‘I’ll take the ten grand in cash,’ he says.
4
The phone has been ringing for some time, I realise that immediately. Schopenhauer is lying at the foot of the bed, out for the count. I haven’t the faintest idea what the time is. Naturally, this isn’t like me. Neither is it like me to set up meetings with gangsters and take my savings out of the cash machine in the early hours. But that’s what has happened. Schopenhauer raises his head and squints at me as the phone continues to ring. He isn’t looking at the phone but at me, as though I were the one responsible for disturbing his sleep. Which, of course, I am. I sit up and fumble on the bedside table for the phone, but it isn’t there.
I walk into the hallway. My phone is on the table next to the coat rack. I don’t recognise the number. I answer with a simple ‘hello’, and Laura Helanto asks if it’s me speaking. Her voice has that familiar bright, perky quality to it, and my mood changes instantly upon hearing it. I can’t say how or in what way – but something happens every time I see her, every time I hear her voice. It is me, I say. Then I catch sight of myself in the hall mirror and wonder if it might not be me after all. I’ve slept in my dress shirt. Such a thing has never happened before. I turn away from the mirror and try to concentrate on what Laura Helanto is saying.
‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupt her. ‘I’ve just woken up. Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s just, I’m in Pitäjänmäki and wondered if you’d like a lift to the park. I can pick you up on the way.’
‘A lift? In Pitäjänmäki? But how…’
‘At the industrial park,’ she says, as though she hasn’t heard me properly, which might well be the case as she is clearly calling from her car. There’s a rushing, humming sound in the background, and at times her voice sounds as though she is speaking underwater. ‘I went there to pick out a new flagpole. You live in Kannelmäki, right? It’s nearby and basically on my way back to the park.’
‘How did you know that…?’
‘That you’re at home? It’s half past ten. And you weren’t at work when I left a short while ago.’
I turn again and look at the clock above the front door. I haven’t slept this late since … ever, actually. Schopenhauer appears in the hallway. He stretches and yawns, then looks around as though it is the very first time he has been in this apartment. In a curious way, I can feel Laura Helanto’s presence at the other end of the phone, though she isn’t saying anything.
‘I still haven’t…’
All at once I feel as though life and the world have somehow taken me and Schopenhauer by surprise, that we have awoken to something so strange and unfamiliar that we no longer know who we are.
‘I can wait,’ she says. ‘Actually, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about. If I offer you a lift, you can make the coffee. I’ll pick up some cinnamon buns and see you in fifteen minutes. Deal?’
I look at Schopenhauer. He looks at me.
‘I suppose I can manage that,’ I hear myself saying.
Exactly fifteen minutes after the end of the call, the doorbell rings.
The dual scent of Laura Helanto and the cinnamon buns. Laura with her bushy hair and large, dark-rimmed glasses on the other side of the table, the cinnamon buns the size of dinner plates in the middle. The coffee maker is gurgling away, and I’ve got my work cut out trying to control myself. For some reason, I feel the need to explain why I have slept this late, that this wasn’t a trivial matter of oversleeping. That the real reason is that I saved my skin by the shores of a dark pond with ten thousand euros, half of which – a down payment – I took from an ATM in the wall of a large hypermarket I’d never seen before, and that I was already tired from lack of sleep the night before when, in self-defence, I killed a man with the enormous rabbit’s ear, which you described as especially ‘unpredictable’, and because dragging the man’s body into the freezer in the café’s kitchen was a two-hour operation requiring raw physical exertion. Instead, I remain quiet, raise a hand to check my tie is straight and notice that my hand is trembling.
‘Sorry,’ Laura says for the second time. She first apologised the minute she stepped into the hallway, as she placed a large case on the floor and handed me the bag of buns. ‘But this is something I’ve been thinking about for so long, and now all my regular work is done and dusted and all I need is … But this, well, inviting myself and turning up like this…’
‘I only let in the people I want to let in,’ I say, and it’s the truth.
Laura Helanto looks at me with those blue-green eyes and gives something approaching a smile.
‘Well, that’s good to know,’ she says.
‘It is,’ I nod because I can’t think of anything else to say, and I’m starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I haven’t forgotten some of our encounters, the things she has said, her look of surprise at the door of my office yesterday. These things bother me, but in a way I can’t put my finger on.
‘The new flagpole is going to look great,’ she says suddenly, as though she was about to say something else but ended up with this. She takes one of the buns and places it on her plate. ‘And it’s much sturdier than the last one. At the store, they assured me it would survive someone accidentally reversing into it.’
I decide not to mention that the probability of this being an accident is more or less zero. I eat my bun and take a sip of coffee. Laura Helanto eats too and looks around, paying, it seems, particular attention to the living room. We are sitting between the kitchen and the living room, almost. This was the most practical solution. The oblong kitchen is too narrow to fit my parents’ old dining table, while the living room is too far from the essential elements of dining, like the fridge, the cooker, the microwave and now the coffee maker.
‘I see you’re a fan of minimalism,’ she says, and now I look towards the living room too.
In the bright morning light, things appear to be slightly further away from one another than they do normally. The room contains one long sofa, upholstered in light blue, with a matching armchair, and standing beside the armchair is a metallic floor lamp. Between the sofa and the armchair is a low coffee table. On one of the longer walls is a bookcase, on the wall opposite a large painting, a reproduction of papers by Gauss, covered in handwritten equations and formulae. A light-grey rug covers the floor and a rice-paper lampshade hangs from the ceiling. Nothing is new, I have to admit, but I doubt that’s what Laura Helanto’s comments were referring to. I decide the matter probably warrants something by way of an explanation.
‘I once calculated how much I use each individual item of furniture,’ I begin once I’ve swallowed my mouthful of bun. ‘Based on these calculations, I drew up a template both for the probability and the cost-benefit ratios of any potential new acquisitions. The results were clear. The probability of sitting on yet another chair or placing a book on yet another coffee table in the course of a randomly selected week was so infinitely small, and the time spent sitting in the chair so microscopic, that I couldn’t possibly defend the acquisition with any logical or reasoned economic arguments.’
I paused, then added:
‘Not that I was looking to buy any new furniture. I already have furniture, as you can see.’
As I speak, Laura Helanto turns from the living room to look at me. Is that the twitch of a smile at the corners of her mouth? Initially I thought Laura’s arrival was first and foremost surprising, but now I realise I find it exciting in an entirely new way. Then I remember something.