The Healer (7 page)

I turned to him and asked, “Why do you keep trying?”

For a moment, he didn't look like Dr. Phil. He looked like someone else—maybe himself.

“Why,” he said. It was more a statement than a question.

His face had a look that was familiar by now, the faintest trace of a little joy—or was it annoyance?

“There's still a chance to do more good than harm here. And I am a policeman. I believe in what I do. Until I have evidence to the contrary.”

 

9

“You're the strangest person I know,” Johanna once said as she came and rested her hands on the back of my neck. “You can sit there for hours staring at emptiness and still look completely focused.”

“That's just it,” I answered, rousing myself from my thoughts. “I'm not staring at emptiness. I'm working.”

“Take a break once in a while,” she said with a laugh. “So you don't wear yourself out.”

She swung herself astride my lap, her legs dangling above the floor, and pressed her lips against mine for a long time, then laughed again.

Life's most significant moments are so fleetingly short and so much a matter of course when they're happening that they're greeted with a grunt or a smile. It's only later that you realize you should have said something, been grateful, told a person you love her. I would have given anything now to feel Johanna's gentle hand caress my face or her warm, full, almost dry lips on my temple.

I sat in the backseat of the taxi exhausted, staring into the dark, and didn't like what I was thinking. Hamid asked where to. Nowhere yet, I answered. I needed a minute to breathe. So we sat in the car in the dark, not far from the Pasila police station. Hamid turned up the heat, then turned it down. It seemed balance was a challenge even in this task.

The rain was so soft and light now that you didn't realize it was a cold winter rain until you were soaked through and shaking with the chill. The digital clock made to look analog on the dashboard said it was half past two. Hamid moved his lips in time to the softly playing music, glanced at me in the rearview mirror, fiddled with his phone, and was clearly bored. I opened my phone to the map Johanna had made.

Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari.

Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Töölö, Punavuori.

West–East / North–South.

I searched for information on Pasi Tarkiainen, but everything I found was more than five years old. There were at least four former addresses: in Kallio, Töölö, Tapiola, and Munkkiniemi. He had worked at doctor's offices in Töölö, Eira, and right downtown, on Kaivokatu.

I remembered what Jaatinen had said. I looked through the lists again. Töölö was on every one of them.

I did an image search, too. The picture was from ten years ago. The young Pasi Tarkiainen didn't look like a murderer. He looked happy, like a bright, optimistic medical student. His smile was so infectious that I almost smiled back. But when I looked closely at the photo, I saw something else. The eyes behind the glasses were ever so slightly mismatched to the dimples in his glowing cheeks. They were older than the face that surrounded them—serious, nervous even. His light hair was short, gelled, and styled in sawtooth bangs. In spite of his broad smile he looked like a man who took things very seriously.

I put down the phone and leaned against the headrest. For a moment I was somewhere else. Closing my eyes was like a time machine. I could go anywhere, forward or back, in seconds.

Johanna.

Always and everywhere.

I opened my eyes and was back in a taxi with a North African driver, surrounded by rain.

I gave Hamid an address, and he pulled onto the road with relief. We descended the hill from Pasila toward the zoological gardens. The windows of the Aurora Hospital reflected bright spotlights like a long row of mirrors. The hospital was guarded by soldiers, particularly around the infectious disease clinic. There were rumors that the guards were there for two reasons: to keep the public out, and to keep the patients in. The same rumors spoke of Ebola, plague, a strain of diphtheria resistant to every treatment, tuberculosis, malaria. The trees of Keskuspuisto formed a wall of gloom behind the hospital. There was no reliable count of how many people were living in the park, permanently or temporarily. The highest estimate was ten thousand. It was as good a guess as any.

We drove past the hockey arena, where hundreds of people flocked, even at this hour of the night. The arena filled with transients every evening—it had become a permanent emergency shelter.

A tram stood dark at the corner of Mannerheimintie and Nordenskiöldinkatu like a great green forgotten thing, like someone had simply walked away and left it there. Hamid was quiet. He drove around the tram and continued down the street toward Töölö.

We stopped on Museokatu. Tarkiainen had lived at 24 Museokatu, and the director of a plastic packaging company and his family of five had been slain at Vänrikki Stoolin katu number 3. The distance from Tarkiainen's former front door to the scene of the crime was about a hundred meters.

I didn't tell Hamid why we were parked on Museokatu—I wasn't sure myself.

I got out of the car, walked to the front of number 24, and looked toward the intersection of Vänrikki Stoolin katu. I felt the rain, first softly on my face, a moment later in swift, freezing drops that slid down into my collar. I looked at the dark, rain-soaked street and then glanced around—I didn't see anything that screamed mass murderer or missing wife.

I walked across to Vänrikki Stoolin katu and looked back to where I'd been. Many of the apartments at Museokatu 24 had a direct view of where I was standing. The windows of the building were dark now except for the topmost floor, where I counted a row of six lighted windows.

I walked back to the cab and was about to get in when I recognized a green and yellow sign a little farther down the street. Why hadn't I thought of that?

I asked Hamid to wait a minute and jogged the hundred meters with my shoulders hunched and my hands in my pockets, as if that could protect me from getting drenched. Memories from years back flooded my mind. They came in no particular order, with no reference to the year or the nature of the events. The one thing they all had in common was that each memory was as unwelcome as the next.

Some things never change, and some things just don't improve with age. The bar looked basically the same as it had ten or fifteen years earlier. Four steps led up from the street and a long counter sat on one side near the door. There were three tables on the right and a dozen in the lounge on the left, and a gap in the wall at the end of the bar. You could see through it into the back room, where there were a few more tables. The place swayed and shook with the sound of music and shouting.

It took effort to make my way through the wall of people to the counter and at least as much effort to get a beer ordered. A pint of beer was slammed down in front of me; I paid for it and tried to see if there was anyone in the bar I knew. The bartenders running back and forth behind the counter weren't familiar, nor was the thin-bearded loudmouth bumming money next to me. He looked remarkably young up close.

I had come to this bar for years, sometimes too regularly. It was on the route I walked to or from downtown back when I lived on Mechelininkatu. That was the time before Johanna. It wasn't a good time.

Patrons at numerous tables had already passed the point where coherent conversation becomes impossible—the only point now was to manage to make a noise at all, to lean on one another and drink some more. I didn't recognize anyone so I continued into the back room.

It was even more poorly ventilated than the front. The smell of liquor and piss intertwined and took command of the air. The people at the tables were complete strangers to me, and I was already turning back when I saw a familiar face through the narrow crack of a half-opened door at the rear of the room. A broad-shouldered bartender that I remembered from ten years before finished stacking a pile of boxes, picked up the top one, walked out of the storage room, and slammed the door shut behind him with one elbow. He noticed me. I gave him a cheerful hello and wished I could remember his name. I couldn't, so my greeting was brief. He continued to the front room with the case of vodka in his arms.

I followed him and shouldered my way up to the counter. I put my beer down on the glass countertop and put my hand in something dark and sticky. I greeted the bartender again. He noticed me and came to stand in front of me behind the counter. He hadn't really changed in ten years; his face was a little more angular, it was true, and there were deep lines in his cheeks on either side of his mouth. His eyes had dimmed and become more expectant, as sometimes happens with age. But his ponytail was still there, his shoulders still spread broad, and the stubble on his chin was the same dark, scruffy mat as it was long ago.

I took my phone out of my pocket.

“I used to come here,” I said.

“I remember,” he said, and added, with a certain emphasis, “vaguely.”

“My wife disappeared.”

“That I don't remember.”

“It didn't happen here,” I said.

He was looking at me now the way he must have looked at most of his customers. He knew very well that there was no point in trying to have a conversation with a drunk about anything more complicated than an order of beer. His face held a completely neutral, closed expression; this was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. As he was turning away, I raised my hand.

“Wait,” I said, and he turned back toward me. “I'm looking for my wife, and also for another person, a man.”

I clicked open the image of Pasi Tarkiainen, enlarged it, and handed the phone to the bartender. The phone shrank in his hand to the size of a matchbox.

“Have you ever seen this guy here?” I asked.

He looked up and handed the phone back to me. The edges of his mouth were curled and his eyes widened ever so slightly.

“Never,” he said. But a fleeting, non-neutral expression flashed in his face.

I looked at him for a moment, trying to grasp the hint of something that I'd just seen in his eyes.

“He lived around here,” I said. “I believe he's been in here many times.”

The bartender waved a hand in my direction. His arm was big enough that he could have reached my nose from where he stood.

“I believe you've been in here many times, and all I remember is the time years ago when we had to carry you to a taxi.”

I put my glass down and managed to get my hand stuck to the counter again.

“Thanks for that,” I said, searching the length of the bar for something to wipe my hand on. I didn't see anything that would be of service, so I left it in its natural state.

I glanced at the picture shining from my phone and turned the screen toward him once more. He didn't look at it. But the stillness of his gaze seemed to require effort from him; he wasn't as cool and relaxed as he'd been at the beginning of our conversation.

“What if I told you this guy was dead?”

He shrugged his shoulders. The impression was like the lifting and lowering of a fortress wall.

“Do you want something to drink? If not, I'll go serve somebody who does.”

“He died five years ago,” I said. “In the big flu epidemic.”

“A lot of people died back then.”

“True,” I said. “But not very many came back to life.”

His hands stopped. He set the bottle of red wine he was holding in his right hand and the glass in his left hand down on the counter in front of him.

“How about I show you the door?” he said.

“I've only had one beer,” I said. “But maybe that was just too much trouble for you. Or are you going to show me the door because of a guy who died of the flu five years ago?”

I showed him Tarkiainen's picture again, and once again he didn't look at it.

“What's your name?” he asked. “No, never mind—I can find that out myself.”

He straightened up, adjusted his stance, and towered over me, showing me his shoulders in all their broadness. Whoever invented the word “overbearing” must have had someone like him in mind.

“Why do you want to know my name?” I asked.

He thrust his head forward but left his chin nearly resting on his chest. He looked at me from under his eyebrows, his lined cheeks completely in shadow.

“So I'll know who I'm showing the door. So I can tell the other employees that there's a guy named such-and-such who's not allowed in here.”

“Are you going to tell Pasi Tarkiainen the same thing?”

He made a gesture toward the door. A gigantic block of solid muscle with a bald head the same bright, meaty pink color as raw salmon started to head in my direction.

“See you later,” I shouted.

I headed for the block of muscle and the door, smelled aftershave a few meters ahead, and braced myself as well as I could for the bouncer to grab me by some part of my body. He looked at the bartender, then stepped aside and let me pass. I didn't look behind me as I went down the stairs to the street and walked back to the taxi.

Half an hour later I was lying in bed staring out at the dark of the night without seeing anything.

I was thinking about Johanna—and trying not to think about her.

The building was quiet. Nothing was moving; it felt like nothing anywhere was moving. It wasn't until I lay down that I realized how tired I was, how much my body hurt, how hungry I was, and how hopeless I felt. I couldn't bear to turn my face toward Johanna's pillow, let alone pull her blanket over me, although I was shivering under my own.

The rain tapped a rhythm against the windowsill, took a long pause before breaking out in a tight series of dozens of drops, then quieted again. I closed my eyes, listened to the wind and rain, and let my fists open and my muscles relax. Without realizing it, without wanting to, I fell asleep.