TH02 - The Priest of Evil

by Matti Joensuu

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m going. But I’ve bought Matti his own mobile. I’ll leave it here on the step. It’s all paid for with a prepaid deal. Wait five minutes then pick it up so no one pinches it.’

  ‘Is it new?’

  ‘Second-hand.’

  ‘Of course, your son isn’t worth a new one, is he?’

  Mikko didn’t reply. He took the telephone and its charger, the instruction manual and the SIM-card and placed them on the top step. Then he took a few panicked steps, like a little boy caught doing something naughty. A moment later, incredibly, he almost burst into tears, but managed to stifle them. It finally occurred to him to go to the shopping centre at Itäkeskus, just in case Matti had ended up there.

  28. Decisions

  Her face in the mirror –

  how pained the sight;

  how keen the girl there feels your spite.

  Lips pursed in a smile, tight and long,

  breasts large and strange and wrong.

  Leena sat at the edge of her desk, her head propped in her hands, reading through the first verse on a smudged and frayed piece of paper, though she knew it off by heart. It was her favourite poem. With the end of a compass she picked absent-mindedly at the corner of the desk, scraping away small white shards of laminate. Her stomach was swollen for the second day running, her abdomen ached every now and then and her breasts were sore – her period would start again any time now.

  Turn away from the mirror,

  and shut tight your eyes,

  only the room’s darkness feels your cries:

  how could anyone love me,

  miss me, touch and kiss me?

  Everything seemed so strange. She had read about a boy who could see the beauty in everything, who could imagine fairies living by the edge of the lake, could speak to animals and understand the language of the birds. How she wanted to be like him. But the first time she had seen Matti in school she had finally understood: Matti was the boy, and she had fallen in love with him, making her head spin; she had never felt so intensely about anyone before. It was as if her dreams had finally become real.

  But no matter how hard she tried Matti had barely noticed her. And why should he have noticed her, he probably hadn’t even wanted to know her: a fat girl, the Hammer Thrower, with a face as bloated as a baseball glove. And now that he had finally noticed her and had become something of a friend, he would have to move to another part of town and go to another school.

  She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and pieces of laminate began to fly again. And then there was the priest. She wasn’t sure whether it was jealousy or envy, but whichever it was she had a nasty feeling about it all – she had realised that, despite his odd behaviour, the priest had taken a shine to Matti. He had even made the holy sign three times for Matti, and only once for her. Matti was his favourite, and she would have to settle for second place. She sensed the sheer darkness of her thoughts, black as liquorice spit. Another tear dropped from the end of her nose.

  But hush, good friend!

  for someone awaits for you,

  in prayers soft and tender whispers: love me too:

  for he loves you – not just the shell;

  your beauty is more than he can tell!

  Sobs passed her lips and she slumped her head on to the table, whimpering. After a while she sat up again, sucked her upper lip between her teeth and thought to herself. It was quiet. Mum had gone to aerobics again, or yoga, or whatever it was she did, and Dad was away on one of his countless business trips. All she could hear was the distant hum of traffic from the Eastern Highway and the occasional sounding of a foghorn from the harbour in Sompasaari. But then something occurred to her. She went into the living room, found a row of novels by Matti’s father standing in the bookcase, removed one of them, placed it in her small pink bag and threw it over her shoulder. A moment later she was in the hallway; she pulled on her shoes and grabbed the keys from the shelf.

  29. Hit

  Harjunpää was crouched on the floor of his office, a newspaper spread out in front of him and a pair of disposable blue rubber gloves on his hands. Again he found himself holding that same waterlogged leather wallet between his fingers. By now it had dried out, shrivelled and gnarled, but the job was still as frustrating as ever: none of the wallet’s various compartments yielded a piece of paper or a card that might have borne a name.

  The wallet had belonged to a male body fished out of Tokoinranta the previous week. The body had clearly been in the sea through the winter, drowned last autumn, and Harjunpää still hadn’t succeeded in making a positive identification of the victim. A notice in the newspaper hadn’t resulted in as much as a phone call and his features didn’t match those of any listed missing persons. Harjunpää hadn’t been able to do anything about the body for a few days and even now he prodded the wallet merely to soothe his conscience.

  He could hear Onerva approaching – nobody else’s shoes clip-clopped in the same way, like soft jazz. He stood up, stretched his back and peeled the gloves from his hands.

  ‘Timo,’ she exclaimed. She had rushed along the corridor, there were red blotches on her cheeks and she was smiling in a way that immediately caught Harjunpää’s attention. She was holding both her hands in the air and from each of them dangled numerous sections of video tape. ‘I think we’ve hit something…’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I think so. These are from the tapes taken after the incident. Look at that.’

  Onerva lay the tapes out flat along the table and Harjunpää reached for his magnifying glass. It was the same one he had had throughout his career, its original leather case was worn and shone like metal. Painstakingly he began moving the magnifying glass along the tapes, and in each frame the same figure could be made out, sometimes immediately after a train had left, when no one else was standing on the platform.

  ‘She goes back there a total of seven times,’ said Onerva. ‘At precisely the spot where the incident took place. Look at this one - she peers over the edge of the platform and moves her head back as if she’s sniffing something.’

  ‘A woman. Not a very young one either, see that long flowing skirt.’

  ‘It’s blue; the monitor decided to show colour for a change. And that beret is a deep burgundy.’

  ‘It’s almost pulled down over her eyes.’

  ‘But what on earth would make someone like that shove people in front of a train?’

  ‘If he was pushed, that is… Still, this woman had better have a pretty good explanation.’

  It was as though something inside him came to a halt; he grasped at the thought, the way one grasps at fragments of a dream that reappear throughout the day, and suddenly he was absolutely certain.

  ‘I’ve seen that woman…’

  ‘Really? Who is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was yesterday when I arrived at the underground station. That woman was standing in a crowd of people on the upper level. She seemed very agitated and started shouting something at me.’

  ‘Something to do with the case?’

  ‘No, she’s one of those religious folk, said something like, I’ll pray for mercy yet.’

  For a moment they stood looking one another in the eye. It had always puzzled Harjunpää, the way her eyes were each a different colour. Then they began to smile, together, each knowing what was going through the other’s mind: like a silent shout of yippee, they both felt the same sense of joy and satisfaction whenever an unfathomable case edged ever so slightly forward.

  ‘Shall we go today?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Harjunpää scratched his chin; indistinct, blurred thoughts suddenly spinning through his mind. ‘We’ve got to plan this properly… We haven’t got any hard evidence against her. She might say she witnessed the incident and was so shocked by it that she was compelled to go back to the scene again and again…’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘In any case – we’re not even sure if there’s a crime to susp
ect her of. We’re still only investigating two miscellaneous fatalities. We can’t apprehend her…’

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘I know. And there’s no way Mäki will turn them into murder investigations on such insufficient evidence.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  30. Disturbance

  ‘Armor cumbator?’ he wondered all of a sudden. Perhaps he even said it out loud, for something was disturbing him. To be more precise, something was disturbing his thoughts - and they were good thoughts. He did not feel threatened – this was a passing disturbance. Could one of the people going down into the underground be a priest? Priests were the envoys of the infidel and their presence always caused him some sort of disturbance; this he had experienced many times before. He scrutinised the people around him, those going down and those coming back up the other side of the escalator, but no; none of them gave off the same negative aura as a priest.

  He quickly shook his head and this seemed to help: he recovered the thought that had so warmed his heart. Only an hour ago he had sacrificed the third pigeon required for the adoption and its blood had been potent, a beautiful red. In accordance with the law of Maammo the boy was now his son, and with his own son he could do as he saw fit. He wanted nothing more beautiful than to sacrifice his son, and through this to surrender his own spirit, his flesh and blood, to Maammo for the sake of the New Big Bang. But he did not yet call the boy to his side, for not everything had become clear to him.

  He was not sure where the event was to take place. Should it be in a church midway through a Sunday service? On the one hand this would have been highly impressive, but it did have one weakness: far too few people attended Sunday services. This time he wanted to create a truly massive swirl. Perhaps a department store would be a better choice, on a Friday or a Saturday during the busiest shopping hours. Indeed, this would be particularly apt, as those covetous people would meet their end surrounded by the very Mammon of their fornication. The third option was naturally an ice-hockey stadium: they were almost hollow and the force of the blast might cause the building to come crashing down upon those who survived, thus creating an even greater swirl.

  ‘Take it! The Truth shall come!’ he shouted to a man who dared walk close enough to him, but to no avail. That day not a single person seemed interested in the Coming of the Truth, and this if anything proved how depraved humanity had become and how profoundly it deserved what was coming. ‘Take it! The Truth shall come!’

  Then he felt it: the disturbance was behind him, perhaps a hundred metres away or as close as the newsagents. He raised his free hand, pressed his first finger and thumb together forming a telescope, then raised his hand up above his shoulder so that the person behind him knew he had been seen. He then moved his hand in front of his face and slowly began to turn around.

  Framed in his fingers was the plump girl. What could this mean? He had not sent her any message, let alone an invitation. And why was she not with his son? Her expression was worried, sad perhaps. She had looked the same when he had first saved her; it had either been the 1st of May or the city festival – a celebration of debauchery nonetheless – and the girl had been sitting on a bench at the railway station, drunkenly sobbing out of sheer loneliness. He had approached her and saved her, made her one of Maammo’s children: he had touched her forehead, sending her his powers, and she had stopped crying and begun to sober up in front of his very eyes. Since then her soul had belonged to him, and through him to Maammo herself.

  ‘Hi there,’ said the girl joylessly, standing out of either shyness or respect about ten metres away from him. This was indeed the way to behave in the presence of the earth spirit. With his fingers he made the first of Maammo’s holy signs and she understood that this meant she should come to him. She began to waddle closer. She was carrying a rucksack, or at least something with straps resembling those of a rucksack, and she clung to the straps with both hands as though it contained something very special.

  ‘Good evening, my girl.’

  ‘Hi. Sorry for turning up like this. I knew you’d be in the middle of your work.’

  ‘Why, that is all right, my child – or should I say young lady? No work could me more important to me than that which I can do to help you.’

  ‘Thanks. Um, well…’

  ‘Shall we move out of the way? Over by the wall, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He walked ahead and the girl tottered after him. He already knew that she was going to ask him something, something which to her tiny mind was very important. He was no longer upset that she had caused him a momentary disturbance, and he suddenly felt most merciful. There was no reason he could not help a poor creature like this. They stopped by the wall.

  ‘Well, you see…’ she stammered, as she began slipping the rucksack from her back. It was pink, a pig, it even had eyes and a snout. Two little piggies back to back. ‘It’s Matti…’

  ‘The boy who went rowing?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him.’

  ‘So his name is Matti…’

  ‘Yes. And, you see, I… To me he’s… His dad wants him to move in with him, and then he’ll have to leave Kulosaari.’

  ‘And you like him?’

  ‘Yes! Couldn’t you do something about it?’

  ‘And where exactly will he and his father be moving to?’

  ‘All the way to Tampere! Then I’ll never see him again!’

  ‘Mortuus percecae!’ he exclaimed. That would not do at all. This would ruin his sacrifice. It would deny him the opportunity to serve Maammo in the most divine way, and could even jeopardise the Coming of the Truth! Restlessly he shifted the position of his legs and looked at the girl, who clearly thought that he too was upset at the prospect of her losing Matti. It was for the best that she thought this.

  ‘And when is this move to take place?’ he asked, and this time he managed to control his voice and his state of anxiety. This may have been a test sent by Maammo to see whether he could overcome great difficulties in order to fight for the Coming of the Truth.

  ‘I’m not sure, but he said it might be very soon. Maybe in a week or two.’

  ‘Sabre dantum!’

  ‘I don’t understand…’

  ‘So you would like me to do something to prevent this?’

  ‘Right!’ she exclaimed and frantically began opening her rucksack. ‘I thought you might be able to change his dad’s mind so that he won’t want to move to Turku… I mean, Tampere… or so that he won’t take Matti with him.’

  ‘I see. You would like that too…’

  The girl finally opened her rucksack, she had been fiddling anxiously with the knot, and removed a book with three large M’s on the spine. After the final M, in almost microscopic lettering, stood ‘oisio’, forming the word MOISIO. She opened up the book to reveal its inner jacket flap.

  ‘There’s a picture of his dad. I thought it might be easier to send him thoughts if you know what he looks like…’

  ‘You are a wise girl. And where does his daddy live?’

  ‘Somewhere in Kallio, I think.’

  ‘Does he work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the postal sorting office. It’s somewhere in Pasila.’

  ‘Well well, Pasila indeed. And how does he travel there?’

  ‘He’s not there at the moment. He’s got a year’s leave and he’s living on some scholarship. But he has got an office in Kontula and he goes there on the underground.’

  ‘Morning and evening?’

  ‘Yes, and he always travels during rush hour, so it feels like he’s really going to work.’

  ‘So he travels between Hakaniemi and Kontula?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Verily I will help you,’ he said ceremoniously and made all three holy signs before the girl’s face. This clearly did her a lot of good, for an expression of contentment appeared on her lips.

  ‘Thanks a lot. Really.’

  ‘It is noth
ing. It shall be my pleasure.’

  ‘You’re the best… Could you…?’

  ‘You would like something more?’

  ‘Erm… could you give me the vibes again?’

  ‘For you, certainly. Go and lean your back against the wall.’

  He approached the wall behind the girl, placed the fingers of both hands upon her temples and began to concentrate: ‘Ea lesum cum sabateum…’

  He wanted to give the plump girl good vibes, very good vibes indeed, for she had earned them. Perhaps she had unwittingly rescued the New Big Bang. He raised his head and stared with all his power right into her eyes, watching her like a hawk, then quickly moved his fingers from her temples to her forehead – and this time she fell down straight away.

  Her eyeballs almost rolled all the way back, with only the slightest strips of her irises still showing; then her eyelids closed and began twitching as though she were dreaming intensely. The whole length of her body pressed against the wall and slowly she sank first to her knees, then to a sitting position. She came to just as her bottom touched the floor. She shook her head in bewilderment, her eyes scanning around her, as if she did not quite know where she was – for a moment she probably didn’t.

  ‘Wow,’ she panted, thrilled, and started pulling herself to her feet.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I was on the roof of a really tall building, right on the edge. And I was really thin, just like a ballerina. I was wearing a leotard and one of those bell skirts. I was scared, but then I jumped and… I could fly! I glided very slowly through the air, hopped off the roof of the next building, and then I turned into a boy…’

  ‘My girl, that was a beautiful vision. You were shown good things as a sign that Maammo loves you and will take good care of you.’