Helsinki Noir

by James Thompson

  If Lauste was honest with himself (he was always honest with himself!), he had to admit that the fear of getting caught—however unlikely that might be—added to the excitement of the thing.

  They drove along the shore at Pohjoisranta. On their left the proud, decorative façades of the Jugendstil apartment houses marched by, on the right the open sea. The water was black and reflected the city lights like a rippling carpet. Lauste glanced at the seat beside him. Minna looked calm.

  “My place is in Lintulahdenkatu, between Sörnäinen and the waterfront,” she said.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Lauste lied. Druggies, drunks, stuffy studio apartments, and stairwells that smelled like shit and piss, he thought.

  He steered the SUV onto the bridge that connected Kruununhaka to Hakaniemi and Merihaka. Lauste often thought that crossing the bridges between south and north Helsinki was very much like traveling from Beverly Hills to the Soviet Union without border inspections. On one side people smiled with white teeth, on the other side people had no teeth, or if they did, their teeth would be browned by tobacco and poverty. And it had always been thus: gentlemen in the south, the unwashed in the north.

  The traffic lights twinkled yellow on the Sörnäinen shore road and he picked up speed. He felt better than he had in a long time. Thank God Minna wasn’t talking. A quick glance assured him that her breasts were still there where he could reach them. The seat belt passed between the pert mounds like it had its work cut out for it struggling to keep the two bouncing tits separated.

  “Take the next left,” Minna said. “There’s a parking spot. Let’s leave the car here. I live up there.”

  Lauste glanced in the direction she was pointing. High-rises climbed up the hillside and their inner courtyard was itself a steep slope.

  The night was hot as midday and Lauste was bathed in sweat by the time they crossed the courtyard and reached the building entrance. Minna’s scent was stronger than ever, perfume mixed with a woman’s smell, a woman’s moisture—he was sure of that. Her high heels clicked over the floor and he had an urge to lift her skirt. Soon, he told himself, soon.

  They took the elevator to the twelfth floor. On the ride up she asked, “Will you take a look at my script now?”

  Lauste stared into her eyes and thought how exciting her proud face would look with one eye blackened and the upper lip swollen and dripping blood. “Of course,” he lied.

  “Wonderful,” she sighed.

  They stepped out of the elevator. Minna turned right and took her keys out of her pocket. She opened the dead bolt, then the door lock. Lauste followed her inside and pulled the door shut behind him. As soon as the door was closed, she turned around and nuzzled against him, pressing her lips to his. He tasted lipstick and red wine and the salty flavor of a woman. Then she pulled away as suddenly as she had grabbed him. She took him by the hand and guided him to the living room. There she pulled the script out of her bag and laid it on the glass-topped table.

  “I’ll get us something to drink. It’ll be nicer to read that way,” she said, and went into the kitchen, which opened off to the left. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Lauste neither sat nor even glanced at the script on the table. He walked to the tall living room windows and was surprised at the view. He hadn’t realized how high up they were. You could almost see the entire city center and much of the outskirts. The night was bright and cloudless and lights seemed to twinkle all the way from Lauttasaari. He glanced around. It wasn’t like an ordinary single woman’s home. It wasn’t like a woman’s home at all. It was like a hotel room: sterile, neutral, without a single object that looked like it belonged to someone. I see, he thought, Minna has a rich man, a businessman, who supports her while she dreams of a career as a screenwriter. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. He heard her heels behind him on the parquet floor and turned around.

  “White wine,” she said, handing him a glass.

  They drank. And as soon as Lauste had swallowed his wine, Minna pressed against him again, and they kissed. This kiss was long, wet, and hot. He even closed his eyes for a moment. He imagined she closed hers too. They sat down on the sofa. They kissed again. They drank wine and looked into each other’s eyes. Lauste’s thirst seemed endless, he had sweat through a whole hot summer day and night and his throat was as parched as if it had been blow-dried.

  “You know what?” Minna said. “I should use the bathroom. It will give you some time to read.”

  They kissed once more, for a long time. Then Minna stood up, got another bottle from the kitchen, brought it to the table, and went into the bathroom. Lauste looked at the wine. He smiled. He waited to hear the water running in the bathroom, then reached into his pocket. He took out the tiny bottle and opened it. He was about to pour its contents into Minna’s glass when he noticed that it was empty. He looked at it. Felt his pocket. Had it leaked? No. His pants were perfectly dry.

  Lauste heard the bathroom door open. At the same moment, he started to feel heavy. And he realized what had happened. Somehow, she had—the first kiss!—slipped the bottle out of his pocket, emptied its contents into his glass—in the kitchen—and put it back in his pocket—the longer, wetter kiss! He tried to get up from the sofa, but it was no longer possible. He heard Minna’s high heels on the floor. They were coming nearer. He meant to turn his head, but he wasn’t able to. Minna appeared, sliding down in front of him. He started to say something, but it was better to keep his mouth shut, because it didn’t want to open. His body felt like it was pressing down onto the sofa with a thousand kilos of weight. The feeling was actually very pleasant. It remained pleasant until he saw the pair of surgical scissors in Minna’s hand.

  From that moment everything happened in fragments, each one simultaneously unforgettable and immediately forgotten. Minna unzips his trousers. Minna pulls his trousers off. Minna cuts his underwear away from his body. Minna grabs his cock like it’s a broomstick, stretches the organ to its limit, and cuts it off at the root. Blood gushes as if a valve has failed. Some of the blood spills on Minna as well, but she doesn’t even seem to notice. Minna shows him the shaft of his cock. Then she roughly shoves it in his mouth. Minna grabs his testicles. The same thing happens: a long stretch, cut at the root, display, mouth filled. His cheeks and jaw are about to burst and break. He bleeds like a fire hydrant that’s been cracked open. It’s hard to breathe. He feels as if he’s sitting in a barrel, in a warm and thick bath of blood. Minna sits down across from him and looks at him with curiosity, even fascination, her graceful latex-gloved hands covered in dark blood. Minna pulls the gloves off, peels the black hair off her head, and shoves her wig into her bag. Minna takes out her colored contact lenses. Removes her makeup, her high-heeled shoes. Changes her clothes and puts on sneakers. She looks so ordinary. And then Lauste hears her voice, which isn’t husky anymore, but bright and clear, like someone playing a xylophone: skillfully, thoughtfully.

  “Laura sends her greetings. You picked her up this time last summer. Laura’s my sister.”

  * * *

  She watched him as he bled out. His breath was quick and heavy at first, then labored and panting, and finally wheezing. Then it stopped altogether. Minna—which wasn’t her real name, of course—sat a little while longer across from the dead body, in this strange apartment, rented for this very purpose. She looked at the man who had raped her sister and may have been the cause of the vicious cycle that had turned Laura—a bright, charming screenwriting and film theory student—into a permanent patient of the mental hospital, a wreck of a person, her life slipping away. The man who’d paid with his blood.

  She stood up, then remembered the script on the table. Although it wasn’t really a script. It was just a stack of A4 paper, blank white pages. Unlike Laura, she didn’t care much for writing. The life she lived and the world around her were much more interesting than any book, any script. Those were just, for lack of a better description, words on paper.

  STOLEN LIVES
/>   BY JOHANNA HOLMSTRÖM

  Vuosaari

  Translated from Swedish by Lone Thygesen Blecher

  I

  It’s three days before the burial, and Carin writes in her blog, Everything from IKEA, possibly with the exception of potted plants, is completely “out.”

  Celestine shuts her laptop with a snap and looks around her living room which could have come straight out of an IKEA catalog. Everything is matching in earthy tones of brown and beige, gray and white, harmonized from the same product lines, carefully planned so nothing stands out, clashes, or disrupts—and all the same it is lifeless, and now also, according to Carin, outdated.

  Of course, Celestine thinks. Carin would never make a mistake like this. Carin who shops in Missoni Home and orders her bedding from Bed Bath & Beyond. Obviously she’s right. Because Carin has everything under control. Everything! Except her baby.

  Carin’s baby takes his daytime naps outdoors just like all the other children, even if it is winter.

  And that’s the reason Finnish babies are so strong and healthy, Carin writes in her blog.

  Unattended, Gabriel snoozes in his Emmaljunga stroller of black-and-white leather by the white plastered walls of the row house apartments, right beneath the window where the shades facing the street are drawn. Pedestrians pass by his stroller, and children with breaths of white clouds play in the nearby snow mounds with bright-colored plastic shovels.

  The baby lies in the safety of his Emmaljunga bubble, behind a white cloth with a pattern of starfish and other sea life while Carin, with her shades drawn, is advising clueless mothers on how to best take care of their offspring. And Celestine is standing on her balcony right across the street, four floors above in the city rental housing, looking at the stroller by the row house wall. She wets her winter-chapped lips and breathes in the smell of melting snow through her nose.

  The rental complex on Lilla Ullholmvägen is jokingly nicknamed the Castle. It is one of the only places in the area where subsidized housing is offered, and most of the inhabitants are on welfare or alcoholics. Large Somalian families stomp up and down the stairs to their apartments, filling the stairwells with the echoes of their laughter. Celestine is one of only a few with a Swedish last name. Everyone else is Finnish, Somalian, Arab, Kurdish, Vietnamese . . . She has tried figuring out how many nationalities are gathered underneath the same roof. There must be at least nine.

  When you move up in the world, you move down, down to the row house apartments. If you do even better, you move to the villas with panoramic windows down by the innermost inlet. That’s where you find the small boat harbor, the yachts, the private tennis courts, and the running tracks. And the closer you get to the waterfront, the whiter the skin color.

  Carin and Anders live in the row houses, and their cars are parked by the curb in front of the Castle. They park for free right in front of the less fortunate. Celestine despises cars. She doesn’t even have a driver’s license. She takes the metro back and forth to the university and a bus in between. Just like most people in her building.

  It’s Carin who drives their town jeep. A Subaru Forester. It is not exactly luxurious. She jokingly calls it her little shopping box. They also have a Benz. That’s the one Anders uses.

  Celestine scratches the Subaru with her keys as she passes and Carin complains at length online. Celestine reads. She reads everything Carin writes. Her eyes glide greedily along the lines and she steals the pictures Carin posts. They are pictures of the new couch in brown antique leather. The soft, cream-colored shaggy rug. Pictures of the coffee maker that you feed with small single-serve plastic cartridges. And pictures from their frequent trips to European metropolises—trips that continued in spite of the family addition. The flow of pictures is punctuated with recipes for lemon meringue pie, homemade ice cream with real vanilla, and the perfect roast beef. And while she’s writing, the boy is sleeping in his carriage beneath the window.

  His name is Gabriel. The angel Gabriel. Celestine looks into his amazed blue eyes and smiles at him almost in real time when Carin posts a picture of something which is, most certainly, no longer just passing gas but a real smile. He doesn’t look at all like Otto, Celestine’s Otto, but there’s something about him that makes her run her finger down the round baby cheek on the screen, very slowly, and when she closes her eyes she sees him.

  * * *

  She was six years old when he was born. Celestine’s mother Harriet had already disposed of her first husband, Tomas, and was busy with the next one, Markku. She and Celestine had moved away from the single-family house in the town by the river where the church burned down when some young vandals threw a Molotov cocktail up onto the roof. Markku lived and worked in the capital and Harriet couldn’t afford the long trips. It was a practical arrangement.

  It was called a suburb, but it felt more like a bedroom community. The streets had names like Starry Eye Alley, Blue Bird, Air Castle Street, Winding Honey Alley, Mossy Path. It was a fairy-tale town by a sandy beach where you could see freighters like red and white spots far out at sea at all times of the year. The harbor was tucked away behind a promontory and you could hear the ships bellow at each other at night. The sound made her shudder. It filled the hollows of her body and seemed to reverberate inside her until she stood in front of the open window, shaking.

  In her new school they made fun of her name. Celestine, out of all the names in the world. It was worth at least a snort and a giggle. The name belonged to a time when Mom still had dreams. Not just a bag to pack when it was time to dump Tomas, Celestine’s dad. Not some deadbeat, but a musician just like Mom was back when she still gave kids names like Celestine. But with Markku, who worked in construction and had a regular income and a pension, all they could come up with was Otto.

  The name is a palindrome. It has no beginning and no ending. It repeats itself forever, on and on, in a perfect symmetry of circles and the two crosses in between.

  From the very beginning he belonged to Celestine and no one else. Their mom Harriet was no Carin. She didn’t know any recipes for lemon meringue pie. She just played her music in bars so smokey that you could hardly open your eyes. She’d come back home long past midnight. Markku loved her, he said, and so he let her have her way.

  —The girl can take care of the boy, Markku said.

  He himself sat with a glass of beer at the bar where Harriet played and never took his eyes off her even when it got to be late and they were both cross-eyed as they started toward home. For a man like Markku it was no problem having to get up for work the next day. For a man like Markku the alcohol is never a problem. The only thing Markku had a problem with was his jealousy, and when Harriet and Markku started breaking apart their love as well as the furniture inside Air Castle Street number 4B, Celestine and Otto had to escape out into the snow flurries.

  II

  Two days before the burial, she straightens up her things and cleans the apartment as though cleaning up a crime scene. A sock gathering dust on the floor goes into the laundry basket. Papers that have slipped out of the printer are swept up and land in a drawer by the computer. She wipes every surface with a damp rag, polishes the mirror and door handles with window cleaner, waters the basil, oregano, lettuce, thyme, sage, and mint by the kitchen window. While she’s cleaning she drifts to another time, another place, and the images that pass before her mind’s eye are so strong and clear that she loses herself in them.

  Her tongue licks the snot from under her nose. The snot is always running, tickling her upper lip, during those wet months. To crawl across the frozen, icy snow in slippery rain pants or winter overalls. The thumping sensation of the plastic shovel blade hitting the snowbank. The constant sliding. The pointless, monotonous digging. The woolen cap soaking up moisture, itching the skin. And the eyes adjusting to the darkness that came creeping in from between the walls of the surrounding buildings.

  The other children, everywhere, all around her, hinged together by the common effort of
conquering the snow mound and carving it into a cavern of tunnels that one could crawl through in a slight state of panic. A feeling of having narrowly escaped the death of suffocation every time one reached safety on the other side. In the dark evenings the parents would light candles and place them in the tunnels, lighting the caverns from within. It was horrific. Beautiful. Like the sacrificial altar of some kind of death cult. A cranium lit up and burning all through the long winter night.

  Celestine runs hot water over the dishes and pulls on a pair of green rubber gloves. The steam hits her face and it gathers in droplets on the down of her upper lip. The taste is salty.

  She used to watch him through the window when he crawled around on the snow mound with the other children. The tip of his tongue licking the upper lip beneath his nose. The pom-pom on his cap bobbed up and down as he dug. When she was done with her house work she used to pull on her cap, jacket, and winter pants, the heavy boots, and then run down to join them. Halfway to the tunnel she would realize she had forgotten her mittens.

  Her hands are still cold. She dug in the snow until her nails were bleeding. It burned like fire when they thawed. Then she screamed. Screamed and cried. But her hands never warmed up again.

  III

  The day before the burial she wakes up with a start and a violent gasp. Her mouth is dry and she sits up in bed. Her head is heavy with sleep, her thoughts at a standstill. She looks at her hands. Blood. Her breathing is fast, she’s trembling, and she lifts up the blanket, the pink one with green and red flowers. The yellow sheet is stained. For a moment the sight drowns her in thick, hot darkness. The sun-filled bedroom disappears, but she is not thrown back into the snow-filled nighttime landscape of her dream where the candles that the parents had placed in the caverns of the snow mound had fallen over and gone out. Instead, she is caught inside the limbo of escalating panic. Suddenly, in a flash of clarity, she regains control of her own body. Time and space returns.