"She kept telling me, 'There's a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!' You're not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn't matter," her husband said.
The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.
"She didn't want a second child," Marja-Liisa's husband told Jack. "The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children."
The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn't speak English, and therefore couldn't understand them--not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they'd been speaking in Finnish.
He's only four, Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn't remember this adventure--being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family's history, which Jack hoped it wouldn't.)
"She's probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other," Jack told Marja-Liisa's husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.
"He wants to use the bathroom," the husband told Jack.
"Sure," Jack said.
There was more Finnish--both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa's husband didn't want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.
The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing--or only what his mom told him had happened, what she wanted him to remember.
"I'm sorry," Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn't going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.
"Who is Jimmy Stronach?" the young man asked Jack.
Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn't mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.
The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn't heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. ("Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!" Jack imagined.)
Possibly Jack Burns had been a more aware four-year-old than Marja-Liisa's little boy, but Jack doubted it.
The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father's neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.
Jack opened the hotel-room door for them--hoping the husband wouldn't give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.
As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: "I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in this movie." Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.
Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he'd not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa's son was a normal four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night--not a moment of it.
Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa's name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.
Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.
"I wish you'd told me the truth," Jack said.
"The truth!" she cried. "What do you know about the truth?"
It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.
He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he'd already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking--he'd had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn't really want to go to Amsterdam, but that's where the plane was going.
30
The Deal
Jack's second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Grand--a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.
The blatancy of the prostitutes--in their underwear, in their windows and doorways--made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were advice-givers. (As Jack himself had been persuaded.)
No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.