Among the Saints: A Novel from the Lapland Series by Jari Tervo

Author:Jari Tervo [Tervo, Jari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ice Cold Crime
Published: 2014-05-29T22:00:00+00:00

23. Ensio Räikkönen,

Chief Executive Officer

I hopped onto the platform, walked through the train station, and got into a taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the Saarenkylä Nursing Home. En route, I glanced at Kari Huhtamo’s twisted metal art sculpture sitting on the hill. I’d always liked it, and still liked it now, but I couldn’t explain why.

It was overcast, which made me think about the sixties. I’d asked my father a few times before he went off the deep end if the weather in Rovaniemi in the sixties was always overcast. Dad said he remembered a few ladies from the fifties; from the sixties freezing weather and chicks who smoked and defiantly tossed back their heads.

My college roommate explained it to me once: the photo albums from the sixties are mostly black and white. Cloudy weather gives the landscape the appearance of a black-and-white photo, not all the time, but when the clouds are the right color and fairly dense. His explanation made sense to me.

Looking at a photo, you can place it in time not only by the way people dress, but also by its colors or hues. My roommate had a summer job as a reporter. He said he’d learned how to date a photo—even nature pictures. He could determine the decade based on granularity, how much the photo had faded, and even by the smell. I once saw him bet against some full-time reporters about the dates of photos they showed him. He won lots of money.

Later he wrote a story about me and my firm for his paper. It was about us winning some Chamber of Commerce award. He was disappointed when he found out what we did—plastic machine parts for manufacturers. It’s difficult to explain to the layperson. I’ve tried to demonstrate it by saying that if a factory needs a fifty-foot-long exhaust pipe, which has two receptacles along its length, and the pipe has a z-shaped curve every ten feet, and the pipe is eight feet in diameter, then the factory calls us. The layperson often asks what the pipe is used for. I have to respond that it’s not used for anything; it was just an example. It’s difficult for the layperson to understand it all.

My reporter friend was disappointed when he realized that he wouldn’t get a nice business gift from me. Of course I could’ve given him a suitcase full of plastic components, but few households need industrial parts. He kept laughing about it. For Christmas I sent him a bottle of brandy. His article was decent, but in the third paragraph my last name was misspelled as Räkkönen instead of Räikkönen. He got my first name right, though. He never wondered why I was named Ensio.

Last week I saw in the paper that he was named news director. I always had the impression that he was good at his job.

I looked out of the taxi window. Trees so rarely grow in straight lines, except when they’re planted that way.

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