The Healer

by Antti Tuomainen

  “Johanna. I wanted her to understand that I still love her. Tarkiainen promised to help me.”

  “How could Tarkiainen help you?”

  The question echoed through the room, hurried, impatient. The words sounded like they came from outside myself.

  “Johanna wouldn’t listen. I wanted another chance.”

  “A chance to do what?”

  “I wanted her to realize that I love her.”

  Of course. And to show her that you love her, you deceived your longtime colleague and led her into the hands of a murderer.

  “Tarkiainen promised,” Gromov continued hoarsely, “that he could make Johanna understand my situation. And he had to meet with her because he had information about the Healer that he could tell her only in person.”

  Gromov’s words came out half-whispered, half in a series of quick yelps, all of it running together.

  “Tarkiainen knew so much,” he said, sounding like he was running a foot race. “About Johanna, me, everything. I arranged to meet Johanna—told her I had a tip. Tarkiainen was supposed to talk to her and then bring her here. So we could talk in private.”

  He stopped speaking like he’d hit a wall and struggled to breathe. There didn’t seem to be any more air going into his lungs than was coming out. He forced out a few more words: “But then Väntinen came here. And now look at me.”

  “Johanna’s phone,” I said. “You had it in your hand.”

  He tried to nod. His eyes closed and his chin jerked. Somehow, he got some oxygen.

  “One more thing, to say,” he said. “To you.”

  I looked into his eyes, where hope and hopelessness were taking turns. Like a man hanging on to a rope that can rescue him as time after time it slips out of his grasp. I waited as long as I could bear it. I was already turning away, looking for the phone, when he spoke again.

  “You don’t know how it feels,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t know what love is. You don’t know what it’s like to lose the one you love,” he said, “and then get her back again.”

  What was he talking about? I kept quiet and looked at his glistening face, drained of all color.

  “I’ve known Johanna longer than you have. You don’t know everything.”

  He looked like he would smile if he only could. I shoved my hands in my coat pockets, a strikingly nonchalant gesture considering that a dying man lay before me with a hole ripped in his chest.

  “We were young lovers,” he said, and if a man with his life about to leave him can sound triumphant and proud, Gromov did. “Twenty years ago. Until she left me. Over a misunderstanding. Then life threw us together again. I’ve always been a one-woman man.”

  I looked at the bloody figure on the bed and took my hands out of my pockets.

  “According to Johanna, you were anything but a one-woman man,” I said.

  His sigh was like a hacksaw on metal.

  “I wanted her to be jealous. To feel the same gnawing jealousy I felt.”

  I shook my head, trying not to lose my patience. He could breathe only a few moments longer. I could see the same rude superiority in his eyes that I’d seen in the past. I didn’t understand where he got his energy.

  “Then she would know how it feels,” he said, in a voice that was so like his normal voice that I almost jumped.

  “Where’s Johanna’s phone?” I said.

  “Johanna still loves me. Do you know how I know?”

  “Stop talking bullshit,” I said, trying not to raise my voice. “I need that telephone.”

  He struggled to breathe again, gulping the air for a while with his eyes squeezed shut. Once he’d got some breath he opened them again, still looking defiant.

  “I know one thing,” he said.

  I didn’t reply.

  “In her hour of need, she didn’t want to call you.”

  I looked at him, wanting him to die, and wanting him to stay alive.

  “You’re lying,” I said, wondering if he could hear the uncertainty in my voice.

  “Why would I lie?” he said, looking as if it took all his strength to speak. “Look at me. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “Johanna would have called me if she could.”

  “She had a chance to call you,” he said. At that moment, his chest stopped twitching. He noticed it, too, and hurried to speak. He only managed a few words: “But she didn’t call you.”

  A look of amazement suddenly covered his face, his mouth opening and closing. His head nearly lifted off the pillow, then fell again. His eyes were left staring at the ceiling.

  The stuffy dampness, the raw, rotten smell spreading from Gromov’s dead body, and my own oppressive, chest-tightening thoughts couldn’t all fit in that small space. His last words echoed through the room clearer than they had come out of his mouth. Before I left the room I looked around, opening drawers and closets searching for the telephone, but didn’t find it. As I walked out the door, I turned around. Gromov lay motionless in a dark puddle, like a big, broken doll. I didn’t know what I should think. I turned out the light and went downstairs.

  I walked once around the half-darkened, open-plan second floor before I remembered what Gromov had worn in the surveillance footage. There was a coat rack just inside the door, and Gromov’s thigh-length, dark overcoat hung neatly from a hanger there. The coat looked empty, spent, the shoulders slumped loose. It felt wrong to rummage through its pockets. The left pocket was empty, but I found what I was looking for in the right one—Johanna’s phone. I held it in my hand, waiting for it to tell me what had happened, what was true. I pressed the power button, but the phone was mute.

  Then I heard the sound of a car on the street moving at high speed. It stopped suddenly. I just had time to look out the window before the motor was turned off. It was a black sports car, with no one in it but the driver. The driver’s-side door opened and Max Väntinen stood on the street. I backed away from the window and quickly scanned my surroundings.

  Väntinen opened the door with a key as I pressed myself into the space between the drapes that covered the window and a projection of the wall. Väntinen walked inside with quick, heavy steps, then stopped. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him and feel his presence. He was a few meters away, and for a moment I was sure I could hear his breathing, his heartbeat, practically even the movement of the blood through his veins.

  After an unbearably long time, he climbed the steps to the third floor. I hoped that I hadn’t left any drawers or closet doors open or left anything in the room that would tell him I was on the premises. But something happened, because Väntinen immediately came stomping down the stairs and out of the house. I heard the car speed away, and only some time later dared to move.

  Adrenaline and fear made my hands tremble and my breath shake as I glanced toward the front door. Although I could see that Väntinen’s car had left, I nevertheless decided to leave by the back door and go back to the taxi the way I had come.

  I opened the door and listened for a moment to the murmur of the rain and the many sounds it made as it fell on the stones of the patio, the rain gutter above, and the shrubs beside me. The trees in the woods stood a few meters away as if observing a moment of silence. Gromov was dead. I had just been hiding a few meters from the murderer. And I hadn’t even thought of the gun, still in my backpack in the taxi. But why would I have brought it with me? I just wanted to find Johanna. I heard the sound of Gromov’s words again: what he’d said was possible, but it didn’t ring true. Johanna’s phone felt hot in my pants pocket, even with the battery dead. It would have the answer to Gromov’s last words, at least—something in the call record, the messages, the memos, or the pictures would offer the key to Johanna’s disappearance a few hours before. It would make things clear.

  The path wound through the rain among the slippery tree roots. I stepped in a puddle at one point; at another my foot sank into a soup of mud. I was making my way along t
he edge of the trail when I heard a voice behind me.

  “How did I guess?”

  I turned and saw Väntinen step from behind a large, gnarled oak tree onto the path. In his hand was a large-caliber pistol. Probably the same pistol that had torn Gromov in two. And one like it had, of course, killed whole families.

  His face was cold and ugly in the scant light. The hood of his raincoat was pulled over his head, and the edge of it cast a shadow over the top of his face to the bridge of his nose and cheekbones. I couldn’t quite make out his eyes.

  “How is it that a guy as curious as you is still alive?” he said.

  “You really shouldn’t kill me,” I heard myself say. “It would be no use to either of you.”

  “Either of who?” he asked.

  The cold rain pasted my hair to my forehead and tickled my scalp. The lights of the next row house twinkled through the branches farther off to the left. I looked as hard as I could at Väntinen, but I still couldn’t see his eyes in the deep shadows. His question seemed sincere, though.

  “The two of you,” I said. “You and Tarkiainen.”

  He nodded quickly.

  “Of course. He’s in this, too. A little difference of vision. Pasi is so idealistic. Always changing the world. I, on the other hand, just got sick of being so damn broke.”

  Looking at the barrel of the gun, I couldn’t help but think of Gromov. I had to ask: “Is Tarkiainen still alive?”

  Väntinen’s lips spread into a smile for a moment.

  “You’re more interested in how your wife is doing, aren’t you?”

  He was right.

  “Where is Johanna?” I asked, and realized I was shivering. The rain, wind, and nearly freezing temperature had taken their toll.

  “I don’t think I’m gonna tell you.”

  The barrel of the gun rose a couple of centimeters.

  “Let you die without knowing. Nosy creeps piss me off, as a general rule. You, for instance. Would you be in this situation if you hadn’t come into my bar whining about your old lady?”

  I had to stall for time.

  “Tarkiainen,” I said, grasping at something, anything. “Was he the one who started all this?”

  Väntinen’s lips smiled wider.

  “OK,” he said. His voice was casual, superior. “Let’s stand in the rain and talk. How did it all start? Pasi wanted to make the world a better place, as usual. This climate change thing. He said that certain people had to be held ultimately responsible for what they’d done. I said, ‘Why not?’”

  His smile evaporated, and the barrel of the gun rose again.

  “Pasi said he was ready to use serious methods. But that’s what everybody says until you actually use serious methods. Same thing with Pasi. First a hell of a lot of bluster, then whimpering when the shit hit the fan. I thought it was a simple matter. Kill a few assholes and collect some money. Nobody suffers. Pasi had a problem with it. He couldn’t be the Healer after all. I had to take care of that damned song and dance, on top of everything else I have to do.”

  I tried to look around. Väntinen noticed.

  “Do you want to hear this or do you want to try to escape? Makes no difference to me. I’m just standing here trying to decide whether to shoot you in the head, the neck, or the chest.”

  I continued to shiver and kept my eyes on his shadowed face. He was standing about four meters away. I couldn’t hear anything but the rain. No cars, let alone people. Where were all those supposed dangerous inhabitants of the park when you needed them?

  “I thought you’d be interested,” Väntinen continued. “I’m getting to your wife—a real pain in the ass, if you don’t mind my saying so. Do you want to hear it or don’t you?”

  I nodded, shaking. The cold had sunk right to my core, into my bones.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “It was the last straw, the last misunderstanding in this whole damn mess. It wasn’t all your wife’s fault, even if she is a fucking nosy bitch. As you know.”

  He smiled and continued.

  “Pasi had a dream. He wanted to get some journalist to understand what he was doing. To get favorable publicity, if you can believe that. He said that once people understood what we were doing and why, they would realize it was necessary.”

  He was almost laughing now, the gun barrel swinging a few centimeters back and forth.

  “And this is the best part—they would join us. What do you think of that idea?”

  I didn’t say anything. Väntinen noticed I was shaking.

  “You’re trembling with excitement. I wasn’t so enthusiastic. But that didn’t stop me. We had a hell of a good business going.”

  “Tarkiainen was in on that, too,” I said.

  “He was sort of forced into it. He was skeptical about the security firm. Afraid people would find out it was a business scheme and turn against us. That’s why we needed a journalist who could understand—somebody who could see the bigger picture and tell the good side of the story to a wider audience. So he decided on his ex-wife.”

  “They were never married,” I said. “Where is Johanna?”

  Väntinen gave a short, cold laugh.

  “Don’t you understand? I’m not going to tell you. You wanted to know how all this started. Now you know. I’m not going to tell you anything more.”

  We stood for a moment in silence. The rain drummed and danced on the trees and sodden ground. I could hear a stream off to my left. Somewhere far away, deep within the woods, was the shrill whine of a chainsaw or a moped—so far off that it wasn’t any use to me. I had to keep the conversation going.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why in general,” I said, looking at the place where his eyes were and seeing nothing but black shadows. “Why won’t you tell me where Johanna is? Why did you kill innocent people?”

  He shrugged so nonchalantly that we might as well have been talking about what to have for lunch.

  “The end is near,” he said lightly. “What does it matter what we do? There are two alternatives: be a pitiful bastard working as a bartender, scraping by, working in a shit hole, more and more miserable all the time, right up to the end, or you can head north, live comfortably in your own house, in peace. And how many of us are truly innocent, anyway? That’s where Pasi and I think along the same lines. We’ve all spent decades knowing what was coming, but nobody wanted to do anything that would make the slightest bit of difference.”

  “Some people tried,” I said, and felt that even my lips were trembling. “A lot of people.”

  Väntinen sighed loudly. A little cloud of steam appeared in front of his face and was almost immediately swept to the ground by the raindrops.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, suddenly sounding exhausted. “It was what it was. But I have someplace I have to be.”

  He straightened his shooting arm. The hole at the end of the gun’s barrel seemed to grow, and I thought, This is the last thing in the world I’ll see—a little black eye that will wink once and end everything.

  The shot deafened my ears and shook my body, and I was certain that even the trees were swaying. Väntinen’s hood flew off the back of his head. His face was missing something. A forehead, I realized. The shot, which had come from somewhere to my right, had knocked it off. Väntinen fell forward. The browless head smacked into the wet sand face-first.

  Hamid came out from behind a tree, picked his way around the limbs and roots, and stepped onto the path. He looked different. His eyes were grim, his short, curly hair shone like steel wool in the rain, and the electric tremor in the cheeks of his thin face showed more clearly than before. In his hand was the pistol I’d left in my backpack. I looked at it, then at Väntinen.

  Väntinen’s hand still held his gun, its barrel now full of sand and mud. On one side of his head I could see white bone, rinsed clean by the rain. I looked up at Hamid.

  “I wasn’t always a cabdriver,” he said.

  CHRISTMAS EVE
r />   27

  A fiery red Christmas star shone in the third-floor window, exactly in the middle of the darkened apartment house. The building around it guarded it like a flame within. The hum of the car heater and the patter of the rain on the hood were the only sounds I heard, once my hearing returned.

  Hamid sat in the driver’s seat without speaking. He had accepted my thanks without speaking, as well. He kept his eyes aimed to the front and sat still, just being there, like he might do something completely unexpected at any moment. He had put the gun into the glove compartment. I thought about asking for it back, but there didn’t seem to be any point, somehow. He was the one who knew how to use it, that was clear.

  We’d found Väntinen’s car after a brief search. There was a meter-high berm separating the parking area from the road. I checked again to make sure that Johanna’s phone was charging and that Väntinen’s keys were in my coat pocket, and got out of the car.

  The wind had subsided, at least momentarily. The fresh night air smelled clean and sharp. Väntinen’s car gleamed like it had just been washed, the raindrops on its black body shining like pearls. I sat down in the driver’s seat.

  The car was as clean inside as out. I went through the door pockets and the storage case between the seats. I found a chamois, work gloves, and a few coins. The only thing in the glove compartment was the auto manual. The small, cramped backseat looked completely unused. Except for the driver’s seat, the leg space was untouched and clean. I got out and moved the seats back to look under them. I didn’t find anything, not even dust.

  I walked around the car and opened the trunk. It was small and crammed full. In the middle was a large athletic bag with a long steel zipper. I opened it: a man’s clothes, presumably Väntinen’s. After a moment of random rummaging I noticed that there were summer and winter clothes in it. It was Christmas Eve. Väntinen had meant what he’d said about going north. If he had his bags already packed, he must have been planning to leave soon.

  I searched two other bags and a small backpack and found more travel items: extra clothes, bath products, shaving gear, and finally Väntinen’s passport. I took the bags out and looked under the mat. Just a spare tire and a jack.