Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  The students had been satisfied. For their work they had received a good wage, and they felt as if they had participated in a real consumer action.

  And they had, just not for a real consumer rights organisation.

  ‘Jesus, this has been a good day,’ Mari said with a sigh.

  Lia felt triumphant as well, even though the whole thing still disconcerted her.

  After merrily drinking a couple of glasses of bubbly, Maggie and Berg left too.

  Now alone, Lia and Mari sat looking out the windows of the Den at the darkening streets of Bankside.

  ‘One of the more common crimes of our age,’ Mari said. ‘It just hasn’t been criminalised. A big company squeezing people for their last pennies. Just to make larger profits.’

  Mari opened a fresh bottle of wine and gradually drank herself into inebriation. Lia sipped hers with more moderation.

  ‘I know you don’t like everything we did,’ Mari said. ‘But I think we had every right to prevent Orpheus from pulling such an underhand trick.’

  Finally Mari set her glass aside.

  ‘Now I’ve got my kännit on,’ she said to Lia. ‘Well, actually, this is something different, since you aren’t really drinking. This is my… kekkuli.’

  ‘Kekkuli. That’s probably the best Finnish word ever for getting drunk,’ Lia said.

  Mari’s gaze became unfocused.

  ‘Should I call a taxi?’ Lia asked.

  ‘Sure, call yourself one. But I’m staying here with my kekkuli. I’ll be putting those hammocks to good use.’

  Lia helped Mari lower one of the hammocks and get settled in. As she left the Studio, Lia made doubly sure the lock on the door clicked shut behind her.

  As autumn began, their friendship changed.

  The number of nights they spent in bars dropped off, and Lia got into the habit of calling Mari at the end of her working day to see whether she was at the Studio. She almost always was.

  Usually Lia walked the short distance to Bankside. She brought Mari and the others presents, like the roasted nuts which the Southern European immigrants sold from their stalls on the Millennium footbridge.

  She spent her evenings sitting with Mari on the couch in her office.

  At some point, Lia realised it was her turn to be tested. Over the summer, she had put Mari through her paces, and now Mari was waiting to see how Lia would adjust to the work the Studio did.

  Despite Lia’s enquiries, Mari was unwilling to discuss past jobs. ‘Let’s talk about that later,’ was her only reply.

  Sometimes Mari asked Lia to wait because she had to handle some pressing matter of business. Lia spent hours sitting in the Den and the other rooms, looking out.

  She could have stared at the vistas of Bankside from morning to night. Two rooms gave onto views of the glimmering Thames, boats and ships gliding along the grey stream. From the other spaces she could see former industrial buildings now home to dozens of companies, societies and cultural centres. Within a stone’s throw was one of the greatest art museums in the country, Tate Modern, the visitors it attracted constantly wandering the nearby streets.

  She quickly became acquainted with Maggie and Berg, who always seemed to have time to chat as they worked. Rico she only ever saw in passing and Paddy not at all.

  Maggie and Berg seemed unusually sincere. Their attitude towards their own work was understated and relaxed, although Lia understood how expert they were in their fields. But about what the Studio did, they knew how to stay tight-lipped.

  Maggie told Lia about her acting career, the major roles she had played and the jobs she had taken just for money. She entertained Lia with her stories about famous directors and the world premiere of Cats in London.

  Maggie had been in the first ensemble, the one that created the musical’s reputation. Every night directors from the great theatres of the world sat in the audience, returning the following day to beg for the opportunity to buy performance rights.

  ‘That show doesn’t mean anything to someone your age, but then it was one of a kind.’ Maggie explained, her eyes lighting up.

  She talked about which of the performers had been given their roles because of their talent, which received them after shagging one of the bigwigs, and how the obscenity of the cat jokes among the cast escalated as the run progressed.

  ‘Starting at the end of the second year, we took a different cat porn picture every night.’

  Posing in their cat costumes, the cast created images of ribald feline orgies. In reality none of them had the energy even to think about sex after their punishing performances, but they had to have some way to vent their cat angst.

  ‘We took at least three hundred photographs. Hopefully they’ll never end up online or Lloyd Webber’s army of lawyers will have a field day,’ Maggie said with a chuckle.

  ‘Isn’t the Studio a strange place for an actor to work?’ Lia asked.

  ‘I love the Studio. Here I’m more than just an actor,’ Maggie said.

  Sometimes Studio jobs even resembled modern theatre. Maggie used to do experimental performances, like one for an audience of a single person or another where the action was presented solely with lights. Now her job was to create new characters, research background, plan performances, rehearse and perform. The performances were more comprehensive than in the theatre: they created entire worlds to accompany their characters.

  ‘These are much better gigs than most actors get. I don’t have to jiggle my bits in adverts wearing some hairy animal costume, hawking chocolate bars.’

  Berg also had a background in theatre. He spoke about his father, Bertil Berg, who had worked as a master set designer in Sweden.

  ‘He was in the Dramaten, the Royal Opera and all the big city theatres. He was so good that in Sweden Bergesque magic was a common phrase. The sets alone were reason enough for people to come to the theatre. When I was little I thought I would grow up to be a set designer too.’

  Berg had received his father’s first name, so he was always Bertil Berg the Second. Perhaps that was why he only used his surname now, Lia thought.

  For a long time he had done everything but build sets. He studied mechanical engineering and architecture, designed aeroplanes, built houses. After turning fifty, he started again from the beginning and studied theatrical set design, offering his services for free to amateur theatres in order to gain experience.

  ‘I was happy when Mari offered me this position,’ Berg said. ‘I don’t want to be in the theatre, but I still want to stage things. Here I feel like I get to take my work even further. Here just having things look good isn’t enough. Now I stage reality.’

  Maggie and Berg didn’t seem to know about Mari’s gift. They respected her, not because she knew how to read people, but because to them she was a smart boss who delivered interesting work.

  ‘Haven’t you told them?’ Lia asked Mari.

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘You said yourself how close they were to you.’

  ‘Lia, they do know – at some level.’

  Such observant people could not help but notice how Mari thought and did things. But she had never talked to them about it directly.

  ‘It’s very personal. And it isn’t always easy being able to do what I do,’ Mari said.

  At the Studio, Lia felt simultaneously inside and excluded. She knew she was close to Mari in a different way from the others.

  The others had given Mari nicknames. Berg referred to her as ‘Boss Lady’. Maggie gave her name a French flavour, Marie. Apparently Rico amused himself by using alternating versions like Maria, Marilyn and Marjorie.

  But Lia pronounced her name as it should be pronounced: Mari. Short vowels, the R short, crisp tap. She was the only person who pronounced Mari’s name the way she had heard it for the first twenty years of her life.

  This was why she didn’t take umbrage at being kept in the dark. She knew that Mari wanted both to keep her close and yet safely at a distance.

  The
idea came to Lia in September, in the middle of a working day. She called Mari to make sure she would be at the Studio that night.

  After arriving in Bankside she was impatient to sit down.

  ‘I have a proposal,’ Lia said.

  Mari’s eyes focused.

  ‘Well? Let’s hear it.’

  ‘You could investigate the Holborn Circus murder. Figure out why that Latvian woman had to die.’

  Mari looked at Lia silently.

  ‘I thought we would come back to this,’ she said finally, looking serious.

  ‘I know that solving a mystery like that has to be terribly difficult. But you could probably get somewhere with it,’ Lia continued.

  ‘How do you know the police haven’t made any progress in their investigation?’

  Lia stopped. That was true – she didn’t know.

  ‘But if they had found anything important, they would have announced it.’

  Mari shook her head. The police didn’t continually update the media about ongoing investigations; sometimes making progress meant calming the situation down. Getting mixed up in a serious crime could also be dangerous. Not to mention that they might hinder the police in their work.

  That was all true, Lia admitted.

  ‘But you see so much even in little things. And if we find something, we tell the police. I’m not asking you to chase criminals, just to see what you can see.’

  Mari was not enthusiastic. One of her most important principles was never to get involved in several undertakings at once. At the moment she already had a project in progress.

  The work usually divided into two phases, a long, slow process of background research and preparation, and then a short, intense execution. They had to give the execution phase space.

  ‘You never know what will happen. Everyone here, especially me, has to be able to concentrate one hundred per cent. Criminal cases like that aren’t something you can control. Something can pop up at any moment, and then you have to be able to react quickly.’

  The second principle was that although Mari led each project, she stayed in the background when it came to hands-on implementation. She didn’t want attention or to be connected to the results of her work.

  Above all Mari wanted to keep away from the police.

  ‘Why?’ Lia asked.

  ‘You name it! We’re not criminals here, but plenty of things we do are illegal or at least borderline. Just think about Orpheus.’

  With the police there was always the risk they would start asking questions. Some detectives really did get ‘hunches’ from noticing little details. That was close enough to Mari’s gift that she didn’t want anyone like that getting too close.

  ‘I’ve also been involved with professional criminals before a few times. Unpleasant is too mild a word. I’d rather not do it again if I have a choice.’

  ‘OK,’ Lia said. ‘And what if we arrange things so you don’t have to go anywhere near the police? Or criminals. You could investigate from a distance, and I’ll help where I can. If we don’t come up with anything, we drop it.’

  Why did Lia want this so much, Mari asked inquisitively.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s call it a hunch, or whatever you want. That woman deserves someone to investigate her case properly. You could do that.’

  Mari thought silently, but Lia could see that her words had set something in motion.

  ‘Well, let’s do this,’ Mari said finally. ‘But you really are going to have to help. If we ever have to contact the police, you’re going to do it.’

  ‘Agreed!’

  ‘Give me two weeks. After that we’ll decide whether we proceed. And you have to accept my decision, whatever it is,’ Mari added.

  ‘Got it. Great,’ Lia said, so excited she stood up.

  ‘Hold on now,’ Mari said. ‘That was only part of the deal. I want a favour in return.’

  ‘Fine, what kind of favour?’ Lia asked, sitting back down.

  ‘I want you to help us stop Arthur Fried.’

  II

  A Better Britain

  14

  Lia glanced at the clock on the wall of the offices of Level. Only 7.55. Still a little time until the others would begin showing up at work.

  She had come in early in order to have time to read everything she could find in the magazine archives about Arthur Fried. Sipping from her mug of vending machine coffee, the bitterness of which no amount of milk could take away, she clicked on another story: ‘Fried promises record number of candidates for party lists.’

  In addition to its own stories, Level’s electronic database contained a sizeable collection of reports from other British publications. Level had purchased the rights to browse them so the reporters could find background material for their stories. Material about Arthur Fried was in plentiful supply.

  A noted, perhaps notorious, politician and the leader of the small far-right Fair Rule Party, of course Lia had already known Fried’s name.

  He was famous for his ability to whip up his supporters into political frenzy with his words.

  Lia had never bothered to research the party’s policy platform, since her own political stance was mostly that she didn’t have one. She found ideas she could support in what the Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour and Green parties said, and had only been relieved when, as a foreigner, she could not vote. But she disagreed with Fair Rule instinctively.

  Maybe that’s where the major dividing line in society runs today. It hasn’t been between left and right in ages.

  Reading the news stories confirmed her prejudices. Fair Rule stood for law and order, racial cleansing and Christian principles. It opposed a huge number of things, beginning with most of what happened in cities and encompassing everything related to youth counterculture, gay rights and social support for single parents. The party even disapproved of such an innocent activity as football clubs for schoolchildren: they claimed to support sport as a hobby, but opposed immigrants having their own teams and uniforms.

  However, the position that had aroused the most discussion was the party’s strict stance on abortion laws. They wanted to ban abortions outright. Even those most people would allow, for victims of rape or incest. For the representatives of Fair Rule, life was sacred – which was a fascinating contradiction of the party’s other main goal, the reinstatement of the death penalty. About this the papers had written significantly less than about the party’s position on abortion, apparently because no one believed they could ever succeed in returning judicial hangings.

  Ever the smiling party leader, Arthur Fried had a penchant for colourful turns of phrase. Like many politicians, he tended to repeat a few favourite lines in his interviews.

  The catchiest of these – and the one that annoyed Lia most – was ‘Get Britain Back’. Even though reporters tried to remove obvious slogans from their stories, Fried nearly always succeeded in slipping this one into his press interviews.

  Let’s get Britain back. What the hell did that actually mean?

  Fried used this catchphrase to add emphasis almost regardless of the topic. Once, The Times had asked Fried to explain the motto, and the result had been a long explanation about the ‘dire consequences of the modern culture of multicultural thought and irresponsible loose behaviour’.

  They either want Muslims to live in slums or get out of the country so the white British population can rule.

  This train of thought seemed to be increasingly popular. Support for Fair Rule in the previous parliamentary and local elections had been in the range of one to one and a half per cent. However, in the most recent polls, that had risen to three per cent.

  Lia looked at the picture of Arthur Fried. Quite tall, blond hair, pleasant face. Not handsome per se, but certainly engaging when he performed. His rather serious demeanour was softened by the broad smile he wore in the photograph. His teeth had been straightened and whitened.

  What was it about this that worried Mari so much? Fried is like an American impo
rt, a right-wing evangelical. No politician like that has ever become very significant in Britain.

  ‘Why do we have to stop Fried?’ Lia had asked Mari.

  Because Arthur Fried was a much bigger phenomenon than people guessed, Mari explained. The next general election was predicted within six months, and Fried was very likely to win a seat in Parliament himself, probably dragging a few party cronies along on his coat-tails.

  How did Mari see that? And why did they have to stop it? If the people wanted to vote for them, was that not just one of the usual irritations of democracy?

  ‘I’ve seen Arthur Fried up close many times. He is the devil incarnate.’

  Mari spoke of Fried in a tone that indicated long-held concern. She had seen Fried once, years before, at an exhibition of classical paintings at an art museum. He was giving the opening address. It was part of a project meant to create dialogue between art and politics. In his speech, Fried had praised the important ‘examples of true beauty’ that the paintings offered contemporary society. Mari found that the realistic depictions of landscapes, Victorian upper-class hunting scenes and posing maidens mostly just made her want to take a nap.

  Mari had watched from close range as Fried shook hands with the attendees, smiling all the while.

  ‘His eyes were so cold.’

  In his mind, Fried classified the people he was greeting into two categories: a small group of useful people and a large group of useless people, for whom Fried held nothing but contempt.

  ‘Watching that was horrible.’

  ‘Sounds like a reptile. But a calculating politician isn’t exactly out of the ordinary – what’s so dangerous about him in particular?’

  There were things about Fried you couldn’t see on the surface, Mari said. Lia would just have to trust her.

  ‘Read everything you can get your hands on about Fried. We have to know him completely.’

  That was why Lia had started sifting through all of the reports about the Fair Rule party. First she wanted to research the objective sources before she started wading into the more colourful offerings of the internet.