Copper Heart (18 page)

As I continued to stare at the canvases, I began to make out colors and shapes in the blackness. Both paintings were of tunnels that expanded into caverns. Something in one of the tunnels was strangely familiar, something in its gatelike edges, the slight lip at the mouth of the cave. Like a picture of the inside of a woman in a biology book. Of course the cave was the womb, the lighter cluster of rocks on its wall perhaps an embryo that had just begun cell division. Or maybe I was just imagining that.

The blackness of the other painting was darker, more oppressive. I looked for something familiar in it too, but in vain. In the corner of the cave it was as if some small flame burned, waiting for an opportunity to flare.

Had Meritta wanted to hide these paintings from Matti? Did something in them relate to her death? I wondered who could interpret them for me. Maybe Matti, and certainly the curator of Meritta’s gallery. Looking up the number for the gallery, I
called but only reached a machine that told me the gallery would reopen in mid-July.

I studied the Saastamoinen Construction bankruptcy papers until I needed to leave for the Old Mine. A local bank had granted Saastamoinen a loan on surprisingly flimsy grounds, and the fact that Saastamoinen’s wife was the bank manager’s sister only made it look more suspicious. No one had even begun questioning the bank manager though, leaving the investigation still wide open. Maybe I could concentrate on that instead of Meritta’s murder so I wouldn’t have to interrogate people I knew. After all, the bank manager hadn’t moved into the area until after I left home.

The day was cloudy, the top of the Tower nearly invisible. Yet the Old Mine was swarming with tourists. Jaska was sitting at the ticket booth and apparently knew to expect me, because he simply waved me through. Then he said something to the girl sitting behind the souvenir kiosk and started walking up the stairs with me toward the restaurant and Kivinen’s office.

“Didn’t we sound good? And that band from Liperi I was telling you about is great too. We might get to do a single on Silent Records—just have to do another demo, but that’ll take a little money. I’ll find it somewhere.” Jaska was having an up day again.

I nodded, hoping that some part of what he was telling me was true.

“I may have something to talk to you about tomorrow, but I have to check one thing with someone first,” he said as he left me at the door of the restaurant. His face had a malicious intensity. The Old Mine staff uniform, brown jeans and a copper-colored silk shirt accented with a gold tie, made him look strangely presentable. But the smell was still Jaska, a stench of tobacco,
dirty hair, and unbrushed teeth that reminded me of something I couldn’t quite nail down.

“If you have something to tell me, do it now.”

“Hi, Maria.” Kivinen appeared at the door, which sent Jaska skittering on his way just like he had at the party the previous Friday night. “Shall we head right down?”

The entrance to the Museum of Mining tunnels had been excavated on the northwest slope of the hill. The path leading to it was overgrown with grass, but soon thousands of tourists would trample it bare.

“This part that’s open to the public doesn’t actually go very deep, but we can take VIPs like you down in the elevator,” Kivinen said. “That’s two hundred meters down.”

When we entered the museum tunnel, he handed me a familiar yellow helmet. No headlamp on it this time either.

The public tunnel was a disappointment, the walls reinforced with concrete, the gravelly floor dry, and the electric lights illuminating our way all too well. At no point did we have to bend over to avoid hitting our heads. Various tools and pieces of equipment were on display and showcases embedded in the walls shared information related to mining life. In one corner was a life-size miner dummy with a drill in his hands. As we approached it, an infernal racket filled the tunnel. The dummy moved, really drilling into the wall! Fortunately, the cacophony lasted only about ten seconds.

“That startled me a little,” I admitted.

There was an odd expression on Kivinen’s face. “That’s the idea. This job wasn’t a game.”

“Your father worked in the mine too, right?”

“Almost forty years. He started at sixteen and retired on disability at fifty-three. They said smoking caused his lung cancer,” Kivinen said, his voice breaking.

The electric light shining from behind him cast his shadow far ahead of us, making it look strangely warped. I wondered whether sheer sentimentality could be the driving force behind this enormous undertaking after all, a desire to somehow compensate a father who had toiled his life away in the mine and to honor all the men who had sacrificed themselves. Perhaps money wasn’t his only motivation.

I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised by Kivinen’s desire to prove himself. Plenty of my friends had the same desire, a yearning to return as conquering heroes to this oppressive little town. And when Kivinen was young, the town had been even more hierarchical than when we were in school. Even in the late seventies there had been a strict caste system. At the top were the lords of the mining company, the managers and engineers. After them came the academic professionals, the doctors, teachers, and priests. Apparently in the teachers’ lounge at school, the wives of the engineers had considered themselves slightly above the rest.

On the lowest rung were the children of the miners, the untouchables. No one really expected them to succeed in school—they wouldn’t even go on to high school. Clearly, expecting them to learn foreign languages was out of the question, so the Swedish teacher didn’t even try. What would a wage slave do with a second language anyway?

By the end of the seventies, when the mine was forced to cut back operations and the city started looking for replacement industries, the caste system began to break down. Still, it was clear that Kivinen had accomplished a small miracle by rising from the bottom of the barrel up to a status on par with the mayor and governor.

The Museum of Mining tunnel ended at a large vault with chairs and a screen for a slideshow. Kivinen asked if I wanted to watch it, but I said no.

“Would you like to go farther down in the elevator?”

I didn’t, remembering all too well the darkness and damp silence below. But I also remembered Meritta’s paintings and the shades of color rising out of the black background. So I nodded yes.

“Let’s take a couple of lights along. Dragging ordinary tourists down into the mine would be too cumbersome, but I have to tell you that you really can’t get a feeling for it up here.” With that, Kivinen led me through a heavy iron door to another vaulted chamber that ended at a yellow-walled elevator that could accommodate about ten people at a time. As we descended I could see the shaft from out the window and a rusted ladder that led up the wall.

“Emergency exit,” Kivinen said. “Back in the fifties, the elevator broke about once a year, and my dad and your uncle Pena had to climb up that ladder at least twice. How is Pena doing, by the way?” he asked just as the creaky elevator jolted to a halt in the middle of the darkness.

“Worse again. He’s on a respirator.”

Holding the door open, Kivinen showed the way with a powerful flashlight. Reluctantly I stepped into the cone of light, and then Kivinen handed me a flashlight as well. I turned it on and with its beam scanned the black, glistening walls. I remembered what Matti had said about phosphorus. The tunnel led down, looking as if it might branch in two directions a little farther off. Pins had been driven into the walls for attaching ropes. I hoped Kivinen’s flashlights had good batteries. The light of the elevator quickly fell behind as we started walking down the corridor. It wasn’t going to go back up without us, was it?

Kivinen told me that we were about three hundred feet below sea level, moving north toward the sports field and the health center. This tunnel had been one of the first ore bodies
they had begun mining in the 1910s. Although Kivinen spoke softly, his voice echoed off the walls. Moisture began creeping through my clothing, and I was happy I was wearing cotton pants and a long-sleeved blazer. There were no large puddles in the tunnel, so my feet stayed dry.

We came to where the tunnel branched, and Kivinen motioned to the right. “That leads to the edge of the subsidence zone. We need to stay away from there.”

With that he started walking down the left tunnel until I asked a question that stopped him short. “Is that where Meritta painted?”

Kivinen’s face was in shadow, but his tone was one of irritation. “Yes. She just had to barge her way into the most dangerous spot. Meritta was interested in a deep pond on the edge of the cave-in. She wanted to paint the way light moves through the water and reflects on the walls. But it was insane. No one should go down there under any circumstances.”

“Then why did you let her go?”

“I didn’t know she was going to go so far! I specifically told her not to! No one has been able to go there for thirty years.”

There was something in the right tunnel that drew me toward it. Its opening seemed narrow, turning ever more sharply to the right. It was a place where darkness and silence lived, a place where everything in the world above ceased to exist. From somewhere in its depths came the quiet, purposeful sound of dripping water.

Kivinen’s footsteps had stopped. Turning my flashlight toward him, I couldn’t find him at first since he had switched off his own. A cold drop of water fell from the ceiling onto my cheek, and I shuddered. In my beam of light I saw Kivinen struggling with his own flashlight. Eventually it lit up only to go out again.

“Of course this damn thing would choose right now to act up.” For the first time I heard the gliding Savo-Karelian note in his voice. “I guess I’ll have to use the small one.”

I turned to follow him, and a moment later the thin, flickering beam of a small flashlight appeared in front of me. This new tunnel we entered branched to the left and was narrow but level and significantly drier than the previous one. In the cold of the mine, I could feel Kivinen’s warmth next to me. Being in this darkness with a perfect stranger was odd.

“Sometimes Meritta and I would meet down here,” he said suddenly, illuminating a narrow bench carved into the wall. “Meritta wanted to sit there. In the dark.”

“Strange thing to want,” I said emphatically.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Kivinen’s voice contained a challenge, and his eyes glittered with amusement in the weak light.

“Of course not,” I said and doused my flashlight. Kivinen laughed and then clicked off his own.

I was used to being able to see in the dark after a few seconds. Even on a moonless, snowless night in November you could start to make out light and shadow in the forest, the shapes of rocks and the motion of tree branches. But now—nothing. Only the weight of the rock above us, the sound of water trickling in the distance, and Kivinen’s breath a few feet away. Then there was a strange scratching sound and a wild blaze from a match head that lit a candle flame.

“Meritta brought this down with her once,” Kivinen said, indicating the stub of candle flickering in an old-fashioned copper holder. “I should take it away.”

Marching single file behind the candle, we turned and went back up the tunnel the way we came, as silent as a funeral
procession. After a while, Kivinen’s dramatics started irritating me, and I turned on my flashlight. Its light was so bright that I could clearly differentiate the gray and brown colors of the rocks, the glistening of the water on the walls, the yellow grains of sand on the floor. The elevator shone like a cheerful lighthouse at the far end of the tunnel.

“When did you and Meritta last meet up?” I asked once the elevator began rattling toward the top.

“As I’ve said several times, our relationship ended months ago!” Kivinen said, acting put-upon. “We parted on good terms. I didn’t want to lose my family, and Meritta already had a new man—Johnny Miettinen—in her sights. I guess I was a little jealous when Meritta was able to give me up so easily for Miettinen.” Kivinen smiled, as if mocking himself.

Who wouldn’t have chosen Johnny? Perhaps someone who valued the power of money more than anything else. But Meritta wasn’t one of those people. Of course Kivinen was perfectly handsome in his own way. He had medium-brown hair cut in a jaunty, youthful style; he clearly took care of his body; and his smile seemed to stretch all the way to his toffee-colored eyes. But compared to Johnny, Kivinen was average.

Although the misty clouds hung so low they nearly touched the top of the Tower, the air outside still felt dry and crisp after the tunnels of the mine. Filling my lungs, I devoured the radiant green of the birch trees as I listened to the sounds of the city echoing from the base of the hill.

Kivinen smiled. “It always feels the same, coming up. My dad said that. Every single day the same feeling of liberation…I hope you’re hungry. Let’s go to the restaurant.”

With that, Kivinen led us to a private room where a vaguely familiar-looking woman in a blue dress was already waiting for us.

“My wife wanted to meet you too,” Kivinen said.

The woman extended her hand. “Barbro.”

Apparently she had already adopted the local first-name rule too.

I had heard that Barbro Kivinen was from an old Swedish-speaking industrial family. Her demeanor was one of assured sophistication, which made me want to double-check whether I had chosen the proper fork for the shrimp cocktail. Barbro inquired about my work and education, saying that she herself had studied at the Hanken School of Economics and now acted as chairman of the board to a couple of the family’s other businesses. The family’s two sons were in school, one at the Helsinki School of Economics and the other in the United States, also studying business. I was telling them about Antti’s postdoctoral fellowship in Chicago when the server brought the veal escalope. I declined any wine, as I was on duty and the Kivinens weren’t drinking either. After the main course, Kivinen made his apologies, explaining that his next meeting was waiting, and left me with his wife to enjoy our cappuccinos.