Blackwater (51 page)

Things were all right between him and Mia now. But fragile. It had been that way ever since he had understood she could make unpredictable decisions.

He telephoned Åbo Academy and asked for Doris Hofstaedter. She turned out to have become a professor and had moved to the University of Helsinki. The receptiÖnist was willing to give him the university number, but he asked for her home number. She hadn’t got it, and anyhow she wouldn’t have given it to him just like that, she said ungraciously. She probably thought he was going to trouble the professor with rude words and heavy breathing.

It wasn’t difficult to find her number and address through directory enquiries. Professor Hofstaedter did not suffer from female paranoia. He dialled the number, not expecting her to answer herself. It was summer and hot. Helsinki must be a desert. But Doris Hofstaedter was there and picked up the phone and answered absently and only barely politely.

He regretted it immediately, but had the presence of mind to speak in Norwegian. He asked her whether she was going to be at home over the next few days and would she be prepared to accept a large package of books from Oslo University. She was. What books were they?

‘I can’t say,’ he said. ‘They’re all wrapped up.’

He noticed with some excitement that he was able to lie swiftly and not without ingenuity.

He had imagined flying to Helsinki, a quick interview with the professor, then a trip to Åbo in a hired car to check seminar lists of eighteen years ago. After that, the tracking-down would be trickier, he realised that. But he felt luck was on his side.

Birger Torbjörnsson wanted to come along. That was inconvenient, but hard to refuse, considering the sorry state he was in, pacing round his untidy apartment like a large, sick bear.

He wanted to go to the police with the name John Larue. Mia didn’t think they would attach any importance to the name of a doll. Only if a John Larue were missing would there be any action. And no missing person had been reported at the time of the event by the Lobber.

Johan did not tell Mia much about the woman who had given him a lift and might be presumed to have met Larue. It wasn’t just because he felt sorry for him that Johan took Birger with him. He was afraid he might talk too much. Not without shame, Johan remembered that he had preached openness to Mia. But he drew the line at Ylja. He had no wish to appear as an ardent and gullible adolescent.

Birger turned their trip into a long-winded affair. He found out that a package including boat fare and hotel room would be cheapest. Johan had heard that Birger seldom went anywhere except Blackwater for his holidays. Now he turned up lugging a heavy old leather suitcase. He found it difficult to adapt to the rules of mass tourism. He tried to buy some liquor without queueing, and to joke with the exhausted Finnish cleaners. When they went into the dining room, he was drawn to the laden buffet table. He described how during his training he had cultivated bacteria in a nutrient jelly that looked exactly like the aspic from which the salmon now stared at them with white eyeballs. He recounted this without lowering his voice, and aroused animosity.

They had shrimps, drank Finnish vodka and juice, and largely did what was expected on board ship. After coffee, Johan worked a one-armed bandit a few times and lost. Birger put some coins in and had a go. The apparatus gave a rattle and spewed a flood of silver coins into the cup. It kept on spitting them out, squealing and flashing its lights. The cup overflowed and the coins streamed all over the carpet at their feet. People stopped and watched. Birger stood quite still while Johan tried to gather up the abundance.

Then Birger started to weep. He remained upright, but otherwise he wept in the same way as he had done when he had brought coffee to Johan in bed in his living room, his mouth gaping open, nose and eyes streaming. His regular, snuffling gasps for breath soon left him in a state of cramp that made his chest and gradually also his capacious stomach tremble and bounce.

People laughed and he was given encouraging cries. They thought he was weeping for joy. Johan wanted to take him away, but, unable to leave all those gapers the money, he knelt down and collected up every single coin, while Birger stood there exposed, sobbing loudly and dribbling mucus and tears.

When Johan piloted him into their cabin and was trying to get him into bed, Birger struck his head on the top bunk. The pain stopped the convulsive crying. Exhausted, he sat on the bunk, leaning forward. Johan put a wet towel across his forehead and placed Birger’s hand on it to hold it there. Then Johan opened the whisky bottle he had bought and drank almost half a tooth-glass. He was not sure it was good for Birger to drink whisky after his attack of weeping, but compromised by just giving him a splash.

He knew Birger was weeping because Annie was dead, but couldn’t work out why the cataclysm of the gaming machine had released the attack. Birger was talking indistinctly about an unbearable, mocking smile. At first Johan thought he was referring to his fellow passengers, but Birger said it was no one’s, just a smile of derision. Then he said: it was chance, sheer chance. He kept saying the word over and over again, and it lost all meaning.

‘Hardly chance,’ Johan said, interrupting him to put an end to it. ‘If so, in a very narrow sense. Those machines are programmed to give out money now and again. You could tell that this one was ready because there were staff standing around waiting to have a go. They keep an eye on the gaming machines and know when they’re getting close.’

Johan went on talking about generating chance. He told Birger about how you could randomise in a computer and to his extreme relief Birger fell asleep without any more weeping. He had an ugly red mark on his forehead.

In the morning, after they had handed in Birger’s huge suitcase and Johan’s bag at the hotel, they at once took a taxi to the address of Professor Hofstaedter. She lived in a late eighteenth-century block, weighty and impressive, untouched by the light and sea-blown classicism which had greeted them as they disembarked. Late summer prevailed in the market down by the harbour; big bunches of dill and beetroot, rudbeckia and snapdragons in the flower stalls, crayfish, lampreys, herrings, onions and knobbly gherkins – an abundance of scents dispersing in the cool air and floating out to sea as lightly as violets. Inside this stony city there was no season at all. Hofstaeder’s block was guarded by limestone gnomes holding up the entrance archway on their bowed backs. Johan pressed the bell on the entry phone and they stood listening to the clatter of trams from the street as they waited. But no one answered.

The building turned out to be not all that far from the Marski Hotel. The taxi had been unnecessary. They went into Fazer’s café and had coffee. Johan ordered a sandwich with his, but Birger, untroubled, gorged himself on cream cakes.

All day they roamed between the apartment block and the inner-city attractions of Helsinki. Johan began to think they had come in vain. Birger didn’t seem to care much about the outcome of their trip. He said he was glad to be able to get away for a while. He stood for a long time in front of Iittala’s shop window staring at the glassware. He also attempted to pat the statue of Havis Amanda on the backside, but Johan stopped him and suggested they should take a tram on the circle line and take a look at Finlandia House. Birger seemed to be enjoying himself and it was hard to imagine that at any moment he might have one of his heartbreaking attacks of weeping. Johan suspected that he was wound up like a clock. He knew what he was going to do and say, even when faced with a female behind.

At five in the afternoon, they heard Doris Hofstaedter’s voice over the entry phone. It silenced Johan, but Birger introduced them both and said they were looking for the professor on an urgent mission. She wanted to know what mission.

‘We’re looking for someone we think you know. A student of yours. From your Åbo days.’

The sound quality was poor and she repeated her question several times, but in the end she let them in. They went up to the third floor in a creaking lift with iron gates. She gave them the once-over through the peephole, then opened the door.

Everything in the place was old and impressive. Johan reckoned it was not the professor’s parents who had furnished the apartment, but more likely her grandparents. They squeezed their way past a vast baroque cupboard in the hall, sabres and pistols hanging on the wall, paintings in heavy carved gilt frames of dark-green landscapes in which only a silvery white streak of a river or a foaming waterfall was distinguishable.

The professor herself was a gruff woman with short dark hair, streaked with white like a badger’s. She wore glasses apparently designed for reading; idly she had pushed them down her nose instead of taking them off. She was wearing a black and white cotton dress of modernistic design with a zip down the front, a kind of tent, the body underneath shapeless. Her face was puffy, particularly below the eyes where the glasses pressed. She had pads of fat below the skin that pulled down her cheeks and blurred her jawline. Johan thought she looked rather frightening and he felt awkward in this magnificent, gloomy apartment. But Birger ploughed on without embarrassment, obviously used to going into people’s homes and breathing in the odours they lived in. He looked as if he were quite genially about to lift up the cotton tent and put his fingers into the professor’s abundant yellow flesh.

She took them into a room which appeared to be a library, the walls lined with shelves of leather-bound books. There was a sagging sofa with greenish-grey cushions covered with dog hairs. Johan didn’t find that out until later, on his trousers. There was no sign of a dog. The room grew dark. She had drawn the brown velvet curtains, then switched on a lamp. Johan found himself sitting right in the lamplight.

He told her that many years ago he had got to know a girl who was probably one of the professor’s students.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘She talked about your research,’ said Johan.

‘What did she talk about?’

‘About the Traveller.’

He had expected her to want to know more about what the girl had told him, perhaps out of professional vanity or quite simply because she was sceptical. But she said:

‘What do you want of her?’

He was not quite sure whether she was being hostile or not. Her intonation was Finnish and not easy to interpret. In any case she was certainly not forthcoming.

‘She knew someone I want to find out more about.’

‘Who?’

‘His name was John Larue,’ said Birger helpfully.

‘I don’t know what girl you’re talking about. Describe her.’

She had been standing with her back to the window and the drawn curtains. Now she sat down in a leather armchair with large brass-studded wings and Johan saw she was wearing sandals. Coarse leather sandals consisting of nothing but a couple of straps over a sole and a crude fastener. She had small, well-formed feet and seemed to have worn sandals a lot, for she had no bunions and her toes were classically straight and close together. Johan fell silent.

‘Well?’

‘She was fair,’ he said. But nothing more came. He stared past the feet down at the rug, which was a dark brownish red, oriental, worn but with a still distinguishable pattern of stylised ornamental flowers. From somewhere behind him, perhaps from the blue and white jar on the floor by the tiled stove, came a strong scent of lemony spices and dried petals.

‘Well, I must have had a lot of students with fair hair,’ she said. ‘What did she look like?’

He couldn’t get it out. He could see her before him but couldn’t describe her. No other words except ‘fair’ and ‘dry’ came to him. He could hear Birger’s anxious, laboured breathing.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She got up. They had to rise from the sofa. Johan made another attempt, but got stuck with something worse than a lack of words. His throat closed. He couldn’t get a word out and made a hissing sound when he tried to speak, as if he were very hoarse. Professor Hofstaedter laughed.

‘Don’t take it so hard,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have helped however eloquently you had described her. I don’t hand out names of female students to a couple of unknown gentlemen from Sweden and Norway.’

‘Why did she say Norway?’ said Birger, once they were down in the street.

‘Because she recognised my voice. I phoned a few days ago and pretended to be Norwegian. I wanted to know if she was at home.’

‘Christ,’ was all Birger said.

The professor seemed to have shaken him more than their failure.

They couldn’t think of anything else to do but have a meal to pass the time until they could go to bed. They found a little Russian restaurant down a side street in the city centre, the interior all gold, black and red with a heavy smell of perfume and food. Birger wanted to try bear ham, but simply seeing the words on the menu disgusted Johan. They agreed on beetroot soup, blini and chopped salt herring with onion and sour cream. It was all very rich and filling and Johan found it hard to swallow. They took a sweet brown vodka and Birger grew tipsy. Johan drank modestly, afraid of feeling sick. When they got back to their double room at the hotel, they went to bed with no more argument about their failed visit to Doris Hofstaedter. Birger slept heavily. Johan lay awake listening to the trams.

After an hour, he got up and dressed. He walked along the arctic night-empty streets and when he got to the entrance with the gnomes, he pressed the button and after a brief pause heard that harsh voice. She hadn’t been asleep. He hadn’t thought she would be, either.

‘It’s Johan Brandberg.’

She received him in the same tent dress, but barefoot and smoking a thin cigarette that smelt foreign.

‘Jukka dear,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d come back.’

‘How the hell did you find me?’

She threw the question over her shoulder as she went ahead of him into the apartment. Not a single light was on, and he could see reflections from the streetlights shining on a large dining table. No sign of the library; they were going in another direction. The apartment seemed to stretch in all directions from the dining room, which had four doors. He could hear someone singing, almost unaccompanied, a bass voice which grew louder the further in they went. ‘
In diesen heil’gen Hallen
,’ he was singing, his voice sinking through loose layers of darkness. They ended up in a room smelling of cigarette smoke and containing an overloaded desk. A green light indicated an amplifier on the far wall and the singer sang his aria to the end. Then Doris Hofstaedter leant back and pressed a button. The green eye went out.