Antti Tuomainen: The Healer

He was almost laughing now, the gun barrel swinging a few centimeters back and forth.

“And this is the best part—they would join us. What do you think of that idea?”

I didn’t say anything. Väntinen noticed I was shaking.

“You’re trembling with excitement. I wasn’t so enthusiastic. But that didn’t stop me. We had a hell of a good business going.”

“Tarkiainen was in on that, too,” I said.

“He was sort of forced into it. He was skeptical about the security firm. Afraid people would find out it was a business scheme and turn against us. That’s why we needed a journalist who could understand—somebody who could see the bigger picture and tell the good side of the story to a wider audience. So he decided on his ex-wife.”

“They were never married,” I said. “Where is Johanna?”

Väntinen gave a short, cold laugh.

“Don’t you understand? I’m not going to tell you. You wanted to know how all this started. Now you know. I’m not going to tell you anything more.”

We stood for a moment in silence. The rain drummed and danced on the trees and sodden ground. I could hear a stream off to my left. Somewhere far away, deep within the woods, was the shrill whine of a chainsaw or a moped—so far off that it wasn’t any use to me. I had to keep the conversation going.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why in general,” I said, looking at the place where his eyes were and seeing nothing but black shadows. “Why won’t you tell me where Johanna is? Why did you kill innocent people?”

He shrugged so nonchalantly that we might as well have been talking about what to have for lunch.

“The end is near,” he said lightly. “What does it matter what we do? There are two alternatives: be a pitiful bastard working as a bartender, scraping by, working in a shit hole, more and more miserable all the time, right up to the end, or you can head north, live comfortably in your own house, in peace. And how many of us are truly innocent, anyway? That’s where Pasi and I think along the same lines. We’ve all spent decades knowing what was coming, but nobody wanted to do anything that would make the slightest bit of difference.”

“Some people tried,” I said, and felt that even my lips were trembling. “A lot of people.”

Väntinen sighed loudly. A little cloud of steam appeared in front of his face and was almost immediately swept to the ground by the raindrops.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, suddenly sounding exhausted. “It was what it was. But I have someplace I have to be.”

He straightened his shooting arm. The hole at the end of the gun’s barrel seemed to grow, and I thought, This is the last thing in the world I’ll see—a little black eye that will wink once and end everything.

The shot deafened my ears and shook my body, and I was certain that even the trees were swaying. Väntinen’s hood flew off the back of his head. His face was missing something. A forehead, I realized. The shot, which had come from somewhere to my right, had knocked it off. Väntinen fell forward. The browless head smacked into the wet sand face-first.

Hamid came out from behind a tree, picked his way around the limbs and roots, and stepped onto the path. He looked different. His eyes were grim, his short, curly hair shone like steel wool in the rain, and the electric tremor in the cheeks of his thin face showed more clearly than before. In his hand was the pistol I’d left in my backpack. I looked at it, then at Väntinen.

Väntinen’s hand still held his gun, its barrel now full of sand and mud. On one side of his head I could see white bone, rinsed clean by the rain. I looked up at Hamid.

“I wasn’t always a cabdriver,” he said.

A fiery red Christmas star shone in the third-floor window, exactly in the middle of the darkened apartment house. The building around it guarded it like a flame within. The hum of the car heater and the patter of the rain on the hood were the only sounds I heard, once my hearing returned.

Hamid sat in the driver’s seat without speaking. He had accepted my thanks without speaking, as well. He kept his eyes aimed to the front and sat still, just being there, like he might do something completely unexpected at any moment. He had put the gun into the glove compartment. I thought about asking for it back, but there didn’t seem to be any point, somehow. He was the one who knew how to use it, that was clear.

We’d found Väntinen’s car after a brief search. There was a meter-high berm separating the parking area from the road. I checked again to make sure that Johanna’s phone was charging and that Väntinen’s keys were in my coat pocket, and got out of the car.

The wind had subsided, at least momentarily. The fresh night air smelled clean and sharp. Väntinen’s car gleamed like it had just been washed, the raindrops on its black body shining like pearls. I sat down in the driver’s seat.

The car was as clean inside as out. I went through the door pockets and the storage case between the seats. I found a chamois, work gloves, and a few coins. The only thing in the glove compartment was the auto manual. The small, cramped backseat looked completely unused. Except for the driver’s seat, the leg space was untouched and clean. I got out and moved the seats back to look under them. I didn’t find anything, not even dust.

I walked around the car and opened the trunk. It was small and crammed full. In the middle was a large athletic bag with a long steel zipper. I opened it: a man’s clothes, presumably Väntinen’s. After a moment of random rummaging I noticed that there were summer and winter clothes in it. It was Christmas Eve. Väntinen had meant what he’d said about going north. If he had his bags already packed, he must have been planning to leave soon.

I searched two other bags and a small backpack and found more travel items: extra clothes, bath products, shaving gear, and finally Väntinen’s passport. I took the bags out and looked under the mat. Just a spare tire and a jack.

I closed the trunk and the driver’s door and locked the car. I walked toward Hamid. His face still stared straight ahead, like a wax mask behind the wet windshield, and I realized I might be able to find out Väntinen’s destination if I went back to where we’d left him.

The body was lying on the trail in the position it had fallen. The gun had sunk into the sand. The rain had whitened the bones of his skull even more and had so wet his clothes through that they were becoming part of the mud on the ground beneath and around them. For the second time that evening I put my hand in a dead man’s pocket. The difference was that this time the coat had someone in it. I found a telephone, and dried it on my shirt as I went back to the cab.

Hamid had turned the radio on, and the taxi was once again filled with the familiar, unknown language, pounding out a thousand words a minute to a hip-hop rhythm. Maybe Hamid was trying to get things back to normal. I couldn’t actually see the look in his eyes, so it may have been something else. I didn’t ask him yet where he’d learned to shoot so well—where he’d learned to kill people. Maybe he would tell me himself sometime. Maybe someday I wouldn’t be so deathly tired, and I’d have the energy to think more about it.

Väntinen’s phone wasn’t password protected, and I went straight to his message files. I didn’t need to search long before I found what I was looking for.

The train ticket was for one person, but it was clear from the message that there would be two other passengers in the group, and that they were leaving tonight.

The departure time was in forty-six minutes.