The Hummingbird

by Kati Hiekkapelto

  ‘Coffee?’ Jere shouted from the kitchen.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Anna replied and thought she recognised the back of the jacket now disappearing into the crowds outside. Just then she realised what was different about the hallway: it was the sweet smell of incense. The smell of Virve.

  ‘I’ll have a cup,’ said Esko, appearing next to Anna in the living room. Anna gave him a meaningful glance and moved her forefinger and middle finger in a running motion along the windowsill. Esko nodded but looked as though he hadn’t fully understood what she was trying to say. Jere soon came through with a tray of coffee.

  ‘What brought you here in such a hurry? Weren’t things sorted as far as I’m concerned?’ The boy was trying to sound nonchalant, but the faint quiver in his voice revealed how nervous he was.

  ‘The only thing that’s clear is that you couldn’t have shot Riikka, but nothing else is sorted – with regard to you or anyone else,’ said Anna. ‘You can be sure we’ll be visiting you many times in the future.’

  ‘Do you know this man?’ Esko asked and pulled a photograph from his jacket pocket.

  Jere glanced at the photograph and handed it back straight away. Too quickly, thought Anna.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure? Take a good look,’ said Esko.

  ‘I’ve already looked and I’m perfectly sure I’ve never seen this guy. Who is he? Did he kill Riikka?’

  ‘Don’t you watch the news? Read the papers?’

  ‘Haven’t had time. I’m a bit busy at the moment.’

  ‘What, shagging Virve Sarlin?’ Anna quipped.

  Jere coughed violently, almost choking on his coffee and sending droplets of liquid flying through the air. Esko looked at Anna and whacked Jere on the back a few times. Eventually he regained his composure, but his cheeks were a dark shade of red. Anna said nothing. Silence was often the best interviewing technique.

  ‘Where were you two days before yesterday between 7 and 11 p.m.?’ Esko asked eventually.

  Jere was silent.

  ‘Would you like to take another look at that photograph?’ he continued.

  Still Jere held his tongue.

  They waited. Esko stirred more sugar into his coffee, his spoon jangling delicately against the sides of the porcelain cup. He sipped his coffee and calmly replaced his cup on the saucer.

  ‘Listen to me, Sonny Jim. We haven’t got time to piss around. I’ve asked you two questions, and for the first question we are particularly keen to hear your answer. It can’t be all that hard for people your age to remember what happened a few nights ago. Now where were you?’

  Jere cleared his throat.

  ‘I was here,’ he said finally.

  ‘Here? Can anyone prove it?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Yes. I was with Virve.’ Jere’s cheeks reddened again.

  Anna and Esko looked at one another. What did I tell you, said Anna’s smug expression.

  ‘Can you elaborate?’ asked Esko.

  Jere thought about this for a moment and eventually decided to give in.

  ‘All right. Virve was here all that day. And yesterday. She came round on Wednesday morning at about ten and we’ve been here ever since. She left just before you turned up.’

  Or at the very moment we turned up, thought Anna.

  ‘So you’ve been in one another’s company for two and a half days?’ she asked, slightly amused.

  ‘That’s right. Well, we popped out to the shop this morning. Bread and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Have you two been at it long?’ asked Esko.

  Jere was silent for a moment before continuing. The redness in his cheeks began to fade and he sat up. The arrogant exterior was back.

  ‘What’s the point in hiding it any longer? We haven’t done anything wrong. We had a bit of a fling before I started dating Riikka, back in high school. Riikka didn’t know about it. She thought Virve hated me, but all the time she was gagging for it.’

  He gave a smug chuckle. You revolting creature, thought Anna.

  ‘And when Riikka and I broke up, Virve came round straight away to – how should I put it – comfort me. Didn’t bother me much. She’s a bit weird, not really my type, but in the bedroom none of that really matters. Quite the opposite.’

  Bastard, thought Anna.

  ‘Did you know that Virve doesn’t have an alibi for the night of Riikka’s murder?’ Esko asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now she has motive too,’ Anna added.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? The thing with Riikka was over, done and dusted. I can have fun with whoever I want. So what if it’s her best friend?’

  ‘Did you tell Riikka about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not like we’re serious or anything, we just have sex every so often. Virve was worried that Riikka might think we’d been at it while the two of us were still dating, because the break-up was so fresh. And we didn’t want to hurt her, Virve least of all.’

  ‘Perhaps Virve is more serious about this than you are,’ said Anna. ‘Perhaps you were going to get back together with Riikka?’

  ‘No way. You can think what you like. What about the second murder, the man?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, so you have heard about it?’

  ‘We bought the paper at the corner shop. Took me a while to put two and two together. Sorry.’

  ‘I see. You realise that two people who give one another alibis aren’t generally considered all that reliable?’ said Anna.

  ‘You can’t prove otherwise,’ said Jere.

  We’ll see about that, thought Anna and asked whether Jere’s Remington was still at the police station. Jere took it from his locked gun cabinet. The weapon was clean and gleaming, the smell of gun oil in the barrel.

  ‘So you’ve got it back?’ Anna commented, though she knew that the police were unable to confiscate weapons without good reason.

  ‘Yes, I have. And I’m planning on going home next week to join the hunt.’

  ‘This has just been cleaned,’ said Esko.

  ‘All those coppers’ fingerprints really started pissing me off.’

  ‘You keep good care of these weapons.’

  ‘They’re expensive things. In good hands they can last for centuries.’

  ‘Is this the gun that shot Riikka?’

  Jere was visibly shaken and shrunk from a bolshie young man into a cowering little boy.

  ‘Jesus Christ, no, it isn’t.’

  ‘What about Ville Pollari?’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’ he repeated and looked as though he might crack at any moment. The shells around tough lads like this are often surprisingly thin and easily torn, thought Anna. Jere began to sob. He wept like a child.

  ‘I always thought you were taking the death of your ex-girlfriend a bit too calmly,’ said Anna.

  ‘I’m not,’ Jere whispered. ‘It’s been hell.’

  ‘So can we start to talk like grown-ups now and tell each other the truth?’ Esko asked.

  ‘I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t killed anybody.’

  ‘What do you know about the Aztecs?’ Anna asked suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Jere looked baffled.

  ‘The Aztecs. What do you know about them?’ she repeated.

  ‘This is a fucking farce,’ said Jere as he dried his eyes on his shirtsleeve.

  ‘It’s far from it, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about them. They were Indians in South America or something.’

  ‘Mexico,’ Anna corrected him.

  At around six o’clock that evening Anna parked her car outside Bihar’s house. The wind had picked up considerably and carried the rain in sweeping gusts. Anna thought of the autumn that extended months ahead; it felt oppressive. Dark clouds gathered across the sky earlier than usual, and the street lights around her lit up one after the other, as if to comfort the suburb emptied of people by the approaching storm. Brightly lit windows dappled th
e sides of the apartment blocks reaching up into the sky. The residents of Rajapuro had fled indoors.

  The lights were on in Bihar’s apartment too. The kitchen and the smaller bedroom looked out on to the car park. Anna had acquired the floor plan of their apartment from the city housing association. She had called them up and pretended to be considering renting an apartment in the area. This is how she knew that the living-room and master-bedroom windows were on the other side of the building, in the courtyard surrounded by four tower blocks. Sometimes Anna had watched from the courtyard, sitting by the sandpit, her eyes fixed on the third-floor windows. She also knew that the parents slept in the living room and that Mehvan had a room of his own. The girls shared a room, the smaller of the two bedrooms.

  Did Bihar really consider this home? Did she feel at home in this suburb, this city? What about her parents? How can someone from far away in the mountains ever settle down among all this concrete, in a land flattened by the long, dark winter?

  In a way, Anna understood Bihar’s parents. If her mother had remained here, she would probably have clung on to some grotesque emblem of the past and worshipped it in the small apartment she rented from the city council, weeping for her sons and her daughter. But her mother had had the opportunity to return home, and Anna knew that in this respect she had been exceptionally lucky. The situation at home had calmed down. In fact, the northern areas of Serbia, where to this day there is still a significant Hungarian minority, had been spared the worst of the conflict – like most areas of Serbia, except for Kosovo. Even the NATO bombings in the late 1990s had caused little more than fear and a few broken windows. Most young Hungarian men had fled across the border to Szeged or Budapest to avoid being called up for the Serb army. Some had gone even further. Some had been sent to the front. And some of them had died. Like Áron.

  Their mother had returned home as soon as Anna turned eighteen. I’ve done my duty, she said, and tried to convince the children to come back with her. But it was different if you were young, with a Finnish education to your name, rooted in university studies. Anna wasn’t able to go back just like that, once and for all.

  Perhaps rooted is too strong a word. For Anna it was a glimmer of the future possibilities that she wouldn’t have in her former homeland if she suddenly dropped out of school. One crucial aspect of that glimmer was the fact that she had immersed herself in a new language. Anna had risen to the surface quickly, learned to swim, managed to breathe. And she wasn’t the kind of teenager to give up a future like that, no matter how thin the bonds to this country. She had already been uprooted by force once, as a child, when they had no other choice. It was more than just a trifling matter, and something she had no desire to repeat. Anna had decided to stay.

  Ákos was another case altogether. He had nothing keeping him here, nothing except the band and now Anna. His studies at the veterinary school in Yugoslavia had been cut short when they fled the country, and his language skills weren’t good enough to secure a study position in Finland. Ákos had fallen through the safety net, and there he had remained. There was no horizon, no letter in a bottle, no white doves bringing him olive branches. He had effectively been abandoned. When their mother had returned home, she had pleaded with him to join her; she’d seen that there was no future for him in Finland. But Ákos thought he was far too old to go back to school with a group of teenagers. Things with the band were beginning to pick up around that time; they rehearsed almost every day and were doing gigs in dingy rock clubs across the country. There had been plenty of booze, of course.

  Ákos had promised their mother he would start studying as soon as his Finnish was good enough.

  Was that another good reason for him not to study this language that people said was a distant relative of their own? Ákos had survived in the band on a smattering of English, and that was the language he still used for official matters at the job centre and social security office. When she had just started at the police academy, Anna had invited Ákos to one of her student parties, and nobody could believe that Anna had a brother who could barely understand what they were saying. Not after meeting Anna.

  The whole evening had been a catastrophe. Ákos had drunk far too much and had ended up being rude to Anna’s friends, going on about anarchism and his connections to the Yugoslav mafia. Anna was mortified. With hindsight, it was after that altercation that her relationship with her brother had become more distant. And after their mother left, Ákos’s drinking took a rapid turn for the worse.

  A figure appeared at the kitchen window in Bihar’s apartment. It was the figure of a woman, of that Anna was certain. It was probably Bihar’s mother, standing there fixedly, a black silhouette against the light. The figure seemed to be looking right into Anna’s car. Good, she thought. I want you to know that I’m still watching you, still keeping my eyes open regardless of your husband’s threats. I will not let anything bad happen to your daughter; I will protect her from you. Don’t you see anything twisted about it, she imagined herself asking Zera Chelkin. Anna felt the urge to sound the horn, to open the car windows and shout her story to the concrete walls around her.

  The figure lowered the venetian blinds and twisted them shut. A moment later the same thing happened in the bedroom, the one that Bihar shared with her little sister. That’s the end of the show, for now, she thought, and turned on the ignition. As she swerved out of the car park, she saw in the corner of her left eye a white-and-blue police Saab. The patrol car drove into the courtyard via the cycle path, then immediately reversed back. Anna caught only a glimpse of the driver. There was something familiar about him.

  The storm hit the city with full force just as Anna arrived at the door of Café au Lait. She struggled against the weather to yank the door open, then a sudden gust of wind almost wrenched it from its hinges. Though the streets were deserted, not everybody had gone home to escape the storm. The café was full of animated conversation and warm light, and the atmosphere sophisticated. Classical piano music could be heard in the background and the scent of coffee tickled her nostrils. Zoran was already waiting at a table in a dusky section towards the back of the café.

  Anna ordered a pot of tea and a slice of white-chocolate cheesecake. Zoran took only an espresso. They exchanged a few words about the howling weather outside, their eyes searching out into the darkening evening more than towards one another.

  ‘Šta je? Why did you call?’ Zoran asked eventually.

  ‘I don’t know. I felt a bit lonely.’

  ‘You know I’m married. There are plenty of things Nataša pretends not to notice, like any good wife, but not for ever. I can’t start dating you.’

  ‘U kurac, Zorane, that’s not what I want.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Pff, I don’t know. Nothing.’

  ‘Ajde, Anna. What’s the matter? You and me, we’ve … you know, in the past. You didn’t used to be the clingy type, that’s why I liked you.’

  Anna stirred her tea, watched as the spoon formed a whirlpool in the cup. She had her reasons for contacting Zoran, and there was nothing romantic about them. But suddenly she had felt the urge to say something altogether different to that handsome, dark-eyed man almost ten years her senior, the man she had known since childhood and with whom she had spent a first night of passion after turning sixteen. Even back then, it was clear that they could never be a real couple. You’re too young, he had said, and then started dating Nataša, who was only a year older than Anna. You’re too independent, is what Anna knew he really meant.

  But now she was unable to say anything.

  Zoran sipped his coffee. Anna had always been charmed by the Serbs’ ability to enjoy the same cup of coffee for hours, to construct an entire social interaction around a single espresso.

  And at that moment she realised that this was precisely what she had been missing.

  A sense of homesickness tightened her throat.

  She wanted to see Réka, to sit on the terrace outside Gon
g, to have a coffee and chat about things. She wanted to speak Hungarian.

  ‘Have you heard of the jogging murders?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘I read about it in the paper. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered if you’d heard anything.’

  ‘Nista. Nothing. This isn’t a professional job or immigrant gang stuff. Looks like it’s some local lunatic.’

  ‘If you hear anything, you’ll tell me, right?’

  Zoran stared at Anna and sipped his coffee, lost in thought.

  ‘Sure. But trust me, I don’t know anything about this. Look, pretty nimble, huh?’

  Anna turned and looked towards the counter and watched a man in a wheelchair taking a cup of tea and a slice of cake into his lap and wheeling himself to the nearest table.

  ‘I’d probably shoot myself if I ended up like that,’ Zoran continued. ‘Still, people can get used to all sorts of things.’

  Petri noticed Anna and Zoran and waved. He looked unhappy. Now he’ll think I have a boyfriend, Anna thought in horror. And so fucking what? I don’t give a damn what he thinks of me.

  ‘You two know each other?’ Zoran asked, surprised.

  ‘We must have bumped into each other at work,’ Anna replied.

  Zoran glanced at his watch.

  ‘I’ve gotta go. Nati is waiting with the kids. Zdravo, honey. See you around.’

  Zoran winked and gave her a salacious smile. Anna felt like smirking back at him, but turned instead to gaze out through the streaks of rainwater pouring down the window. Arsehole, she thought.

  Half an hour later Anna left the café with a raft of unpleasant thoughts heaving in her head like a sea in a storm. The wind almost blew her over and on the way home gusts of wind gripped the car and shook it violently. Needless to say, Petri had come over to chat with her as soon as Zoran had left. Straight away he asked whether Anna had received any more of those messages. Then he started asking how she was, as if they had once been much closer friends. Anna had forced herself to answer politely, and had even tried to smile a little, asking him about his work, this and that, the things friends talk about. Petri had brought his tea and cake over to her table and sat there for a while chit-chatting. Then he asked her directly why she hadn’t wanted to see him again. Anna had been unable to answer. Was she with that man who just left? No. Was it because he was disabled? No. Then why? I don’t know. After that Petri didn’t say another thing; he wheeled himself outside leaving his half-eaten cake on the table. She had felt like bursting into tears.