“But my mother jumped onto the tracks herself.”
“Lambert is a master of these things.”
Norma frowned and rubbed her eyes, her nose moving.
Marion had just revealed a significant fact and was expecting questions. None came. The sound of the tree frogs intensified, and the ice in her hand melted into a puddle on the table. Maybe Norma would understand the situation if Marion gave more detail, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t told Anita either. Even if Marion had left out the one part of the story that proved her complicity, Anita would have seen through her: Marion had lied to Albino in Cartagena. After the drug wars, Colombia wanted to be like Venezuela, a factory that endlessly pumped out international beauty queens; Marion pretended they were traveling to a business meeting so Albino could get acquainted with the growing hair business in Colombia, a step up for her. Marion had been convincing and Albino’s eyes trusting. But Marion wouldn’t have been able to look Anita in the eye. Instead she told her that Albino had run off with a new lover and broken Alvar’s heart.
“Lambert murdered Anita,” Marion said emphatically. “I’m sure of it. And that’s also Lambert’s way of dealing with people who don’t pay their debts.”
Marion repeated herself to make sure the girl understood what she said. No one would pass up an opportunity to take revenge on her own mother’s murderer, and Norma could get retribution most easily by giving Marion the Ukrainian connection. But Norma remained mute.
“We can go anytime and leave all this behind,” Marion continued.
“And Lambert wouldn’t follow? What about the loan?”
The girl had opened her mouth. That was a start.
“That’s a question of planning. I have ways to keep Lambert in check.”
“You should have used them when my mother was alive.”
“We didn’t have time,” Marion said. “The money is waiting in London. After we open the salon, we can take care of the rest of the payments. All we need for success is the Ukrainian hair. If you don’t believe me, I’ll get you an account statement and all the papers. We both want a new life. Let’s create it together. You just have to trust me.”
Norma pursed her lips and pushed the envelope to Marion between the drinking glasses. Now Marion was sure of success. “I started to pack my mother’s things and found these. I thought they would go well on the walls of the salon.”
Marion opened the envelope, then immediately dropped it on the table. Disappointment flashed across her face, and she rubbed her arms as if warding off a chill. Norma shook the pictures out of the envelope. She had chosen a random selection of blond women from her mother’s collection, leaving out Eva.
“My mother’s calendar had an entry about taking old photos to Johannes,” Norma said. “Does that name mean anything to you? Maybe he’s a photographer. I don’t know anyone named Johannes.”
Marion grabbed her bag and stood but then sat back down just as suddenly, managing to knock over her glass. Her handbag thudded to the floor, and she began to dry the table without saying a word, fetching more napkins from the counter and prodding the ice cubes back into the glass. Her reaction surprised Norma. When she accused Lambert of murder, Marion’s voice had been steady and self-assured, but now she was acting erratically. Had Marion really thought Norma would believe her story that easily?
“Maybe Anita was taking them to Helena in the hospital,” said Marion. “Johannes was one of Helena’s voices.” She didn’t look at Norma, instead waving to the waitress to bring more napkins.
“Tell me.”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” said Marion. “Lambert is not a good man, and Helena had to invent something to help her bear it all. When he suggested divorce, she fell apart completely. She was pregnant at the time, and miscarried. She never recovered. You should leave that in the past, though. None of it matters anymore. What we should talk about is how to escape Lambert to get out of the mess we’re in now.”
“I’d rather hear about Johannes first.”
Marion grabbed a napkin and started picking at it.
“Why would my mother have taken pictures like this to Helena? I just want to understand.”
“Maybe Anita wanted to keep Helena in a good mood,” Marion said. “Helena had an obsession with old photos and a fantasy about a traveling photographer. Supposedly he was her lover who was going to take her to America.” She picked up another napkin after shredding the previous one. “Whenever Helena saw old pictures in the newspaper, she would cut them out and save them because she believed Johannes took them. They were everywhere. Sometimes she cut out the faces. We couldn’t bring visitors to the apartment because Helena would want to tell them how Johannes was saving money for their journey. He took pictures of hookers to satisfy the tastes of his customers, some of whom were important officials who could arrange travel papers: passports, certificates of nonimpediment for marriage, birth certificates. Helena was always going on about that. Johannes was arranging the documents she’d need to run away with him. She just had to be careful their romance wasn’t exposed.”
Marion’s explanation was identical to the story her mother had told on the videos. The fantasy about Johannes was Helena’s way of defending herself. Helena’s move from Sweden back to Finland had also played a part in her deteriorating condition and further fueled these delusions about emigrating. Marion thought it might have had something to do with the bad reputation of Finns in Sweden, although Helena was always talking about America, not Sweden. She was especially concerned about the Italian Hall Disaster, a tragedy that occurred in Michigan. It was real—Alvar checked. Finnish immigrants had been involved in organizing mining strikes, which turned bloody, and in 1913 American officials began deporting them. Then at a Christmas party at a union hall in Calumet, someone yelled “fire,” and dozens of people were crushed to death. Alvar tried to find some sense in their mother’s interest in the event. Maybe she had read about it and identified with the Finns in America. In the legal proceedings after the disaster, the prosecutor demanded answers from all witnesses in English, even though none of them knew the language. The witnesses who eventually appeared before the court gave testimony in English—but they hadn’t seen a thing.
—
Once she’d worked through the entire packet of tissues, Marion said she was finished and left. On the table were a puddle of melted ice cubes and a pile of shredded paper, heaped up like snow. Norma put the photos back in her bag. Marion hadn’t wanted them.
April 2, 2013
At the market when Eva walked past the photographer’s stand and swung her braid, the photographer jumped as if from the crack of a whip. The next morning he appeared with his camera at the Naakka property and said he wanted to photograph the farm’s prize cows. Eva was sent to show him the way, and Johannes’s camera fell in love with her, not the cows. He was leaving for America, the land of opportunity, and he began seducing Eva, trying to persuade her to come with him. At first Eva wasn’t interested. Then she noticed the purr of her hair and the new sweetness of its scent. It rippled as if ready for an ocean voyage and gravitated toward Johannes as if he were made of barley sugar.
—
Eva’s situation in the Naakka home was not easy. The heirs romping around the yard had not eased her mother-in-law’s suspicion of her, and good living had made her overly fertile. Despite constant drinking of nettle and juniper tea, she had already missed her cycle twice and she knew a day would come when neither wild rosemary nor angelica root would help. Before long she would be caught, either because of her nightly haircutting or by having the wrong kind of children. Better to leave before then.
—
The reality in America turned out to be different from what Eva had imagined. Her compass broke immediately after they arrived in the New World. It didn’t help that Johannes had arranged for living quarters in a Finnish boardinghouse in Harlem. There were no other white people living there, and her blond hair stood out. Some openly stared. The ch
ildren would try to touch her hair without being seen, and Eva was constantly afraid that she’d hear the sound of scissors at the base of her ear and be sheared like a sheep. Straightening irons heated in the ovens of the salons day and night, and the stench of singed hair hung in the air. Black women wore wigs made of white women’s hair. Within a week Eva saw her first wig theft in the middle of the street. A legal case ensued, which was solved when the police found the stolen hair concealed in the robber’s mattress.
—
The Finns’ poor reputation in America also provided good reason to fear the immigration officials. Some believed that Finnish independence would improve the situation, and they rejoiced that Finns were no longer marked as Russians on their papers. For Eva, this progress was still too slow. Suspicion of Communists was rampant, and there were plenty of them among the Finns. The bloodbath at Calumet cast a long shadow. Eva feared the boardinghouse would be the target of a raid sooner or later. She had to get to a better area, somewhere where she would be less conspicuous. But all their savings had gone to travel expenses.
—
The hair business was experiencing a revolution: short hair for women was all the rage, but exposed necks were blamed for the economic downturn in the industry, and curlers arranged demonstrations against bob cuts. A French innovation, a lightweight wig cap, brought a glimmer of light to the predicament. It allowed a woman to have short hair during the day and then at night a long mass of curls appropriate for evening dress. Eva could have solved her money problems by selling her hair. She didn’t do that, though.
—
Later Eva met numerous hair salon matrons, hair culturalists as they were called, and businesswomen who built fortunes with hair products regardless of their skin color. She read about the Harperists who set up salons under a franchising agreement with Martha Matilda Harper, and the opportunities Harper offered poor women by giving them jobs and training. The Harperists’ clientele came to include such legendary women as Jacqueline Kennedy. Success would have been guaranteed for Eva if only she’d known how to take advantage of her uniqueness.
—
So when Eva presented her plan to me, she knew what she was talking about. We guessed you would object to selling your hair, which was why we thought it best not to tell you. Plus, the more I familiarized myself with the industry, the more I doubted your hair would have an overwhelming competitive advantage. Chinese factories put out twenty thousand kilos of bulk Remy quality hair every week; from Russia there were thirty thousand kilos every month. I didn’t understand why Lambert’s clan would go crazy for your hair if the supplies were already at that level. But Eva laughed at my concerns. I just needed to trust it, and your hair would be unstoppable.
Some of Norma’s mother’s videos showed just grass or flower beds, with talking in the background. Sometimes her mother and Helena sat in the apple orchard at the mental hospital or walked in the park, passing piles of thinned wood on paths lined by pine trees. The administration building flashed in the background, its classical symmetry strange in contrast to the otherwise unbalanced content. When a shirtless man looking haggard from too much medication appeared on the screen, Norma realized her mother must have been doing something unauthorized. That explained the strange angles and the recording stopping in midsentence so often. Sometimes Helena and Norma’s mother sat in a garden swing, and the creaking of the swing mingled with the voices of the healthcare staff. A chain-link fence that curved in at the top surrounded the buildings visible in the background. It was a reminder that despite the surroundings, the area was not a museum or a beautifully restored mansion with a garden shop for tourists and well-kept canna lilies in the flower beds.
During the first videos, the apples were green. In the autumn recordings, her mother walked past the same trees and plucked a ripe piece of fruit. Sounds of chewing mixed with her words. In the winter, snow covered the grass of the park. Her mother turned up the collar of her recently purchased winter coat and stroked it like a new cat. Surrounded by an idyllic eastern Finnish winter landscape, she once again extolled the effects on Helena of smoking Norma’s hair.
A line of fir trees stood in the background like a mocking, toothy grin, and her breath condensed like speech bubbles. This was around the time she had announced to Norma the good news about her new job.
In some frames, Norma saw the Kuopio market square in the background. On Helena’s days outside the hospital, she dressed normally, and no one would have guessed she was an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane. Her conversation focused on her departure for America and how Johannes, whom she had in her snare, had agreed to a first-class cabin and a private room at the port in Hanko. The dorm room at the emigrant hostel would have been impossible, Helena said, smoothing her hair, inspecting it for split ends, and lighting her pipe. The doctor’s physical required before the journey had made her nervous, but she sailed through it.
When Helena spoke as Eva, the effect of the medications disappeared from her eyes—her gaze was like that of a mouse, focused and keen. Sometimes Finnglish crept into her speech, and her accent was strong. Norma’s mother called her Eva. Maybe the purpose of the recordings was to convince Norma that Helena really was channeling Eva. Some of Eva’s story might be true, such as being born in Tampere and abandoned to Kaisu the cupper. Eva’s ability to read hair would have burnished Kaisu’s reputation. But Norma’s mother and Helena also might have made it all up. Her mother knew how Norma’s hair worked, so she and Helena could have crafted stories that Norma would find credible. Her mother could whisper Norma’s secret into Helena’s ear without concern: if she let something slip, no one would believe her anyway. At most, they would increase her medication.
But Norma hadn’t told her mother everything. She hadn’t revealed that she could read death, cancer, and disease from people’s hair. She recognized the darkness the first time as a child—the cashier at the store was terminally ill—and even then had known that the ability to predict death would have been too much for her mother. Her mother wouldn’t have been able to walk past these people without caring, without trying to take them to the doctor. So how was it possible that her mother and Helena were talking about that on the video?
Marion put the phone back in Norma’s bag. She stood behind women playing with their screens all day every day and had never seen such an underused phone, not from someone that age. She’d expected to find communication about her murder accusations, but Norma hadn’t tried to contact anyone since their conversation at the Playful Pike. Maybe she should see that as good luck. If the girl had rushed to Lambert to accuse him of murder and told him who put that idea in her head, Marion wouldn’t be sitting here. She wouldn’t have spent the morning waiting for a moment when Norma left her phone on the counter before it locked, and she wouldn’t be searching her handbag now, the contents of which seemed just as trivial as the phone’s: a couple of bags of walnuts and seeds, a pair of scissors, a stack of crisis line business cards.
This wasn’t Marion’s first time searching here. When she’d been looking for clues about the Ukrainian hair, she had set her hopes on the girl’s phone, but in vain. All she’d come up with were Anita’s funeral arrangements and a few updates from the women at Norma’s former job. The only spice came in the form of a few suggestive texts from men who were clearly short-term interests. Anita’s old messages were about everyday things, and the more recent ones were neutral vacation updates. Norma didn’t use social media apps either. The camera had only a handful of pictures: except for one of Anita, they were all from parties at her old office. Everyone had at least a few pictures of themselves on their phone, but not Norma. This was the phone of a person with something to hide. It was the phone of a criminal. Only the model was wrong.
Marion heard the girl get back to removing extensions out in the salon. Marion’s hand instinctively went to her pants pocket again, the one where she had kept her project phone, as if she wished she could call Anita to ask why Norma hadn’
t reacted to Marion handing her a murder suspect on a silver platter. The morning after their conversation, Norma had arrived at the normal time and immediately started arranging the hair for their first client. She seemed the same as always, down to her evasive gaze. Maybe she was still out of sorts after losing her mother. That would explain the strange questions about Helena’s voices. She clearly didn’t understand the stakes.
Only one interesting thing had turned up on the phone, though it wasn’t what Marion had expected: the day before she’d seen Marion at the Playful Pike, the girl had texted Alvar an invitation to meet. Could it be that Alvar had reached her first? Did Alvar promise her evidence that Anita’s death wasn’t a suicide? Did Alvar realize he could get the Ukrainian connection that way, and probably all the other information the girl had? He hadn’t mentioned anything about it.
Nine
The Lamberts are megalomaniacs. They want the whole world, and they chose the right professions for their crusade. He who controls dreams, controls the world. He who controls hair, controls women. He who controls women’s reproduction, controls men. He who keeps women satisfied, also satisfies men, and he who seduces people with fever dreams of hair and babies is their king.
This wasn’t the first time Marion waited for Alvar outside the fence of Villa Helena. Even though she hated it, she always did it when her calls went unanswered, when she realized she hadn’t been told everything: she came here, sat on the lid of the same closed well, and waited. She’d come because of Albino, she’d come because of the ones she already wanted to forget, and on the day Lambert removed Anita, she’d come for Anita, praying she would find her here. This time she came for herself and hoped that once again her doubts would turn out to be groundless worrying. But as Alvar approached the gate, his steps slowed, and Marion guessed that she had reason for concern.