Dark As My Heart

by Antti Tuomainen

  I knew I was taking a big risk. If Ketomaa couldn’t tell the authorities what had happened at the house, I would be a suspect; there were traces of me everywhere, especially on the nail gun, where they would probably find a print from every one of my fingers. Not to mention DNA. But Ketomaa had been alive when I left. He would tell them about Saarinen, about his kidnapping, about Saarinen’s plans. And Saarinen – I had to find him.

  What other choice did I have? As I watched the flashing blue lights approaching I realised that I would be in jail in half an hour if I stayed where I was. There were only two people in the house, a badly injured, unconscious victim, and me, with the weapon in my hand. Who would believe even for a minute a story about how the millionaire Henrik Saarinen wanted me to marry his daughter and this was his way of making it happen? No one, at least not until Saarinen’s presence there could be proved, and that might take weeks. When I stood up, my knees wet with blood, I decided that if I had to spend time in jail I would do it after I’d seen Saarinen face to face.

  I went around the residential areas, keeping clear of outdoor lights. Finally I found what I was looking for. I crossed a ditch next to a yard, checking the lighted windows to make sure no one was looking out. I ran to the clothesline and tore down some men’s jeans and a sweatshirt, then ran back into the woods. I shoved the clothes under my coat, to keep them clean, and kept running for a quarter of an hour. I came to a larger road and saw a bus stop in the distance, and people waiting there. Hidden by some bushes, I took off the bloody trousers and shirt and put on a strange man’s large jeans, clammy with damp, and the dark blue sweatshirt with a Lions Club logo on the right breast. I emptied my own pockets and shoved my wallet and phone into the pockets of the baggy, clumsily rolled-up jeans. The sweatshirt felt like a sackful of wet dishrags. I pulled on my coat and walked to the bus stop.

  When the bus came, I saw that it was headed to Kamppi shopping centre, in central Helsinki. That suited me. I paid the fare with my bank card, adding one more piece of evidence to the growing pile that would eventually topple on me. I sat in the first empty pair of seats. I was damp through. The cold had sunk deep into my bones. My teeth wanted to chatter. I tried to keep them still. I hoped that the weak warmth of the bus would reach me eventually. I couldn’t hear any sirens. That didn’t mean anything. The area was probably crawling with police cars. The paramedics had no doubt called the police in as soon as they saw that it wasn’t the DIY accident I’d reported when I called. The call – that was another piece of evidence against me. I’d lost count of all the suspicious things I’d done in the past hour. I sat in my stolen clothes trying to warm up and thinking about what to do next.

  The bus wound its way through neighbourhoods I knew only by name. One by one they were left behind. We reached Helsinki city limits. Saarinen’s words were taking on more and more new meanings as I thought about them.

  I see a man who would make a perfect husband for Amanda. The kind of man she needs. Someone with his feet on the ground. Someone who can make her give up … make her stop …

  Aleksi, you have a wonderful future ahead of you. The only thing you have to do is help me with this.

  I lost someone I loved, but I had nothing to do with it.

  If you only knew what I’ve done for you.

  The bus arrived at Kamppi. I decided to get on another one. I would go back to Kalmela. Start there. But before that I would need something to eat, or at least something to drink. My stomach ached, my throat was rough and dry.

  I went up the escalator to the shopping centre and knew all at once that I was the loneliest person on earth. I didn’t even want to think about what I looked like in my wet, mud-soaked shoes, my too-big, uncle-style jeans, and my Lions Club sweatshirt, stuffed up under my coat. I didn’t know how dirty my face was, how messy my hair was. I had tried to see my reflection in the bus window, afraid Ketomaa’s blood had got onto my cheek, my chin, my forehead, wiping my nose and mouth with my sleeve and finger-combing my hair into what I imagined was a presentable state.

  The loud bustle of the shopping centre told me the shops were about to close. I was just in time. I walked into a grocery store without looking around me. I saw couples shopping together, their happiness, their clean clothes.

  I found a shelf of sandwiches, grabbed one with chicken and a bottle of cola. If I ran I could still make the next bus to Kalmela. I turned towards the cashier’s counter, stopped, froze, and my jaw would have dropped all the way to my wet, miserable feet if the dried sweat and dirt on my cheeks weren’t holding it up.

  When had we last seen each other? Was it only six weeks ago?

  I couldn’t form words. All I could do was stare.

  What thoughts can you have in a hundredth of a second? How much regret? How many things can you realise you’ve done wrong, how many ways you’ve been a fool?

  Miia’s expression changed from second to second, like a sleek, quick elevator moving from one floor to the next.

  First surprise, a half happy look, then just plain surprise, open bewilderment, and finally shock, sympathy, shame. Obviously I looked even worse than I’d feared. She glanced to the side, into the next aisle, then looked at me again. She was dressed in a black, knee-length jacket, red jeans, and a patterned scarf.

  ‘Hello, Aleksi.’

  ‘Hi,’ I said, making myself speak. I couldn’t find the words. ‘How have you been? Out grocery shopping?’

  Brilliant, I thought. At the same moment I saw what was in her basket. Cheese, fruit, fish, bread. Maybe going to a friend’s. Or maybe friends were coming to her house. I remembered long evenings in her lovely home. Another time. Another world.

  ‘Sort of. We’re … buying some dinner. I’ve been well. Thanks for asking.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ I said, holding a limp, ready-made sandwich and a tepid, sugary drink in my hands. Next to the Gouda, Manchego, and Brie, gravlax and rye bread in her basket it looked more like punishment than food.

  ‘How’re things with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘Just grabbing a snack before I hop on the bus.’

  She looked at me. I felt her gaze traverse from my head to my toes and back again. She waved her free hand, as if to help me see my condition.

  ‘Was this your big secret? You were planning to become a wino?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I haven’t become a wino.’

  ‘What, then?’

  I shifted my feet into a firmer stance. My wet shoes squished out water. Glancing down I saw that my sweatshirt reached nearly to my knees, like an ugly skirt. And I couldn’t take it off – the shirt underneath was stained with blood.

  ‘This isn’t how it looks,’ I said, and congratulated myself again. Where were these banalities coming from?

  ‘No doubt. What bus?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re grabbing a snack before you hop on a bus. That’s what you said, anyway. But then you say all kinds of things and make people believe all kinds of things. Where is this bus going?’

  I realised that the people in the store were giving me more space than they normally did. It was possible that I reeked of sweat, dirt, and wet clothes. I felt like yelling to Miia and everyone else to just try to keep from sweating when somebody’s shooting at you with a nail gun and kicking you in the stomach and ribs and you have to run from the police through the dark woods and you’ve hoped and feared for twenty years and wanted justice for the mother who was taken away from the little boy you once were.

  ‘Going to work,’ I said quietly.

  ‘So you are working.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You look like you … Like you’re not working. Where are you working?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  Miia had the same familiar look in her eye that I’d seen on that horrible night when every word tore a little more of my heart away.

  ‘Of course you can’t. I forgot you work for the CIA. Aleksi, are you
living on the street?’

  I was so tired that I didn’t have it in me to deny it, or to try to explain somehow, from another angle.

  ‘Miia, could I call you some –’

  Before I could finish my question a thirtyish, well-dressed man appeared from between the grocery shelves. He placed himself next to Miia. He was of average build, with an elegant, striped tie, knotted with studied carelessness, dark-rimmed glasses, and dimples in his cheeks that deepened with a quick, practised expression.

  ‘This is Olli,’ Miia said, glancing at him. ‘And this is Aleksi.’

  Olli demonstrated that he was a civilised man in matters other than just dress. He reached out to shake my hand. I did the same. At the very end of the reach, just before our hands clasped, he hesitated. He’d seen my hand. I saw it too, for the first time. It must have been because of the bright, cold light in the supermarket. My hand looked as if it had been digging through guts and then done some gardening. Which it had, in a way. Our hands clasped. Olli took back his hand and left it hanging away from his body.

  ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he said.

  Miia coughed into her fist.

  ‘Heard good things,’ Olli added.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said.

  His eyes did the same thing Miia’s had just done, moving from my muddy shoes to my dirty forehead and back. They couldn’t get enough of me. I was like an object lesson in failure, a loser, a bizarre relic, the lunatic exception in her otherwise sensible past.

  ‘We should go,’ Miia said. ‘Take care.’

  ‘OK. You, too,’ I said, to no one in particular.

  Of course I’d heard that old saying about how before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. It did. I watched Miia’s retreating back, her hand reaching for Olli’s upper arm, the brisk movement of her boots, and I felt as if I was dying.

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  KALMELA WAS DESERTED. I knew as soon as I saw the main house that Henrik Saarinen wasn’t there, so my trip was partly in vain.

  The night wind kept a steady hum through the trees, otherwise everything was still, with no sign of life. The windows of the manor house were black as the mouth of a tunnel. The wan glow of the yard lights made the house seem separate from its surroundings, as if it could get up and leave. I’d walked four kilometres in the dark along the road and thought way too much. I wanted a warm shower, longed for dry, clean clothes so much that it hurt.

  Common sense told me I had time. It would be a while before I could talk to Ketomaa. My fingerprints weren’t in any registry, nor was my DNA. They would only know I had been there if Ketomaa told them, and I didn’t think he would. I didn’t know what Saarinen was guilty of besides what he’d done to Ketomaa, but I was fairly certain he wouldn’t be the first one to turn himself in.

  The main house was quieter than ever. I made a quick circuit of the inside although I knew deep down that there was no point. I stopped in the middle of the hall. Suddenly everything seemed such a long time ago. The day I came to the estate, meeting Amanda and Henrik, doing my maintenance work. Back when I knew what I was doing. That thought took me in its fist and squeezed. The night grew darker. I was shivering with cold. I turned out the lights and went to my apartment.

  I undressed, stuffed the clothes I was wearing in a rubbish bag, and tied it closed. I shoved the bag under a cabinet, not for a moment believing that what was out of sight would be out of mind. I was under the hot shower for a long time, used quantities of shampoo and soap. Ketomaa’s blood rinsed down the drain, but the guilt for my old friend’s suffering didn’t come off as easily. I told myself over and over that I’d done what I could, acted on the understanding I’d had, and that I would help him in every way possible.

  After my shower I toasted some rye bread, spread some of Enni’s elk pâté on it, and ate it with a mug of coffee. I thought many times of calling Amanda, but something stopped me – maybe what Saarinen had said, maybe just a desire to have at least a little time and distance from what had happened.

  As I ate I stared blindly out of the window. The main house was still there, shining in the night like a ship, mute and self-assured. If it was keeping secrets it wasn’t going to tell them. Coming here hadn’t been like opening a treasure chest or rolling a stone from the mouth of a cave the way I’d thought it would be, but I’d come, and now I was here, and everything that had happened had happened for a reason.

  Ketomaa had believed Saarinen was guilty. I had believed Saarinen was guilty. Saarinen had thought Ketomaa’s investigation was harassment. And he had let me get close to him.

  I turned out the lights and lay down on the bed. Slowly but surely the darkness took on shapes, outlines.

  Early the next morning, a little before seven, I walked to the bus stop again. The sun was just starting its rise, its light dawning a delicate pink on the horizon. I waited for the bus next to the dark, impenetrable spruce forest, going through my phone files with fingers stiff from the morning cold. I was looking for a number I could call. There weren’t any. I searched through yesterday’s evening news for a headline or even a mention of the incident or of Ketomaa, but I didn’t find anything. I couldn’t call the Meilahti hospital, where I assumed Ketomaa had been taken. They wouldn’t release information to a stranger.

  The bus came into view. I waved an arm to get it to stop. There weren’t many passengers, and the trip into Helsinki went quickly. I sat in the second row of seats and watched the sunrise change from pink to red to autumn yellow as it climbed the sky and eventually shone into my eyes.

  I walked from the Kamppi terminal to Liisankatu. My car was where I’d left it, with an 80 euro parking ticket under the wiper. I shoved the ticket in my coat pocket. I started the car and was about to drive away, then didn’t. I locked the car again and walked the short distance to Amanda’s building. I rang the bell and waited. No answer. Perhaps it was too early. I didn’t see Amanda’s black SUV anywhere. I wanted to talk to her, ask her where I could find Henrik. Talking on the phone wasn’t the same, especially not now. I went back to my car and waited to see if I could get another parking fine. Two hours later I went to a café down the street and ordered a croissant and a cup of coffee. I went to the little WC and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked better than I had when I ran into Miia the night before. Which was no consolation. The thought of Miia was painful and bleak.

  In the afternoon I moved the car for something to do. I found another no parking zone a little way down the street. Young people were pouring out of a school, fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, alone or in larger groups. I remembered my loneliness at that age, my constant awareness that I would never walk home like that again, that nothing would ever be like it was before.

  That feeling had always been with me. I couldn’t shake it on the football field, at the cinema, with girls or later women, alone, no matter when or where. Maybe that was why I developed two separate lives, one inside and one outside. Inside I was searching for the truth, carrying out a task, the same task whose outcome I was waiting for now as I sat in the car. On the outside I did all the things that other people my age were doing: school, sports, studying, working. Maybe I should congratulate myself. The moment had come when those two hopelessly separate lives seemed finally to be merging.

  Life had never been what I’d once thought it would be. Nothing had happened the way I had imagined it would. The only certainties were the vanishing days, and the unknowability of those to come.

  A little before four o’clock I looked up. Amanda Saarinen’s black Range Rover appeared in my wing mirror. It rolled up from the direction of the shore like a wagon into a new city, swaying over the cobblestone street, slowly advancing as if its driver were exceedingly on guard. It wasn’t a style of driving that matched Amanda’s personality. The black side of the SUV passed me and found a parking spot almost directly in front of Amanda’s building, on the opposite side of the street. It seemed Amanda really did get whatever she wanted. I couldn’t begin to imagi
ne how that felt.

  I got out of the car and noticed that my legs were stiff as I hurriedly crossed the street. Amanda was sitting in her car wearing sunglasses. I went to the building entrance. I let the seconds, then the minutes, pass. Finally she opened the car door, climbed out, and saw me. I could tell because her back stiffened and she glanced quickly around her, the way a person does when she has to encounter someone she doesn’t want to encounter, or so I imagined.

  She was dressed entirely in black, which made her look thinner. Her knee-length black leather coat was narrow and tight-fitting, as were her black blouse, black trousers, and black leather boots. Her face and neck were paler than I remembered. Her lip was swollen and slightly purple.

  ‘Have you been waiting long?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses. Judging by her voice, the question was a rhetorical one.

  ‘There are a couple of things we need to talk about,’ I said.

  ‘As it happens, I was thinking the same thing.’

  She rattled the bundle of keys in her hand and pushed one into the door lock. I followed her up. I walked behind her, as I had before, but I didn’t feel the same sense of expectation as I had then. Nothing like it. And I didn’t know why. Of course there were the events of the night before – her father shooting nails at people, and running away as I shot them at him. But that didn’t totally explain it.

  Amanda didn’t take off her tall boots, instead wore them into the apartment, into the kitchen, took a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, poured herself a glass, and walked with it in her hand into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa. She was still wearing the sunglasses. I sat in the chair across from her. The afternoon sun was trying to penetrate the recessed window, making dim, long shadows that would disappear in a brief moment.