The Healer

1

Which was worse—complete certainty that the worst had happened, or this fear, building up moment by moment? Sudden collapse, or slow, crumbling disintegration?

I lurched with the force of a swerve that shook me out of my wandering thoughts, and looked up.

Yellow-black flames from a wrecked truck lashed the pillar of the pedestrian bridge at the Sörnäinen shore road. The truck looked broken in the middle, embracing the pillar like a pleading lover. Not one of the passing cars slowed down, let alone stopped. They moved to the outside lane as they flew by, passing the burning wreck at the greatest possible distance.

So did the bus I was sitting in.

I opened my rain-soaked parka, found a packet of tissues in the inside pocket, pulled one loose with numb fingers, and dried my face and hair with it. The tissue was drenched through in a moment. I squeezed it into a ball and shoved it into my pocket. I shook drops of water from the hem of my jacket into the space between my knees and the wall, then took my phone out of the pocket of my jeans. I tried to call Johanna again.

The number was still unavailable.

The metro tunnel was closed from Sörnäinen to Keilaniemi because of flooding. The train had taken me as far as Kalasatama, where I’d had to wait for the bus for twenty minutes under a sky pouring rain.

The burning truck was left behind as I went back to watching the news on the screen attached to the back of the driver’s bulletproof glass compartment. The southern regions of Spain and Italy had officially been left to their own devices. Bangladesh, sinking into the sea, had erupted in a plague that threatened to spread to the rest of Asia. The dispute between India and China over Himalayan water supplies was driving the two countries to war. Mexican drug cartels had responded to the closing of the U.S.-Mexico border with missile strikes on Los Angeles and San Diego. The forest fires in the Amazon had not been extinguished even by blasting new river channels to surround the fires.

Ongoing wars or armed conflicts in the European Union: thirteen, mostly in border areas.

Estimated number of climate refugees planet-wide: 650–800 million people.

Pandemic warnings: H3N3, malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola, plague.

Light piece at the end: the recently chosen Miss Finland believed that everything would be much better in the spring.

I turned my gaze back to the rain that had been falling for months, a continuous flow of water that had started in September and paused only momentarily since. At least five seaside neighborhoods—Jätkäsaari, Kalasatama, Ruoholahti, Herttoniemenranta, and Marjaniemi—had been continuously flooded, and many residents had finally given up and abandoned their homes.

Their apartments didn’t stay empty for long. Even damp, moldy, and partially underwater, they were good enough for the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in the country. In the evenings large, bright cooking fires and campfires shone from flooded neighborhoods without power.

I got off the bus at the railway station. It would have been quicker to walk through Kaisaniemi Park, but I decided to go around it, along Kaivokatu. There weren’t enough police to monitor both the streets and the parks. Walking through the masses of people around the railway station was something always to be avoided. Panicked people were leaving the city and filling jam-packed trains headed north, with all their possessions in their backpacks and suitcases.

Motionless forms lay curled up in sleeping bags under plastic shelters in front of the station. It was impossible to tell whether they were on their way somewhere or simply lived there. The dazzling glow of tall floodlights mixed at eye level with the shimmer of exhaust fumes, the streetlights, and the garish red, blue, and green of lighted advertisements.

The half-burned central post office stood across from the station, a gray-black skeleton. As I passed it, I tried to call Johanna again.

I reached the Sanomatalo building, stood in line for fifteen minutes waiting to go through security, took off my coat, shoes, and belt, put them back on, and walked to the reception desk.

I asked the receptionist to ring Johanna’s boss, who for some reason wasn’t answering my calls. I had met him a few times, and my guess was that if the call came from within the building he would answer, and when he learned who it was, he’d let me tell him why I had come.

The receptionist was an icy-eyed woman in her thirties who, judging by her short hair and controlled gestures, was a former soldier who now guarded the physical integrity of the country’s last newspaper, her gun still at her side.

She looked me in the eye as she spoke into the air.

“A man named Tapani Lehtinen… I checked his ID…. Yes… One moment.”

She nodded to me, the movement of her head like the blow of an ax.

“What is your business?”

“I’m unable to reach my wife, Johanna Lehtinen.”

2

Half by mistake, I had recorded the last phone conversation I’d had with Johanna, and I knew it by heart:

“I’m going to be working late today,” she began.

“How late is late?”

“Overnight, probably.”

“Inside or outside work?”

“I’m already outside. I have a photographer with me. Don’t worry. We’re going to talk to some people. We’ll keep to public places.”

A murmuring sound, the noise of cars, a murmur, a low rumble, and the murmur again.

“Are you still there?” she asked.

“Where would I have gone? I’m at my desk.”

A pause.

“I’m proud of you,” Johanna said. “The way you keep going.”

“So do you,” I said.

“I guess so,” she said, suddenly quiet, almost whispering.

“I love you. Come home in one piece.”

“Sure,” she whispered, and her words came quickly now, almost a single chain. “See you tomorrow at the latest. I love you.”

A murmur. A crackle. A soft click. Silence.

3

Managing editor Lassi Uutela’s roughly forty-year-old face was covered in blue-gray stubble, and his eyes showed an irritation that he lacked the ability, and perhaps even the desire, to hide.

He was standing directly in front of me when the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor. He wore a black dress shirt and a thin gray sweater, dark jeans, and sneakers. His arms were crossed over his chest, a position they relinquished with elaborate reluctance as I stepped toward him.

Lassi Uutela’s least appealing characteristics—his envy of more accomplished journalists, his tendency to avoid confrontation, his habit of holding grudges, his need to always be right—were all familiar to me from what Johanna had told me. Johanna’s and Lassi’s views of the job of a reporter and the direction of the paper had been clashing more and more often. The ripples from these clashes had come ashore even at home.

We shook hands for a long time and introduced ourselves even though we knew who we were. For a fleeting moment it felt like I was performing in a bad play. As soon as he got his hand free, Lassi turned and brushed the door open with his fingertips. I followed him as he kicked his feet angrily in front of him, as if dissatisfied with their progress. We arrived at the end of a long hallway where there was a corner office a few meters square.

Lassi sat down at his desk in a black high-backed chair and gestured toward the room’s only other chair, a sort of white plastic cup.

“I thought Johanna was working at home today,” he said.

I shook my head.

“To tell you the truth, I was hoping to find her here.”

Now it was his turn to shake his head. The gesture was impatient and brief.

“The last time I saw Johanna was at yesterday’s all-staff meeting, around six o’clock. We went through the jobs in progress as usual, then everybody went their separate ways.”

“I spoke with Johanna yesterday evening at about nine o’clock.”

“Where was she?” he asked indifferently.

“Outside somewhere,” I said, and then, after a pause, more quietly, “I didn’t think to ask where.”

“So you haven’t heard from her for a whole day?”

I shook my head, watching him. His posture, leaning backward, the expression on his face, and the pauses deployed between his words revealed what he was really thinking—that I was wasting his time.

“What?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand his body language.

“I was just wondering,” he said, “whether this has ever happened before.”

“No. Why?”

He puckered up his lower lip and lifted his eyebrows—it looked like each one weighed a ton—and acted as if he expected a reward for raising them.

“No reason. It’s just that these days… all kinds of things can happen.”

“Not to us,” I said. “It’s a long story, but these things don’t happen to us.”

“Of course not,” Lassi said, in a tone somewhat lacking in conviction. He didn’t even bother looking me in the eye. “Of course not.”

“What story was she working on?”

He didn’t answer right away, just weighed his pen in his hand, perhaps weighing something in his mind as well.

“What was it about?” I pressed, seeing that he wasn’t going to begin on his own.

“It’s probably stupid of me to share this information with you, but then it was a stupid article,” he said, leaning his elbows on the desk and looking at me obliquely, as if to gauge my reaction.

“I understand,” I said, and waited.

“It’s about the Healer.”

I may have flinched. Johanna had told me about the Healer.

She’d got her first e-mail from him right after the family in Tapiola was murdered. Someone who called himself the Healer had taken responsibility for the crime. He said he did it on behalf of ordinary people, to avenge them, and said he was the last voice of truth in a world headed toward destruction—a healer for a sick planet. That’s why he had murdered the CEO of a manufacturing company and his family. And that’s why he would continue to murder whoever he claimed had contributed to the acceleration of climate change. Johanna had notified the police. They investigated and did what they could. There were now nine executives and politicians who’d been killed altogether, along with their families.

I sighed. Lassi shrugged and looked satisfied with my reaction.

“I told her it wouldn’t lead anywhere,” he said, and I couldn’t help noticing a slightly triumphant tone in his voice. “I told her she wouldn’t find out any more than the police had. And our rapidly shrinking readership doesn’t want to read about it. It’s just depressing. They already know that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.”

I looked out into the rain-soaked darkness over Töölö Bay. I knew there were buildings out there, but I couldn’t see them.

“Did Johanna already write the article?” I asked when we’d had sufficient time to listen to ourselves and the building breathing.

Lassi leaned back in his chair, put his head against the headrest, and looked at me through half-opened eyes, as if I were not on the other side of his narrow desk but far off on the horizon.

“Why do you ask?” he said.

“Johanna and I always keep in touch with each other,” I explained. It occurred to me that when we repeat things, it isn’t always for the purpose of convincing other people. “I don’t mean constantly. But if nothing else we at least send each other a text message or an e-mail every few hours. Even if we don’t really have anything to tell each other. It’s usually just a couple of words. Something funny, or sometimes something a little affectionate. It’s a habit with us.”

This last sentence was purposely emphatic. Lassi listened to me, his face expressionless.

“Now I haven’t heard from her for twenty-four hours,” I continued, and realized I was directing my words to my own reflection in the window. “This is the longest time in all the ten years we’ve been together that we haven’t been in touch with each other.”

I waited another moment before I said something just like all the clichés, not caring a bit how it sounded.

“I’m sure that something has happened to her.”

“Something has happened to her?” he said, then paused for several seconds in a way that was becoming familiar. There could be only one purpose for these pauses: to undercut me, to make what I said sound stupid and pointless.

“Yes,” I said drily.

Lassi didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he leaned forward, paused, and said, “Let’s assume you’re right. What do you intend to do?”

I didn’t have to pretend to think about it. I immediately replied, “There’s no point in reporting her disappearance to the police. All they can do is enter it in their records. Disappearance number five thousand twenty-one.”

“True,” Lassi agreed. “And twenty-four hours isn’t a terribly long time, either.”

I lifted my arm as if to fend off this statement physically, as well as mentally.

“As I said, we always stay in touch. For us, twenty-four hours is a long time.”

Lassi didn’t need to dig very deep to find his irritation. His voice rose, and at the same time a colder rigidity crept into it, as he quickly said, “We have reporters that are in the field for a week at a time. Then they come back with the story. That’s the way it works.”

“Has Johanna ever been in the field for a week without contacting you?”

Lassi kept his eyes on me, drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair, and puckered his lips.

“I admit, she hasn’t.”

“It’s just not like her,” I said.

Lassi twisted in his chair and spoke rapidly, as if he wanted to hurry up and make sure he was right: “Tapani, we’re trying to put together a newspaper here. There’s basically no advertising money, and our rule of thumb is that nobody’s interested in anything. Except, of course, sex and porn, and scandals and revelations connected with sex and porn. We sold more papers yesterday than we have in a long time. And I assure you we didn’t do it with any in-depth reports about the thousands of missing warheads or investigative articles on how much drinking water we have left. Which, by the way, is about half an hour’s worth, from what I can tell. No, our lead story was about a certain singer’s bestiality video. That’s what the people want. That’s what they pay for.”

He took a breath and continued in a voice that was even more tense and impatient than before, if that was possible.

“Then I’ve got reporters, like, for instance, Johanna, who want to tell the people the truth. And I’m always asking them, what fucking truth? And they never have a good answer. All they say is that people should know. And I ask, but do they want to know? And more important, do they want to pay to know?”

When I was sure he had finished, I said, “So you tell them about a no-talent singer and her horse.”

He looked at me again, from someplace far away where clueless idiots like me aren’t allowed to go.

“We’re trying to stay alive.”

We sat silently for a moment. Then he opened his mouth again: “Can I ask you something?” he said.

I nodded.

“Do you still write your poetry?”

I expected this. He couldn’t resist needling me. The question had the seed of the next question in it. It was meant to indicate that I was on the wrong track when it came to Johanna just like I was when it came to everything else. So what. I decided to give him a chance to continue in the vein he’d chosen. I answered honestly.

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you were published?”

Once again, I didn’t need to think about my answer.

“Four years ago,” I said.

He didn’t say anything more, just looked at me with red-rimmed, satisfied eyes like he’d just proven some theory of his to be correct. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It would have been a waste of time.

“Where does Johanna sit?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I want to see her workstation.”

“Normally I wouldn’t allow it,” Lassi said, looking like his last bit of interest in the whole matter had just evaporated. He glanced nonchalantly past me at the office full of cubicles, which he could see through the glass wall. “But I guess there’s not much we do normally anymore, and the office is empty, so go ahead.”

I got up and thanked him, but he’d already turned toward his monitor and become absorbed in his typing, as if he’d wished he were someplace else the whole time.

Johanna’s workstation was easy to find on the right side of the large, open office. A picture of me led me to it.

Something lurched inside me when I saw the old snapshot and imagined Johanna looking at it. Could she see the same difference in my eyes that I saw?

In spite of the large stacks of paper, her desk was well organized. Her closed laptop lay in the middle of the table. I sat down and looked around. There were a dozen or more workstations, which the reporters called clovers, in the open office space, with four desks at each station. Johanna’s desk was on the window side and had a direct view into Lassi’s office. Or rather, the upper section of his office—cardboard was stacked against the lower half of the glass walls. The view from the window wasn’t much to look at. The Kiasma art museum with its frequently patched copper roof loomed like a gigantic shipwreck in the rain—black, tattered, run aground.

The top of the desk was cool to the touch but quickly grew damp under my hand. I glanced toward Lassi Uutela’s office and then looked around. The place was deserted. I slid Johanna’s computer into my bag.

There were dozens of sticky notes on the desk. Some of them simply had a phone number or a name and address; a few were complete notes written in Johanna’s precise, delicate hand.

I looked through them one by one. There was one in the most recent batch that caught my attention: “H—West–East/ North–South” then two lists of neighborhoods—“Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari” and “Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Kluuvi, Punavuori”—with dates next to them.

“H” must mean the Healer. I shoved the note in my pocket.

Next I went through the piles of papers. Most of them were about pieces Johanna had already written: articles about the alleged closing of Russia’s nuclear power plants, the dwindling Finnish tax base, the collapse in food quality.

One pile was entirely about the Healer. It included printed copies of all his e-mails. Johanna had written her own notes on the printouts, so many on some that they nearly obscured the original text. I crammed the whole stack into my bag without reading them, got up, and stood looking at the abandoned desk. It was like any other desk, impersonal and indistinguishable from a million others. Still, I hoped it would tell me something, reveal what had happened. I waited a moment, but the desk was still just a desk.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Johanna had sat here.

And she would still be sitting here, if something hadn’t happened to her.

I couldn’t explain why I was so sure of it. It was as hard to define as the connection between us. I knew that Johanna would call me, if only she could.

I took a step away from the desk, unable at first to take my eyes off her papers, her handwriting, the little objects on the table. Then I remembered something.

I went back to the door of Lassi Uutela’s office. He took no notice of me, so I knocked on the door frame. The plastic cracked against the back of my hand. I was surprised at the loud, hollow sound it made. Lassi stopped his hurriedly typing fingers and left his hands waiting in the air as he turned his head. The irritation in his red-rimmed eyes didn’t seem to have diminished.

I asked which photographer had been on the job with Johanna, although I had already guessed who it was.

“Gromov,” Lassi growled.

I knew him, of course. I’d even met him. Tall, dark, and handsome. Something of a ladies’ man, according to Johanna, obsessive when it came to his work, and apparently in everything else as well. Johanna respected Vasili Gromov’s skill at his job and liked working with him. They had spent a lot of time together on jobs in Finland and abroad. If anyone had any information about Johanna, it would be him.

I asked Lassi if he’d seen Gromov. He understood immediately what I meant. He picked up his telephone, leaned his head against the headrest on his chair, and aimed his gaze at the ceiling, either toward the air conditioner duct or toward heaven.

“This world’s a fucking mess,” he said quietly.

4

As I made my way home, Lassi’s questions about why I was still writing poetry rose up in my mind again. I hadn’t told him what I was thinking. I didn’t want to. Lassi wasn’t a person you confided in or trusted any more than you had to. But what would I have said, what reason would I have given, for keeping at something that had no future? I would have told him the truth.

To keep writing was to keep living. And I didn’t keep living or writing to find readers. People were trying to survive from one day to the next, and poetry didn’t have much to do with it. My reasons for writing were completely selfish.

Writing gave my days a shape, a routine. The words, the sentences, the short lines, brought an order to my life that had disappeared all around me. Writing meant that the fragile thread between yesterday, today, and tomorrow was still unbroken.

I tried to read Johanna’s papers, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything because of the clatter of beer cans and other trash on the bus. They were thrown there by drunken teenagers who were no real danger to the other passengers, but it was still annoying. The late-night routes were another matter, especially the ones without security guards.

I got off the bus at the Herttoniemi metro station. I gave a wide berth to a gang of drunken skinheads—a dozen bald scalps that shone with rain and tattoos—avoided the persistent panhandlers patrolling in front of the shops, and headed toward home in the dark evening. There was a break in the rain, and the strong, gusting wind couldn’t decide which direction to blow. It lunged here and there, grabbing onto everything with its strong hands, including the brightly lit security lights on the walls of the buildings, which made it look as if the houses themselves were swaying in the evening darkness. I walked briskly past the day care that had first been abandoned by children, then scrawled on by random passersby, and finally set on fire. The church at the other side of the intersection had an emergency shelter for the homeless, and it looked like it was full to the brim—the previously bright vestibule was halfdim with people. A few minutes later I turned onto the path to our apartment building.

The roof of the building opposite had been torn off in an autumn storm and still hadn’t been repaired, and the top-floor apartments were dark. Soon we would be facing the same thing, like people in a thousand other buildings. They weren’t designed for continuous high winds and rain for half the year, and by the time people realized that the wind and rain were here to stay it was too late. Besides, no one had the money or the interest to keep up a building where power and water outages made living unpleasant and probably eventually impossible.

The lock on the street door recognized my card, and the door opened. When the power was out we used the old cut key. Keys like that should have been unnecessary, should have been history, but like many other objects and ideas once considered relics, they managed to do what the newer ones couldn’t: they worked.

I tried the lights in the stairwell, but the switch was out of order again. I climbed to the second story in the dark, using the stair railing as a guide, arrived at our door, opened both safety locks and the ordinary lock, turned off the alarm, and, instinctively, breathed in.

The smell of the place had everything in it: morning coffee, a hurried spritz of perfume, the pine soap from washing the rugs the summer before, the long Christmas holidays, the armchair we bought together, every night spent with the person you love. It was all there in that smell, and it was all connected together in my mind, although the place had been aired out a thousand times. The smell was so familiar that I was just about to announce that I was home, automatically. But there was no one there to hear me.

I carried my bag into the kitchen, took out the papers and the laptop, and put them on the table. I warmed up the vegetable casserole Johanna had made over the weekend and sat down to eat. Somewhere a couple of floors up lived some devoted music lovers. The beat was so low, steady, and repetitive that it was easy to believe it would carry on forever—nothing short of massive intervention would ever stop its progress.

Everything I saw on the table and tasted in my mouth and thought in my head confirmed my fear that something bad had happened. An outsized lump rose in my throat and made it difficult to swallow, and I felt a squeezing around my chest and abdomen that suddenly forced me to concentrate entirely on breathing.

I pushed my plate aside and turned on Johanna’s computer. The hum of the machine and the glow of the screen filled the kitchen. The very first thing I saw was the desktop image: Johanna and I on our honeymoon ten years ago.

More swallowing.

The two of us in the foreground, younger in many ways, above us an almost palpably blue southern European sky, behind us Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, beside us a patch of the uneven, ancient wall of a house and the gilded sign of a riverside café, half illegible from the dazzle of sunlight.

I looked at Johanna’s laughing eyes, aimed straight ahead—reflecting green as well as blue in the bright light of April—her slightly wide mouth, her even, white teeth, the very beginnings of tiny wrinkles, and the short, curly hair that bordered her face like spring petals.

I opened the folders on the computer desktop.

In the folder marked “New” I found a subfolder “H.” I realized I had guessed correctly: “H” was for Healer. I went through the documents. Most of them were Johanna’s text files, some were news videos, links, and articles from other papers. The most recent text file was from yesterday. I clicked it open.

The piece was nearly finished. Johanna would certainly be using most of it in her final article. As soon as she writes it, I reminded myself.

It began with a description of the multiple murder in Tapiola. A family of five had been killed in the early morning hours, and someone using the pseudonym “the Healer” had announced himself as the perpetrator. According to the police investigation, the father of the family was the last to die: the CEO of a large food company and an advocate for the meat processing industry, he’d had to look on, with his hands and feet tied and his mouth taped, as his wife and three small children were each cold-bloodedly executed with a gunshot to the head. He was murdered last, with a single bullet to the center of his forehead.

Johanna had interviewed the police investigator, the interior minister, and a representative of a private security company. The piece ended with an extended plea from Johanna, directed as much at the police and the public as it was at the Healer himself.

I also found a map of Helsinki and a chart Johanna had made of the date and location of each murder, the times she received the e-mails, and the main contents of the messages. This had to do with the sticky note I’d found. I looked at it again: West–East or North–South. The map clearly showed that the murders had progressed chronologically, first from west to east, then from north to south.

Based on Johanna’s summaries of the contents of the messages, the e-mails had grown darker as the murders reached the south side of the city. Some of the messages also had a surprisingly personal tone: Johanna was addressed using her first name and praised for her “truthful and uncompromising” journalism. The writer even seemed to believe that she would understand the necessity for this kind of extreme action.

The second-to-last message had come the day after the murders in Punavuori. A family of four—a father who owned and operated a large chain of car dealerships, his wife, and their two sons, aged ten and twelve—were found dead in their home. Without the e-mail message, the deaths would probably have been classified as another of the murder-suicides that were occurring weekly. The suicide theory was supported by the fact that the large-caliber weapon the murders were committed with was found in the father’s hand, as if he were handing it to the police as proof.

Then the Healer’s message arrived. The address was given in the e-mail—Kapteenikatu 14—with an admonition to investigate the matter more thoroughly.

This was duly done, and it became clear that although the gun had been in the father’s hand, someone else had helped him aim and shoot. So he had felt each shot in his hand and body and seen and heard his own children die from bullets that came from a gun he was holding.

The last message was hastily and poorly written—stilted in both grammar and content. It didn’t defend the crimes in any way.

I got up from the table, walked to the balcony, and stood there for a long time. I breathed in the cool air, trying to blow away the invisible stone on my chest. The stone lightened, but it didn’t roll away completely.

We’d moved into our place almost immediately after we married. The apartment had become a home and the home had become dear to us; it was our place in the world—a world that was completely different ten years ago. Of course it was easy to say afterward that all the warning signs were already visible then—the summer stretching out long and dry into autumn, rainy winters, increasingly high winds, news about hundreds of millions of people wandering the world, and exotic insects appearing in our own yards, on our own skin, spreading Lyme disease, malaria, sandfly fever, encephalitis.

Our building was on a high hill in Herttoniemi, and on a clear day you could see across the bay from the living room and balcony all the way to Arabianranta, where most of the houses were continuously flooded. Like many other neighborhoods that suffered from flooding, Arabianranta was often dark. They didn’t dare let electricity in because of the water that remained in the badly damaged buildings. With the naked eye, from two and a half kilometers away, I could see dozens of fires along the shore. From where I stood they looked small and delicate, like just-lit matches that could easily be blown out. The reality was otherwise. The fires were as much as a meter and a half in diameter. People used all kinds of things they found on the shore and in abandoned buildings as fuel. There were rumors that they used dead animals, even people.

It was strange how I’d got used to seeing the fires. I couldn’t have told you when the first ones appeared or when the evening ribbon of flames they formed became a daily sight.

Farther off, beyond the silhouette of the buildings on the shore, were the modern towers of Pasila, and the blaze and glow to the left told me where the city center was. Over it all lay a dark, boundless night sky that held the whole world in its cold, sure grip.

I realized that I was looking for connections between what I’d just read and what I was now seeing.

Johanna.

Out there somewhere.

Like I’d told Lassi, there was no point in my going to the police. If they didn’t have the time or the resources to look for the murderer of these families, how would they have the time to look for a woman missing for twenty-four hours, one of thousands of missing people?

The Healer.

West–East or North–South.

The night didn’t seem to hold any answers. The music thumped upstairs. The wind moved through the trees on the slope of the ridge below, singing through the bare branches as well as it could but able to prevail against the barrier of human and machine-made sound only for brief moments. The cold of the balcony’s cement floor on the soles of my feet prompted me to seek warmth.

I returned to the kitchen table, read through all of Johanna’s documents on the Healer one more time, made some coffee, and tried to call her again. It was no surprise when the number could not be reached. It was also no surprise that a hint of panic and desperation was beginning to splash through my worried mind.

There was one thing I could be sure of: Johanna had disappeared on a job investigating something connected with the Healer.

I pushed all other thoughts aside, drank my coffee, and read the printouts of the e-mails the Healer had sent to Johanna, in the order they were received. As I read them, I sorted them into two piles. In the first, I put messages where the necessity of the crimes was defended, sometimes at great length, and Johanna’s previous articles were mentioned, sometimes with the implication that her work was something like the Healer’s—to uncover lies and to liberate. The other pile contained the messages that directly stated where the murder victims could be found and contained only a few hastily and poorly written lines.

I leafed through the piles again and came to the same conclusion that I had the first time. There were two authors. At least in theory. At least that’s what I thought.

I opened the map Johanna had made again. It was like a pocket guide to hell. I moved through the red points marking the murders, went through the dates and Johanna’s figures. There were two or three days between the murders. Johanna had added a question mark to each of the four points of the compass and calculated possible locations of future murders.

As I stared at the map, the icon for Johanna’s e-mail program caught my eye. I hesitated. Reading another person’s e-mail is undoubtedly wrong. But maybe this situation was an exception. Besides, we didn’t have any secrets from each other, did we? I decided that I would open her e-mail only if the situation absolutely demanded it. In the meantime I would get by strictly on what related directly to the article Johanna was working on now.

I remembered the phone call I’d recorded, turned on my own laptop, and plugged my phone into it.

I copied the last conversation I’d had with Johanna onto the computer, searched a moment for the right program, downloaded it, and opened the audio file with it. The audio editing software was easy to use. I separated the sounds, removed my and Johanna’s voices, and listened. I could hear the noise of cars, a rumble, and the same murmuring sound I’d heard before. I listened to it again and again, then separated out the rumble and the sound of cars until I was able to make out the tone of the murmur by itself. With a hopeful feeling I seemed to hear something regularly repeating, not wind or the brush of coat sleeves but something with a much more even rhythm: waves. I played the file again and shut my eyes, trying to listen and remember at the same time.

Was it the sound of waves, or was I just hearing what I wanted to hear?

I let the sound play in a loop and looked at Johanna’s map and calculations. Maybe this murmur, its regular repetition, really did indicate the sea or the seashore. Assuming that the murders occurred over a two- or three-day cycle, then the points set apart by dates and question marks, following the Healer’s crimes from north to south—however roughly—would converge somewhere around Jätkäsaari, on the southwest shore of the city.

Furthermore, assuming that Johanna had come to the same conclusion, then that would have been the area she called me from the last time we spoke.

5

The taxi driver, a young North African man, didn’t speak Finnish and didn’t want to use the meter. That suited me. We agreed on a price, half in English, half using our fingers, and the meter was left glowing four zeros in the dark car as he accelerated away from my apartment and onto Hiihtomäentie, past the metro station and the abandoned shopping center and across the overpass toward Itäväylä. He avoided the potholes and cracks in the road as skillfully as he did drivers who made dangerous passes or swerved out of their lanes.

The waterfront homes at Kulosaari were, with a few exceptions, among the first houses left empty by their owners and were now filled with new arrivals. Those who had the means had moved north: those with the most means to northern Canada, the rest to Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian Lapland. Dozens of high-security, privately owned small towns had been established in the north in recent years, both on the Arctic coast and in the interior, with self-contained water, sewage, and electrical systems—and, of course, hundreds of uniformed guards to keep out undesirables.

Now the majority of those living in the dark houses of Kulosaari were refugees from the east and south. A string of tents and campfires lined the shore. The coexistence between the refugees and the tenacious original inhabitants defending their houses and shoreline wasn’t always peaceful. The Healer would no doubt have had an opinion about that, as well.

As we drove I looked through the news videos in Johanna’s H file. The closer they got to the present, the more exasperated the reporters were in their questions, and the more exhausted the police were in their answers. The statements of the red-eyed police inspector in charge of the investigation were, in the end, confined to the comment “We will continue to investigate and let you know when we have any new information.” I moved his name from the screen to my phone memory and looked up his number. Chief Inspector Harri Jaatinen.

I leaned back in my seat.

When had I known for certain that something had happened to Johanna? When I woke up at four in the morning and heard a dog barking? Making coffee two hours later, after it became obvious that getting up would be less trouble than continuing to try to go back to sleep? Or did the doubt change to fear over the hours of the day as I mechanically did my work, checking my telephone every other minute?

The young cab driver was good at his job—he knew where the roads were out and proceeded accordingly. When we got to Pitkäsilta we stopped at the intersection and a stretch SUV pulled up beside us with its rear window open. I quickly counted eight young men inside—their expressionless faces, their forward-focused lazy-lidded eyes, and their tattooed necks told me they weren’t just gang members but also probably armed. As the SUV pulled into traffic, not one man’s expression faltered.

There was a fire in Kaisaniemi Park. Judging by the height of the flames, it must have been a car or something. The massive column of flame was like the mark of a bacchanal in the otherwise lightless night. At the corner of Vilhonkatu and Mikonkatu I heard gunshots and saw three men running toward the park. They disappeared before the echo of the shots had faded. People were kicking a man lying prostrate in front of the Natural History Museum. Then someone, apparently the strongest of the group, started dragging him by his filthy clothes toward the metro tunnel entrance, perhaps planning to throw him down the shaft.

We arrived at Temppeliaukio in twenty minutes. I shoved a bill through the narrow opening in the Plexiglas and got out of the car.

The modern dome of Temppeliaukio Church was gone; what was left of the building resembled ancient stone ruins perched high on a rock. The fragments of wall cast long shadows all the way to Lutherinkatu. Surrounded by the yellowish light of the street lamps, the shadows were black as pitch, as if painted on the ground. Someone had taken a PARKING PROHIBITED sign from its pole and thrown it into the middle of the street. The sign looked like it had finally given up on prohibiting anything.

The night was as cold in Töölö as it had been at home in Herttoniemi, but not as quiet. Cars could be heard here and there, the honk of horns, Finnish rock, people shouting, even people having fun. Above all the noise a woman’s bright laugh sounded carefree, and stranger than anything I’d heard in a long time.

Ahti and Elina Kallio were friends of ours—it was Johanna and Elina’s friendship that first brought us together. And no, Elina hadn’t heard from Johanna.

I stood in the foyer of their apartment, took off my rain-soaked jacket and shoes, and listened to Elina and Ahti ask questions in turn:

“Where do you think she might be?”

“She hasn’t called you at all?”

“And no one knows where she is?”

Finally Ahti asked a question that I knew how to answer.

“Yes, I’d like some coffee. Thanks.”

Ahti disappeared into the kitchen, and Elina and I went into the living room, where two floor lamps in opposite corners and one calmly fluttering candle on the dark wood table in the middle of the room gave the place a softer light than was perhaps desirable. Somehow I felt that at that moment I needed a different atmosphere, more light, something decisively brighter.

I sat on the sofa. Elina was in the armchair across from me. She pulled a light brown wool shawl onto her lap, not spreading it out but not leaving it folded, either. It sat in her lap like a living, waiting creature. I told her the basic outline of what I knew: Johanna hadn’t been heard from in twenty-four hours, and the photographer couldn’t be reached, either. I also told her what Johanna had been writing about.

“Johanna would have called,” Elina said when I’d finished. She spoke so quietly that I had to repeat the sentence in my mind.

I nodded and looked up at Ahti, who had just come into the room. He was a short, wiry man, a lawyer by trade, meticulous to the point of being comical, but just as likely to surprise you in some situations. A thought occurred to me, and as it did I saw a trace of uncertainty in Ahti’s blue, penetrating eyes that disappeared as quickly as it had come.

He looked quickly at me, then gave Elina a longer, more meaningful look. They held each other’s gaze for an unusually long time and then, almost in unison, turned their gazes back to me. Elina’s brown eyes welled with tears. I’d never seen her cry before, but it didn’t surprise me for some reason. Maybe the exaggerated homeyness of the room was a sign that surprises were in the offing.

“We should have told you about this before,” Ahti said. He stood with his hands in his pockets behind Elina’s chair. Tears glistened on her face.

“What?” I asked.

Elina quickly wiped her eyes as if the tears were in her way.

“We’re leaving,” she said. “We’re going north.”

“We have a year’s lease on an apartment in a little town up there,” Ahti said.

“A year?” I said. “What about when the year’s over?”

Elina’s eyes filled with tears again. Ahti stroked her hair, she lifted her hand and held his. The eyes of both wandered the room, unable to latch onto anything. A more paranoid person might have thought that they were being evasive about something, but what could they have to be evasive about?

“We don’t know,” Ahti said. “But it can’t be any worse than living here. I lost my job for good six months ago. Elina hasn’t had regular teaching work for a couple of years now.”

“You haven’t said anything about it,” I remarked quietly.

“We didn’t want to because we thought things would get better.”

We sat for a moment in silence. The smell of fresh coffee floated into the room. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it.

“I’ll go see if the coffee’s done brewing,” Ahti said with audible relief.

Elina wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. The loose sleeve wrapped around her wrist and she had to straighten it with her other hand.

“We really believed we would think of something,” she said, again so quietly that I had to lean forward to make out the words that fell from her lips, “that there was some solution, that this had all been some kind of horrible, sudden crisis that would work itself out and life would go on like before.”

I didn’t know if she was talking about their situation or the whole world’s, but it probably didn’t make any difference.

Ahti came back with the coffeepot. His movements were as smooth and precise as always as he poured the coffee into cups painted with flowers like mementos of a time forever lost. Which, of course, they were.

“Have you sold this place?” I asked, waving a hand and looking around to indicate the apartment. Ahti shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly.

“Tell him the truth, Ahti,” Elina said, wiping away the two or three more tears trickling down her cheeks with her sweatshirt sleeve.

Ahti sat at the other end of the sofa and pulled his cup closer, obviously going over the matter in his mind before speaking.

“Who would buy this place?” he said, sitting up straighter. “There are holes in the roof, there’s water in the basement, mold everywhere, rats and cockroaches. The electricity goes out all the time, and so does the water. The city’s about to collapse. No one has any money, and the ones who do sure don’t want to move in here. There are no more investors, and even if there were, why pay rent when you can live someplace for free? And who really believes things are going to get better?”

Elina stared straight ahead, not crying anymore.

“We believed,” she said quietly, looking at Ahti.

“We believed for a really long time,” he agreed.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I drank my coffee, watching the steam rise from it, warming my hands on the cup.

“Johanna’s certain to turn up,” Elina said suddenly, waking me from my thoughts.

I looked up at Elina, then at Ahti. He was nodding to her, as if to confirm what she’d said, and stopped suddenly when he noticed me staring at him. I didn’t let that, or the trace of uncertainty I saw again in his eyes, trip me up. I knew that if I didn’t ask, I might regret it.

“Ahti, I could help you out with a little money and buy something from you at the same time.”

He hesitated a second. He was obviously searching for words.

“I don’t know what we could have that you—”

“You like to go shooting sometimes,” I said.

He looked almost surprised. He glanced at Elina, who didn’t say anything, but nodded. Ahti leaned forward.

“Why not?” he said, getting up. “I don’t need both of the shotguns, and I only need one pistol. And I doubt there’s anyone who’d turn me in if I sold you a gun.”

I followed him into the bedroom. Large, nearly full duffel bags stood in front of the open, ransacked closets. There were clothes on the bed, headboard, and two chairs, and piled on the floor in front of the bags. Ahti went around the bed, stopped in front of a freestanding dark wood cabinet, and opened the door with a key. In the cabinet were two shotguns, a small rifle, and three pistols.

“Take your pick,” he said, pointing at one pistol and then the other. There was a touch of the salesman in the gesture, which seemed unnecessary under the circumstances. “A ninemillimeter Heckler and Koch USP or a Glock seventeen, also nine millimeters.”

Then he pointed at a steel revolver above them, and he didn’t look the slightest bit like a salesman. He looked like a man who had made a decision.

“The Smith and Wesson is for me.”

I took down the nearest pistol, the Heckler and Koch.

“That’s a nice piece. Made in Germany, back when they still made things in Germany.”

The gun was surprisingly light.

“Six hundred sixty-seven grams,” Ahti said, before I could ask. “Holds eighteen shots in the clip.”

He took out a box from the lower shelf. It clinked as he picked it up.

“You can have these, too, of course. Fifty rounds.”

I looked at the box and at the gun in my hand. They both seemed completely out of place in this ordinary bedroom. I had to act fast, before I changed my mind.

“Do you have a backpack?” I asked.

He found a small black backpack in one of the jumbled closets. Its ordinariness, its plain old gymbagness, contrasted shockingly with its intended contents.

“No extra charge. Least I can do.”

I gave him the money. He put it in his pocket without counting it and without looking at me. I looked again at the pistol in my right hand and the box of cartridges in my left. Ahti saw my befuddlement.

“I’ll show you,” he laughed, and took the gun from me.

With quick, practiced movements he dropped open the clip, filled it from the box, and pushed it back into place. He seemed to be in his element.

“Ready,” he said. “This is the safety and this is the trigger. Don’t aim it at anyone you don’t intend to shoot. Or maybe that doesn’t matter anymore.”

He tried to smile, but there was no energy in it. His smile congealed on his lips and gave his face a helpless look. He realized it himself.

“The coffee’s getting cold,” he said quickly. “Let’s go drink it.”

I thought about how suddenly things had changed. How long ago was it that we had spent dinners together, drank wine, planned our futures? We were going to take trips, I was going to write books, Johanna would write better articles than ever, and Ahti was going to start his own law office and—of course, naturally—a family, with Elina.

The change had crept into our lives gradually, but now it was all coming to an end suddenly, in one great crash.

Elina sat in her chair, not touching her coffee. I sank into the sofa and tried to think of something appropriate to say. It wasn’t easy because I had only one thing to talk about. Ahti must have sensed it: “I hope you find Johanna,” he said.

I realized that that was my only hope in the world. I understood it with a clarity that penetrated me like warmth or cold and made me remember everything good that I might lose. A lump rose in my throat. I had to get out of there.

“I hope you like it up north,” I said. “I hope everything works out for you up there. I’m sure it will. A year’s a long time. You’ll find some work, earn some money. It’ll be fine.”

There was something missing from my words. But words weren’t the biggest thing missing. It felt like we all heard it and—above all—felt it. And I didn’t really know how long I could continue speaking, so I got up from the sofa without looking at either of them.

“Elina, Johanna will call you as soon as she can.”

I went into the foyer. Ahti followed me and stood in the darkest corner of the room. I heard Elina’s steps on the wood floor and then she was standing in front of me, tears in her eyes again. She came to me and gave me a hug.

“Tell Johanna everything will be OK,” she said, her arms still around me. “And tell her that we never meant any harm.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I didn’t want to linger so I didn’t ask for an explanation.

6

The rain had gained in strength. It came down from the sky in broad swaths of fat, heavy drops that fell to the asphalt and splattered as if in a tantrum, turning the surrounding city shiny, black, and wet. There was something sour in the smell of it, almost rancid. I stood for a moment in the arch of the entryway trying to decide what my next step should be, thinking about where I was and where I was going. It was nine-thirty. I’d lost my wife and drunk who knows how many cups of black coffee. There was no way I was going to be able to get to sleep.

I could hear a fight coming from where the laughter had been before, the sound of shattered glass followed a moment later by the laughing woman’s shrieking, cursing protests. I pulled the hood of my parka up, tightened the straps of the backpack, and set out.

I kept my eyes focused straight ahead. The rain stung cold on my skin. I turned into Fredrikinkatu and had taken a few steps when I heard a car horn toot once, then twice. The sound was coming from across the street. I pulled my hood aside enough to see who was honking: the same young North African man who had driven me here from Herttoniemi.

The taxi was sitting in the center of the dark block with the motor on, and it looked significantly drier and warmer inside than it was on the sidewalk. In a few seconds I was sitting firmly in the backseat and asking him to take me south this time.

He had a name and a history: Hamid. Been in Finland for six months. Why had he waited for me? Because I was a paying customer. I couldn’t blame him. Not many people want to work for free.

Hamid liked Finland. Here, at least, there was some possibility of making good—he might even be able to start a family here.

I listened to his fast-flowing, broken English and watched him in profile. A narrow, light-brown face, alert, nut-brown eyes in the rearview mirror; quick hands on the steering wheel. Then I looked at the city flashing by, the flooded streets glistening, puddles the size of ponds, shattered windows, doors pried from their hinges, cars burned black, and people wandering in the rain. Where I saw doom, Hamid saw hope.

We came to the end of Lönnrotinkatu, crossed the shore road, and headed for Jätkäsaari.

Hamid drove slowly now. He had stopped talking and turned the stereo up. The music thudding and twitching from the speakers was some sort of combination of hip-hop and North African music. A man’s voice, speaking a thousand words a minute in an unknown language, moved rhythmically over it.

When Hamid asked me where to go, I said straight ahead. I couldn’t think what else to do. I opened Johanna’s documents on my phone again and went quickly through her memos. I opened the sound file, too, with Johanna and me edited out, and asked Hamid to hook my phone up to his speakers. He said it would cost extra. I said I’d pay extra. He said in advance. I handed him the phone and some money. He smiled broadly, folded the bill and put it in his pocket, then plugged the phone into the speakers.

The thousand-words-a-minute man fell silent, replaced by the murmur.

Hamid looked at me curiously, obviously reassessing me.

I nodded: this was what I wanted to hear.

We came to the end of the road—ahead on the right was the bridge to Lauttasaari, ahead on the left darkness, and behind us, apartment buildings. Hamid asked where next. I pointed to the closed waterfront café and the parking lot behind it.

The café was dark on the inside and lit up on the outside. Its large rectangular windows were intact and clean, and there wasn’t much trash around the place, either. It was as if we’d driven into another world in just fifteen minutes.

I told Hamid this was a good spot and asked him to turn off the motor so I could listen. I passed him another bill. He turned off the motor and let the murmur drift through the car and disappear into the darkness. I opened the window and asked him to slowly lower the volume.

One murmur faded, another took its place.

Maybe.

Just maybe?

A firm maybe?

Maybe this was where Johanna had called me from.

I asked Hamid to wait, took my phone, and got out of the car. The wind blowing off the sea immediately grabbed my hair and clothes. It ripped and tore like it was trying to get a good grip on me. This close to the shore, its hands would have been wet even without the rain.

I pulled up my hood and held the phone to my ear under it, sheltered from the rain, and let it play the murmuring sound again. I raised and lowered the volume as I walked north along the shore, looking at the six-, seven-, and eight-story waterfront houses. Not knowing where to begin, I tried to see and hear parallels among what may have been unrelated things: the last phone call, the sounds in it that might have been wind and waves, the Healer’s coordinates that Johanna had plotted, and my own instinct and hope. I relied on these as I walked along the rainy, windy point, my shoes wet through, the soles of my feet aching with cold.

The houses along the shore seemed to be in unusually good condition: there were lights in many of the apartments, which was almost a small miracle, for at least two reasons. We were near the shore, an area that often flooded. We were also in a wealthy neighborhood. In a lot of other places that meant that the residents had gone north already—got out while the getting was good, whatever that means these days.

There was a steel stairway built into the vertically split side of a large rock. I climbed up the stairs and came to a little platform surrounded by a waist-high steel railing. I found a pair of binoculars fixed to the seaside, pointed out toward open water. You could probably see a long way with them on a sunny day. At the moment, you couldn’t see anything.

I turned around. The waterfront café was a couple of hundred meters away and the nearest house about fifty meters. I lowered the phone from my ear. I listened.

The rough, salty smell of the sea and the rhythm of the waves spilling against the shore was calming and soothing in the midst of the wind and rain. Some say the sound of the sea was impressed into our genes long ago. Some say it will one day, once more, press us under.

I went down the stairs and headed back toward the taxi.

When I’d got about halfway there, a hundred meters from the rock and a hundred meters from the cab, I suddenly found myself in a spotlight’s beam. I stopped and heard heavy footsteps coming from the direction of the light. Then the footsteps stopped.

The men were holding bright, powerful flashlights, which they seemed to have lifted onto their shoulders. They didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Only the sea and the wind spoke, overlapping murmurs. Neither of the men took a step forward. They stood in front of me, one to the right and one to the left. They had apparently been trained to stand this way, far enough from each other that the beams of their flashlights crossed where I stood.

The brightness of the light forced me to lower my head. I didn’t see the club until it hit my left side, near the kidney.

I fell to the ground and gulped for breath, paralyzed with pain, held fast in place.

“What are you doing here?” I heard from above me.

I tried to say that I didn’t mean any harm, I was just looking around. Before I could speak, I felt a steel-toed army boot smash into my stomach. The last vestiges of oxygen disappeared. The blinding beams of light spun wildly.

“What are you hanging around here for?”

“What kind of bum are you?”

“We don’t need any fucking refugees around here.”

I tried to say something. Spit gurgled out of my throat, not sufficient for words.

“Beggar.”

A kick to the ribs.

“Loser.”

A club to the right kidney.

“Fag.”

A kick to the groin.

I couldn’t see anything, could hear only words oozing with hate. I turned onto my stomach. Another blow exploded in the middle of my back like an angry stone.

“You’re lucky there ain’t more of us today.”

“You’re getting off easy.”

“You coulda been killed.”

Laughter. A club struck my left ear. It turned hot and deaf at the same time. More laughter.

Then a third voice, younger, speaking English: “Back off, or I’ll shoot.”

The beams of light disappeared.

“Go now. Go away, or I’ll kill you.”

Heavy steps. Moving away this time.

“Get going.”

Lighter steps. Hands grabbing my coat, lifting me.

“Get up.”

I tried to stand. It wasn’t easy. I leaned against something.

“Into the car.”

I fell onto something, first sitting, then lying down. A door slammed behind me. The world lurched; I rolled onto my back, then onto my side. Something hit me in the forehead.

“Now let’s get out of here.”

Of course. I was in the car. In Hamid’s taxi.

“They almost killed you.”

I rolled onto my stomach. I leaned my head forward and vomited onto the floor.

“Shit. Now we really have to hurry.”

I tried to stay conscious. I tried to hold on to the door handle. I tried to open my eyes. It seemed like no matter what I tried, I failed.

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Just fifteen more minutes.”

Fifteen minutes. To where?

7

I held Johanna in my arms, breathed in the scent of her neck and kissed her warm lips. She let out a little laugh, pulled her face away, and looked into my eyes. I was about to say something, but then she was back in my arms again, laying her head on my chest. I stroked her hair, letting it flow through my fingers, and rested my other hand on the back of her neck. It was slender and graceful, radiating heat at the roots of her hair.

I could feel in my fingertips the places where the muscles attached, the delicate point where everything, where life itself, was connected. Johanna lifted her head. I looked into her eyes again and saw the green reflections in them. I pulled her closer and held her tight against me. She was small and soft like she always is in the morning. She turned off the alarm clock and snuggled close, put her arm across my chest, laid her forehead against my cheek and nearly fell asleep again, snuffled, said something sweet and silly.

I held her there, knowing that if I let her go I would let her go forever. I smelled her hair, breathing in its fragrance and trying to store it all away and remember how she really smelled, remember it for a long time. She breathed evenly. Silence surrounded us and we were safe. We belonged to each other.

Then she gave a start, like she sometimes did when she was falling asleep. Someone was pulling her away. I pulled back, clutching her closer to me, but that someone was strong and persistent. I held on to her. I wouldn’t let go. I tried to see her face, but it was turned downward. My grasp came loose. That unknown someone finally got hold of her and she sank away out of my arms into the darkness. When she had disappeared completely from my sight and only emptiness was left, I felt a shivering cold. I shook, and my hands reached out to grasp at nothing.

The light changed to a deep red, cursive neon behind a thin curtain. I tried to read it for some time from left to right before I realized that I was looking at it backward. I finally managed to make it out from right to left: kebab-pizzeria.

I lifted my hand to my left ear, which was itching, and I felt a rustling wad of bandage, held on with tape. I was lying on my side with my weight on my right arm, which had gone completely numb. I pulled my arm out from under me, grabbed hold of the edge of whatever it was I was lying on, and sat up.

I was in some sort of back room or storage area. My mouth tasted like blood and metal. I sat where I was, took a few deep breaths, shook my numb arm gingerly. There was a pain in my back whenever I breathed.

I heard a language foreign to me on the other side of the curtain—first a man’s voice, then a woman’s. I remembered my dream, felt a sense of panic, and took my phone out of my pocket. The display was dark. Either it had been hit by a club or the battery was dead. My panic grew.

I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t hold me, and I collapsed back to where I’d been sitting.

I fixed my gaze on the red text glowing behind the curtain and managed to remain upright. I breathed for a moment until I was sure that I wouldn’t get dizzy, and looked around me. A gray cement room, cardboard boxes and junk along the walls, plastic sacks full of soft drink bottles in the doorway, some full, some empty, and a chair with the backpack I’d got from Ahti slung over it. It was less than two meters away.

I got to my feet again and—made wiser by my previous attempt—used the wall for support. I got the backpack and sat down again. The gun lay in my hand as the pack fell to the floor.

The voices behind the curtain paused.

I held the pistol on my lap as the curtain was pulled aside. I recognized Hamid in spite of the red glow behind him that left his face in darkness and formed a halo around his head, softening his outline.

“Take it easy,” he said.

I shook my head, opened my mouth, and moved my tongue, but I couldn’t get any sound to come out.

“Water,” I heard Hamid say.

A moment later the curtain was pulled completely to one side. Into the room came a woman with a pitcher of water in one hand and a glass in the other. She filled the glass, set the pitcher on the floor, and handed the glass to me.

I drank as if it were my first taste of water. Half of it slopped down my chest, the other half I coughed back up. Swallowing was going to take some practice. I did better with the second glass—the woman didn’t need to back up to avoid a spray of water this time.

She was about thirty years old, brown-eyed, with slightly lighter brown skin than Hamid. She had long black hair twisted into a bun on the back of her head and large silver earrings that shone brightly. She was wearing dark jeans, a yellowish hooded sweatshirt, and a startlingly white apron. She handed me my backpack.

“My cousin,” Hamid said, nodding in her direction.

He came closer and pointed to my ear.

“She knows what she’s doing.”

I touched the wad of paper and tape. For that ear the world was full of rustlings and raspings. It didn’t hurt, though, so perhaps it was wisest to be grateful. And I was. I said so to Hamid.

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “They almost did you in.”

The woman also smiled. I tried to.

“Thanks,” I said to her. First in Finnish, then in English.

“I speak Finnish,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Tapani,” I said, extending my hand.

“Nina.”

Her hand was warm and narrow in mine, and I held on to it longer than was necessary for a handshake. Its slenderness immediately reminded me of the dream I’d just had about my wife, whose hand was just as smooth and delicate. My mind was flooded with memories, and in all of them I was touching Johanna. On the street at night coming home from the movies, under the table at a boring dinner party when no one was watching, walking her to work on an early summer morning.

Nina noticed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Hamid intervened: “You’re in some kind of difficulty.”

It was close enough to the truth, so I nodded.

“Can you tell me about it?”

Why not? Provided he would tell me where I was.

“You’re in Kallio,” he said.

I told him that my wife had disappeared and I had to keep looking for her. The gun was mine, and I would pay Hamid for having returned it to me. He kept his eyes on me all the time I was speaking.

Nina got up from the chair, went out into the restaurant, and came back carrying her purse. She took out a packet of painkillers and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, taking out two tablets and swallowing them with some water.

Next Hamid went into the restaurant, clattered around for a moment, and came back carrying a cup and saucer.

“Tea. With lots of sugar.”

The tea was as dark as coffee, burning hot, and so sweet it sent a stab through my teeth. I drank the whole cup in a few swallows. I felt the hot liquid in my throat and a moment later in my stomach.

When I was sure the tea would stay down, I got up and stood for a moment. I took a few tottering steps toward the door and went out into the restaurant. The room was the size of a small office. Half the space was taken up by an open kitchen and buffet counter that stretched along one wall. The other half was set aside for three small tables. The wooden chairs around the tables were empty. A television on the wall was showing a report about a wildfire.

“Is this the local news?” I asked.

Nina shook her head.

“Our home country,” Hamid said.

I looked at the fire again. It looked like all the other fires in the world.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Hamid.

“Me, too,” he said.

Nina picked up the remote from the counter and changed the channel. The Helsinki area information station reported news of the capital continuously. I asked her to call up the latest news broadcast. She pressed the remote.

I took out my phone and asked for a charger. Hamid snapped up the phone and took it behind the counter.

I sat in one of the restaurant’s chairs and looked at the clock on the wall: twelve past one. I felt weak and sick. Ideas came into my mind, but I didn’t want to follow them to their conclusions. Most of the thoughts revolved around Johanna, and the mere idea that something might have happened to her like what had just happened to me hurt more than the beating I’d taken.

The local news didn’t offer any more clues. Armed robberies had increased—they were being committed in the daytime now, and closer to the city center. A skyscraper in central Pasila had been set on fire earlier in the evening. Traffic from the Russian border to the capital was jammed again. There was also good news: The metro tunnels had been pumped out, and the metro was back up and running. They had also increased the number of armed guards there.

But none of that was any help to me.

Hamid sat on the other side of the table.

“I’m sure things will get better,” he said when I turned away from the television and looked at him.

I STOOD FOR A moment in front of the pizzeria, breathing in the night’s thin air, feeling it in my throat, and keeping my eyes on the trees that stood stock-still behind the library, silently waiting for spring, for warmth and new life, in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night, glistening with rain, their limbs dripping. The earth beneath them was numbingly cold and would be for months yet, but the trees didn’t let their nerves get to them, they didn’t tremble or blame anyone for the unpleasantness of their situation. I was awakened from this lesson when Hamid backed the taxi around the corner and stopped in front of me.

I turned my phone back on in the taxi. No sign of Johanna. I took out a tissue and wiped my earlobe. The wound had opened again when I washed my face. The tissue turned dark red in seconds. I took a new one out of my pocket and held it against my ear.

We drove north to avoid the roads closed due to the high-rise fire in Pasila and made it to the police station without any trouble. Hamid stopped the car a few hundred meters before he reached the gates, and I handed him who knows how many bills. I hadn’t calculated how much the fare would be. He had saved my life, so I felt I ought to pay a little extra. I asked him to wait. If I didn’t return in an hour, he could go look for another fare.

I walked as upright as the pain in my back would allow me, shoved the bloody tissue in my pocket, and adjusted my face into as friendly and neutral an expression as I could without a mirror. In spite of all that my way was blocked as soon as I got to the gate in the fence that surrounded the police station.

No, I don’t have a pass.

No, no one is expecting me.

I explained that I’d come to see Harri Jaatinen, chief inspector of the violent crimes unit, and that I was there concerning the man known as the Healer. The young policeman, in a heavy armored vest and helmet, with an assault rifle in his hands and eyes that kept darting from side to side, listened to me for a moment, then walked to the guard’s booth without saying a word, waited, and opened the gate.

I was directed to the security checkpoint, where they took my phone and gave me an ID badge to pin to my chest. After security I walked into a building with a large foyer full of people and only one empty seat.

Across from me sat a wealthy-looking, well-dressed couple roughly the age of Johanna and me. The woman was half in the man’s lap, sniffling quietly. Her fist clasped a tissue, and her face was twisted and blotched with red. The man’s pale face was pointed straight ahead, and the empty, frozen look in his eyes was unchanging as he mechanically moved his hand over her back.

I closed my eyes and waited.

8

“Tapani Lehtinen?”

I opened my eyes.

“If you’re reporting a theft, robbery, or assault, take a number at the first window.”

Harri Jaatinen was amazingly similar in person to the way he seemed in the news clips—just as tall and chiseled as he was in those painful close-ups. I got up and shook his hand. He was quite a bit older than me—nearer to sixty than fifty, with dark gray at his temples, in his mustache, and in his eyes. He reminded me of Dr. Phil, the American psychologist on the old television show. But it took only a few words of conversation to easily distinguish where Dr. Phil ended and Inspector Jaatinen began. Where Dr. Phil would have coaxed and flattered with artificial empathy, Jaatinen’s tone was dry, gruff, and unapologetic. It was impossible to imagine that voice dithering, sentimental, or fawning—it was a voice made for pronouncements, statements of fact. His handshake was the same: straightforward and professional.

I instinctively touched the bandage on my ear. It hadn’t occurred to me that it might seem to be my reason for being here. I shook my head.

“I’m here about the Healer. I believe my wife, the journalist Johanna Lehtinen, has been in touch with you about the case.”

Jaatinen seemed to remember and understand immediately what I was talking about. He switched his weight from one leg to the other.

“That case and many others,” he said, and I couldn’t quite tell from his expression whether he was pleased and faintly smiling, or vexed by the memory. Then he said, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

The coffee was acrid, but warm. The stark room contained a desk, two chairs, and Jaatinen’s computer.

I quickly told him everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours: Johanna’s disappearance, how I had found out about her investigation, and, of course, my own investigations, which had resulted in the bandage on my ear, a back that was black and blue, and a crazy theory about waves on the seashore.

“Johanna’s a good reporter,” Jaatinen said. “She’s been a lot of help to us.” His voice didn’t rise or fall and had no shades of color or tone. He didn’t take sides or make commitments. But it was a surprisingly pleasant voice to listen to. “As you no doubt know, we’re short of staff at the moment. I’m sure you understand that I can’t spare any staff to search for your wife. Or for anyone else.”

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” I said. “I want to know more about the Healer, because that’s how I can find Johanna.”

Jaatinen shook his head sharply.

“That’s not at all certain.”

“It’s all I’ve got. And the police have nothing to lose, whether I find her or not. In any case, you’ll have one more man investigating the murders. Everybody wins.”

Jaatinen measured me with a glance and didn’t answer right away. Maybe he was calculating my trustworthiness, or comparing me in his mind to the thousand other people offering or asking for help that he must run across in his profession. I sat in my chair and tried to look as forthright as possible, tried to look like I’d be a lot of help to him. The bandage on my ear probably didn’t reinforce that impression.

“We have DNA tests from only some of the cases because the lab is overbooked and understaffed, and the equipment is starting to wear out. Anyway, there are DNA tests from the most recent case, the murder in Eira. What I’m about to tell you is absolutely confidential until you hear otherwise. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Johanna was a great help to us, and to me particularly, in solving those kidnappings three years ago.”

He took a sip of coffee and glanced at his cup with a satisfied look. I was perplexed, and tasted mine again. It was almost undrinkable.

“We have one suspect, the same person who’s suspected in the first murder, the one in Tapiola. We got a DNA sample in that case, too, and we even got it to the lab for testing, which happens less and less nowadays.”

He took another mouthful of coffee. He was enjoying his so much that he was willingly lingering over it before swallowing.

“So. We compared the samples to the national DNA bank and got a name. There was only one problem.”

His gray-blue eyes shone in the poorly lit room. He looked all of a sudden like he was sitting much closer to me than I’d realized. Either that or the room around us had shrunk and the walls were pushing us closer together.

“The man in question died in the flu epidemic five years ago.”

“OK,” I said after a little pause, trying my best to make myself comfortable in the suddenly confined space.

He put his coffee down and pushed it away from him, dropped his gaze to his elbows leaning on the desk, and scooted them forward, too. If the desk had been a living thing it would have been crying in pain.

“The suspect was about to graduate from medical school. Pasi Tarkiainen. Died at home.”

“So?”

Jaatinen’s expression was unchanged, and the pitch of his voice remained the same. Apparently he was used to explaining things to people slower than himself.

“So we have a dead medical student who left traces of himself that were found on the victims,” he said. “And he may be using the name ‘the Healer.’”

“There must be some explanation.”

He seemed to be of the same opinion; an indentation appeared between his lower lip and the tip of his outstretched chin that seemed to say: Exactly. Quite. That is the point.

“Of course there is. But we don’t have enough investigators to find out what it is. We had three detectives officially resign yesterday, and one of them was assigned to this case. Last week two of my employees didn’t come to work, and it looks like they’re gone for good, since they took their weapons with them but left their security passes. And this bunch has a calling for the job—I can only imagine what the situation’s like in other departments.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk a few times and sharpened his gaze.

“All our time goes to recording new cases. There’s no time for investigation because new, and worse, cases are constantly arriving. We go as fast as we can and we’re still at square one. It’s no wonder people give up. Maybe I should leave, too, while I still can. But where would I go? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

“Did Johanna know about this?” I asked. “About Pasi Tarkiainen?”

Jaatinen leaned back and sized me up again, me and the whole situation.

“Probably not. Unless she found out through her own research. Our department’s not as airtight as it used to be. After all, here I am talking to you. But did she know? I don’t think she knew.”

I shifted my position in the chair, trying to throw my left leg over my right, but the pain in my lower back stopped me like a wall. It was as if someone had taken a screwdriver directly to the nerve. I let out a squeak and put the leg back where it was before.

“Do you know who they were?” Jaatinen asked.

“The ones who clobbered me?”

He nodded. In a friendly way this time, I thought. I shrugged. It was of absolutely no importance, I thought. “If I had to guess, I’d say they were from some private security company, paid professional sadists. There are still people living in those houses, and they can afford to pay someone to keep the place clean.”

“The only sector that’s growing,” Jaatinen said. “We’ve had a lot of people defect. They want to try to earn enough to go north. But the space up there isn’t unlimited. And life up north can’t be much easier or more delightful than it is here.”

I had to get the discussion back on track. I was looking for Johanna, not pondering convulsions in the labor market.

“Let’s assume that you could investigate the Healer and Tarkiainen,” I said. “Where would you begin?”

Jaatinen seemed to have expected this question. He didn’t think for even a second before saying, “I’d look for Tarkiainen. Dead or not.”

“How?” I asked.

“With the information you have, some instinct, and a bit of luck. You’ll need all of it. The evidence indicates that Tarkiainen is alive. Somewhere there are people who know him. I’d be surprised if they weren’t right around the corner. I have a feeling the killer knows the areas he’s active in very well. The same would apply to the people around him. I would look for old friends of his—workmates, neighbors, golf buddies, kindred spirits. One of them might still be in contact with him. He might even go to the same pub he used to.”

Jaatinen was quiet for a moment and seemed to purposely leave the obvious question hanging in the air.

“You don’t believe that Tarkiainen’s dead?”

He didn’t need to wrestle with his answer.

“No,” he said in a dry and implacable voice.

We talked for a few more minutes, and I had the feeling he was still keeping me at a distance. He had told me a lot, but not everything.

I DIDN’T PRESS HIM. Nor could I bring myself to ask him directly what he thought Johanna’s chances were, but we did talk about the kidnapping case three years earlier that she had helped to solve, thanks to which two girls, aged six and eight, though permanently traumatized, had been returned alive. I could tell that Jaatinen hoped this chat would encourage me. I did my best to accept whatever crumbs I could get from it.

After a moment of silence, he got up and pulled up his dark suit pants. I did the same with my jeans. There was another sharp pain in my back. We shook hands and I thanked him for his time. He said, “We’ll keep trying,” and I said, “Yes we will.” We were at the door before his choice of words registered.

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.