Blackwater. Part 32

He knew Birger was weeping because Annie was dead, but couldn't work out why the cataclysm of the gaming machine had released the attack. Birger was talking indistinctly about an unbearable, mocking smile. At first Johan thought he was referring to his fellow pa.s.sengers, but Birger said it was no one's, just a smile of derision. Then he said: it was chance, sheer chance. He kept saying the word over and over again, and it lost all meaning.

'Hardly chance,' Johan said, interrupting him to put an end to it. 'If so, in a very narrow sense. Those machines are programmed to give out money now and again. You could tell that this one was ready because there were staff standing around waiting to have a go. They keep an eye on the gaming machines and know when they're getting close.'

Johan went on talking about generating chance. He told Birger about how you could randomise in a computer and to his extreme relief Birger fell asleep without any more weeping. He had an ugly red mark on his forehead.

In the morning, after they had handed in Birger's huge suitcase and Johan's bag at the hotel, they at once took a taxi to the address of Professor Hofstaedter. She lived in a late eighteenth-century block, weighty and impressive, untouched by the light and sea-blown cla.s.sicism which had greeted them as they disembarked. Late summer prevailed in the market down by the harbour; big bunches of dill and beetroot, rudbeckia and snapdragons in the flower stalls, crayfish, lampreys, herrings, onions and k.n.o.bbly gherkins an abundance of scents dispersing in the cool air and floating out to sea as lightly as violets. Inside this stony city there was no season at all. Hofstaeder's block was guarded by limestone gnomes holding up the entrance archway on their bowed backs. Johan pressed the bell on the entry phone and they stood listening to the clatter of trams from the street as they waited. But no one answered.

The building turned out to be not all that far from the Marski Hotel. The taxi had been unnecessary. They went into Fazer's cafe and had coffee. Johan ordered a sandwich with his, but Birger, untroubled, gorged himself on cream cakes.

All day they roamed between the apartment block and the inner-city attractions of Helsinki. Johan began to think they had come in vain. Birger didn't seem to care much about the outcome of their trip. He said he was glad to be able to get away for a while. He stood for a long time in front of Iittala's shop window staring at the gla.s.sware. He also attempted to pat the statue of Havis Amanda on the backside, but Johan stopped him and suggested they should take a tram on the circle line and take a look at Finlandia House. Birger seemed to be enjoying himself and it was hard to imagine that at any moment he might have one of his heartbreaking attacks of weeping. Johan suspected that he was wound up like a clock. He knew what he was going to do and say, even when faced with a female behind.

At five in the afternoon, they heard Doris Hofstaedter's voice over the entry phone. It silenced Johan, but Birger introduced them both and said they were looking for the professor on an urgent mission. She wanted to know what mission.

'We're looking for someone we think you know. A student of yours. From your bo days.'

The sound quality was poor and she repeated her question several times, but in the end she let them in. They went up to the third floor in a creaking lift with iron gates. She gave them the once-over through the peephole, then opened the door.

Everything in the place was old and impressive. Johan reckoned it was not the professor's parents who had furnished the apartment, but more likely her grandparents. They squeezed their way past a vast baroque cupboard in the hall, sabres and pistols hanging on the wall, paintings in heavy carved gilt frames of dark-green landscapes in which only a silvery white streak of a river or a foaming waterfall was distinguishable.

The professor herself was a gruff woman with short dark hair, streaked with white like a badger's. She wore gla.s.ses apparently designed for reading; idly she had pushed them down her nose instead of taking them off. She was wearing a black and white cotton dress of modernistic design with a zip down the front, a kind of tent, the body underneath shapeless. Her face was puffy, particularly below the eyes where the gla.s.ses pressed. She had pads of fat below the skin that pulled down her cheeks and blurred her jawline. Johan thought she looked rather frightening and he felt awkward in this magnificent, gloomy apartment. But Birger ploughed on without embarra.s.sment, obviously used to going into people's homes and breathing in the odours they lived in. He looked as if he were quite genially about to lift up the cotton tent and put his fingers into the professor's abundant yellow flesh.

She took them into a room which appeared to be a library, the walls lined with shelves of leather-bound books. There was a sagging sofa with greenish-grey cushions covered with dog hairs. Johan didn't find that out until later, on his trousers. There was no sign of a dog. The room grew dark. She had drawn the brown velvet curtains, then switched on a lamp. Johan found himself sitting right in the lamplight.

He told her that many years ago he had got to know a girl who was probably one of the professor's students.

'Why do you think that?'

'She talked about your research,' said Johan.

'What did she talk about?'

'About the Traveller.'

He had expected her to want to know more about what the girl had told him, perhaps out of professional vanity or quite simply because she was sceptical. But she said: 'What do you want of her?'

He was not quite sure whether she was being hostile or not. Her intonation was Finnish and not easy to interpret. In any case she was certainly not forthcoming.

'She knew someone I want to find out more about.'

'Who?'

'His name was John Larue,' said Birger helpfully.

'I don't know what girl you're talking about. Describe her.'

She had been standing with her back to the window and the drawn curtains. Now she sat down in a leather armchair with large bra.s.s-studded wings and Johan saw she was wearing sandals. Coa.r.s.e leather sandals consisting of nothing but a couple of straps over a sole and a crude fastener. She had small, well-formed feet and seemed to have worn sandals a lot, for she had no bunions and her toes were cla.s.sically straight and close together. Johan fell silent.

'Well?'

'She was fair,' he said. But nothing more came. He stared past the feet down at the rug, which was a dark brownish red, oriental, worn but with a still distinguishable pattern of stylised ornamental flowers. From somewhere behind him, perhaps from the blue and white jar on the floor by the tiled stove, came a strong scent of lemony spices and dried petals.

'Well, I must have had a lot of students with fair hair,' she said. 'What did she look like?'

He couldn't get it out. He could see her before him but couldn't describe her. No other words except 'fair' and 'dry' came to him. He could hear Birger's anxious, laboured breathing.

'Well,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'

She got up. They had to rise from the sofa. Johan made another attempt, but got stuck with something worse than a lack of words. His throat closed. He couldn't get a word out and made a hissing sound when he tried to speak, as if he were very hoa.r.s.e. Professor Hofstaedter laughed.

'Don't take it so hard,' she said. 'It wouldn't have helped however eloquently you had described her. I don't hand out names of female students to a couple of unknown gentlemen from Sweden and Norway.'

'Why did she say Norway?' said Birger, once they were down in the street.

'Because she recognised my voice. I phoned a few days ago and pretended to be Norwegian. I wanted to know if she was at home.'

'Christ,' was all Birger said.

The professor seemed to have shaken him more than their failure.

They couldn't think of anything else to do but have a meal to pa.s.s the time until they could go to bed. They found a little Russian restaurant down a side street in the city centre, the interior all gold, black and red with a heavy smell of perfume and food. Birger wanted to try bear ham, but simply seeing the words on the menu disgusted Johan. They agreed on beetroot soup, blini and chopped salt herring with onion and sour cream. It was all very rich and filling and Johan found it hard to swallow. They took a sweet brown vodka and Birger grew tipsy. Johan drank modestly, afraid of feeling sick. When they got back to their double room at the hotel, they went to bed with no more argument about their failed visit to Doris Hofstaedter. Birger slept heavily. Johan lay awake listening to the trams.

After an hour, he got up and dressed. He walked along the arctic night-empty streets and when he got to the entrance with the gnomes, he pressed the b.u.t.ton and after a brief pause heard that harsh voice. She hadn't been asleep. He hadn't thought she would be, either.

'It's Johan Brandberg.'

She received him in the same tent dress, but barefoot and smoking a thin cigarette that smelt foreign.

'Jukka dear,' she said. 'I thought you'd come back.'

'How the h.e.l.l did you find me?'

She threw the question over her shoulder as she went ahead of him into the apartment. Not a single light was on, and he could see reflections from the streetlights shining on a large dining table. No sign of the library; they were going in another direction. The apartment seemed to stretch in all directions from the dining room, which had four doors. He could hear someone singing, almost unaccompanied, a ba.s.s voice which grew louder the further in they went. 'In diesen heil'gen Hallen,' he was singing, his voice sinking through loose layers of darkness. They ended up in a room smelling of cigarette smoke and containing an overloaded desk. A green light indicated an amplifier on the far wall and the singer sang his aria to the end. Then Doris Hofstaedter leant back and pressed a b.u.t.ton. The green eye went out.

'Well?'

She hadn't forgotten her question. She sat down at the desk, which left him nowhere to sit except the leather armchair opposite. He sat down like a examination candidate.

'I found your book,' he said. 'The Myth of the Traveller.'

'Oh, Christ, you've changed social cla.s.s and got yourself academic qualifications and instincts.'

Intimacy, he thought. Here it is. In this dusty room. Had he tried to tell himself it was possible to approach another person by being nice? Here she was, eighteen years later, not beautiful even then, making demands on his membranes and exposed skin. He had no desire at all to lie to her, and said: 'I found the book by sheer chance. But I have got a university degree, that's true. I'm a meteorologist.'

'What do you really want?'

'I didn't know it was you. I was looking for the girl.'

'Here she is. She's fifty-nine now.'

He calculated in his head and saw her noticing.

'I was forty-one,' she said, smiling broadly. He disliked the discoloration of her teeth by tobacco, and they were longer than he remembered. The gums had receded upwards, and her eyelids sagged heavily into deep yellow folds. She wants to frighten, he thought. He went on counting in his head, for he felt he had been swept into a labyrinthine game in which he was confronted with stereotyped figures demanding pa.s.swords. There sat the Witch with the lovely feet. A few days ago he had met the Dirty Old Man. At the time when he was most enthusiastically climbing on to the women at Starhill, he had been no older than I am now, Johan thought. Had Mia also calculated in her head?

'You took a sixteen-year-old with you to your Trollevolden.'

'Don't act innocent and seduced, Johan. You rubbed me raw inside.

She leant back in her chair and peered at him. The chair rocked slightly.

'Jukka, Jukka,' she said. 'You were as keen as a hunting hound. No childish flesh between us, oh no. Brutal, you were. A truly fine, clean animal.' Her Finnish accent was still marked.

'Then you no doubt returned to a regular life?'

He found that difficult to deny and she laughed.

'Swedish youth fed on soft cheese and social benefits have their excesses in the playground. Howling at rock concerts when the play leaders shout f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k and a.s.shole. But twenty years ago you really did drive a thumb with Norwegian margarine up my a.r.s.ehole, and you had learnt that at the movies, my friend.'

'Trollevolden, by the way, belonged to the Tourist a.s.sociation,' he said.

'That's right.'

'You said it belonged to your family.'

'My grandfather was a merchant in Trondheim. Timber, fish, shipping anything that could be traded. Every autumn he went north to shoot. He built the hunting lodge in 1905. Life on a grand scale, really. Five hundred grouse was nothing unusual. Whole drifts of hares. Salmon. Bears. You could call it excess. Not like twenty thousand orienteerers subjecting game to days of death struggle without even noticing it. But right in it with blood on your boots and gun smoke and skins turned inside out.'

She got up and left the room. Johan didn't know what to expect. Was she going to come back with photographs? He vaguely remembered some photos of shoots. When he heard her returning, he could also hear a clinking.

'Whisky or vodka?'

'Whisky, please.'

'His daughter, who was of a less flamboyant kind, met a Finn, an engineer.' She went straight on with her story. 'That was in a seaside resort on the island of Sylt. She moved to Finland when they married, and had two children. Me and my brother. When the Winter War started, we were evacuated to Grandfather. They hadn't reckoned on the Germans attacking Norway a few months later. I went to Amalie Clink's School for Girls in Trondheim, a very fine private school. Her name was really Lock, but we called her Amalie Clink. She had a little briefcase that used to clink inside. Port.

'Just imagine,' she said. 'Amalie Clink even had a port-wine nose. A real old-fashioned, coa.r.s.e-pored, reddish-blue number. In that friendly little face.'

She raised her gla.s.s of transparent vodka to him.

'But you've been careful,' he said. 'Only clear spirits.'

'Johan, you don't like it that things have gone well for me although I've drunk vodka and smoked cigarettes.'

'Have things gone well for you?'

'I've got a professorship. I'm a member of learned societies. I'm fit and never find life dull. Does that annoy you?'

When he didn't answer, she went on: 'During the war, the whole school went on an outing to Trollevolden. On the day after the end of term. First by train, then horse and cart up to the house. It wasn't so overgrown in those days, you see, and you could get there by horse and cart. Grandfather was magnificent. Right in the middle of the grey old war, we had cream cakes and strawberries and eggnog and charlotte russe, if you know what that is. There were maids and enamelled jugs of thick yellow cream. Pale veal steak with cream sauce. You don't know what veal is, Johan, the kind you could get before the war. Fattened calf, box-calf, fed on cow's milk and tender as your sweet little p.r.i.c.k. It was unforgettable a childishly bright and easily digested extravagance. But it was Grandfather's last gesture; his business was failing, partly because he refused to cooperate with the Germans and partly because shipping was at low ebb. When he died, his fortune had gone. Trollevolden remained, but wasn't worth much. My mother was dead. She died of pneumonia during the last month of the Winter War. My brother and I gave Trollevolden to the Tourist a.s.sociation so that at least the house would be more or less maintained. In the 1950s, the preservation of unique interiors was not a priority. But it was forgotten, fortunately. It was so remote. Anyone walking and wanting to stay the night was given the key at the store in the village. People were decent in those days. It got shabby, but never ruined inside. There's a warden there now. Lockable shutters. Tourist a.s.sociation fittings. My brother and I have stopped going there.'

'Was that your brother, the streaky man?'

'Yes. I wasn't keen on him seeing you close to. I was slightly embarra.s.sed by your youth. I hadn't reckoned on his being there. Only the girls. And they were to leave after a day or two.'

'Were they tourists?'

'Goodness, no. They were Amalie Clink's former pupils. Aged about forty, all of them. They were celebrating their thirtieth anniversary up there. In memory of that party in the middle of the war. We even made charlotte russe, but I don't think you got any of that.'

'I haven't come here to listen to all this,' said Johan.

'No, but it really does interest you, doesn't it?'

'I want to know more about John Larue.'

'That's someone I don't know.'

'You met him at the chemist's or in the store in a small village called Byvngen. You gave him the telephone number to the store in the village near Trollevolden. I think you'd thought he was going there.'

'Oh, dear me. A pick-up, do you mean?'

'Yes, you bought condoms as well.'

She really did look surprised then and had to take another cigarette. She extracted one out of a black lacquered box decorated in old-fashioned Russian red and gold.

'How did you recognise me today, Johan?'

'Your feet,' he said, then thought that was tactless of him. But did she mind?

'Ah, yes, we've always got something unspoilt, haven't we? I've actually always looked after my feet. They appear in a novel. A romanticised autobiography by an elderly Finnish writer.'

She went on talking away, her speech academically articulate. Not for a moment was she going to let him get any closer to her, and yet there was an intimacy between them. It wasn't I know what you think. But I feel what you feel. Like one flayed body hot against another.

'I want to talk about John Larue,' said Johan. 'You had no use for those condoms. Not one. I've been wondering about it, and this is what I think happened. You met Larue in the chemist's and heard about his troubles with his girlfriend and her period pains. He was good-looking. You wanted to take him with you. But you realised you would have to protect yourself if you were going to be with him.'

'Oh, dear.'

'Birger Torbjornsson thought that one up. I think you wanted to lure Larue with you at once. But he was too decent. True, he didn't know the girl he was travelling with very well. He had only recently met her in Gothenburg. They had been to a rock concert together. You gave him Finnish vodka and quinine powder for the girl. You bought a notebook and wrote down the number of the shop in it. They had taken a room at the guesthouse in Byvngen. I think you did, too. You counted on the girl falling asleep once she had dulled the pain. Then John Larue was to come into your room and have a little foretaste of the delights awaiting him in Trollevolden.'

'The way you put it, Johan. Foretaste of delights. Oh, my goodness.'

'But I don't think he came. Perhaps she was suspicious and surprised him on his way to you.'

'Why not in flagrante?' said the woman he still thought of as Ylja.

'Because the condom pack was unopened. I think you stayed in that dismal guesthouse for a whole day in the hope that he would come back and go with you. He must have left that possibility open. But he didn't come. He went to Blackwater and then on up towards the mountain. You lay in your bed at the guesthouse and realised he wasn't coming in to you that night, either. I think you were really fed up by then.'

'What happened next?'

'Then John Larue and his girl were stabbed to death in a tent.'

'That's got nothing to do with it,' she said.