The Rabbit Factor: The tense, hilarious bestseller from the 'Funniest writer in Europe' … FIRST in a series and soon to be a major motion picture E-Book

Antti Tuomainen

• Herausgeber: Orenda Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 457

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

An insurance mathematician's carefully ordered life is turned on its head when he unexpectedly loses his job and inherits an adventure park … with a whole host of problems. A quirky, tense and warmly funny thriller from award-winning Finnish author Antti Tuomainen, FIRST in a series… **Soon to be a major motion picture starring Steve Carell for Amazon Studios** 'Laconic, thrilling and warmly human. In these uncertain times, what better hero than an actuary?' Chris Brookmyre 'The antic novels of Antti Tuomainen prove that comedy is not lost in translation … Tuomainen, like Carl Hiaasen before him, has the knack of combining slapstick with genuine emotion' The Times 'A thriller with black comedy worth of Nabokov' Telegraph _______________ Just one spreadsheet away from chaos… What makes life perfect? Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen knows the answer because he calculates everything down to the very last decimal. And then, for the first time, Henri is faced with the incalculable. After suddenly losing his job, Henri inherits an adventure park from his brother – its peculiar employees and troubling financial problems included. The worst of the financial issues appear to originate from big loans taken from criminal quarters … and some dangerous men are very keen to get their money back. But what Henri really can't compute is love. In the adventure park, Henri crosses paths with Laura, an artist with a chequered past, and a joie de vivre and erratic lifestyle that bewilders him. As the criminals go to extreme lengths to collect their debts and as Henri's relationship with Laura deepens, he finds himself faced with situations and emotions that simply cannot be pinned down on his spreadsheets… Warmly funny, rich with quirky characters and absurd situations, The Rabbit Factor is a triumph of a dark thriller, its tension matched only by its ability to make us rejoice in the beauty and random nature of life. _______________ 'Inventive and compelling' Vaseem Khan 'Readers might think they know what to expect from Nordic noir: a tortured detective, a bleak setting, a brutal crime that shakes a small community. Finnish crime novelist Tuomainen turns all of this on its head … The ear of a giant plastic rabbit becomes a key weapon. It only gets darker and funnier' Guardian 'The funniest writer in Europe, and one of the very finest … original and brilliant story-telling' Helen FitzGerald 'Full of refreshing wit and wisdom … a treat' Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW 'A dark and delightful novel with an intelligent, brave, and persnickety hero' Foreword Reviews 'Antti Tuomainen turns the clichéd idea of dour, humourless Scandi noir upside … Dark, gripping and hilarious. Tuomainen is the Carl Hiaasen of the fjords' Martyn Waites 'A triumph … a joyous, feel-good antidote to troubled times' Kevin Wignall 'Finland's greatest export' M.J. Arlidge 'You don't expect to laugh when you're reading about terrible crimes, but that's what you'll do when you pick up one of Tuomainen's decidedly quirky thrillers' New York Times 'Tuomainen is the funniest writer in Europe' The Times 'Right up there with the best' Times Literary Supplement 'Tuomainen continues to carve out his own niche in the chilly tundras of northern' Daily Express For fans of Fargo, Fredrik Backman, Richard Osman.

Leseprobe

What makes life perfect? Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen knows the answer because he calculates everything down to the very last decimal.

And then, for the first time, Henri is faced with the incalculable. After suddenly losing his job, Henri inherits an adventure park from his brother – its peculiar employees and troubling financial problems included. The worst of the financial issues appear to originate from big loans taken from criminal quarters … and some dangerous men are very keen to get their money back.

But what Henri really can’t compute is love. In the adventure park, Henri crosses paths with Laura, an artist with a chequered past, and a joie de vivre and erratic lifestyle that bewilders him. As the criminals go to extreme lengths to collect their debts and as Henri’s relationship with Laura deepens, he finds himself faced with situations and emotions that simply cannot be pinned down on his spreadsheets…

Warmly funny, rich with quirky characters and absurd situations, The Rabbit Factor is a triumph of a dark thriller, its tension matched only by its ability to make us rejoice in the beauty and random nature of life.

iii

The Rabbit Factor

ANTTI TUOMAINEN

Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

v

To all the friends I know by their first name Thank you

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONNOWTHREE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS EARLIER12345678910NOW1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435TWO WEEKS LATERSOURCESACKNOWLEDGMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORABOUT THE TRANSLATORCOPYRIGHT

1

NOW

I’m looking the rabbit in the eye when the lights suddenly go out.

With my left hand I squeeze the tube of industrial-strength glue, with my right I hold the screwdriver, and I listen.

In the half-dark, the rabbit seems to grow. Its head swells, its eyes bulge, the tips of its ears stretch upwards and seem to disappear into the dimness, its front teeth curve like an elephant’s tusks. In an instant, the three-metre figure looks twice as tall, twice as wide and considerably more threatening, as though it were guarding the darkness within it. Now it seems to be watching me as if I’m an enticing carrot.

Of course, none of this is the case. The huge, German rabbit is made of hard plastic and metallic reinforcements.

The hall is a large space, tall and empty. YouMeFun. It still smells of children’s horseplay and fast food; the saccharine sweetness of the bakery products seems to cling to your clothes.

I’m standing between the Big Dipper and the Komodo Locomotive, and I wait. The ladder beside me casts a long shadow across the floor. Light seeps in from the lamp glowing above the main door and from the various lights, large and small, on the machinery and rides dotted throughout the hall. The result is a misty, soupy light tinged with hues of EXIT-sign green, stand-by orange and power-button red.

Only a short while ago, in a situation like this, I would have assumed the reason for the sudden disappearance of the lights was surely a power cut or a technical problem with the lights themselves. But recent events have taught me that what once seemed likely, as per the laws of probability, is more often than not in the realm of the impossible. And vice versa: what once I would have been able 2to discount through a simple calculation of probability ratios and risk analysis is now in fact the entirety of my life.

Footsteps. I don’t know why I didn’t hear them sooner.

The final customers left the hall an hour ago. The last member of staff went home thirty minutes ago.

Since then I have been working by myself, checking the rides and machines, and I’ve even crawled through the Strawberry Fields Labyrinth with rubber gloves on my hands; children leave all sorts of things in the labyrinth, everything from food and clothes to the contents of their nappies. I have climbed up umpteen platforms, terraces and doorways, cleaned the Ghost Tunnel and more than a few of the Turtle Trucks, checked that the vines in Caper Castle aren’t twisted round one another but are fully operational, attached to the poles and ready for tomorrow’s sticky-fingered little Tarzans. Then I began attending to the broken rabbit. I can’t understand how anyone managed to make its right ear fall off. The ear starts growing at a height of two and a half metres. The average height of our clients is around one metre, twenty centimetres, and the median is lower still.

With some degree of exactitude, I identify the footsteps as coming from near the Curly Cake Café. They belong to someone trying to move as quietly as possible but whose sheer bulk makes this impossible.

I move a few metres to the side, then take a number of quick steps back towards Caper Castle. Just then I catch my first glimpse of the new arrival. The stocky man, dressed in dark attire, is walking as cautiously as he can. He seems to be looking for me at the foot of the rabbit, but I’ve already made it to the protective shadows of the garage housing the Turtle Trucks. I continue moving backwards and head for the gates of Caper Castle. From there, a pathway runs behind the Secret Waterfall. This isn’t a real waterfall, of course; it’s a climbing wall made of blue ropes. Once inside, getting myself out of Caper Castle will be another matter altogether. That being said, I’m not planning on trying to escape in one of the Turtle Trucks, whose top speed is ten kilometres an hour. 3

The man has come to a stop in front of the rabbit. I see him in profile, the emergency light above the front door illuminates him from behind, forming a toxic-green halo around his shaven head. He is carrying something in his right hand. Both man and rabbit are standing about twenty metres away, at a diagonal to me. The entrance to Caper Castle is about seven metres to my ten o’clock. I take a few silent steps. I’m halfway there when the man suddenly turns. He sees me and his hand rises into the air.

A knife.

A knife is better than a pistol. Quite simply. But I don’t hang around to calculate their respective probability ratios.

I dive inside Caper Castle. I overcome the first section – the wobbly stairs – and hear the man behind me. He isn’t shouting for me to stop, isn’t bellowing. He’s come here to kill me. The room with the slanted floors is equipped with banisters that help guide me through the space. Escaping is harder and much slower than I’d expected. Light drips in through two plastic windows. The man appears at the entrance to the room. He stops, perhaps to gauge the situation. Then he sets off after me. With his free hand, he grabs the banister to give himself momentum, gripping it like he would a barbell. It works, and I’m beginning to doubt my plan.

I reach the door, step into the freely spinning, metre-long Tumble Tunnel and instantly fall onto my right side. The barrel of the tunnel is turning as though it were a unit of its own, independent from everything else. I trip a few times before I’m able to get up on my hands and knees. I crawl towards the opening at the other end. The large man steps into the Tumble Tunnel, and all my equilibrium is gone. Even on all fours, staying upright is impossible. I hear the man slam against the walls and base of the barrel. He doesn’t shout. The sound he makes is more a loud snort, almost a roar. We roll around inside the barrel like two drunken, legless friends.

He’s gaining on me.

I make it to the other end of the Tumble Tunnel, crawl a metre, another, then clamber to my feet again. The world is spinning and 4swaying; it’s like walking in a squall. I approach what are called simply The Steps. The tips of these columns, designed for feet much smaller than mine, are part of my plan. This is why I’ve kept hold of the tube of superglue. I open the cap and squeeze glue across the steps behind me. The man’s progress is slowed now as he tries to maintain his balance, making the glue more effective on the soles of his shoes.

I hobble onwards, leaving a trail of glue behind me. The Steps seem suspended in the air, somewhere between the first and second floors of the entrance hall. There’s more light. It’s as though all the individual spotlights in the room have joined together to allow me to walk unhindered. It feels like I’m walking a tightrope through a bright, star-lit night. I take care to stay on The Steps. There’s nothing dangerous beneath us, only a soft, deep sea of sponge. But falling now would fatefully slow my journey. I glance over my shoulder and see…

…the knife.

And right then, from the motion of the man’s arm, I remember a knife isn’t only designed for close combat. You can also…

…throw it.

The knife slices the air. I manage to duck just enough that it doesn’t pierce my heart. It grazes my left arm but doesn’t actually stab me. I drop the tube of glue. From inside his jacket, the man pulls out another knife. I dash towards the Pinball Parlour. Just then, the man speaks for the first time.

‘Stop,’ he shouts. ‘I’m warning you. I want to show you…’

His argumentation doesn’t convince me. I continue on my way into the Pinball Parlour. In the darkness I bump first into one soft rubber pillar, then another. Then my gashed arm hits another of the pillars. Pain erupts through my body, almost knocks me to my knees. I’m a human pinball in a darkened, life-sized pinball machine. The only light in the room comes from the doorways. The middle of the room is pitch-dark. On the plus side, throwing another knife is impossible, as there’s no direct line of sight. I keep 5my right arm outstretched as the flippers shunt me between the pillars and the rubber walls. I make my way towards the light, all the while hearing the man being buffeted back and forth between the flippers and hoping the glue on his shoes will slow him down.

I arrive at the waterfall, slip between the ropes into a space where there is a door leading to the warehouse. I pull the keys from my trouser pocket. The key turns in the lock, but the door won’t open. I yank the handle until I realise what has happened. The locks have all been reserialised. But why have they been changed today, and why wasn’t I told about it?

I return to the waterfall and walk through it. I see the man on the platform opposite, pulling a piece of carpet from the bottom of his shoe. I do what I can. I run and jump. I’m diving through the air. I crash down onto the tin slide, the pain is so agonising that I let out a yelp. I start sliding. The slide turns and twists. Throughout the slide, the wound on my arm seems only to exaggerate the fluctuations in the force of gravity. The slide and the pain seem such an impossible combination, like a bike without a saddle: you’ll get to the end one way or another, but sitting down is out of the question.

I flop off the slide onto the soft mat at the bottom, stand up, and I’m taken aback. I don’t hear a sound from the slide. The man can’t be inside it. I can’t see the upper platform, but I assume he must be back there.

I walk all the way round Caper Castle one more time, then run to get back to the rabbit and the front door behind it. It takes time, but I don’t have any other options. My keys won’t open the other doors either, only the front door can be opened from the inside without a key. At the final corner I stop, peer round the corner and listen. I can’t see or hear anything.

I dash into a sprint, run straight for the rabbit. I run and run, and I’m about to reach the rabbit, when the big, broad-shouldered man steps out from behind it. It takes a split second to understand what I’m seeing. There’s a good explanation for the man’s quick and silent 6appearance: either by design or by accident, the soles of his feet are covered in small squares of sponge. He jumped down from the platform, and the padding made his steps silent.

Anger boils inside me.

I play by the rules. Again.

I carry on running. All I can think of is the rabbit. I slam into it and it topples over on top of the man. We all fall down, all end up on the concrete floor. The man sees me beside him, and at the same moment I see him too. He is the first to act. I only manage to free part of myself before he lashes out with the knife. The blade cuts my thigh and strikes the laminate flooring beneath us. In doing so it pins my trousers to the floor. I’m stuck. I shout out, and, with my arms flailing, I grip the first thing I can reach.

The rabbit’s ear.

It’s come loose again.

I grab the giant ear and hit out in the man’s direction. I strike something. I stand up, my trousers rip. The man reaches into his jacket pocket. A third knife, I wonder? No, that would be too much. I act before he has the chance to throw it or stab me. I hit, hit, hit again.

Then I let go of the ear. The entrance hall is empty and silent. All I can hear is my own panting. I peer around.

The hall looks different.

An adventure park for all the family.

Suddenly it’s hard to remember everything that has led to all this being my responsibility. This and much more besides – everything is suddenly uncontrollable, unpredictable.

I am an actuary.

As a rule, I don’t run adventure parks, and I certainly don’t batter people to death with giant, plastic rabbit ears.

But as I said, my life hasn’t been following the probability calculus for some time now.

7

THREE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS EARLIER

1

Kannelmäki in September. I knew nothing more beautiful. Radiant, crimson leaves and the most competitive house prices in Helsinki.

The smell of autumn hung in the early-morning suburban air – air that had been scientifically shown to be the crispest in the city. From the surfaces of large leaves in shades of red and yellow hung beads of dew, the rising sun making them sparkle like feather-light mirrors. I stood on my fourth-floor balcony and realised once again that I was in exactly the right place, and nothing could ever make me change my mind.

The area around Kannelmäki train station was the most effective piece of town planning in Helsinki. From my door, it was a brisk two-and-a-half-minute walk to the station. The train took me to my workplace in Pasila in nine minutes and, once a month, to the cinema downtown in thirteen. Given their proximity to the city centre, apartments in Kannelmäki were very good value for money, and they were well designed with excellent functionality and no wasted floor space. There was nothing decorative, nothing superfluous.

The houses were built in the mid-1980s, a time of optimal rational thinking. Some people called this area of the city bland, depressing even, but perhaps that was because they only saw the façade, the cubic repetitiveness and general greyness of the neighbourhood, in itself a feat of astonishing uniformity. They made a mistake that people often make. They didn’t make detailed calculations.

For, as I know from experience, it is calculations that tell us what is beautiful and what is not. 8

Kannelmäki was beautiful.

I took another deep breath and stepped back inside. I walked into the hallway, pulled on my shoes and jacket. I did up the zip, leaving it slightly open at the top. My tie gleamed, its knot balanced and orderly. I looked at myself in the mirror and recognised the man looking back at me. And at the age of forty-two, I had only one deep-held wish.

I wanted everything to be sensible.

Actuarial mathematics is a discipline that combines mathematics and statistical analysis to assess the likelihood – or risk – of any eventuality, in order to define an insurance premium that from the insurer’s perspective is financially viable. This is the official definition. Like many other official-sounding, and therefore potentially boring, definitions, this is one that goes over the heads of most people. And even when it doesn’t go over their heads, few people pay attention to the final two words of that definition, let alone ask what, in this context, the words ‘financially viable’ actually mean.

Insurance companies exist to make a profit; in the case of insurance against accidents, to the tune of almost thirty percent. Few companies ever reach such revenue figures with a single product. But insurance companies do, because they know that people don’t have any other options. You can choose not to take out insurance – everyone can make their own decisions – but on balance most people decide to insure at least their home. Insurance companies also know that people are fragile and that human beings’ capacity to get themselves into trouble vastly exceeds that of all other living species. And so, right now insurance companies everywhere are calculating how often people will slip and fall over in their own gardens, how often they will stick objects of varying shapes and sizes into various orifices, how often 9they will tip smouldering barbecue coals into the rubbish bin, crash into one another on brand-new jet skis, reach up to the top shelf to find something behind a row of glass vases, drunkenly lean on a sushi knife, and how often they will send fireworks flying into their own and other people’s eyes … next year.

Insurance companies, therefore, know two things: one, that people essentially have to take out insurance policies; and two, that a certain number of people, despite advice to the contrary, will inevitably set themselves on fire. And it is between these two factors – shall we say, between the pen and the matchstick – that actuaries operate. Their job is to ensure that while the self-immolator will be reimbursed for his troubles, the insurance company still makes its predefined profit margin by insuring him and many others besides.

And there, right between the sharpened pencil and the burning flame, was I.

My workplace was in the district of Vallila. The new office block on Teollisuuskatu was completed last spring, and our company moved in while the paint was still fresh. Now, when I arrived at our open-plan office every morning, I always felt the same annoyance and disappointment, like a chunk of black ice inside me that refused to melt: I had lost my office. Instead of an office of my own, I now had a workstation.

The word ‘station’ told me everything I needed to know. My ‘station’ was nothing but a narrow, cramped slice at the end of a long desk facing the window. In front of our long desk was another, identical communal desk. Opposite me sat Miikka Lehikoinen, a junior mathematician who regularly regaled me with endless barbecuing anecdotes. On my left sat Kari Halikko, a junior risk analyst with a habit of chuckling to himself for no obvious reason. Apparently, they represented a new generation of actuarial professionals.

I didn’t like them and I didn’t like our open-plan office. It was noisy, full of distractions, interruptions, banalities. But more than 10anything, it was full of people. I didn’t like the things that so many others seemed to like: spontaneous conversations, the continual asking for and giving of advice, the constant cheap banter. I didn’t see what it had to do with demanding probability calculations. Before moving into our new premises, I tried to explain that our office was a risk-control department, not Disneyland, but this didn’t seem to have any impact on those making the decisions.

My productivity levels had dropped. I still never made mistakes – unlike almost everybody else. But my work was significantly hampered by the constant stream of meaningless chatter concentrated around Halikko’s workstation.

Halikko laughed at everything and seemed to spend most of his time watching videos of high-jumpers’ backsides, ridiculous singing competitions or people with strange pets. Everybody laughed, and one video led to another. Halikko sniggered and guffawed. I thought it unbecoming behaviour for a risk analyst.

The other cause of disturbance was Lehikoinen, who talked non-stop. On Mondays, he told us what had happened over the weekend, in the autumn he told us about his summer holiday, in January I learned all about his Christmas. Things seemed to happen to Lehikoinen. On top of this, he had already been married and divorced twice, which to my mind demonstrated a weak, unpromising grasp of the notion of cause and effect. A junior mathematician ought to know better.

On this particular morning, they were both sitting at their workstations before me. Halikko was scratching the short, shaven hair on his head, while Lehikoinen was pursing his lips, staring at something on the screen that made him drum his fingertips against the arm of his chair. They both looked as though they were concentrating solely on their work, which in itself was surprising. I looked at the clock on the table. It was nine o’clock exactly, the end of our flexible start time.

Since moving into the new premises, I had delayed my departure from home by approximately thirty seconds every 11morning in order to avoid the daily exchange of meaningless chit-chat before work, and this was the result: arriving only barely in time. This was out of character for me. I placed my briefcase next to my chair and pulled the chair out from beneath the desk. This was the first time I’d heard the sound of its hard, plastic wheels rolling against the carpet. There was something about the sound that made me shiver, like cold fingernails running along my spine.

I booted up my computer and made sure I had everything on the desk for the day’s work. I had been conducting my own research into the influence of shifts in interest frequency on pay-out optimisation in an ever-changing economical world, and I was hoping to conclude my two-week investigation today.

The silence was like water in a glass, transparent but still concrete, tangible.

I typed in my username and password to sign into the system. The boxes on the screen shuddered. A red text beneath the box told me that my username and password were invalid. I typed them again, more slowly this time, making sure the capitals were capitals, the lower-case letters were lower case, and that every letter was as it should be. Again the boxes shuddered. Beneath the box there were now two lines of red text. My username and password were invalid. Additionally – and this was written in BLOCK CAPITALS – I had only one (1) attempt left to enter them correctly. I glanced over the screen at Lehikoinen. He was still drumming the arm of his chair, gazing out of the window at the McDonald’s across the street. I stared at him as I thought through my username and password one more time. I knew them both, naturally, and I knew I’d entered them correctly on both attempts.

Lehikoinen turned his head suddenly, our eyes met. Then just as quickly he looked down at his screen again. The drumming had stopped. The office space hummed. I knew it was the air conditioning and that I could hear it because nobody was talking, but suddenly there was something about the hum that got inside my head. Maybe it was this that stopped me turning around and 12asking Halikko if he’d had trouble signing into the system this morning.

If there had been problems earlier on, they were long gone: Halikko was tapping his mouse as though he were giving it a thousand tiny fillips one after the other. I placed my hands on the keyboard, and the cold fingernails started scratching my back again. I moved my fingers carefully, concentrating on every key I pressed. Finally, I pressed ‘Enter’, making sure I only pressed it once and that I pressed it with an appropriate dose of briskness and determination.

I didn’t even blink, let alone close my eyes. But the pressing of that button felt significant, as though one moment I was looking at one kind of day, and the next moment I had fallen asleep or otherwise lost consciousness, and when I woke up the landscape in front of me had changed beyond recognition. The day had lost its brightness and colour, the fulcrum of the entire world had shifted. The box in the middle of the screen shuddered a third time. A blink of an eye later, it disappeared altogether.

I heard a familiar voice.

‘Koskinen, my office for a moment?’

13

2

‘Let’s have a little chat,’ my department manager, Tuomo Perttilä, said. ‘Bounce some ideas around.’

We were sitting in Perttilä’s office, a glass-walled cube whose unpleasant attributes included, alongside the lack of privacy, the fact that there was no table between the people sitting there. To me this was unnatural. We sat opposite each other as though we were in a doctor’s reception – I didn’t want to think which of us would be considered the patient and which the healer. The chairs had hard, uncomfortable metal frames with nowhere for me to put my hands. I placed them in my lap.

‘I want to listen,’ said Perttilä. ‘I want to hear you.’

Physical discomfort was one thing, but I found Perttilä’s new role far more difficult to swallow. I had applied for the position of department manager. I was the more suitable and experienced candidate. I didn’t know how or with what Perttilä – a former sales chief – had convinced the board of directors.

‘This way, I think we’ll understand each other better,’ he continued. ‘I believe if we open up to each other, we’ll find something we share, reach a decision. And a shared decision is the right decision. It’ll only happen once we realise that we’re just two people having a discussion, two people stripped of all excess, with no hierarchy, no forced agenda. Two people sitting round a campfire, coming together, opening up, on an emotional level, moving forward.’

I knew it was fashionable to talk like this, I knew Perttilä had taken countless courses on the subject. Naturally, I couldn’t imagine the two of us naked in the middle of the woods. But there was a bigger, more fundamental problem with his manner of speech: it didn’t impart information, it didn’t resolve anything. 14

‘I don’t follow,’ I said. ‘And I don’t understand why the system wouldn’t…’

Perttilä gave a friendly chuckle. His head and face were one and the same thing: he shaved all his hair off so he was completely bald, and when he smiled you could see it at the back of his head.

‘Hey, sorry, sometimes I get a bit carried away, I’m so used to opening up, I forget to give people space,’ he said in a voice that even a year ago he didn’t have. A year ago he spoke like everybody else, but after attending all those courses his tone was somewhere between reading a bedtime story and negotiating a hostage situation. It didn’t fit with what I knew about him. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I want to give you space. You talk, I listen. But before we get started, there’s something I’d like to ask you.’

I waited. Perttilä rested his elbows on his knees, leaned forwards.

‘How have you been finding our new set-up here, the teamwork, the openness, doing things together, sharing knowledge in real time, the whole community vibe?’

‘As I’ve already said, I find it slows down our work and makes it more difficult to—’

‘You know, the way we’re all in this together, we get to know one another, we can feel each other’s presence, learn from one another, bring our sleeping potential to life?’

‘Well—’

‘People say they’ve found their true selves,’ Perttilä continued. ‘They tell me they’ve reached a new level of awareness, not just as mathematicians and analysts but as human beings. And it’s all because we’ve made a point of breaking down boundaries. All boundaries, internal and external. We’ve risen to a new level.’

Perttilä’s eyes were deep-set, the dark eyebrows above them made it hard to read his expression. But I could imagine that, deep behind his eyes, a fire roared fervently. Uncertainty scratched its nails down my back again. 15

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I find it hard to assess these … levels.’

‘Hard to assess…’ Perttilä repeated and leaned back in his chair. ‘Okay. What kinds of tasks do you feel ready to take on?’

The question blindsided me. I could hardly keep my hands in my lap.

‘The tasks I already have,’ I said. ‘I am a mathematician and—’

‘How do you see yourself fitting into the team?’ Perttilä interrupted. ‘What do you bring to the team, the community, the family? What’s your gift to us?’

Was this a trick question? I opted for full honesty.

‘A mathematical—’

‘Let’s forget the maths for a minute,’ he said and raised his right hand as if to stop an invisible current running through the room.

‘Forget mathematics?’ I asked, dumbfounded. ‘This job is based on the principles of—’

‘I know what it’s based on,’ Perttilä nodded. ‘But we need a shared path that we all walk along together, whether it’s with maths in our arms or something else.’

‘Our arms? That’s the wrong body part, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘This is about logic. We need a clear head.’

Again Perttilä inched forwards, placed his elbows on his knees, leaned first to the side, then struck a pose. He held a long pause, then finally spoke.

‘This department was stuck in the mud when I took the helm. You remember, everyone shut away in their own little rooms, working on whatever, and nobody knew what anybody else was doing. It wasn’t productive, and there was no sense of community. I wanted to bring this group of pen-pushers and astrophysicists into the twenty-first century. Now it’s happened. We’re flying, flying up towards the sun.’

‘That’s inadvisable,’ I said. ‘Under any circumstances. Besides, even metaphorically speaking, it’s—’

‘You see? That’s exactly what I mean. There’s one guy always 16pushing back against everything we do. One guy still sitting in his own little corner calculating away like fucking Einstein’s long-lost cousin. Guess who?’

‘I just want things to be rational, sensible,’ I said. ‘And that’s what mathematics gives us. It’s concrete, it’s knowledge. I don’t know why we need all these internal children, these … mood charts. As far as I can see, we don’t. We need reason and logic. That’s what I bring.’

‘Brought.’

That one word hurt me more than the thousand previous words. I knew my professional calibre. I could feel my pulse rising, my heart racing. This was wholly inappropriate. The uncertainty passed and was now replaced with irritation and annoyance.

‘My professional skills are second to none, and they have improved with experience…’

‘Not all of them, apparently.’

‘What we need nowadays—’

‘What we need nowadays is something different from what people needed in the seventies,’ said Perttilä, now agitated. ‘And I mean the nineteen-seventies. Or shall we go even further back?’

I realised that the shuddering of the password box was only the beginning. And I knew this side of Perttilä. This was his real voice now.

‘Now listen up. As senior actuary, you can have exactly what you want,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be a team player. You don’t have to use the intranet. You can sit and calculate things all by yourself. You can have your own room too.’

Perttilä sat up straight. He was sitting right on the edge of his seat.

‘Everything’s been taken care of,’ he continued. ‘Your office is on the ground floor, the little room behind the janitors’ desk. You can even shut the door. There’s a notebook and a calculator. You don’t need the intranet. Your task is to assess the impact of inflation from 2011 on insurance premiums in 2012. The 17material is all on your desk. If I remember, there are about sixty folders.’

‘That’s not at all sensible,’ I said. ‘It’s 2020. Besides, that was already calculated when we defined the insurance premiums for that year…’

‘Then calculate it again, check everything was as it should be. You like that kind of thing. You like mathematics.’

‘Of course I like mathematics…’

‘But you don’t like our team, our openness, our dialogue, the way we communicate, open ourselves up, explore our emotions. You don’t want to let go of yourself, you don’t trust the moment, you don’t trust us. You don’t like what I’m offering.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Exactly. You don’t. So…’ Perttilä reached over to his desk ‘…there is another option.’

He handed me a piece of paper. I quickly read it. Now I was no longer irritated or annoyed. I was flabbergasted. I was furious. I looked up at Perttilä.

‘You want me to hand in my notice?’

He smiled again. The smile was almost the same as at the beginning of our conversation, only now it lacked even the faint, distant warmth I might have detected only moments ago.

‘It’s a question of what you want,’ he said. ‘I want to help offer you different paths.’

‘So, either I conduct meaningless calculations or I take part in amateurish therapy sessions that jeopardise our attention to serious mathematical thinking of the highest order? The former is pointless, the latter leads only to disorganisation, chaos and perdition.’

‘There’s always the third option,’ said Perttilä and nodded in the direction of the sheet of paper.

‘Precision requires precision,’ I said, and I could hear my voice quavering, the blood bubbling inside me. ‘You can’t achieve inscrutable exactitude in correlation matrices with the KonMari 18Method. I cannot be part of a team whose highest ambition is going on a sushi-making weekend.’

‘There’s a small room for you downstairs…’

I shook my head.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just not sensible. I want things to be sensible, I want to act sensibly. This agreement is … More to the point, it says I would have to give up the six-month severance pay to which I am entitled and that my resignation would be effective immediately.’

‘That’s because this would be a voluntary decision,’ said Perttilä, now in that soft voice again, as though he very much enjoyed the sound of it. ‘If you want to stay with us on this floor, tomorrow morning there’s a compulsory, three-hour seminar on transcendental meditation, which will be led by a really excellent—’

‘Can I have a pen, please?’

From their faces, I could tell the others already knew. I had just one personal belonging at my workstation: a picture of my cat, Schopenhauer. I emptied my leather briefcase of work-related papers and dropped Schopenhauer’s picture into the now-empty case. I took the lift down to the ground floor and didn’t so much as glance at the janitors or the door behind them. I stepped out into the street and stopped as though I had walked right into something, as though my feet had stuck to the ground.

I was unemployed.

The thought seemed impossible – impossible for me at least. I’d never imagined I could be in the situation of not knowing where to go first thing in the morning. It felt as though a great mechanism keeping the world in order had suddenly broken. I glanced at the watch on my wrist, but it was just as useless as I’d imagined it to be. It told me the time, but all of a sudden time didn’t have any meaning. It was 10:18 a.m. 19

It seemed only a moment ago that I was pondering the difference between conditional probability and original probability and was trying to find a way to define mathematical independence in complementary events.

Now I was standing by the side of a busy road, unemployed, with nothing but a picture of my cat in my briefcase.

I forced myself into motion. The sunshine warmed my back, and I began to feel slightly better. As Pasila train station came into view, I was able to see my situation more pragmatically, applying logic and reason. I was an experienced mathematician and I knew more about the insurance industry than Perttilä’s team of functionally innumerate psychobabblers combined. I began to relax. Before long I would be calculating for his competitors.

How difficult could it be to find an insurance company that took both itself and mathematics seriously?

It can’t be that hard, I thought. Soon everything will look much clearer.

Quite simply, everything would be better.

20

3

‘Your brother has died.’

The light-blue shirt and dark-blue jacket only enhanced the third shade of blue in the man’s eyes. His thinning, wheat-blond hair combed over to the left looked tired too, somehow wilted. The man’s face was pale, all except for the bright red of his cheeks. He had introduced himself and told me he was a lawyer, but his name seemed to have disappeared with the news.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said in all honesty.

The taste of the morning’s first cup of coffee still lingered in my mouth, and now it took on something new, a tinny, almost rusty aftertaste.

‘Your brother has died,’ the lawyer repeated, trying perhaps to find a more comfortable sitting position on my couch. At least, that’s what his movements seemed to suggest. The autumnal morning behind the windows was cool and sunny. I knew this because I’d let Schopenhauer out to sit in his favourite observation spot right after breakfast and walked straight to the door as soon as the bell rang. Eventually the lawyer leaned forwards slightly, propped his elbows on his knees. His jacket tightened around the shoulders, its fabric gleaming.

‘He left you his amusement park.’

I spoke without even thinking. ‘Adventure park,’ I corrected him.

‘Excuse me?’

‘An amusement park is like Linnanmäki, like Alton Towers. Rollercoasters and carousels, machines that you sit in and let them toss you around. An adventure park, on the other hand, is a place where people have to move by themselves. They climb and run, 21jump and slide. There are climbing walls, ropes, slides, labyrinths, that kind of thing.’

‘I think I understand,’ said the man. ‘Amusement parks have that catapult with bright flashing lights that throws people into the air, but an adventure park has … I can’t think of anything…’

‘A Caper Castle,’ I remembered.

‘A Caper Castle, right,’ the lawyer nodded again. He was about to continue but looked suddenly pensive. ‘Well, an amusement park could have a Caper Castle too, I suppose. Like the old Vekkula in Linnanmäki. You had to climb in and keep your balance, and by the time you came out at the other end you were drenched in sweat. But it’s hard to imagine a simple catapult in an adventure park, all you do is sit down and experience a momentary shift in gravity … I think I understand the difference, but it’s hard to find a clear dividing line…’

‘My brother is dead,’ I said.

The lawyer looked down at his hands, quickly clasped them together.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My condolences.’

‘How did he die?’

‘In his car,’ said the lawyer. ‘A Volvo V70.’

‘I mean, what was the cause of death?’

‘Right, yes,’ the lawyer stammered. ‘A heart attack.’

‘A heart attack in his car?’

‘At the traffic lights on Munkkiniemi Boulevard. The traffic wasn’t moving, someone knocked on the driver’s window. He was adjusting the radio.’

‘Dead?’

‘No, of course not.’ The lawyer shook his head. ‘He died while he was adjusting it. A classical channel, I believe.’

‘And he’d made a will?’ I asked.

To put it nicely, Juhani was a spontaneous, impulsive person. He lived in the moment. The kind of forward-planning required to draw up a will didn’t sound like him at all. He used to joke, saying I 22would die of stiffness. I told him I was very much alive and not at all stiff, I just wanted things to occur in a good, logical order and that I based all my actions on rational thinking. For some reason, he found this amusing. Still, it should be said that though we were the diametric opposite of each other, we were also brothers, and I didn’t quite know how to take the news of his passing.

The lawyer reached for his light-brown leather briefcase, pulled out a thin black folder and flicked open the bands at the corners. There didn’t seem to be very many papers inside. The lawyer examined the uppermost document for a long while before speaking again.

‘This will was drawn up six months ago. That’s when your brother became my client. His final wish was very clear: you are to receive everything. The only other person mentioned by name is your brother’s former wife, whom he explicitly disinherits. There are no other relatives; at least, he doesn’t mention any.’

‘There are no others.’

‘Then everything is yours.’

‘Everything?’ I asked.

Again the lawyer consulted his paperwork.

‘The amusement park,’ he stated again.

‘Adventure park,’ I corrected him.

‘I’m still having difficulty appreciating the difference.’

‘So there’s nothing in there except the adventure park?’ I asked.

‘The will doesn’t mention anything else,’ said the lawyer. ‘After a brief investigation, it seems your brother didn’t own anything else.’

I had to repeat his last statement in my head to fully grasp its contents.

‘To my knowledge, he was a wealthy and successful entrepreneur,’ I said.

‘According to the information here, he was living in a rented apartment and drove a part-owned car – both of which have been in arrears for several months. And he ran this … park.’ 23

My first thought, of course, was that none of this made any sense – because it simply didn’t. Juhani was dead and essentially penniless. Both statements seemed like misunderstandings of the highest order. Besides…

‘Why am I only hearing about his death now?’

‘Because he wanted it that way. He wanted me to be informed if anything happened, then I was only to tell the next of kin once everything was sorted out. That goes for the will too, once the assessment and inventory of his estate was complete.’

‘Was he ill? I mean, did Juhani know that he…?’

The lawyer leaned forwards an inch or two. He no longer looked tired; he almost seemed a touch enthusiastic.

‘Do you mean, are there grounds to believe someone might have … murdered him?’

The lawyer looked at me as though we were doing something terribly exciting together, solving a mystery or competing to win a quiz.

‘Yes, or rather—’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, and no longer looked at all enthusiastic. ‘Nothing like that, I’m afraid. Heart problems. Something inoperable. He explained it all to me. There was always a risk it could happen, then one day it happened. His heart just gave up. The death of a middle-aged man is generally pretty uneventful stuff. No material for a blockbuster, I’m afraid.’

I turned and looked out at the autumnal morning. Two crows darted past the window.

‘But look at it this way,’ I heard the lawyer saying. ‘This is a great business opportunity. Your brother’s … park.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not an adventure-park kind of man. I am an actuary.’

‘Where do you work?’

The blue of the lawyer’s eyes was so exactly between that of his shirt and his jacket that there was an almost mathematical symmetry to it. In other circumstances it might have felt like an 24interesting feature. Now it didn’t. This morning at 7:32 a.m., after only a week and a half of diligent job searching, the final actuarial door had slammed shut in my face. Without delay, I had sent my CV and an application to every respected insurance company and stressed that I took traditional mathematics very seriously indeed and said upfront that I had no time for buzzwords and parlour games. When I heard nothing from these companies, I contacted them myself and listened to their banalities in stunned silence. One wanted to create a soft-flowing team dynamic, another wanted to shift towards a newer form of algorithm-based calculation. Each of them took pains to explain that there were no current vacancies. This I was able to correct. I told them I knew their companies had been recruiting. Time and again, this led to a hum of silence at the other end of the phone before the call was abruptly rounded off by wishing me a pleasant autumn.

‘I’m looking around at the moment,’ I said.

‘And how’s that going?’

It was a good question. How were things going? This morning’s balance sheet was clearly in the red. I wasn’t going to find work in my own field, my brother had died, and it seemed I now owned an adventure park.

‘I’m sure things will work out sensibly,’ I said.

The answer seemed to satisfy the lawyer. An expression crossed his face that seemed to suggest he had just remembered something important. Again he leafed through the folder. An envelope.

‘Your brother left you a message. A letter, just in case. It was my idea. I told him that once the will was ready, due to his diagnosis there were two things he should take care of right away: my bill and this greeting to you.’

‘Greeting?’

‘That’s what he called it. I don’t know what’s in it. As you can see, the envelope is still sealed.’

This was true. My full name was written across the C5-sized 25envelope: Henri Pekka Olavi Koskinen. It was Juhani’s handwriting. When was the last time I’d seen him?

We’d had a quick lunch together in Vallila about three months ago. I paid for the pepperoni pizzas because Juhani had left his wallet in the car. Of course, now I wondered whether there were more problems with his wallet than its simply being left behind. What did we talk about? Juhani told me about some new acquisitions at the adventure park, I mentioned Kolmogorov’s foundational principles of probability theory in explaining why he should make big investments one at a time, once he’d been able to see and assess how many people each new acquisition brought to the park. Juhani didn’t look as though he was about to drop dead any second. And he didn’t look like he had just drawn up a will either. What do people usually look like after writing a will? I’m sure there’s no quintessential mien, though such people are on the cusp of the impossible: trying to influence life after death.

I opened the envelope, slid out the folded sheet of paper inside.

HI HENRI

I’m not dead after all! Hahaha – I know you’re not laughing, but I want to laugh. I can’t think of anything else. No, seriously, if you’re reading this, I probably am dead. The doctors told me this heart defect was so bad that my time might be up much sooner than planned. Anyway, I guess by now you’ll have heard what’s going on. I’m dead and the adventure park is all yours. I’ve got one last wish for the place. I’ve never had much luck with money, and the park’s finances aren’t in very good shape, not to mention my own finances. I’ve never had the patience to count things properly, dot the Is, cross the Ts, that sort of thing. But you’re a mathematical genius! Do you think you could keep things ticking over for me? That’s my final wish. In fact, it’s my only wish. I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud, but of all my business ventures – and you know 26there have been plenty of them over the years – the park is the most important. I want it to be a success. I suppose you’re asking yourself why. There are as many reasons as there are debtors, I’m afraid. I want to be good at something, to leave something behind. And there’s another reason you’ll discover once you’ve successfully completed your mission. Remember how we used to spend the summers at Grandma’s place, and how we were allowed to be away from home, where everything was always screwed up? I think of those summers now. You would always sit inside counting things, and I was outside playing. But we always went fishing together. If I’m dead, sit inside for a while, count things up and save the park, then go fishing. I’ll bring the worms. (Compulsory joke, sorry, couldn’t resist. Everything else is deadly serious.)

JUHANI

I felt annoyance verging on rage. This was typical of Juhani, a complete and utter lack of responsibility. The letter was clearly written in haste, drawn up on the spur of the moment. It lacked all rational thought and argumentation. Detailed analysis and clear conclusions were conspicuous by their absence. For the thousandth time in my life, I wanted to tell him there simply wasn’t any sense to this.

But Juhani was dead.

And I was sad, angry, confused, frustrated and, in a peculiarly intangible way, exhausted. Combined, these emotions burned my lungs, clawed at my chest. Everything pointed to the fact that I did, indeed, now own an adventure park.

‘So, this is everything?’ I sighed.

‘Not quite,’ the lawyer responded, quickly rummaged in his briefcase and, in a considerably more practised gesture, produced a slightly larger envelope. ‘My bill.’

He placed the envelope with his bill next to the envelope with Juhani’s letter. I noted that both of them bore my name. The 27lawyer checked the papers one last time, then slid the folder to my side of the table.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘My condolences.’

28

4

YouMeFun sprawled through the autumnal landscape in technicolour, almost genetically modified splendour. A box of tin and steel, painted in garish red, orange and yellow, and almost 200 metres across, it was an eyesore, no matter which colour of tinted spectacles you used to look at it. Presumably the point of the brash colours and enormous lettering was to spread the joyous gospel of sweaty fun and games for all the family to everyone who entered its gates. It was hard to gauge the height of the adventure-park box, fifteen metres maybe. There was enough space inside for a sports ground and an air hangar, a few schools and a truck park. YouMeFun was situated just beyond the Helsinki city limits.

Two days and two rather sleepless nights had passed since the lawyer’s visit.

I accidentally got off the bus one stop too soon. The closer I got, the harder walking became. It wasn’t because of the slight incline or the faint headwind, or the fact that I wanted to enjoy the cobalt-blue sky and almost white afternoon sun. It was more a question of disbelief, disgust and despair that I felt welling within me the closer I got to the park. As though something was forcing me to turn around, walk in the opposite direction and never look back. This must have been the voice of reason, I thought. But at the same time, I heard Juhani’s voice: It’s my only wish.

I knew very little about the adventure park’s operations. I knew that Juhani had nothing to do with its day-to-day running. The doors opened and closed without him. He had an office in the building, but he was away a lot, vaguely ‘on business’, as they say. As to who did take care of the day-to-day running of the park, I 29knew nothing at all. The car park, a field of concrete the size of three football pitches, was half full. Most cars were family-sized, most of them a few years old. I looked at the lettering on the roof of the building.

YouMeFun

The letters looked bigger than on my previous visit – which was also my only visit to date. To my surprise, they looked almost threatening. I found myself thinking I’d need to be careful not to be struck by the sharp prongs of the Y or caught in the fluttering flag of the F. Where had the thought come from? I could only assume that recent events had been more than enough to foster such irrational trains of thought. I walked towards the entrance and glanced up at the roof one more time.

Once inside, I queued at the ticket desk. The foyer seemed to give a clue as to what was in store: children bursting with energy, wild cries and high-pitched shrieks, and the lower, rather less enthusiastic conversation of the mums and dads. The semi-circular counter, around ten metres in length, was painted in the same colours as the rest of the park. Along the length of the red-orange-and-yellow counter, a large dome curved through the air. Between the counter and the dome, as though caught inside an enormous, psychedelic space helmet, stood a man in an adventure-park uniform.