The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (18 page)

“All last evening and night I thought about what the newspaper would say this morning about the discussion. How he would make fun of all the writers, the men as well as the women, but especially the women. How he would laugh at the Japanese woman for being over fifty now and well-known for her erotica, how he would turn that girl Marion into a call-girl again.

“How he would laugh at Silje and me being there,” Tom said, “—‘the two children’s writers getting an earful.’”

“We couldn’t let the article come out,” said Silje.

“But how do you know what he’d written?”

“We didn’t know,” said Tom quickly, pulling at Silje’s arm.

“We only suspected,” Silje said, but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.

I changed the subject. “How did Helga marry a guy like that?”

Tom shook his head. “I knew her from years ago. She was a friend of my sister’s. She was very wild and free. I think she was a challenge to him. So he decided to break her. He sleeps with everyone he can. Almost right in front of her.”

I remembered how he’d touched Marion’s arm at the cocktail party, and how she’d let him. How did that fit with the fact that Marion had been the last in the sauna? She had insisted on staying while the rest of us staggered away. She was a strange combination: punk and tough with a little bit of sex kitten. Had she arranged to meet him there? I didn’t want to think that.

I wanted Luisa’s advice, but she was holed up in our room, writing away and wouldn’t open up. “It’s sad, it’s very depressing, my life,” she shouted through the keyhole in jubilation. “I have to write it. I shall not stop until I write it all down.”

“But Luisa, everything is in an uproar. A man is dead. They think he might have been murdered. You can’t just stay in there and write!”

There was a silence and then she came to the door. “Who died?”

“Pekka, the literary critic. Helga’s husband.”

“But he told me he likes my work.”

“That’s no guarantee against murder.”

“Cassandra, I hope it wasn’t you,” Luisa scolded. “Some women just aren’t cut out to be lesbians. You must accept that and not murder their husbands.”

“Of course I didn’t kill him.”

“Well, he did have a very unpleasant laugh,” Luisa remarked, before locking me out of the room again.

Out on the lawn a struggle was in progress. Two plainclothes Finnish detectives were on either side of Marion, dragging her unwillingly to their car. They had gotten her confession, the word went around the group of writers standing shocked on the grass, that Pekka had accosted her in the sauna when she’d been there alone, and that she’d escaped and locked him in to die of overheating.

“We can’t let this happen,” said Simone. “There must be more to the story. We must protest.”

“I should never have let Marion stay there alone,” said Mayumi. “I said to her, ‘Come with me, Marion, don’t stay here alone,’ and she said, ‘No, I’m fine. Just ten more minutes.’”

And then the police car was gone. Now for the first time I saw Helga. She was standing under a tree, watching the whole scene from a distance.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, going over to her.

“Don’t be. Whatever Marion did to him, he probably deserved.”

“You’re sure she did something?” I said, taken aback at Helga’s harsh tone. She looked years older this morning, her blonde hair slicked back, her skin pale and clammy.

“She came to me early this morning and told me about it. How he found her in the sauna alone after all the rest of you had left. He was drunk, she said. He tried to attack her, but she easily got away from him and locked the door. She only meant to teach him a lesson.”

“But when she went back to let him out, he was dead?”

“Exactly. It only took a short while. She didn’t realize he had a heart condition.”

“But that’s not really murder, then.” I was relieved.

“That’s what I told the police.” Helga looked at me. “That I didn’t think she meant to kill him.”

“You went to the police then?”

“Yes, I told them. I couldn’t cover it up for her.”

Her iciness puzzled me. She may no longer have loved Pekka, but could she be glad that he was dead? Perhaps it was suppressed anger that made her seem so remote and hard.

“Please excuse me. There are many things to arrange. Under the circumstances, I don’t know if the conference will be continuing,” she said, and started across the lawn to the main offices.

I watched her walk away with those long legs that had once leaped over the snowbanks. “I like the sauna to be as hot as possible,” she’d told me that weekend long ago. “As hot as would kill most people.”

The conference was declared over and hasty preparations begun to transport us all back to Helsinki. If I didn’t work fast, I might lose my opportunity. I found Silje and Tom getting into a car in the parking lot.

“May I just ask you a couple of questions before you go?”

They said nothing, so I asked anyway. “Was it generally known that Pekka had a heart condition?”

They shook their heads. “Perhaps among his friends. We didn’t know.”

Silje was already sliding into the driver’s seat when I asked, “Would you be willing to turn over the article that Pekka wrote to the police?”

“But how?” she began and Tom interrupted, “We never saw any article. We only imagined what it would have in it.” He got in the passenger seat and slammed the door.

Seconds later they were gone.

The rest of us were given two hours to pack up and meet back at the bus. In a small group, the women from the sauna huddled together. Because none of us thought that Marion had killed him on purpose, the question was complicated. Had Marion been framed, or had it merely been an impetuous response to Pekka’s unwelcome overtures? Birgit said she was bound to get off. Mayumi remembered a similar case in Japan, a murder that had been made to look like a suicide. Eva hinted at conspiracy, and Simone quickly joined her in wondering whether larger forces had not been involved. It was only on the bus, when I was sitting next to Luisa, that I thought to ask her when she’d had a chance to hear Pekka’s laugh, the laugh she said was so unpleasant.

“After the football game. He was in a group, laughing, I think with some Finns, that young pair of children’s authors. And Helga. Then the Finns walked off, looking angry. And he came by with Helga to congratulate me on heading off the goal ball. We talked about my work, and then the two of them walked away.”

“In what direction?”

“I don’t remember. The office, I think. He had some papers in his hands.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Yes, a bit. Helga was holding his arm. He was laughing.”

“What time was this?”

“Oh, quite late. Or perhaps very early.”

The conference by the lake might be over and the Finnish writers dispersed back home, but the foreign participants still had several days to wait for our return flights. Only Birgit, for family reasons, showed an interest in getting home sooner. She changed her ticket and left shortly after our bus arrived in Helsinki. The rest of us—Mayumi, Eva, Simone, and me—checked back into a central hotel. Luisa, in her inimitable way, had actually rented a flat in the city so as not to disturb her writing process. She would stay in Finland until
Diary of a First Love in Montevideo
was finished.

She urged me to come stay with her, but I felt too unsettled to take her up on it. I did make some cursory excursions around Helsinki, scribbling my final notes for Archie, describing with many adjectives the colorful market by the harbor, the splendid Russian orthodox church, the impressive monument to Sibelius, the fascinating outdoor museum with its authentic farm and country buildings. However mostly I spent hours with my new friends, discussing what had happened to Pekka and how we might help Marion.

Helga seemed to have vanished. I had no easy way of contacting Silje and Tom. All three of them, it seemed to me, had far greater motives—longer-standing motives certainly—for killing Pekka than Marion had. In the end, it was to Mayumi that I shared my suspicions and the little information I had, for Eva and Simone, with their experience of state repression, consistently drifted into conspiracy theories. Pekka was a journalist, wasn’t he, and in Czechoslovakia and Algeria journalists who were on to something were often threatened or kidnapped or outright murdered. Pekka could have been killed by government agents who then pinned it on Marion.

It after one of these sessions with Eva and Simone, at breakfast on the morning after we returned from the lake, that Mayumi caught up to me in the lobby as I was going out to send my Finnish observations to Archie, and suggested that after the post office we stop by the newspaper where Pekka had worked.

This was the
Helgosin Sanomat
, which sounded more like a particularly tidy launderette than a newspaper, but it was Helsinki’s largest daily. We asked to see Pekka’s editor and his assistant came out to the lobby to escort us up. To my surprise, the assistant was none other than the depressed young man from the FinnAir flight.

He recognized me too. “And your friend Luisa Montiflores?”

“She’s staying on in Helsinki for a while, writing,” I said. “She says Finland is like a television movie with the sound turned very low.”

The meeting with the cultural editor was brief and not very useful. He was a balding man with darting eyes in an immobile face. He shrugged away our concern that Pekka might have been murdered by someone who didn’t like what Pekka was planning to write or had written about them.

“Ladies, the late Pekka wrote many articles over many years that poked fun at many writers. If someone was going to kill him, they had ample reason before now.”

“Do you have the article he was writing at the lake, about the conference?” Mayumi asked him point blank.

“I don’t see what his article has to do with anything,” the editor blustered. “No one has asked to see it, and besides, we don’t have it.
I’ve
never seen it, anyway.”

“And that’s that,” said Mayumi, as we were shown out. We sat down on some modern looking chairs in the lobby, unsure what to try next.

“There are several questions I ask myself,” said Mayumi, and I recalled I had read in her biographical notes that she had an advanced degree in psychology. “First, obviously: who had a reason to kill him? Someone he had harmed, or was about to harm.

“Second, what was that reason? Was it fear, or was it revenge? The former suggests an uncalculated, perhaps hasty response. The latter a more premeditated plan.

“Then, I’m curious about two more things. Who knew that locking Pekka in a very hot sauna might kill him? That is, who knew he had a heart condition? And finally, why kill him at such a public event, where the chances of being discovered or seen were very great?”

“But where the possibilities of pinning the blame on someone completely outside Pekka’s usual circle were very great, too,” I reminded her.

We sat staring at each other for a moment. I had earlier dismissed Mayumi, I blush to say, as a grandmotherly type: gray perm, glasses, a pantsuit and scarf. Suddenly I realized that in spite of my bomber jacket and black jeans, my hair was also gray and I could only be a few years younger than she, at most.

I also remembered, with a jolt, a few tasty passages from one of her novels, a scene between two women.

Behind the glasses were curious, warm black eyes. Her skin was ivory and smooth.

“Intimacy. Humiliation. Revenge. Exquisite organizational skills. The ability to dissimulate,” Mayumi said. “All these were necessary.”

We were interrupted by the pale and breathless assistant, who came skidding to a halt in front of us. “You’re still here,” he said. “I thought I would have to track you down at your hotel.”

He was holding two sheets of paper, copied from a fax. “The editor was not quite telling the truth,” he said. “Pekka’s article came in the middle of the night. I don’t have time to translate it for you, but I can tell you what’s in it. It was never published.”

“Why didn’t the editor run it?” Mayumi asked.

“He didn’t think it came from Pekka. He didn’t think Pekka wrote it.”

“Why not?”

The assistant looked bewildered. “It’s an apology,” he said. “To all the writers he had mocked over the years.”

On my way to Helga’s apartment, I thought of what Mayumi had said: “Intimacy. Humiliation. Revenge. Exquisite organizational skills. The ability to dissimulate.”

There could be no one but Helga. All that remained was to put together some coherent time frame for the actual murder, between the last time anyone had seen them, well after midnight, and the time the fax had arrived at the newspaper office. The article of course was written by Helga. I should have left it to the police, of course, but I couldn’t bear to let her go out of my life without seeing her again.

The assistant had given me her address. It was in a quiet block of tall, nineteenth-century terraced houses, all painted white and sparkling in a sunshine so constant it was beginning almost to grate on me.

Behind her door, I felt her regarding me through the peephole. Then she let me in.

She was in a summer suit, a light blue that matched her eyes. Her hair was pale as whipped honey, and her skin quite brown. She did not look relaxed, but she didn’t look agitated either. I noticed that a cotton coat was thrown over a suitcase in the hall. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her, in Leningrad, at a dismal gathering at one of the Intourist ballrooms. She had been only twenty-five then, gangly in an ill-fitting skirt and jacket, her idea of what a professional woman travelling abroad should wear. Actually I’d heard her before I’d seen her that evening. She was laughing. A joyous, dithery laugh that came from deep inside.

I hadn’t heard her laugh once this time.

“I know about the article you wrote in Pekka’s name. The apology.”

Without answering, Helga led me to a couch in the middle of the room. The flat had tall ceilings and was starkly furnished. Perhaps it was this starkness that gave me the feeling she was packing up and leaving permanently. The tall drapes were drawn, as if Helga too found the constant light tiring.