‘The will doesn’t mention anything else,’ said the lawyer. ‘After a brief investigation, it seems your brother didn’t own anything else.’
I had to repeat his last statement in my head to fully grasp its contents.
‘To my knowledge, he was a wealthy and successful entrepreneur,’ I said.
‘According to the information here, he was living in a rented apartment and drove a part-owned car – both of which have been in arrears for several months. And he ran this … park.’
My first thought, of course, was that none of this made any sense – because it simply didn’t. Juhani was dead and essentially penniless. Both statements seemed like misunderstandings of the highest order. Besides…
‘Why am I only hearing about his death now?’
‘Because he wanted it that way. He wanted me to be informed if anything happened, then I was only to tell the next of kin once everything was sorted out. That goes for the will too, once the assessment and inventory of his estate was complete.’
‘Was he ill? I mean, did Juhani know that he…?’
The lawyer leaned forwards an inch or two. He no longer looked tired; he almost seemed a touch enthusiastic.
‘Do you mean, are there grounds to believe someone might have … murdered him?’
The lawyer looked at me as though we were doing something terribly exciting together, solving a mystery or competing to win a quiz.
‘Yes, or rather—’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, and no longer looked at all enthusiastic. ‘Nothing like that, I’m afraid. Heart problems. Something inoperable. He explained it all to me. There was always a risk it could happen, then one day it happened. His heart just gave up. The death of a middle-aged man is generally pretty uneventful stuff. No material for a blockbuster, I’m afraid.’
I turned and looked out at the autumnal morning. Two crows darted past the window.
‘But look at it this way,’ I heard the lawyer saying. ‘This is a great business opportunity. Your brother’s … park.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not an adventure-park kind of man. I am an actuary.’
‘Where do you work?’
The blue of the lawyer’s eyes was so exactly between that of his shirt and his jacket that there was an almost mathematical symmetry to it. In other circumstances it might have felt like an interesting feature. Now it didn’t. This morning at 7:32 a.m., after only a week and a half of diligent job searching, the final actuarial door had slammed shut in my face. Without delay, I had sent my CV and an application to every respected insurance company and stressed that I took traditional mathematics very seriously indeed and said upfront that I had no time for buzzwords and parlour games. When I heard nothing from these companies, I contacted them myself and listened to their banalities in stunned silence. One wanted to create a soft-flowing team dynamic, another wanted to shift towards a newer form of algorithm-based calculation. Each of them took pains to explain that there were no current vacancies. This I was able to correct. I told them I knew their companies had been recruiting. Time and again, this led to a hum of silence at the other end of the phone before the call was abruptly rounded off by wishing me a pleasant autumn.
‘I’m looking around at the moment,’ I said.
‘And how’s that going?’
It was a good question. How were things going? This morning’s balance sheet was clearly in the red. I wasn’t going to find work in my own field, my brother had died, and it seemed I now owned an adventure park.
‘I’m sure things will work out sensibly,’ I said.
The answer seemed to satisfy the lawyer. An expression crossed his face that seemed to suggest he had just remembered something important. Again he leafed through the folder. An envelope.
‘Your brother left you a message. A letter, just in case. It was my idea. I told him that once the will was ready, due to his diagnosis there were two things he should take care of right away: my bill and this greeting to you.’
‘Greeting?’
‘That’s what he called it. I don’t know what’s in it. As you can see, the envelope is still sealed.’
This was true. My full name was written across the C5-sized envelope: Henri Pekka Olavi Koskinen. It was Juhani’s handwriting. When was the last time I’d seen him?
We’d had a quick lunch together in Vallila about three months ago. I paid for the pepperoni pizzas because Juhani had left his wallet in the car. Of course, now I wondered whether there were more problems with his wallet than its simply being left behind. What did we talk about? Juhani told me about some new acquisitions at the adventure park, I mentioned Kolmogorov’s foundational principles of probability theory in explaining why he should make big investments one at a time, once he’d been able to see and assess how many people each new acquisition brought to the park. Juhani didn’t look as though he was about to drop dead any second. And he didn’t look like he had just drawn up a will either. What do people usually look like after writing a will? I’m sure there’s no quintessential mien, though such people are on the cusp of the impossible: trying to influence life after death.
I opened the envelope, slid out the folded sheet of paper inside.
HI HENRI
I’m not dead after all! Hahaha – I know you’re not laughing, but I want to laugh. I can’t think of anything else. No, seriously, if you’re reading this, I probably amdead. The doctors told me this heart defect was so bad that my time might be up much sooner than planned. Anyway, I guess by now you’ll have heard what’s going on. I’m dead and the adventure park is all yours. I’ve got one last wish for the place. I’ve never had much luck with money, and the park’s finances aren’t in very good shape, not to mention my own finances. I’ve never had the patience to count things properly, dot the Is, cross the Ts, that sort of thing. But you’re a mathematical genius! Do you think you could keep things ticking over for me? That’s my final wish. In fact, it’s my only wish. I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud, but of all my business ventures – and you know there have been plenty of them over the years – the park is the most important. I want it to be a success. I suppose you’re asking yourself why. There are as many reasons as there are debtors, I’m afraid. I want to be good at something, to leave something behind. And there’s another reason you’ll discover once you’ve successfully completed your mission. Remember how we used to spend the summers at Grandma’s place, and how we were allowed to be away from home, where everything was always screwed up? I think of those summers now. You would always sit inside counting things, and I was outside playing. But we always went fishing together. If I’m dead, sit inside for a while, count things up and save the park, then go fishing. I’ll bring the worms. (Compulsory joke, sorry, couldn’t resist. Everything else is deadly serious.)
JUHANI
I felt annoyance verging on rage. This was typical of Juhani, a complete and utter lack of responsibility. The letter was clearly written in haste, drawn up on the spur of the moment. It lacked all rational thought and argumentation. Detailed analysis and clear conclusions were conspicuous by their absence. For the thousandth time in my life, I wanted to tell him there simply wasn’t any sense to this.
But Juhani was dead.
And I was sad, angry, confused, frustrated and, in a peculiarly intangible way, exhausted. Combined, these emotions burned my lungs, clawed at my chest. Everything pointed to the fact that I did, indeed, now own an adventure park.
‘So, this is everything?’ I sighed.
‘Not quite,’ the lawyer responded, quickly rummaged in his briefcase and, in a considerably more practised gesture, produced a slightly larger envelope. ‘My bill.’