“This is a good place for walking. The city does an admirable job taking care of the area. It’s always safe to move about here,” he said.
I waited, because even though I had one foot out the door, it was clear that Ransu wanted to say something.
“Yes?”
THE SCRIPT
BY ANTTI TUOMAINEN
Lintulahti
Translated by Lola Rogers
Juhana Lauste knew that he was being watched. That in itself wasn’t a surprise. He had come into the bar to be recognized. Or rather, not just to be recognized. That was merely the first step. A pleasant electricity shot through him, from the soles of his feet through his whole body.
Lauste tried to find the best stance. He lifted his foot onto the ankle-high steel footrest and lowered his right elbow onto the bar, checking first to make sure that the spot in front of him was dry, not wet and sticky like it would be later in the evening. The so-called music, a generic drumbeat mixed with sighing meant to be sensual, wasn’t yet loud enough to be annoying. The open door to Uudenmaankatu provided ample ventilation. Later, when the door was closed, the smells of sweat, piss, and a thousand people exhaling would torment the senses like a public toilet. Which the place was, of course, even if it pretended otherwise with its chandeliers and black leather couches.
Juhana Lauste was dressed casually in soft tan leather shoes, two-hundred-euro, distressed designer jeans, and a thin white button-up shirt with wild patterns reminiscent of flowers or stars woven into the front in multicolored thread.
Lauste had only been wearing the shirt for the past couple of hours. He’d done something he often did—gone to a clothing store, flirted with an anorexic, garishly made-up saleswoman toddling about on high stiletto heels, and shoved the shirt he was wearing into the trash bin (Diesel, a hundred and sixty-nine euros, one he unfortunately still liked and had only had for a few weeks, but sometimes you just had to show people who was who). Then he’d put on the new shirt, careful to let the empty, desperate eyes of the thirty-something clerk, with her fringes of false eyelashes, linger as long as possible on his tanned, muscular torso. While he did this he chatted familiarly, his voice pleasantly soft and friendly, and behaved as if he could be anyone at all, although of course he couldn’t. He was Juhana Lauste, producer, the king of Finnish film and television.
It was his weekend. His wife, who was his second wife (or did Malla count too? In that case, Tiina was his third), had taken the children with her to visit her parents up north in Oulu. Lauste hated his in-laws. He didn’t really like his wife and children, either, but that was different. His wife and children were sort of required, part of the package. They were something to be had, just as in the spring you would purchase the most expensive riding mower with the biggest Briggs & Stratton engine possible. They were all part of the same presentation that showed people that he always got what he wanted. Which was everything. The worst thing about visits to Oulu was of course that he wasn’t recognized up there. Or if he was, his name didn’t impress anyone. They could have their Lapland, and fuck their reindeer.
It was different here in Helsinki, and in south Helsinki in particular.
More and more often Lauste felt like the city ought to be divided from the rest of the country by a wall. On the other side of the wall would be the woods that stretched from Helsinki’s farthest suburbs almost to the Arctic Sea; a nearly uninhabited wasteland with a surface area the size of Central Europe where bugs and ugly people sucked the life out of anyone the slightest bit interesting who happened to turn up there.
South Helsinki suited him: stone buildings, expensive apartments, boutiques, award-winning restaurants, trendy bars, stylish customers. Here people recognized him, flattered him, sucked up to him, awaited his next creation.
His television shows were what are called mass-audience programs. In other words, they were made cheaply, sold out their ad spots, and cultivated a kind of humor (“I’m soooo drunk.” “Me too. Except I’m so drunker.” Studio audience laughs.) anyone can understand, even if they’re senile, retarded, sedated, drunk, or so numbed from stuffing themselves with sausage that they have to get around on all fours like some cross between a sheep and frog, which was how Lauste described the target audience for his shows.
He had the good fortune not to have to spend his Saturday evenings in front of the television. This was a thousand times better: a pulsing nightclub filled with the scent of women, the sweet expectation of sex. He rarely made the first move, and only when he had a particular reason. Women approached him—young women. He himself was already nearly fifty (he’d celebrated three forty-sixth birthdays, and had resolved to do the same with his forty-seventh, if it ever happened to sneak up on him), which meant two things: he had to go to the gym every day, and his bed partners were younger than his oldest son, Timo, a Subutex user whom he hadn’t seen in six years. Lauste had also started taking large amounts of Viagra and Cialis. Just in case, he would tell himself as he sat in the front seat of his SUV and swallowed the little blue pills.
It took a minute for Lauste to locate his observer. The woman was sitting alone at a table near the door. And what a woman. About thirty, shapely, with short bangs and thick, straight black hair. A modern Cleopatra. Lauste felt her brown eyes hot on his cheeks, forehead, and lips. The distance between them was about fifteen meters. The intervening space was filled with groups in lively conversation, men and women talking over each other, their eyes constantly straying to nearby tables.
Lauste’s right hand went instinctively toward his pants pocket. Only one year ago he wouldn’t have been able to tell you why the right front pockets of jeans have a smaller pocket sewn into them. Now he knew. That was where he carried a handy dose of liquid Rohypnol. He’d first heard of the drug from a foreign acquaintance who was also a film producer. His movies were euphemistically called adult entertainment, though they didn’t waste time with needless aesthetic considerations and explored something other than interpersonal relationships. This fellow producer’s stories of the drug’s effects had piqued Lauste’s interest. He asked if his colleague could get some of it for him too. Well, not exactly for him, of course, but for his use.
Lauste performed his first test of the drug on his wife. Tiina had just put the children to bed and they were drinking wine in front of the fire downstairs. The glass doors to the terrace were open, the water of Jollaksenlahti was gleaming in the moonlight, the night perfectly windless. They touched glasses and drank. Tiina was saying something about the children and Lauste was doing what he always did—pretending to listen, behaving as if he were interested, lying in his replies. When Tiina got up to go to the bathroom, Lauste poured some of the drug into her glass. She returned to sit beside him on the sofa and took a drink. Lauste waited. After several minutes, she looked at him as if she were trying to remember something. Something crucially important. Then an expression of confusion came over her face, and then it went lax. For the sake of practice, Lauste took off her clothes, had a long session with her, and carried her to bed. In the morning, she remembered nothing of the evening at all, she simply wondered at the strange salty taste in her mouth, the tenderness in her rear end, and the heaviness in her extremities. Lauste had patted her on the aforementioned rear end and said it was no doubt due to the hot lovemaking of a summer night and the wine she’d imbibed.
After that there was no going back.
It was hard to say what he liked best about drugging women. It wasn’t that he suffered from any shortage of females, or their naked bodies. But something about that moment—the moment when a woman realized she’d been deceived, that fleeting fraction of a second when she realized that something had gone terribly wrong, realized that the evening, and that particular moment between them, was not at all what she had imagined it to be—was endlessly fascinating to Lauste, made him tingle, before and afterward, made him finally feel something. And the certainty that the moment belonged only to him, would remain only in his memory, made it comple
tely unique, utterly incomparable.
Lauste picked up his glass—a fresh, sparkling gin and tonic—and turned his back to the bar. He looked at the dark-haired woman on the other side of the room. And as it happened, the woman smiled. Lauste fixed his attention on the redness of her lips. Then she stretched out her wrist slightly and pointed at the chair in front of her. Lauste hummed with contentment. Once again, he hadn’t had to make the first move.
Up close, the woman was even more beautiful than he’d thought. Her black hair gleamed, falling over her shoulders like a raven’s feathers, and her eyes were dark and elegantly moist. Her shoulders were strong yet graceful, the fullness in her breasts really was truly just full breasts, not part of a heavy build. Even seated, she gave the impression of being the proverbial ten, physically, and Lauste liked to collect those.
Then came the scintillating moment: introducing himself. What made the moment scintillating was its utter redundancy. Lauste knew she knew who he was.
He stretched out his hand and said his name. The woman’s smile was just what he’d expected. There was no surprise in that smile. She said her own name.
“Minna.”
Her voice was slightly low, and ever so slightly husky. Lauste sat down across from her. Just as he was leaning his elbows on the table, before he had a chance to say something that one says in such situations, like, I couldn’t help but notice you, or, How nice that the most beautiful woman in the city just happens to be sitting here alone, the woman said, “You’re the film producer.”
Lauste had hardly anticipated that he would have even less work to do this evening than usual. But then the woman did something. The woman, this woman named Minna, leaned to one side and took a leather bag, a woman’s dark-brown purse, from the chair next to her and opened it. Lauste could see in a second what was happening. He’d been led into a trap, he knew it instantly. Under normal circumstances he would have walked away. But the woman was so beautiful, so incredibly desirable, that he didn’t want to, wasn’t able to.
She pulled out a stack of papers, laid them on the table, and looked him in the eye. He could feel the powerful gaze of her brown eyes in the pit of his stomach, and lower, bolting through him like a flash of lightning, leaving him stripped and shaken, but in a pleasant way. Her eyes contained such animal promise that they conquered the revulsion he felt for the stack of white paper she’d just put on the table.
He hated these piles of paper more than anything—with the exception of the people who created them. He knew what the paper on the table was. A script. He didn’t have many rules in his life, but there was one he followed absolutely faithfully. He never read scripts.
Then the woman, this woman named Minna, said: “I have a script here that I’d like you to look at.”
Lauste felt a mixture of lust and loathing. The lust was directed at the woman’s body, the loathing at her script. Scripts were a dull, stupid waste of time. They were full of childish, utterly incomprehensible ideas that writers thought were important. Lauste left it to his underlings to read the scripts and talk to those walking bedsores, the burdensome scribblers who wrote them.
He made his decisions based on how a thing sounded.
If someone suggested, for instance, a talk show with two of the hottest young actresses of the moment scantily clad and interviewing some idiot, he might look into the matter. If somebody suggested a multilayered, subtly tragic story of survival that the author describes as “written from the heart,” he wanted to murder the receptionist who let such a piece of human trash into his conference room. And of course he said no. But never directly. Because you never know, one of those thousands of clowns might strike gold with that dull pickax of his one day, and you had to be ready to make use of it if he did.
And now he was in a situation where he ought to . . . he ought to play his cards right.
“What’s it about?” he managed to say.
The woman leaned forward. Lauste could smell the fruity scent of her perfume. The smell carried with it other sensations: a dark night, the sweat on a woman’s skin, a g-string buried in the groove of her ass.
“You should read it yourself,” the woman said in her husky voice, pushing the sheaf of paper across the table toward him. Lauste felt the same feeling he’d had a moment before—a mixture of urgent sexual pressure and repellent loathing.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
She stared intensely into his eyes. “I don’t know how I would describe it. I wrote it from the heart. Said everything I wanted to say.”
Lauste was able to contain the burst of laughter before it reached his face. He knew in an instant that here was something he could take hold of.
“That’s the most important thing,” he said, nodding. “In all writing, that’s what matters the most. Honesty, integrity, vision.” How easy it was to talk like this. He’d learned them all—asinine phrases to use with writers if you were forced into contact with them. He went on: “There are so many writers who just try to please, who write what they think a producer wants. But the most important thing to me has always been exactly that—a creator with a strong point of view of her own.”
This, of course, couldn’t have been further from the truth. There was only one point of view that Lauste respected or even considered: his own.
“That’s just what I’ve done,” the woman said, laying her left hand on top of the stack of paper. “I haven’t considered in the slightest what you or anyone else might want, only what I myself want.”
Lauste’s gaze followed her hand down to the paper. Her hand was slim and delicate, her fingernails long and red. The hand covered the text in the middle of the first page—doubtless the name of the story and the author. Those hardly mattered.
“It sounds good,” Lauste said. “A writer should be honest with herself. She shouldn’t think about commercial considerations at all.”
At that moment, lying felt even more pleasant than usual. Perhaps it was because of her brown eyes, her thrusting breasts, her tongue licking a drop of red wine from her lips.
“It’s really nice to hear you say that,” she said, her voice rough and soft. “And a little surprising.”
She took a sip of her wine. Lauste reminded himself that he would be wise to call this woman Minna. Women were often offended if you didn’t remember their names.
“Unfortunately, Minna, many people have the wrong idea about me. So many envy my success. But my success has always come from the fact that everything I’ve done has been first-rate, of the highest quality.”
That last statement was perhaps the biggest lie of all. But it sounded so good that Lauste would gladly believe it himself. He couldn’t tell from the woman’s—or rather Minna’s —face what she was thinking. He decided to make use of an approach that had been tested in real-life situations and proved valuable.
“Between you and me,” he continued, leaning slowly forward and gently touching, caressing, the manuscript, “and this is strictly confidential—I never agree to requests like this. But in your case I could make an exception. I have the feeling there might be something in it. Something very promising.”
And then Minna smiled, smiled in a way he understood, there was only one thing a smile like that could mean—he’d broken down her wall of hesitation.
“You don’t know how good it is for me to hear that,” Minna said, her husky voice like a sigh. “I’ve done such a terrible . . . such a terrible lot of work to get here. And now here you sit, praising my manuscript, even though you haven’t—”
Lauste raised his hand. They were sitting with their faces so close together that he could have almost reached his tongue out to her lips, between her lips.
“Keep in mind how long I’ve been doing this. I only need to read a few lines to see if it’s got the goods.”
He was so close to her brown eyes now that he could have torn them out with his teeth. There was something in those eyes that kept drawing him deeper, to some unknown destination. Then he
heard her say: “Should we go someplace quieter and continue this conversation?”
* * *
A hot summer Saturday night in Helsinki, a city on overdrive. The sun wouldn’t set for a couple more hours, and the parks, streets, and bars buzzed with life, swarmed with revelers. There were two different Helsinkis, two different Finlands: the summer and the winter. Summer could be seen in people’s faces—not just their suntans, but their looks of credulity, of relief, of surrender, even. Winter’s cold, miserable damp, its unrelenting chill and endless slush, didn’t just turn skin pale. It sucked everything into its all-pervading darkness. But on a summer night everyone was awake and restless and insatiable. Lauste loved these nights.
He knew he was over the blood-alcohol limit, but he drove anyway. He’d never been caught before, and he wouldn’t be caught now. And Minna had murmured to him as they were leaving the bar, asking him not to call a taxi. That suited him. His Porsche Cayenne was parked practically around the corner on Tehtaankatu. He let Minna move in front of him to the other side of the car, and he had a chance to appreciate her shapely ass. An erection appeared of its own accord, like a warm greeting from an old friend. Lauste’s right hand flicked to check that he still had the drug in his pocket. And, of course, he did. His erection hardened, swelled tight against the front of his jeans. He had an urge to touch himself, but the time for that would come later.
Minna was sitting next to him in the SUV. Lauste wasn’t worried about her seeing his car, feeling the warmth of the leather seat under her firm ass, or that she would hear his favorite music, melodic Swedish pop. None of it mattered. Lauste knew Minna wouldn’t remember anything about the evening, and this drive was no exception. That was the effect the drug had. It wiped away everything as it went, even stealing some of the hours that preceded it. Lauste’s producer colleague had described his own experience with the drug, said there was nothing like it—once he’d taken it he lost all capacity to make a record of the things he saw and experienced in his memory. He was conscious of what was happening, and conscious even that he couldn’t commit anything to memory. He still knew that in the morning. But the events themselves were impossible to remember.
Helsinki Noir Page 21
