“And this man helped you?”
“Yes. I was grateful to him. He also helped Erik on his final journey.”
“Here at home?”
“What better place to die?”
I saw the place at Jätkäsaari again. Human forms under a blanket. Bloodstains on the wall above the bed.
“No better place, I guess,” I said. “Then what happened?”
She looked at me.
“Then Erik was cremated and I was left alone after forty-six years,” she said.
“I’m sorry. And after that?”
She looked impatient now.
“I would have liked to die, but I didn’t die,” she said. “Sometimes it’s that simple.”
“Forgive me, Mrs. Bonsdorff,” I said quietly. “I didn’t mean that. Perhaps I didn’t say it very well. I mean, what about this doctor, Tarkiainen? Did you ever hear from him again?”
“He disappeared the same way he had come. He arrived uninvited and left without saying good-bye. I’ve never heard from him again.”
“Do you know whether he lived in this building at the time he was helping Erik?”
She pondered the question.
“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose it’s possible. It’s certainly not impossible.”
“Did you ever run into him on the stairs or in the courtyard?”
She shook her head, slowly but with certainty.
“I don’t think so. Of course…”
“Yes?”
“Now that I think about it, I may have wondered at the time how he could get here so quickly after we called him, and in his shirtsleeves, with just his bag in his hand. But I didn’t think any more about it at the time.”
I didn’t know in which direction my questions should go. I wiped my lips with the small napkin she’d given me, although they were already painfully dry.
“Are you and your wife happy?” she asked abruptly.
I looked deep into her blue-green eyes, so much like Johanna’s that for a fraction of a second I almost fell into them.
“I’ve never loved anyone or anything as much as I love my wife,” I heard myself say. Mrs. Bonsdorff’s gaze never faltered. Deep creases appeared in her cheeks, at the edges of her eyes. A warm smile rose to her face, and I could see that they were her eyes and not Johanna’s.
* * *
I WAS IN THE foyer putting on my coat and looking at myself in the large, gilt-framed mirror when she said, “When you find your wife…”
I turned and looked at her. She was nearly swallowed by the large entrance to the living room and the dense fog outside the window.
“Don’t lose her again.”
I tied my scarf around my neck.
“I’ll do my best, Mrs. Bonsdorff.”
I had already turned away from her and put my right hand on the door handle and my left on the lock when I heard her say: “It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.”
20
I looked at the directory again for the building manager’s apartment number. It was on the first floor, someone named Jakolev. There was no answer. Maybe they weren’t home, or maybe they were just keeping quiet on the other side of the door. I could hear myself breathing, and water in the pipes somewhere, and smell the heavy, rotten smell of fried eggs. I waited a moment, then found the phone number on the directory and tried calling. Jakolev didn’t answer. I was getting used to no one answering my calls, I guess. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and left.
When I got outside I filled my lungs with air, opened the door of the taxi, and got in, waking Hamid.
“Where to now?” he asked, looking more alert in a second than I ever did.
I thought about where to go, what place made sense. And about what I knew for certain now: Tarkiainen was alive.
Johanna had been on the trail of the Healer.
Tarkiainen had some connection with the Healer.
Tarkiainen and Johanna had met.
That’s as far as I’d got when Hamid turned and looked at me with his dark, nearly black eyes.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked.
At that moment my phone beeped, telling me I had a message. I took it out, read the message, and immediately knew where to go.
* * *
ON THE WAY, HAMID stopped at a service station. He hopped lightly out of the car, went to the pump, inserted his card and keyed in his code, and started to fill up. I got out of the car, too, got a blast of heady, metallic gasoline fumes, and walked the couple of steps to the counter. The fog was still thick, and the air felt stagnant and damp on my skin.
The former culinary school behind the service station stood silent, its windows black. There were about a dozen people milling around in front of it, men and women who communicated through roars, grunts, and half-syllable shouts. They had a plastic bottle that they were passing around and lifting to their lips.
A large, high SUV with darkened windows pulled into the station on the other side of the pump. Both the driver’s and the passenger’s doors opened and two Slavic-looking men the size of bulldozers appeared and dropped to the ground. One of them went to the gas pump and the other stood next to the car. I couldn’t see inside the car, but I made an educated guess that there was a man in the backseat who would never be able to spend all his money.
The service station was the world in miniature: petroleum under the ground, the masses in their vehicles, and a few who enriched themselves on the distress of the rest. I suppose we all had our place here at this gas station, and in the universe.
Hamid put the nozzle back on the side of the pump with a clank, waking me from my thoughts. His timing was excellent because the bulldozer guarding the car had noticed me staring and, judging by his expression, was about to come over and ask me if I had anything to say to him. And I couldn’t honestly say that I did.
Hamid backed the taxi up from the pump and headed toward the center of town.
The plaza at the train station was nearly full of people and cars. Hamid dropped me off in front of the shopping center across from the station. I dodged people, went into the café, and got in line. While I waited I heard bits of conversation in at least ten different languages. Some of them I understood, most I didn’t. I bought a coffee and a sandwich that was so tightly wrapped in thin paper that only the golden-brown tip told me that it was some kind of bread. I paid and looked around for someplace to sit. I got lucky when an African family gathered its coats and bags and headed toward the railway station.
I sat down, and when a man with a broad smile asked in Spanish-accented English if he could have the extra chairs, I told him yes, except for one. One was saved for Johanna’s editor, Lassi Uutela. I didn’t say that part out loud.
The roll was dry and contained the thinnest slice of cheese I’d ever seen. Had it been any thinner, I wouldn’t have seen it.
I’d finished the sandwich and coffee when Lassi arrived.
He shook my hand, glanced into my eyes only in passing, pulled out a chair, threw his left leg over his right, slapped his hair into place, and ran a hand over the stubble on his face. Then he picked up his spoon and stirred his coffee.
He looked as tired and world-weary as he had the day before, but I understood better now that his battered, worn-out appearance was a kind of armor that made it easier to make decisions, to play for time, and to conceal his own thoughts and their resulting actions. The whole image of the exhausted but tough newspaperman, red around the eyes, his beard always at the right stage of stubble, was just a role made to measure for an experienced player.
“I’ve got a pretty tight day today,” he said. He nodded toward his offices across the street. “The place is in chaos. A lot of articles just about to come together. That’s why I suggested meeting here. Get a little peace.”
“Right,” I said, and looked around me. The people of all ages and colors, the multitude of languages, and the clatter of the café made it a pleasant place to meet, of course, but it certainly would hav
e been more peaceful someplace else. “I haven’t looked at this morning’s paper, but I’m sure there must have been an article about that singer and her horse you were talking about yesterday.”
Lassi still didn’t look me in the eye.
“Did you want to praise me for a successful piece of journalism?”
He slurped his coffee, the cup steady in his hand, his eyes not evading mine by a millimeter now.
“Why not meet at your office?” I asked.
“Like I said,” he sighed, putting his cup gently on the table and pushing it a few centimeters away from him, “it’s more peaceful here.”
“First you don’t answer my calls, then when I send a message that I’m coming to your office, you call and suggest we meet somewhere else. It makes me wonder—who’s at your office who isn’t supposed to see me?”
He looked at me questioningly, again with that tired skepticism that said he was perhaps a bit intrigued, but also convinced that I was an imbecile and a nuisance.
“Who isn’t supposed to know that Johanna’s missing, and her husband’s looking for her?” I asked.
He didn’t speak for a moment.
“Keep on babbling,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“OK, let’s forget that for a moment. Tell me why you called me to tell me Gromov was dead.”
Lassi looked at me almost pityingly.
“I was trying to help,” he said.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” he repeated with a sigh.
“I don’t remember exactly how you put it, but you said something about how much you value your employees.”
“It’s true,” he said.
“Then tell me why Johanna’s disappearance hasn’t caused you to act. You know that Gromov is dead. You have reason to believe that Johanna is in at least some kind of trouble. You have reason to believe that the trouble she’s in might have something to do with the family murders she was writing about.”
“You’re a poet, Tapani. A journalist would get to the heart of the matter, think about what the truth is, and report on it. You’re building stories, fairy tales. You’re making things up. On the other hand, imagination is a good thing. We need it these days.”
“No editor would pass up a story like this,” I said.
“I don’t see any story in it.”
“You don’t want to see one. And I want to know why.”
Lassi leaned back in his chair.
“You sound like your wife,” he said. “And that’s not a compliment.”
“What have you got against Johanna?”
He shook his head.
“The question is, what has Johanna got against me?”
“Your attitude, for one thing, I would imagine.”
“I’m trying to put out a newspaper.”
“And Johanna’s not?”
“Not the same newspaper. I told you what our situation is. Some people get it, and some people don’t.”
“And Johanna didn’t?”
I glanced outside. The fog looked like it was pressing against the windows, trying to get in.
“Not at all,” Lassi said, leaning still farther back. “We’re living in rather difficult times, in many ways, but one thing is beginning to become clear. The kind of truth that a few journalists like Johanna are still looking for just doesn’t exist anymore. There’s nothing to rest it on, nothing to base it on, nothing to cultivate it. I could talk for a long time about the end of history, the disappearance of values, the pornographication of everything. But stuffed shirts like you know better. It was what it was. We’re trying to put out a paper in the environment we’re in now. I have a blank page that I have to fill with pictures and text that looks like news, something that will interest people. And what are people interested in? Today it’s an R&B singer and her horse. Tomorrow it’s a celebrity caught shoplifting and exposing herself, if it’s up to me. We have surveillance photos, close-ups almost, of this woman stuffing an MP3 player in her underwear, and while she’s at it you can see practically everything, if you know what I mean.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“You think you can afford to be sarcastic? You’re a poet whose most successful collection sold less than two hundred copies. We sell at least two hundred thousand papers a day.”
“You’re relieved that Johanna’s missing.”
“Relieved is the wrong word,” Lassi said, shaking his head.
“There’s more to it than that,” I said.
“Of course there is,” he said with a laugh. There was more than a touch of superiority in his laugh. He looked at me in amusement. “You can imagine what you want. Write a book of poems and put all your crazy imaginings in there.”
I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table.
“I know that Pasi Tarkiainen is a friend of yours. Or a former friend, at least.”
He stopped. There was a crack in his practiced, weary expression, a brief glimpse of uncertainty, before his jaded outer shell remembered to cover it up. I mentally thanked Jaatinen for giving me the information.
Lassi looked at me for a moment before he spoke.
“Former friend.”
“You played on the same floor hockey team,” I said.
“On the one hand I’m amazed that a scribbler like you found something like that out, but on the other hand I’m rather frustrated. You know why?”
I shook my head, spread my arms.
“No matter how I try,” he said, “I can’t see any sense in all this. So what if I played floor hockey with the guy—what was his name again?”
“You don’t remember his name? A moment ago you were sure that he was an old friend of yours.”
Lassi sighed, once again safe within his role—the weary, worn-out newspaperman. He folded his arms across his chest.
“Pasi Tarkiainen was a friend of yours and you also worked together in radical activities,” I said. “I found out about the floor hockey by accident, by doing an Internet search for your name and Tarkiainen’s together. I found out from other sources that you were part of one of the most extreme environmental groups. Tarkiainen joined when you two already knew each other, didn’t he? You were young—young enough to think that bombs could change things. Metaphorically and literally.”
Lassi looked at me, his face locked in that one familiar expression that masked whatever he might be thinking or feeling. I continued: “And when a bomb went off at the offices of Fortum Energy fifteen years ago, you were one of the people questioned. So was Tarkiainen. Neither of you was ever indicted, however, and nothing was found to connect you to the crime. Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of thing an editor wants people to know about him. You can hardly put such a thing on your résumé: Fortum Energy bombing, such and such a year.”
He looked out the window before speaking.
“Someone once said that a person who isn’t idealistic in his youth hasn’t lived and a person who isn’t conservative in his old age hasn’t learned anything from his life. I might add that by ‘conservative’ I mean realistic, recognizing reality. And your information is correct in the sense that I was a young idealist. As far as the rest of it, I would respectfully suggest that you go fuck yourself.”
I nodded and asked softly, “So did Tarkiainen the young idealist turn out to be a cynical shit like you?”
Lassi had regained his superior smile, and he used it.
“Pasi Tarkiainen died years ago. Whether he died an idealist or a cynical shit I don’t know and I don’t care. And, anyway, what does he have to do with anything?”
“Maybe a lot. And you’re lying again. How long have you known that Tarkiainen isn’t dead?”
Lassi’s grin contracted a little at the edges. He scratched the bridge of his nose. He looked like he might be a little nervous.
“Is that a trick question?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a straightforward question, and it has to do with Johanna. It has
to do with your reluctance to invest in finding her and your sudden lack of interest in publishing a story that would almost certainly bring in readers. Just think of it—families brutally murdered, an ambitious reporter vanished, police stupefied. A textbook case of media appeal. Is Tarkiainen blackmailing you?”
Lassi laughed, but it was a feeble laugh this time. He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look me in the eye.
“Last question,” I said. “Let’s go back to the beginning: Why couldn’t we meet at your office?”
21
Johanna was working the first time we met. She was writing an article about the closing of the libraries, and I happened to be one of the people she interviewed.
“Do you come here often?” she asked as we stood in the foyer of the Kallio library during its last week in operation. I was struck by how she had worded her question.
I seized the opportunity and said, “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”
She blushed the way that she always did—just a fleeting trace of pink. She wrote my answers in her notebook, thanked me, and was turning to leave when I asked her how often she came to the library.
She smiled a little and turned to face me again.
“A couple of times a week,” she said.
That’s when I really noticed her eyes. They seemed to gather all the sunlight that filtered through the tall, many-paned windows into the library. It felt like all the light in the dimming, fast-darkening world was shining from this young journalist’s eyes.
“What do you like to read?” I asked.
She thought for a moment.
“Mostly nonfiction, I guess,” she said, looking like she was really thinking about it. “Things connected with my work. Directly or indirectly.”
“What about history?”
“Sometimes.”
“Novels?”
“Sometimes.”
“Poetry?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
“It’s annoying. Particularly newer poetry. Deliberately, willfully obscure. ‘Heart’s blood on a hammer’s handle striking eternal moonlight as the gentle hoof handkerchief lashes its licorice temples.’ Who can read something like that and pretend they get something out of it?”
The Healer Page 12