Antti Tuomainen - The Healer

I read for a moment, finished my oatmeal, put some coffee on to brew, and walked into the living room. I could see a few fires far off on the other side of the bay. Otherwise the landscape was dark except for the electric glow of the city on the left edge of the starless sky. The black limbs of the leafless trees in front of the building stood out like they’d been burned.

I had to get started, so I went back to the computer, opened the browser, and typed in “Pasi Tarkiainen.” I didn’t find anything new. I tried other searches: “Pasi Tarkiainen” and specific years. I still didn’t find anything recent, only information I already knew from the past. Then I combined “Tarkiainen” with other search terms: first his home addresses, then his workplaces. Nothing. I tried combinations of names: “Pasi Tarkiainen Harri Jaatinen.” No results. “Pasi Tarkiainen Vasili Gromov.” No results. “Pasi Tarkiainen Johanna Lehtinen.” A brief news item caught my attention. Another search, this time with Johanna’s maiden name: “Pasi Tarkiainen Johanna Merilä.”

A cold fist wriggled in my chest, my stomach dropped away to the point of pain, my fingers on the keys started to tremble, and my fingertips were suddenly numb.

It was an article from thirteen years ago.

Johanna was young in the picture, as was Pasi Tarkiainen, of course. He had his right arm around her, and you could see him pulling her closer to him. Johanna’s expression was neutral, though there was perhaps a trace of discomfort either from the mere fact of being photographed or because of his overeager squeeze. Tarkiainen’s smile was once again broad and radiant, but there wasn’t yet that intensity in his eyes that I’d seen in the photo taken several years later.

There was a headline above the picture: ENVIRONMENTALLY EFFICIENT LILLIPUT HOUSES GET THEIR FIRST TWO RESIDENTS.

The article didn’t really say anything about Johanna or Pasi Tarkiainen; it was mainly about a new residential development in Kivinokka. A former allotment garden had been converted to housing in the same miniature spirit as garden cottages, with the goal of demonstrating the housing construction of the future. Everything about the neighborhood was twenty years too late—although the houses produced their own energy and were entirely recyclable, sustainable, and nonpolluting, the environment was already so changed by then that the innovations were meaningless. On top of that, the houses were too expensive for an ordinary person to afford, and those who could afford them certainly didn’t want to move to Kivinokka. Nowadays the houses were inhabited by anyone brave enough to live in them—the forgotten suburb of Kivinokka had a bad reputation, for a lot of reasons. The area near the bay at Vanhakaupunki was strewn with about a dozen skeletons of high-rises whose builders had run out of money and time before they were completed. But that didn’t mean that no one lived there. The people living there didn’t mind being off the beaten path.

The nearly decade-and-a-half-old article mentioned that the young couple were a medical student and a journalist, and that they were pleased with their new home. “This place has it all: sustainability, nature, the city, good transit connections.” The words were attributed to Pasi Tarkiainen.

I looked at the photo again.

What surprised me the most?

The fact that Johanna had once lived with Pasi Tarkiainen? That she had lived in Kivinokka, just a couple of kilometers from where we lived now? Or that I knew nothing about either of these facts?

I got up, walked to the living room, opened the balcony door, and went outside. I looked out toward Kivinokka. It was dark, of course, as it almost always was. Here and there fires shone, but otherwise the entire cape was blank darkness but for the angular outlines of the tall black buildings.

Why hadn’t Johanna told me about Tarkiainen and the place in Kivinokka? On the other hand, why would she? When we’d met ten years ago and married six months later, it was the beginning of a new life for both of us. So why would we have ever had anything to say about Pasi Tarkiainen or a miniature house they’d lived in thirteen years ago?

It had been a long time since she lived in Kivinokka. When we met she was living in Hakaniemi in a one-bedroom with a kitchen that she’d been in for at least a year and a half. That left another year and a half between the time of the article and her move to Hakaniemi.

Something had happened, and it had happened in a very short time. It may have been nothing more remarkable than the end of young love, though, of course, the discovery of Tarkiainen’s DNA at the scenes of the Healer killings and Johanna’s disappearance brought to mind other possibilities.

I went back into the kitchen and looked at the picture again, rubbing the cold out of my toes. The photo was cropped so that Johanna Merilä and Pasi Tarkiainen were cut off at the waist and filled the left side of the frame. On the right was a little yellow house with solar panels on the roof, either their house or one of the first to be completed. The caption read: “Johanna Merilä and Pasi Tarkiainen moved to Kivinokka from Kallio.”

I looked through Tarkiainen’s list of previous addresses. One of them was Pengerkatu 7, in Kallio. I tried an address search under Johanna’s name, but all I got was her address on Hämeentie, which I already knew.

I thought for a moment, then picked up my phone.

It was almost seven.

In spite of the time, Elina answered quickly, in a voice that sounded more like someone who’d been awake all night than someone who’d just been awakened.

“Has Johanna been found?” she asked, before I’d finished saying hello.

“No,” I said. “Are you still in Helsinki?”

Elina didn’t say anything for a moment. Maybe she was checking to see where she was.

“We’re still here,” she said quietly.

I waited a moment for her to say something more, but she didn’t. The silence almost described the way she closed her eyes and hung her head.

“Elina, is everything all right?” I asked.

“No,” she said quickly, sharply, then paused a moment and said more cautiously, more softly, “We’re not leaving. At least not yet.”

“What happened?”

Another silence. I could almost hear her gathering her thoughts and putting them in order. Then she spoke, in a quiet, even tone:

“Ahti was in the basement yesterday getting our things together, and he was bitten by a rat. At first we thought it was nothing, but he woke up last night with a fever, looking yellow, throwing up, and having cramps, and we had to call a doctor. He might have died otherwise. You know there’s no point in going to the hospital.”

“I know,” I said, guessing the end of the story.

“The doctor wouldn’t have agreed to come if it weren’t for the fact that we could pay in cash. We had the money you gave us, but it wasn’t enough. I had to sell our train tickets.”

“Did you have enough money then?”

“Enough for the doctor’s visit and the antibiotics. And he gave Ahti an injection of something.”

“Is Ahti all right?”

“He’s sleeping,” Elina said, again so quietly that I was almost leaning into the telephone to hear her better. “Or under some kind of sedation. His breathing is rough. Labored, like he can’t get enough oxygen.”

“Does he have a fever?”

“Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Elina,” I said, trying to make my voice a touch lighter, to pick up the pace. “I’m sure Ahti will recover from this and you’ll be able to take your trip. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. It has to do with Johanna. And Pasi Tarkiainen.”

The phone was completely quiet, with not even the normal background buzz. Elina didn’t say anything. I took the phone away from my ear and looked to see if we’d been disconnected. The display said she was still on the line.