Europa Blues

2

THE OLD FISHERMAN had seen a lot. In actual fact, he thought he had seen it all. But that evening as he packed up the watermelon stall which had long since replaced his fishing nets, he was forced to admit that there were still some surprises left. Even that had surprised him. Life – and above all tourism – still had plenty of madness to offer. It felt… comforting. A sign that life wasn’t quite over yet.

It had been years since the old fisherman had first realised that the money he could earn selling watermelons to tourists vastly exceeded the amount his nets could bring in. And that it required much less effort.

This particular fisherman wasn’t especially keen on effort, which any fisherman worth his salt probably should be.

He looked out over the Ligurian Sea, rising and falling in the spring evening like it was enjoying it just as much as the casual observer. The old fisherman’s gaze wandered up towards the wooded slopes surrounding the little town and then on towards the walls ringing the old town, which had once been an Etruscan harbour. Not that the old fisherman knew anything about that. But what he did know, as he let the pine-scented sea air fill his lungs, was that Castiglione della Pescaia was his home and that he was happy there.

He also knew that today he had been surprised for the first time in a long, long while.

It had all started relatively harmlessly. With his slightly darkened vision, he had spotted a blue-and-white parasol in the middle of the beach on which the majority of sun worshippers were lapping up the spring sunshine with as little protection as they could. But under the parasol, three children of different ages had been sitting, each of them chalk white, their bodies as pale as their hair. Another had appeared and sat down beneath it, followed by a woman holding another small child by the hand. Six utterly chalk-white people were cramped together beneath the parasol, sharing the little circle of shadow it was casting down onto the moderately sun-drenched beach.

Fascinated by the strange sight, the old fisherman had forgotten all about his business for a moment and heard, as though in the distance:

‘Cinque cocomeri, per favore.’

His surprise at the strange family beneath the blue-and-white parasol was compounded by his surprise at this enormous order – and was given yet another boost at the sight of the customer’s good-natured smile.

It belonged to a thin, utterly chalk-white man dressed in a loose linen suit and bizarre sun hat with a bright yellow Pikachu on it.

Despite the strange pronunciation, his order had been perfectly clear. If somewhat absurd.

‘Cinque?’ the old fisherman exclaimed.

‘Cinque,’ the chalk-white man nodded, taking the watermelons and staggering like a drunk tightrope-walker along the beach, clutching them in his arms. One by one, they dropped down into the sand by the parasol, like enormous seeds being planted by a giant. The chalk-white man practically threw himself into the shade, as though he had been wandering lost in a radioactive area and finally come across a protective safe zone.

The old fisherman wondered for a moment how five watermelons could be divided between seven people. Then he asked himself the inevitable question:

Why travel to Italy, to the Tuscan coast, to Maremma, to Castiglione della Pescaia, if you couldn’t bear the sun?

Not even Arto Söderstedt knew quite what to say to that. ‘Beauty’ wasn’t really a satisfactory answer for taking five children out of school during an important few weeks in spring. ‘Peace’ wasn’t quite enough of a reason for two adults to take months off from their jobs in the public sector either, particularly when, as with his wife, Anja, you were a tax inspector and the self-assessments had just come flooding in.

So, of course, his conscience was there, picking holes in both the ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’ arguments. The only thing his conscience hadn’t reached was his own situation. Arto Söderstedt didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty at having temporarily left the police corps.

The A-Unit, or the National Criminal Investigation Department’s Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature, had certainly been busy over the past year, but since the Sickla Slaughter case had reached its peculiar conclusion, the big, all-consuming cases had been noticeable in their absence. They had come extremely close to a disaster of huge international proportions during the Sickla case. But that was almost a year ago now, and time does have a tendency to heal old wounds.

And so when the money came pouring in like manna from heaven, Arto Söderstedt didn’t hesitate for a second.

Besides, he also felt burnt out, without quite understanding what that meant. Everyone was burnt out nowadays, everyone but him – mainly because he had never quite understood the meaning of it. He had probably been burnt out for years without having been any the wiser.

It was his turn now, in any case. In the name of ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’, he allowed himself to tend to his burnout – regardless of whether it existed or not. And there was plenty of both in Tuscany, that much he knew after having been there only a few days.

The family had rented a house in the Tuscan countryside, nestled among the vineyards. It wasn’t a villa – in Italy, a villa was something completely different to elsewhere – but a rustic little stone house on a pine-scented slope not far from the village of Montefioralle and the town of Greve. At the foot of the slope, the wine estates spread out like eternity’s own fields, as though the sky had split to make room for small pieces of paradise to fall down to earth and form an other-worldly patchwork quilt.

Arto Söderstedt was enjoying it to the full – all while feeling oddly unworthy. It felt as though St Peter had fallen asleep just as a chalky-white detective inspector had slipped his slender body in through the gates of paradise. Thoroughly undeserved. He often found himself sitting on the porch, waiting in the nights with a glass of Vin Santo or a majestic Brunello di Montalcino washing over his taste buds. He had deliberately and uncritically devoured the whole Tuscany myth and he was enjoying himself enormously. He would never forget a single moment from his trip to Siena, that magical town. Even though the kids had howled away in the heart of the cathedral. Organ pipes was all he could think, watching those five little creatures standing there, in order of both height and pitch, screeching at the top of their lungs. Until a guard had decided that enough was enough and thrown the whole rabble out, that was. When that happened, Söderstedt had denied his paternity without a single pang of conscience. The guard had glared suspiciously at his identical, albeit slightly larger frame. Lying about such a thing in the house of God… He had wandered around inside the cathedral for an utterly peaceful thirty minutes after that, drinking in Donatello, Michelangelo, Pinturicchio, Bernini, Pisano. When he came back out again, the children had been sitting calmly on the cathedral steps, slurping Italian gelati. Not even Anja, slurping worse than the children, had seemed particularly annoyed.

He had even switched his mobile phone off.

But sitting there now beneath the blue-and-white parasol, trying to remember how he had been planning to divide five watermelons between seven people of varying sizes, his thoughts turned to his Uncle Pertti. Thoughts of gratitude. And also of guilt.

He had completely forgotten the man was still alive. And now he wasn’t.

Strictly speaking, Uncle Pertti had been his mother’s uncle, and during his childhood the legend of him had never been far away. The hero from the Winter War. The doctor who became one of the greats in Mannerheim’s army.

Söderstedt himself had no siblings – that was presumably why he and his only-child wife had five children together – and his side of the family was microscopic. His parents, themselves both only children, were long since dead, and he had no other relatives. As a result, there had been no other heir.

Arto Söderstedt fumbled with his knife and thought: five divided by seven, hmm, that’s 0.714 of a watermelon each, assuming everyone gets an equal amount, but if they went by bodyweight instead…

He paused, glancing at his big, shadow-drenched family which, in turn and increasingly grumblingly, was looking at his passive knife. Were they really worthy heirs to Pertti Lindrot, the great hero of the Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi; one of the architects of the famous motti tactic, used to crack the Red Army’s road-bound troops by splitting them into smaller units as they passed through forests, surrounding them and defeating them?

‘Just cut it into pieces,’ his second oldest daughter Linda said impatiently.

Arto Söderstedt looked at her, offended. He would certainly never work so sloppily. No, no. Arto was sixty-five kilos, Anja roughly the same; Mikaela weighed forty and Linda thirty-five, Peter too; Stefan weighed twenty-five and little Lina twenty. Two hundred and eighty-five kilos in total. Of that, twenty-three per cent – sixty-five divided by two hundred and eighty-five – should go to each of the parents. And twenty-three percent of five watermelons was…

‘Just cut it into pieces,’ little Lina echoed.

… was 1.5 watermelons. More than one whole melon for each of the parents. Was that really how he had envisaged it?

If that was the case, there would be only 0.35 of a watermelon for little Lina, and that didn’t seem fair.

Fair.

Was it fair that he, a man who had just gone up to his eyeballs in debt to buy a big family car, suddenly found that the whole thing had been paid off and that he had so much left over that he could, immediately and without the family’s knowledge, go online and rent a house in Tuscany for two months?

No, it wasn’t especially fair.

But what was fair in life?

Certainly not 0.35 of a watermelon for the little one, he thought with sudden decisiveness, cutting the melon into pieces and dividing them fairly between the various members of his enormous family.

More than a million. Who could have known that old Uncle Pertti, whose very existence he had forgotten, was sitting on such riches? With the money came memories, though Arto Söderstedt could really only remember him as a stinking mouth and a handful of half-rotten teeth. A hero who had let himself go, but whose heroic halo always shone brightly. As though he had the right to let himself go, that was how he understood his parents’ attitude. He had always had the impression that it had been his parents, Pertti’s last living relatives, who provided for the old man. And then it transpired he had been sitting on just over a million.

Nothing was ever really as it seemed.

When he reconstructed Pertti’s life, it must have gone something like this: young, enthusiastic, provincial doctor finds himself drawn into the Finnish Winter War after an abrupt attack by the Soviet Union. He turns out to have a knack for guerrilla warfare in the frozen winter forests and quickly climbs the ranks. He becomes a hero after several decisive offences, and after the Russian victory, disappears into the forests like a classic guerrilla fighter. He returns after the Second World War, more or less a broken man. He starts drinking more and more and has trouble keeping his job as a doctor in increasingly remote backwaters. He eventually returns to Vasa and becomes an eccentric, living that sad old life until he turns ninety. End of story.

Or so Arto Söderstedt thought.

Until his inheritance arrived.

The inheritance which was now being consumed, in the form of watermelon, beneath the growing shade of an umbrella. The Tuscan spring sun was now touching the curving horizon of the Ligurian Sea. Before long, it had sunk low enough for the chalk-white family to venture out into the water.

After everyone else – shivering – had already left the beach.

Arto Söderstedt saw the old fisherman pack up his stall of watermelons, cast a last astonished glance at the shadow-covered family, shake his head, and head off for a glass of wine in his local osteria. Once there, he would tell his friends about the sun-shy family and pay with money which had once belonged to a different eccentric from a completely different part of the world.

For a moment, Söderstedt was fascinated by the movement of money, its transfer, its origins.

Then he took off his crinkled suit and ran at the head of a line of children towards the edge of the water, testing it with his big toe. Its icy coolness reminded him of the Finnish lakes of his childhood.

On the beach, Uncle Pertti sat, necking Koskenkorva vodka and laughing hoarsely at his cowardice.

He ran in. The children wailed like organ pipes.

And in his rucksack, up under the blue-and-white parasol, his mobile phone was still switched off.