“No, thank you. I’m not really in the mood for company.”
“Sometimes it’s important to talk about things. Is there anyone you can unburden your heart to?”
Norma’s increasing pace didn’t seem to bother Lambert. They quickly sped past the row of bars, making oncoming traffic get out of their way. Dogs lifted their noses, and women guarded their handbags. This scene from a summer evening comedy would have been humorous if Lambert’s intrusive behavior hadn’t begun to seem like stalking.
Norma didn’t understand what he wanted. Lambert couldn’t have any business with her, and she hadn’t found any clues in her mother’s apartment that might explain his sudden interest. Still, her hair urged her on. It wanted out of here. A sculpture depicting a working-class mother approached, marking the intersection with Sturenkatu, and Norma listened for an approaching streetcar she could jump onto. Or maybe this had to do with her father. But if Reijo Ross had heard about her mother’s death, why would he have chosen a messenger Norma didn’t know, Helena’s ex-husband? And why would he want to contact Norma at all?
The heat took her breath away. Norma couldn’t walk any faster. She leaned against the corner of the streetcar stop and set down her bags. She felt uncomfortable, and her hair retreated in from her forehead in tight twists. She shoved her double ponytail under her dress.
“I thought you lived on Vaasankatu, above Anita. Or was it below? Anita had a beautiful home,” Lambert said.
The heat had stuck Lambert’s shirt to his chest. As they stood, out of breath and dripping sweat after having rushed to the stop together, they looked like a father and daughter who had been assigned to bring the drinks for a family party but were late. A young couple who came to wait for the streetcar didn’t see anything strange in the situation, and another pair who hurried by with Nordic walking poles didn’t even glance at them. After her breathing leveled off a bit, Norma realized what Lambert had said: he had been in her mother’s apartment.
“I thought the two of you were only childhood friends.”
“That too, that too.”
Lambert produced a cigarillo case and offered Norma one. Norma shook her head and glanced at the timetable. Eight minutes until the next car. A taxi would come faster, so she brought up the number on her phone. But she didn’t call. The phone returned to her handbag.
“What does he want? My father. This has something to do with him, doesn’t it?”
Lambert’s brow furrowed.
“Please be so good as to leave me alone. That’s what you can tell him,” Norma said.
Her mother would have said exactly the same thing. Nothing personal. As colorless and polite as possible. The voice had come from her of its own accord, and Norma had clearly succeeded in throwing Lambert off balance, at least a little. Satisfied, she stood a bit taller. Had he expected tears and blubbering followed by a toast with the wine peeking out of her bag?
“Reijo was really sad you lost contact. He missed you a lot.”
Norma bit her lip and swallowed the question she didn’t even want to think about. It just slipped into her mind. What was her father like? This man knew, but she did not. Now she wasn’t going to be able to get any answers from her mother to the questions she had always put off asking. Norma had nothing left of Reijo Ross other than his last name.
“As I already said, we could talk about this somewhere more comfortable,” Lambert said.
His tone was probing, and Norma was shocked at its effect. Even though the tingling in her scalp reminded her that the man standing next to her was a threat, she wanted to hear what Lambert had to say about Reijo Ross, which made her feel like accepting his offer. Surely one glass wouldn’t hurt. But as soon as the idea crossed her mind, she felt the roots of her hair constrict as if scolding her, and that brought her back to her senses.
“I don’t want to hear about my father.”
“Unfortunately my business has nothing to do with your father. I haven’t seen Reijo in ages. We made our last trip together ten years ago.”
Norma’s cheeks flushed at her stupid, fleeting notion that her father might have been interested in her. If he hadn’t shown interest in three decades, what would her mother’s death have changed?
Suddenly Lambert slapped his forehead in a wide, arcing gesture appropriate to a silent film. “But wait…! Didn’t your mother tell you? It didn’t even occur to me that I should introduce myself in more detail. Anita was one of my employees. I own Marion’s salon.”
Norma sat on the bench, which was hot from a day in the sun, and Lambert flopped down next to her. No, her mother had not told her. Maybe she hadn’t known who owned the salon. There could be no other explanation. Her mother would never have done this, not to Helena. The burning plastic under Norma’s thighs made the sweating worse, and her ponytail, now curly at the top, swelled under her dress like a tumor. Saliva pooled in her mouth, and she felt nauseated.
“I’ve been traveling so much,” Lambert said, “it’s no wonder we haven’t run into each other. However, I do drop in on the salon from time to time. According to Marion, Anita seemed somewhat distant during her last few days, perhaps even sad.”
“Sad how?”
“Marion interpreted it as a kind of goodbye.”
“How could she tell?”
“Just in her expression. And her words. Anita asked Marion to look after you if anything happened to her.”
Lambert’s body temperature rose at his temples and along his hairline. The lie was obvious.
“Some of Anita’s things are still at the salon. Would you like to come by and get them?”
The clattering of the streetcar approached, and Norma stood up. Was she imagining it, or had Lambert’s tone changed? At first Norma couldn’t find the right word, and then she realized what it was: fatherly. He sounded more fatherly. Lambert grabbed her shopping bags before Norma could stop him.
“This is the wrong moment,” Lambert said. “But someone has to say it, since apparently you don’t know…”
The streetcar stopped. The folding doors opened.
“There’s no point in beating around the bush. Reijo died in a boating accident in Thailand. A while ago. He was like a brother to me, and I have many stories I could tell about him. Our family is prepared to help you any way we can. We always take care of our own.”
—
Norma rode until the streetcar completed its loop and returned to her street in Kallio. Lambert hadn’t been lying about her father. But the news didn’t arouse any feelings in Norma, and the sentimentality that had bothered her at the streetcar stop did not return. Her skin tingled, but it didn’t have anything to do with Reijo—it was from the hug Lambert had foisted on her before he lifted Norma’s purchases onto the streetcar. Only now did Norma remember that Lambert still hadn’t told her what the unfortunate business was he had hinted about at the cemetery gates. And she realized she’d been looking for clues about her mother’s relationship with Lambert in the wrong decade: he had been part of her mother’s life recently.
The laptop. There could actually be something there.
Lambert’s gaze was glued to the screen. Once again he was playing back the security camera footage sent from the Bangkok clinic. The footage that had led to Anita being found out. The footage in which a woman recognizable as Anita questioned a girl handcuffed to a bed. The video was from the closed wing and clearly showed that Anita had a camera in her hand, that she had recorded the conversation.
“Turn it off,” Alla said. “There isn’t anything new in it.”
“Where the hell is that camera?” Lambert asked, tapping the screen. “Whoever was doing business with Anita knows that she got caught and that she’s dead. Why aren’t they reacting?”
Alla looked out into the yard at her children playing with Ljuba and dabbed layer after layer of gloss on her lips. The layers began to build into waves that would soon run into the wrinkles around her lips. Two of Lambert’s mongrels stood at the edges of the
property, alert to every movement and sound, whether it was the boy distributing junk mail who sped by, the banging of a lawnmower motor, or the popping of beer bottle caps after sauna on the other side of the fence. Alla had demanded around-the-clock monitoring for her children as soon as suspicions about Anita’s activities had surfaced, and she never went anywhere alone anymore. She had changed cars to one with bulletproof glass, and the home security system had been upgraded. These measures had calmed Alla, but not completely.
“If the Russians have gotten mixed up in—”
Lambert interrupted Alla by raising his hand like a truce flag. “Anita’s modus operandi was not the traditional Russian way of handling conflicts. The Russians would have made themselves known after her death.”
“But if they are involved, we need to blow the whistle,” Alla said. “We aren’t going to war. That would be unacceptable.”
The applicator pressed hard against Alla’s lower lip. Done with dabbing, she dragged it across her mouth as if scratching a rash. Her intermediaries still hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. Business in Ukraine continued without interruption. There had been no threats against dealers, no plundered or burned stockpiles, and no broken windows. Except for Anita’s exposure, nothing indicated a turf war—unlike when Alla had been establishing her Russian hair logistics chain. Lambert still remembered too how Alla had driven off a few Americans who were trying to muscle in on the Ukrainian market.
Alla dropped the lip gloss and picked up her nail file. The thought of war toppled the imperiousness from her like a meringue onto a plate, and for a moment the person leaning against the window was the girl who had been dating a Uralic hair mogul when matters got out of hand. The power struggle in the hair industry had become so intense that her partner got a bullet in the brain, the man who had been hunting Alla lost his own head, and that man’s right hand had fled to Congo. Now Alla ruled her corner of the market from Finland with the aid of an army of helpers, but her iron grip had clearly slipped. Brittle from worry, she glanced at the kids running around on the grass, her hand clutching the file as if it were a weapon.
“The Ukrainian could just have been bait. A way to get Anita inside,” Alvar pointed out. “No one could resist that hair.”
Lambert ground his teeth. They had drawn a blank at Margit’s, Norma’s, and Anita’s apartments, and the clan still didn’t know the origin of the hair. Lambert cursed his blindness. The clan had made a mistake and forgotten caution. They should have suspected something immediately when Alla’s contacts in Ukraine didn’t know where the hair was coming from, who controlled it, or from whom Anita was getting it. But they had been smitten by the possibilities the Ukrainian hair offered and let the mole burrow in close.
“Whoever is selling it can continue doing business with us. It’s too good to leave to the others,” Lambert said.
“Sounds like war,” Alvar said.
“We’re only taking what belongs to us. We’ll follow the trail until we find whoever the hair is coming from. Then we’ll also find Anita’s real boss and lay down the law,” Lambert said.
“That’s a war.”
“Fine!”
Lambert slammed his fist onto the table. Their opponent was devious, more devious than any of Lambert’s other enemies. He had known to find a mole from Lambert’s past, a woman his children would trust.
Folake’s salon was closed, but the drone of sewing machines was audible from the threshold. The girls in the back room were still working, and Marion would be able to take the finished hair soon. They had everything: sew-in, hot fusion, tape-in, all top quality as always. No one would notice that there was Russian mixed in. Folake was sure of that.
“We still won’t give this to hypersensitive customers,” Marion said.
Folake nodded. The Russian raw hair had been treated with the normal chemicals, but for the Ukrainian, just a wash and a hypoallergenic dye were enough. It had become a hit in Nigeria because it worked for people who were allergic to human hair. Before, hypersensitive clients had been forced to use synthetics, but now they could have the real thing.
“When will you get more?”
“Soon. It’s just a delay.”
Marion smiled her most convincing smile and took the glass of juice Folake offered. The logistical disturbance caused by Anita’s death had to be fixed before Folake began to suspect that Anita had been behind everything. Marion glanced at her phone again. She had to continue calling the girl. She must know her mother’s friends. She had to pick up Anita’s trail even though no one in the clan seemed to believe she was capable of doing so. At the family meeting she’d been left out of the discussion as if her countdown had already begun. Air—she was only air to the clan even now.
The sew-ins would still be a few minutes. Marion sat to wait and looked outside. The mango juice in her hand was evidence that she wasn’t under suspicion. She knew that. Otherwise she wouldn’t be sitting in Folake’s salon—she would have met Anita’s fate. She would have been picked up at the airport just like Anita. She had been lucky that they always took different flights just to be safe. Even though her plane had landed a full two hours earlier, she’d stayed to wait. While she was getting her Starbucks, she noticed Lambert’s men. First she was paralyzed, then she tried to call Anita, with no success. When the doors of the baggage claim area opened, Anita had walked right into Lambert’s arms, and Lambert’s fingers snapped around her wrist like a handcuff. Later Marion feigned confusion—she had no idea Anita had followed her to Bangkok. She thought Anita was on vacation somewhere else with friends. The clan believed her because they thought she was so stupid.
The droning stopped, and Marion was given the box of extensions, each bundle carefully packaged.
The other businesses on the street were already closed, but farther off the sounds of the pub patios were picking up. There was no sign of any gangs of immigrant boys or Lambert’s mongrels. Contrary to Alla’s advice, Marion had declined the offer of extra security. Still, she felt Lambert’s eyes on her back. Ever since the moment she realized Anita was gathering evidence of the clan’s business activities in order to blackmail them, overthrow them, and claim their territory, those had been the eyes of a predator sharpening its teeth.
The upper corner of the display began to scroll through a list of unread emails from the past several weeks, all from customers. The emojis in the subject lines pricked her heart. Norma had put off touching her mother’s laptop because she knew that a wave of salon garbage would tumble out as soon as she opened the lid. But the good news was, what she saw on the screen was obviously her mother’s doing, not anyone else’s. Unlike Norma, her aunt didn’t know the password: Elizabeth Siddal.
Norma logged into her mother’s bank account. The final transaction was a grocery store purchase the day before her flight to Thailand. She had paid her May rent before the trip, leaving 250 euros in the account. Nothing about the transactions seemed strange, until she realized that despite all the traveling her mother had done that spring, she hadn’t made any large credit card payments or any large cash withdrawals before each trip. Norma tried to count. Her mother’s travel expenses exceeded her income. Had she taken out a loan and not mentioned it? Nothing in the account information indicated that.
The browser history had been cleared. She found messages to Marion in the sent folder, but they only touched on reservations and shifts at work. Norma moved on to the salon Facebook page, which her mother had administered under the name Anita Elizabeth. The account had been created for her in the spring, and she’d used it only for work. Other than Marion, all her Facebook friends were clients. Norma lit a cigarette and thought. Just a few hours before her flight to Thailand, her mother had confirmed some customer reservations. Why would she have done that if she was planning to end it all?
The notification sounds for the unread messages distracted Norma from her pondering. She turned off the computer’s network connection, as she’d also done on the phone. Her mother w
ould never be online again, and there would never be a need to water her houseplants again, contrary to the reminder that had appeared on the screen.
Norma placed the pot of angel’s tears on the counter and said she wasn’t interested in houseplants. Under her care they would just die.
“This was Anita’s.”
The florist hadn’t heard about her longtime customer’s demise. She knew someone had jumped in front of a metro train while she was in the south vacationing, but not that it was Norma’s mother. The woman sat down and sighed.
Norma allowed time for condolences before presenting the seedling she had brought from her mother’s balcony. “Mother meant to plant this almond bush in the backyard.”
“You still could.”
“No, you plant it somewhere.”
The woman inspected the plant—it was rare at this latitude. In recent years, Norma’s mother had begun tending the garden at their apartment building to make it more welcoming. The almond bush had been a gift from a grateful client just before her trip to Thailand. Norma had already turned to go when the shopkeeper began rummaging for something under the counter.
“Anita left her spare key here.”
The woman gave Norma a padded envelope. It was glued shut, with no writing on the front.
“Did my mother do that often?”
“Whenever she left on a trip.”
Norma didn’t understand. She already had a spare key to her mother’s apartment, and Norma thought she kept another at work.
She tore open the envelope. There was no key inside. Instead she found a flash drive and a memory card.
The screen showed an open suitcase with clothes tossed in. Norma’s mother was operating the camera and couldn’t seem to hold still, constantly walking around and occasionally checking the stove. Norma recognized the package of lamb fillets. The garam masala and almonds. This was the last meal they had shared, so the video on the memory card must have been made just before, the day before her mother left on her trip. The display began to tremble, and the light was so dazzling her eyes watered. Norma turned her head and took a sip of wine to force down the lump that had formed in her throat. She had been looking for her mother’s message in the wrong places, thinking she would have written to Norma even though she’d never been a writing person. She handled things by calling or coming to visit. She talked. Norma should have realized that.