
I crossed the bridge between Eteläisen and Pohjoisen Rautatiekatu and looked down. Cars driven under the bridge and abandoned there now formed a row of small dwellings. The narrow passage under the bridge had been growing into its own neighborhood for several years. I could see smoke and steam rising, and smell grilling meat, gasoline—and moonshine, of course. The shouts of children could be heard here and there, playing a game, or shouting for other reasons.
I looked at my watch. It was almost ten. The minutes and hours seemed to pass more quickly as time went by. I reached Arkadiankatu, took out my telephone, and tried to call Johanna, with the same results as before. How many times would I try to call her? How many times would I listen to the toneless recorded voice of the woman telling me again and again what I knew only too well? I didn’t know. Maybe events had to be repeated until the repetition produced results, or until it was useless to try.
A tram full of people coming from downtown rattled past a couple of meters from me. The passengers standing near the door had their coats pressed up against the windows. Countless people on their way to work, on an ordinary day, getting on with their lives. The tram thudded to a stop and I continued walking, the cold wind, the smell of burned meat, and the angry stench of ethanol elbowing me in the back as I went.
I arrived at Ahti and Elina’s building, pressed the buzzer, and wait
ed a moment. The camera moved under its hood like an insect’s antenna as it made its little circuit of the entrance. When it had assured itself that I wasn’t a threat, it stopped, the lock on the door opened, and I went inside. Although the elevator was waiting in the lobby, I took the stairs. My footsteps on the stone staircase rang like drumbeats in the quiet building.
The smell of a sickroom hit me as soon as I walked into the apartment. Elina’s face was small and pale in the electric light of the entryway. She nodded in greeting, turned, and walked into the living room. I pulled the door closed behind me, took off my coat and shoes, and followed her, pausing at the door to the bedroom to hear Ahti’s snores and see his feet under the covers at the foot of the bed. I was about to take a step into the room but decided against it.
Elina sat on the sofa with her feet tucked under her, her long hair lying all in a clump on her left shoulder. Once again the soft light gave the room a feeling that it had been forcibly frozen in time, an overly homey feeling. That was what bothered me about it. It felt like a fantasy, an attempt to return to the past.
I sat down in an imposing armchair that was covered in rough black fabric. It instantly warmed and relaxed my tired frame. I became aware of how exhausted and hungry I was, and of how little I felt like eating anything or making myself comfortable.
“Luckily he’s sleeping again,” Elina said. “Since he’s not really awake when he’s awake. He was so mixed up when he was talking just a while ago that it scared me.”
“I’m sorry Ahti’s sick. I’m sorry your trip’s been delayed.”
Elina gave a yelping laugh, but there was no joy in it. She took a breath, exhaled quickly, and lifted her left hand to her forehead, like she’d just remembered something.
“I’m sorry. I’m a little tired,” she said. “Tired of everything.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s just a temporary setback. We’ll think of something.”
Elina didn’t say anything but glanced toward the bedroom and looked for a moment like she was listening very carefully to something that my ears, at least, couldn’t hear.
“Elina, we have to talk,” I said.
She looked at me again, her gaze sharper, colder.
“About Pasi Tarkiainen?”
I nodded. About Pasi Tarkiainen.
“What does he have to do with anything?” Elina asked. “With finding Johanna or anything else? It was all years ago, fifteen years or so. What does it matter?”
“I have a theory that Tarkiainen does have something to do with it.”
She stroked her hair with one hand and tugged at the hem of her sweater with the other.
“Johanna and Pasi lived together in Kivinokka, didn’t they?” I asked.
Elina nodded—not right away, but she nodded nevertheless.
“I find it hard to believe that digging up the past will help you find Johanna,” Elina said. “But go ahead. Do what you like.”
She sighed and tucked her feet tighter beneath her.
“We lived a different kind of life then,” she said. “We were young and naive. Students. We did everything together. Some things we shouldn’t have done.”
“Like what?”
“Like things Pasi thought of.” Elina glanced at me, saw the expression on my face, and laughed again. This laugh was noticeably more genuine than the previous one. “It’s not what you’re thinking. Pasi Tarkiainen was a radical environmentalist back then. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.”
“I see,” I said, and realized I was blushing.
“You’re jealous,” Elina said.
I nodded reluctantly, feeling heat in my cheeks.
“This all happened a long time ago. I’m sure you have a past, too.”
“Of course I do,” I said, feeling the heat spread to my neck and wanting to change the subject. “What were these ideas of Pasi’s?”
“He was a hard-line conservationist. He had contacts with the kinds of groups that were starting to shoot company owners and politicians—anyone who had caused environmental destruction or hadn’t done enough to slow it down. It was the black-and-white thinking of youth: if you’re not with us, you’re against us, and you don’t deserve to live. Johanna and I waved that flag, too. In secret, that is. But we believed it.”
“I didn’t know you were so radical,” I said. “I mean, I knew that Johanna was an activist, but I didn’t know that she’d been living with a terrorist.”
Elina looked for a moment like she was trying to remember how things really were. The coolness was disappearing from her gaze little by little.
“Pasi wasn’t a terrorist. A passionate person, even an obsessive person, yes, but he wasn’t a bad person. He hasn’t done anything wrong, has he?”
I thought of the murdered families and the evidence that Tarkiainen was at the scenes of those crimes. I shrugged and let the question pass.
“Why is it so hard for you to talk about?” I asked.
Elina nodded toward the bedroom.
“Ahti doesn’t really understand,” she said, then added faintly, almost involuntarily, “for a lot of reasons.”
I looked at her.
“Haven’t the two of you ever talked about it?” I asked.
She looked surprised and offended for a moment, then just surprised.
“Why would we? You and Johanna didn’t.”
The truth stung.
“No, we didn’t. I guess there wasn’t any reason to.”
“You were happy as long as you thought you knew everything you needed to know,” Elina said. “And now that you know that there were things you didn’t know, you feel bad. You’ve got to make up your mind about how much you really want to know. Even about your own wife.”
There was something in her voice that I’d never noticed before. The coolness had returned, and with it something hard, even bitter.
“Tell me more about Pasi Tarkiainen,” I said.
“Why?”
I looked her in the eye.
“You haven’t told me everything.”
She let out a puff of air and rolled her eyes. But she was a bad actor. Even she knew it.
“You’re not going to find Johanna by digging up things that happened a hundred years ago.”
“You haven’t told me everything,” I said again. “Ahti’s asleep. You can tell me.”
She glanced toward the bedroom again. We listened to the silence for a moment. I could hear Ahti snoring.
“This is important, Elina,” I said. “Johanna has been missing for a day and a half. I don’t even want to think about any other possibility but finding her alive, unhurt. I need all the help I can get. It’s not easy to ask, but I have to. I have to find Johanna.”
Elina pulled her legs up even closer, brushed the hair from her face with a few quick movements of her hand, and looked straight ahead for a moment. Then she looked at me again, her head bowed a little, and said, as if she were surrendering something:
“I adored Pasi Tarkiainen.”
She was still looking at me, perhaps waiting for some reaction. Then she continued: “I don’t know how to explain it now, but I adored him. And, of course, I wished that he adored me in the same way. But it was Johanna he wanted. I can admit it now—now that it’s been so many years. I was in love with Pasi, and I was dying of jealousy when I saw how happy they were together.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“Did you tell Johanna about it?”
“No,” Elina said quickly, shaking her head. “I didn’t even tell Pasi about it. I just tried to make him notice me. And then when I heard that they weren’t really that happy, at first I was pleased, but then I was just sorry, thinking, What kind of person am I that I’m happy when my friend’s partner is revealed to be something other than he seems, when I learn that she’s not happy?”
“What happened?”
“I don’t really know,” Elina said, and she sounded sincere. “All Johanna told me was that Pasi wasn’t the
man she had thought he was. Sometimes if I’d had a glass of wine, or two or three, I would ask about it, but somehow we just didn’t talk about it, even though we talked about everything together. Pasi just disappeared from our lives, and we forgot about him. Then Ahti came along, and you, and everything that had to do with Pasi had vanished.”
She smiled an entirely joyless smile.
“I’ve never talked with anyone about this. Not even Johanna. It seems like a different world now. It feels like ages ago, like I’m a different person now, and so is everyone else.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Johanna’s my best friend,” she said. “The best friend I’ve ever had or ever will have. I love Ahti. Ahti’s my husband. But Johanna’s my friend.”
I still didn’t say anything. I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at her, her brown eyes still shining with the anger of a moment earlier, the shadows on her face. All the coldness and hardness had gone out of her face, but something dark still lingered.
“And now here we are,” she said in the same resigned tone that she’d begun with. “Last night I started thinking, Why in the world are we going north? That won’t solve anything. Nothing. We’ll have even less there than we have here. I want you to find Johanna, so we can be together again. You and Johanna and Ahti are all the family I have left. My parents both died of the flu four years ago, my big sister is somewhere in America, and she’s not coming back. I was sitting beside Ahti last night thinking that no matter what comes, we don’t need to leave here. We shouldn’t.”
She lifted her head. A delicate smile lit up her face, its warmth slowly rising to her eyes.
“Let’s stick together and live as long as we can, as long as we’re able to,” she said softly, then added faintly, troubled, “let’s do the best we can under the circumstances.”
Ahti didn’t awaken even when I was purposefully noisy putting on my coat and shoes at the door. I would have liked to talk to him, but Elina felt we should let him keep snoring. I asked her to call me if she remembered something, anything at all, about Pasi Tarkiainen.
I tried to show her Tarkiainen’s picture, told her that he’d lived on Museokatu, just a little way from here, a few years before she and Ahti had moved into the neighborhood. But she didn’t want to look at a photo of her former infatuation or think about how close he had once lived to where she was now.
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