“Her name was Minna,” Hannele told him. “She was William’s friend, one of your dad’s older women. I always thought it was a peculiar relationship, but Minna had gone through some hard times—like your dad. She had a child out of wedlock, and the child died as an infant—some upper-respiratory ailment.”
“Your father wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, Jack. He was probably still in love with the Dane,” Ritva said. “Minna was just a comfort to him. I think that’s all he thought he was good for, to be a comfort to someone. You know, it’s that old Christian idea—you find someone down on their luck and you help them.”
Certainly Agneta Nilsson, who’d taught William choral music in Stockholm—and Jack how to skate on Lake Mälaren—was an older woman. Maybe Agneta had been down on her luck, too; after all, she’d had a bad heart.
“Look, we’re musicians, Jack. Your dad was first and foremost a musician,” Hannele said. “I’m not claiming an artist’s license for how I live—William wasn’t, either. But what sort of license was your mom taking? There wasn’t anything she didn’t feel entitled to!”
“Hannele, the slut was his mother—no matter what you say about her,” Ritva said.
“If somebody dumps you, you move on,” Hannele told Jack. “Your mom made a feature-length film out of it!”
“Hannele!” Ritva said. “We’ve seen all your movies, Jack. We can’t imagine how you turned out so normal!”
Jack didn’t feel normal. He couldn’t stop thinking about the waitress with the fat arms—Minna, Sami Salo’s daughter. How her arms had jiggled; how she’d been a friend of his father’s!
So Jack’s mother had undermined even that—a comfort relationship. Hannele doubted that his dad and Minna had ever had sex; Ritva thought they probably had. But what did it matter? Alice had convinced Sami Salo that his unlucky daughter could expect nothing but betrayal and heartbreak from William Burns. Sami couldn’t wait for Alice and Jack to go to Amsterdam, where William would be bound to follow.
It was true that Sami Salo was a scratcher; even so, he wasn’t losing that much business to Daughter Alice. As Hannele and Ritva explained to Jack, his mom tattooed mostly students at the Hotel Torni; even well-to-do students weren’t inclined to spend their money on tattoos. Most of the sailors still went to Sami; at that time, sailors spent more money on tattoos than students did.
Jack also learned that Kari Vaara traveled—Vaara was always giving concerts abroad. William was what amounted to the principal organist at the Johanneksen kirkko, where he loved the church and the organ. He loved his students at Sibelius Academy, too—Ritva and Hannele being two of the better ones.
William would have no students in Amsterdam, where his duties at the Oude Kerk were so demanding that he had no time for teaching, too. “You mean the organ-tuning?” Jack asked Hannele and Ritva.
“The what?”
Jack explained what he’d been told: namely, that his dad’s only real job in Amsterdam was tuning the organ in the Oude Kerk, which was indeed vast, as Kari Vaara had described it, but the organ was always out of tune.
“William couldn’t tune a guitar, much less an organ!” Ritva cried.
“He only agreed to play the organ at the Oude Kerk if the church hired an additional organ-tuner,” Hannele told Jack.
“There was already someone who tuned the organ before every concert, but—at your dad’s insistence—the new organ-tuner came almost every day,” Ritva said.
“It was every night,” Hannele corrected her.
That’s when Jack knew who the additional organ-tuner had been—the dough-faced youngster who, Alice had said, was a “child prodigy.” The young genius who’d put baby powder on the seat of his pants so that he could more easily slide on the organ bench, which was also vast—Frans Donker, who’d played for Jack and his mom, and whatever whores were on hand, one night when he, the “child prodigy,” was supposed to be tuning the organ.
“They say that in the Oude Kerk, one plays to both tourists and prostitutes!” Kari Vaara had told Alice and Jack. Vaara was very proud of William, Hannele and Ritva said. Vaara had called William his best student ever.
Yet Alice had wanted Jack to see his father as a mere organ-tuner; she had purposely discredited William in his son’s eyes.
“Something happened in Amsterdam,” Jack said to Hannele and Ritva. “My dad stopped following us—something must have happened.”
Hannele was shaking her head again, the blond curls holding fast to her head. “The lawyer made a deal with your mother, Jack,” Ritva said. “It was a hard deal, but someone had to stop her.”
“It was no deal for William!” Hannele said angrily.
“It was the best deal for Jack, Hannele,” Ritva said.
“I don’t remember any lawyer,” Jack told them. “What lawyer?”
“Femke somebody. I don’t remember her last name,” Hannele said. “She was some super divorce lawyer—she’d been through some big-deal divorce herself.”
Well, it was almost funny that Jack had thought Femke was a prostitute; there’d been some preposterous story about her becoming a prostitute to embarrass her ex-husband. (Femke was rich, as Jack recalled, yet she’d become a whore!) What wouldn’t you believe when you were four, and your mom was the manager of your so-called memories?
“Begin with the cop, Jack,” Ritva said. “There was a cop—he was your dad’s best friend.”
“He got you out of there—he was your best friend, too, Jack,” Hannele said.
“Yes, I remember him,” Jack said. He was a nice guy, Nico Oudejans. Nico’s eyes were a robin’s-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone he had a small scar shaped like the letter L. “Naturally, I thought he was my mother’s friend,” Jack told Hannele and Ritva. “And I thought Femke was a prostitute!”
They were sitting on the leather couch in the living room, with the darkness now fallen over the glowing dome of the Church in the Rock. The two women flanked Jack on the couch; they put their arms around him.
“Jack, your mother was a prostitute. Femke was just a lawyer,” Hannele said.
“My mom was a prostitute for just one night!” Jack blurted out. “She took only one customer—a young boy. She said he was a virgin.”
The two women went on hugging him. “Jack, no one’s a prostitute for just one night,” Ritva said.
“There’s no such thing as a prostitute who takes only one customer, Jack,” Hannele told Jack. “Not to mention one virgin!”
“We should all have dinner tonight!” Ritva cried suddenly.
“Unless Jack has a date,” Hannele said, teasing him. “I refuse to share Jack with a date.” Jack just sat on the leather couch, staring at the darkness out the window.
“From the look of him, he’s got a date,” Ritva said.
“Yes, he’s got a date. I can see it in his eyes,” Hannele said.
“I’m sorry,” Jack told them. He just didn’t know how sorry—not yet.
The aerobics instructor was thirty-one weeks pregnant and expecting her second child.
“Same anonymous sperm donor?” Jack asked as nonchalantly as the circumstances permitted. They were both naked and in bed, in his hotel room at the Torni, and Marja-Liisa was pressing Jack’s face against her big belly so that he could feel how a thirty-one-week-old fetus moved around in there.