Below the Surface

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “How did they break into the car?”

  “Annukka thought she left the window open when she ran down to the corner store to pick up the newspapers. She would have told me if her manuscript was stolen!”

  “She didn’t even tell you what was in it,” Autio pointed out.

  At this, Jääskeläinen became irate. Jumping up, he started to scream profanities at anyone and everyone. At the police, at Annukka, at Kervinen. His face burned so red I worried he was going to have a heart attack.

  “Mr. Jääskeläinen. Atro! We want to find out how that manuscript ended up in Jouko Suuronen’s possession—just like you do. And you can help us best by answering our questions instead of throwing a fit. Tell us about the car break-in—” I began, then my phone rang. More work for the Violent Crime Unit. The duty officer told me that a Russian woman had been found unconscious in the basement of her apartment building. She’d been rushed to the hospital, and the officers suspected she’d been sexually assaulted.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Koivu and Autio, you continue. Let’s talk later about next steps.”

  “Prostitute?” I asked when I arrived on the scene.

  “Probably. There’re two or three apartments in that building with an indeterminate number of Russian and Estonian women staying in them. We’ve raided it a few times, and you can guess how many of them had proper visas.”

  “Aha. So I can get background from Patrol. I’ll see who I can spare. And we can’t question the woman right now, right? But she’s going to live?”

  “The doctors are still looking her over.”

  Back at my office, I assigned Lehtovuori and Lähde, along with a Russian interpreter, to interview the woman once she was able to talk to us. Everyone knew that Russian prostitution was happening, but it was ridiculously hard to get a handle on. Women came and went, no one dared talk to the police, and they changed apartments and phones constantly because there was big money behind the operation. And the criminals were the women, not their clients. That’s because so many of the people who made the laws were also customers. For years a tenacious rumor had been going around the station that Assistant Chief of Police Kaartamo enjoyed variety in his sex life and didn’t mind paying for companionship. Of course people always gossiped about bosses, but the idea didn’t feel impossible.

  I was glad that we were going to get to make contact with at least one of the prostitutes, since it might give us an opportunity to free a few people from human trafficking. I called Lehtovuori again and ordered him to arrange a guard for the woman at the hospital.

  Then my thoughts returned to Annukka Hackman. Why didn’t she tell her husband the full contents of her book? He had a right to know—after all, he was her publisher. I went to our conference room, which we also used as a case room, and found the pictures of Annukka Hackman’s body. Things rarely went well for lone rangers in real life. A couple of times I’d had to take stupid risks in my own work, but I wasn’t going to do that anymore. A case I’d investigated just before my maternity leave, the murder of a politician named Petri Ilveskivi, had shown me how productive working as a group can be. That was sure to be the case now too. Koivu and Autio would get Jääskeläinen to talk, and someone else would succeed with Suuronen.

  At four it was time to go pick up the kids. When I arrived in the yard of the day care, Iida rushed up to me.

  “Mommy! My shoe broke! Look, I have the school’s extra shoes. They’re way too big.”

  Minna, one of the day care workers, also came over.

  “Hi,” she said. “I noticed when we came in from our morning play that Iida’s foot was soaking wet. The toe of her shoe separated from the sole.”

  That’s all I need, I thought. There was no point fixing cheapo winter boots from the megamart, and Iida needed shoes fast. Then I caught myself: a broken winter boot was a pretty small problem compared to the previous day, when I thought someone had sent Iida a mail bomb. Be thankful for a small, boring life.

  I decided to drive to Tapiola—maybe I could feed the kids fast food while I was there. Antti hated hamburgers and the disposable ideology of the restaurants that served them, so I felt like I was doing something on the sly when I walked into McDonald’s with the kids. The line was long and the smell of the grease made me ill. Iida began demanding a toy with her kid’s meal, and Taneli joined in the chorus. For girls they were offering ponies with pink tails and monsters for boys, the cashier informed me. I didn’t want either, but I didn’t feel like fighting, and of course Iida wanted the girl toy, and Taneli wanted the monster. Gender roles were learned quickly in day care. But it wasn’t like the world would be a better place if my son played with plastic ponies and my daughter tried to frighten him with a monster.

  I ordered just a salad, because I knew I’d end up eating half of Taneli’s meal. Of course he wanted the same thing as Iida. There was no space downstairs, and maneuvering upstairs with a two-year-old and a full tray was a chore. Iida careened headlong through the people toward a free window table.

  Christmas had already arrived in the Tapiola shopping district, and all the windows were full of Christmas advertisements and lights, Santa Claus flying in his sleigh, and cheery songs. I pitied the salespeople who had to listen to the same Christmas tracks for a month on end, since I had a hard time simply surviving a shoe purchase with the music playing. Taneli was angry because we didn’t buy him anything, so I went to the children’s clothing department to get him some new gloves. The excitement of riding on the escalator cheered him up, and I barely managed to tear him away from it. A violet sequined dress with spaghetti straps caught Iida’s eye, but the cut was far more appropriate for an adult, with an open neckline and back, accentuated waist, and short hem with strings of sequins dangling from it. Something like that would have looked fantastic on Ursula but not on a six-year-old.

  “Mommy, can I have this? It’s so cute!”

  “I don’t think you need a new dress.”

  “Our preschool Christmas party is soon.”

  Suddenly I realized that Taneli had disappeared as we were fighting. Hopefully he hadn’t gone back to the escalator! I could just see my child tumbling over and being strangled by his hood on the belt. Ignoring Iida’s protests, I grabbed her hand and started dragging her toward the down escalator. I reached Taneli just as he was stepping onto it. The whole place was teeming with adults, but no one had tried to stop him.

  “Mom, I want that dress!”

  “Be quiet!” I picked up Taneli, and he squealed and squirmed, wanting to walk on his own. Iida started crying, and I felt as if the entire shopping center was staring at us disapprovingly. One more career woman who can’t handle her kids. Oh hell.

  In order to make peace, I suggested that we go to the library. I checked out a couple of books for myself too, hoping to escape from reality in bygone England or a world of fantasy. I had a hard time convincing Taneli that the Moomin book he wanted was already on our bookshelf at home. On our way back we walked through Tapiontori Square. The fountain was silent, and stars twinkled over the central office tower. The Tapiontori Restaurant was only half-full since it wasn’t quite dinnertime.

  “She said she was going to give it to him at Tapiontori.” That was what Sini had said Annukka Hackman had promised Kervinen. And what if the thing Kervinen was supposed to get was waiting for him here? Atro Jääskeläinen had said Annukka sometimes mailed copies of articles and manuscripts to people for safekeeping. Could Annukka have mailed something to the restaurant, to be retrieved either by herself or by Kervinen?

  I’d have to check.

  “Let’s go to one more place,” I told the kids and led them into the restaurant. Luckily there wasn’t any Christmas music playing.

  “Hello, I’m Maria Kallio from the Espoo Police,” I said to the bartender as I flashed my badge. “You had a regular customer, a reporter named Annukka Hackman. I’m leading her murder investigation. Has your restaurant received any mail addressed to her?”

&nb
sp; The bartender gave me a suspicious look. Police detectives didn’t usually conduct criminal investigations with two children hanging on their coattails and an armful of picture books.

  “To Annukka Hackman . . . No, nothing comes to mind. I know the case, though. We hardly ever receive mail addressed to customers, but wait a minute and I’ll ask the manager.”

  The bartender disappeared into a back room. Iida had sat down in an armchair near the bar and was looking like an expert as she flipped through a business magazine, and Taneli was flirting with a woman sitting at a nearby table by hiding behind my back, then peeking out and smiling. Why didn’t I ever come here for lunch with Taskinen? I mean for dinner with Antti? I thought, correcting myself.

  The bartender came back. He was carrying two envelopes, a large A4-size one and a smaller padded mailer.

  “There wasn’t anything for Hackman, but these have been sitting on the manager’s desk for weeks. This bigger one is addressed to an Ulla Aalto, and I think it came in the summer, and this other one . . . I think it says Kervinen.”

  I felt like snatching the envelope from the bartender, but instead I extended my hand with feigned calm. I’d seen Annukka Hackman’s large, clear handwriting on enough documents that I easily recognized it.

  Tapiontori Restaurant, H. Kervinen, for pickup, the envelope said. I looked at the postmark date. November 4. That was the day before Hackman’s body was found, two days before her intended meeting with Kervinen at this restaurant. Cautiously I felt the envelope. There was something thin and rectangular inside, presumably a floppy disk. There was no sender listed on the outside.

  This was exactly what I’d been looking for. “I’ll give you a receipt for this,” I told the bartender and started fishing for my notepad.

  “But shouldn’t it go to this Kervinen?”

  “It should, but he’s dead too. I’m taking it now.”

  I could barely write legibly. What version of the manuscript had Annukka sent Kervinen?

  I put the envelope in my bag in a zippered pocket. The excitement made me impatient, and I was agitated as I drove home, with no patience for Iida’s questions about what an exchange rate was, even though my only real principle of parenting was that children’s questions deserved answers. I felt like driving to the police station and assigning someone to read the manuscript immediately. Should I call someone to pick it up? No—I only had two hours until Iida’s bedtime, and I wanted to read it myself. But had Antti taken our laptop with him on his trip to Vaasa?

  Fortunately the computer was at home. I would have liked to start reading immediately, but the children wouldn’t stand for it. I read them their library books at a record pace and glanced at my purse every fifteen minutes. Of course Taneli had no interest in going to sleep, and Iida kept asking when Daddy was coming home and spent ten whole minutes brushing her teeth. What had I been thinking earlier in the day about lone rangers and working as a team? Someone else could have already read the disk. Ursula was right. I was a selfish bitch who didn’t know how to delegate.

  When the breathing in the children’s room had quieted to slow, sleepy sniffles, I finally opened the envelope. The disk was a standard black Canon floppy. I carefully slid it into the computer, then copied it to the hard drive and then to another disk. Every noise from the stairwell made me jump as if someone could just come through the locked door downstairs. I checked the chain on the door and lowered the blinds, then laughed at myself in derision.

  When I’d finally opened the file directory, I clicked on the Table of Contents. First came the Introduction, which I’d read. Then Chapter One, Rauha and Viktor’s Story. That hadn’t been in the versions I’d seen so far. Sasha’s parents’ background had only been covered briefly in a chapter about his childhood. Now his childhood years were in another file, as Chapter Two. No other chapters had been added.

  What was Rauha and Viktor’s story about? My head buzzed as I opened the file.

  21

  RAUHA AND VIKTOR’S STORY

  TRANSLATED FROM VIKTOR SMEDS’S ORIGINAL SWEDISH MANUSCRIPT BY ANNUKKA HACKMAN

  Dear Andreas and Alexander. By the time you read this, I’ll already be gone, so I can tell you with peace of mind who your father really was. I was not the man you thought I was.

  I was born in Leningrad in 1935, not in 1938 like all the documents say. My given name was Viktor, that’s true, but my last name was Rylov. My father died in the Winter War at the Battle of Raate Road, blown up by a tank. My younger sister, Natalia, starved to death during the Siege of Leningrad, and my mother never recovered from that. Mother died in 1952, on the opening day of the Helsinki Olympics.

  I don’t remember much about my father, because he was away from home so much serving in the army. Natalia and I were both conceived while Father was on leave. Mother worked in a makhorka factory rolling cigarettes. I still remember the way she smelled. We lived in a room that was smaller than the woodshed at Smedsbo. The toilet was at the back of the yard, and we heated wash water on the stove once a week. We weren’t any poorer than anyone else I knew, though. Everyone was poor. My mother was a communist, because she didn’t dare to be anything else. Babushka, my father’s mother, hated the Finns because they killed her son. I remember being afraid of many things: the rats people said bit little children’s fingers and toes, the Militsiya, Uncle Vladimir who lived next door and beat my mother and me when he was drunk.

  I wasn’t particularly good in school, and that was probably partially because I began my studies during the war and partially because of malnutrition. I didn’t have many dreams other than getting to eat as much butter as I wanted. Before the war I’d been able to taste butter. But during the war, we lived on cabbage and rutabagas, or, when times were particularly bad, wallpaper paste and grass. I dreamed of eating butter with a spoon straight from the dish. That time didn’t happen until I was here in Finland, though.

  My memories of my childhood are disjointed and fragile. Your mother says I don’t want to remember and I’m shutting it out. My Leningrad wasn’t the city of bridges and empire architecture I’ve seen in pictures. It was a limited area of backstreets, our house, the school, and the cemetery where I went to remember my father. Natalia was buried on the Field of Mars in a mass grave my mother didn’t even remember the precise location of. After the war my mother’s health declined steadily, but we were never able to get her to a doctor. When the lung cancer was discovered, it was so far along nothing could be done. By then I’d quit school and spent my days working in a shoe factory and my nights caring for Mother. I didn’t think I was lucky or unlucky. Life was just like that. During her final weeks, Mother prayed often, and I feared the neighbors would hear. The only god allowed was Stalin.

  After Mother passed away, I was called into the army. I was sent far from home, to Baku in Azerbaijan, but I enjoyed it there. I was an infantryman in the 114th Rifle Division. The warmth was intoxicating after the terrible winters of Leningrad. I was used to bullying and violence from my childhood, so the army felt like home. And besides, soldiers had a better life than civilians. We had food, clothing, and a dry place to sleep. I didn’t have to make any decisions myself. Everything was decided for me. Routine created a feeling of security: there would be food tomorrow, and no one else would be lying in my bed in the evening. I didn’t have any other plans for the future, so I decided to stay in the army if they would let me. This decision was strengthened by learning that I might be able to go abroad, perhaps to Poland. I didn’t want to go back to Leningrad and the shoe factory. I was a good shot. That was the first thing I’d ever been better at than anyone else. Eventually I was invited to join the Communist Party. You didn’t refuse that.

  In the end, the army sent me to Finland. I was disappointed when I heard. Finland would be even colder than Leningrad. I didn’t know much about the country, other than it had been beaten in two successive wars by the Soviet Union and was now such a faithful ally that it had agreed to lease us the Porkkala area for fifty
years. And that was the area I was going to now, to defend my nation from the capitalists’ attempts to destroy communism.

  I arrived in Finland late one night in early May 1952. When we crossed the border at Vainikkala, I didn’t know that I would never return to the land of my birth. I sensed a shift, but I thought it was just the change of environment. I had no idea I would change myself. At first I was disappointed that the landscape bathed in the moonlight wasn’t any different from the parts of Karelia we’d already traveled through. We rode past Helsinki and through Espoo, and the morning gradually dawned. The journey from Baku had lasted for days, and I’d only slept a little. When our transport finally stopped at the border of Espoo and Kirkkonummi to check our papers, I thought I was dreaming. I didn’t know the sea could look like that.

  Of course I’d caught glimpses of water before in Leningrad, but only lakes and rivers. I didn’t learn to swim until I was in the army. The sea smelled different, though, and I could make it out even through the stench of truck fuel and dirty men’s sweat. The sea. I hoped I could get close to it. I wished I could dive into it. Soon my dream was realized when I was stationed close to the shore, at a farm named Smedsbo on the Degerö Peninsula. I was assigned to guard the border. Sometimes I was on the northern border at Lake Humaljärvi, sometimes on the western border at Ström. I was given a bicycle, and during my free moments I often rode to the beaches at Kopparnäs and Degerö to swim.

  Life at the Porkkala base was much more luxurious than in the Soviet Union. The base had its own school, a movie theater in a former church in Kirkkonummi, and all sorts of goods and foods that I’d never heard of before in the store. Mandarins in tissue paper, good strong coffee, tobacco that tasted different from what my mother had taught me to smoke as a child. That summer was magical: white nights, warmth, and even an occasional feeling of camaraderie with the other residents of the base.