The Healer Read Free

this. He couldn’t resist needling me. The question had the seed of the next question in it. It was meant to indicate that I was on the wrong track when it came to Johanna just like I was when it came to everything else. So what. I decided to give him a chance to continue in the vein he’d chosen. I answered honestly.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhen was the last time you were published?”
    Once again, I didn’t need to think about my answer.
    â€œFour years ago,” I said.
    He didn’t say anything more, just looked at me with red-rimmed, satisfied eyes like he’d just proven some theory of his to be correct. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. It would have been a waste of time.
    â€œWhere does Johanna sit?” I asked.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI want to see her workstation.”
    â€œNormally I wouldn’t allow it,” Lassi said, looking like his last bit of interest in the whole matter had just evaporated. He glanced nonchalantly past me at the office full of cubicles, which he could see through the glass wall. “But I guess there’s not much we do normally anymore, and the office is empty, so go ahead.”
    I got up and thanked him, but he’d already turned toward his monitor and become absorbed in his typing, as if he’d wished he were someplace else the whole time.
    Johanna’s workstation was easy to find on the right side of the large, open office. A picture of me led me to it.
    Something lurched inside me when I saw the old snapshot and imagined Johanna looking at it. Could she see the same difference in my eyes that I saw?
    In spite of the large stacks of paper, her desk was well organized. Her closed laptop lay in the middle of the table. I sat down and looked around. There were a dozen or more workstations, which the reporters called clovers, in the open office space, with four desks at each station. Johanna’s desk was on the window side and had a direct view into Lassi’s office. Or rather, the upper section of his office—cardboard was stacked against the lower half of the glass walls. The view from the window wasn’t much to look at. The Kiasma art museum with its frequently patched copper roof loomed like a gigantic shipwreck in the rain—black, tattered, run aground.
    The top of the desk was cool to the touch but quickly grew damp under my hand. I glanced toward Lassi Uutela’s office and then looked around. The place was deserted. I slid Johanna’s computer into my bag.
    There were dozens of sticky notes on the desk. Some of them simply had a phone number or a name and address; a few were complete notes written in Johanna’s precise, delicate hand.
    I looked through them one by one. There was one in the most recent batch that caught my attention: “H—West–East/ North–South” then two lists of neighborhoods—“Tapiola, Lauttasaari, Kamppi, Kulosaari” and “Tuomarinkylä, Pakila, Kumpula, Kluuvi, Punavuori”—with dates next to them.
    â€œH” must mean the Healer. I shoved the note in my pocket.
    Next I went through the piles of papers. Most of them were about pieces Johanna had already written: articles about the alleged closing of Russia’s nuclear power plants, the dwindling Finnish tax base, the collapse in food quality.
    One pile was entirely about the Healer. It included printed copies of all his e-mails. Johanna had written her own notes on the printouts, so many on some that they nearly obscured the original text. I crammed the whole stack into my bag without reading them, got up, and stood looking at the abandoned desk. It was like any other desk, impersonal and indistinguishable from a million others. Still, I hoped it would tell me something, reveal what had happened. I waited a moment, but the desk was still just a desk.
    Twenty-four hours earlier, Johanna had sat here.
    And she would still be sitting here, if something hadn’t happened