‘Fine, then,’ he says. ‘Let me explain it a bit more simply, so you understand. We’ve got these pictures of you now. If you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll send them to the boss and your wife or girlfriend, or whatever, I don’t care if you’re screwing a fucking goat, mate. And there’ll be an explanation with the pictures. Summa summarum, as I’m sure you’d bloody well put it, you work for me now. I own you.’
I would never say something like summa summarum, but I don’t tell Lizard Man this.
‘I reckon you enjoyed that,’ he says. ‘Iira is hot stuff.’
‘Iira?’
‘I knew you were keen.’
‘Why did she … accost me like that?’
‘Because I told her to.’
‘You tell naked people to sit in the laps of complete strangers?’
Lizard Man laughs. It’s the same laugh as in the barn, scornful, spiteful.
‘She can do far worse than that,’ he says.
‘At your orders?’
‘Yes, at my orders. I think you’re finally getting the message. It’s that simple. I own her. And I own you.’
Inside the car, everything is quiet for a few seconds. Then I catch sight of those cold, reptilian eyes in the rear-view mirror and hear his voice, lower now than before.
‘It’s one plus one, Einstein,’ he says.
10
I don’t sleep a single minute. I sit on the sofa until morning. My tie done up, a book in my hand. Twice Schopenhauer visits and asks why I’m not in bed asleep. Both times I stroke and scratch him until he has had enough and goes to sleep himself. I can’t even bring myself to tell him what kind of thoughts I am thinking or how agitated I am.
The early hours I spend trying to calm myself down. I realise that this is vital – quite literally. Though I can’t work out the precise probability that my affairs would become this complicated in such a short period of time, I still have to find a rational way to examine the overall situation in which I find myself. This requires a cool head, and cooling my head takes time.
Lizard Man. Laura. AK. The clandestine nightclub. The body in the freezer. Iira, the naked lap-dancer. The big man. The bank. The money-laundering. The hanged man. Perttilä and his emotional leadership.
I try to arrange everything in my mind, to make sense of it. Eventually I have a semblance of a plan for every name, place and item. Except for Laura Helanto, for whom I can’t draw up a plan. When I try to do that, I end up hoping that the constituent parts of my other plans don’t prevent us visiting the Kiasma museum to acquaint ourselves with contemporary art. This, of course, feels more than a little crazy, to be frank. The idea that, after all this, after all that’s happened in recent weeks, the thing that worries me most is not being able to share an evening of art with Laura Helanto. It’s hard to explain why contemporary sculpture, and Laura’s explanations and interpretations of it, feel so important after having my hair pulled, a nipple shoved in my mouth and my life threatened, or after having started – temporarily – laundering money or using a giant rabbit’s ear to beat to death a man who tried to kill me.
The letter in my hand is from the regional state administrative agency. It arrived with yesterday’s post. The letter tells me that I, or rather the company I have set up alongside the adventure park, now have the legal right to operate as a money-lending service. Meanwhile, Heiskanen the lawyer has filled my inbox with various documents and notifications. He has worked quickly and has followed my instructions. His bill, the first of many documents attached to his email, is substantial. Additionally, he rather redundantly tells me that his nephew, a student of information technology, can help me – not surprisingly – with matters relating to the bank’s information technology.
Everything is ready.
I can award my first loan.
By half past six, it is light. Not necessarily bright, but there is enough light that we can say a new day has dawned. I stand up from the sofa, take a shower, pull on some clean clothes. I have breakfast with Schopenhauer, check my tie and leave for the adventure park, and so, I hope, will many others.
11
Minttu K is ready to start immediately. This time, she doesn’t try to challenge me. Maybe she can see I’m serious. I was serious before, too, but now I realise I am moving and speaking in a different way, more directly, as though there are no alternatives. Which, of course, is true. There aren’t.
True to form, Minttu K smells of gin and cigarettes, and it’s only 9:00 a.m. Either that or the smell is ingrained into the walls and furniture and the numerous items of clothing hanging in her office wardrobe. It’s like sitting in a bar in the mid-1990s. Minttu K is dressed in a tight white top and black blazer, and her tan seems so intense that she’s more bronzed than the average Swedish tourist.
‘Honey,’ she says, and her voice is like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. ‘I’ll get my favourite graphics guy to work on this. We’ll have the sketches ready by this afternoon.’
I leave her to order the posters, leaflets and flyers – jargon I have learned during the course of our conversation – and return to my office, where Heiskanen’s gangly nephew is sitting at my laptop. His fingers dance across the keyboard. Soon afterwards, he tells me he is finished. I thank him and he stands up from the chair like an animated matchstick: his movements angular, his limbs scrawny. I take two hundred euros from my wallet and hand it to him. The boy looks at the four fifty-euro notes as though he has just wiped his hand in something unpleasant. I tell him this represents an hourly rate of almost three hundred euros. Two hundred and eighty-nine euros and seventy cents, to be precise, he replies. We look at each other for a moment, then I take another fifty-euro note from my wallet and hand it to him. In a strange way, it feels almost like looking in the mirror, a mirror that distorts time, as though I were that young man and my middle-aged self all at the same time. I think of Einstein and his theory of the curvature of time and space, how time passes more quickly in some places than others.
Then I look at my terrestrial watch, realising that time and space waits for no man, and head to the entrance to relieve Kristian from behind the counter. I have timed this hand-over so that there will already be enough customers queuing up for tickets that Kristian won’t be able to start another conversation about becoming the general manager. Oddly, he looks as though he doesn’t want to talk about it. We can only hope that our conversation, in which I channelled Perttilä the snake-oil salesman as though I had taken leave of my own body and handed it over to my former boss to use as he pleased, frightened Kristian just as much as it frightened me. Kristian says nothing but flexes his muscles more than usual as he gathers up his things – his keys, phone, wallet, protein shake – and does it as though he is showing off his biceps to me. I’ll admit, they are impressive biceps. As he leaves, he appears to spread out his back muscles and raise his shoulders. For a moment, it feels as though we have landed in the middle of the jungle and fallen a few rungs back down the evolutionary ladder.
Then it happens. I award my first loan.
It isn’t very difficult. There are three children, all at the age when they are more than capable of whingeing until they get what they want, and the father barely has enough money to cover the entrance tickets. I comment in passing that his financial situation looks quite precarious. He says he is aware of that, then lowers his voice and from beneath his thick, dark eyebrows asks me what ‘the flying fuck’ it’s got to do with me. Of course, it’s none of my business, I reply, how could it be? But I can award him a small loan right away. After a brief conversation, he types a few lines of details into the iPad on the counter, a flexi-loan account opens up in his name and the money is deposited in his account.