tattoo artist’s circumstances was the Hotel Torni, where the so-called American Bar was a hangout for well-off students. One of the Finns or Swedes on deck referred to it as the place where you went to meet brave girls. “Brave girls” were right up Daughter Alice’s alley, since she took “brave” to mean that the girls (and the boys who wanted to meet them) would be open to being tattooed.
The hotel itself had seen better days. Because the old iron-grate elevator was “temporarily” out of service and they were on the fourth floor, Jack and Alice became well acquainted with the stairs, which they climbed holding hands. They had a room without a bath or a toilet. There was a sink, although they were advised not to drink the water, and a view of what appeared to be a secondary school. Jack sat on the window seat and looked with longing at the pupils; they seemed to have many friends.
The bath and the WC, which Jack and his mother shared with some other guests on the floor, were a fair hike down the twisting hall. The hotel had a hundred rooms; one day, when Jack was bored, he made his mom count them with him. Fewer than half had their own bathrooms.
Yet Alice had been right to choose the Torni. From the beginning of their stay, she did a brisk business among the clientele at the American Bar. While only a few of the girls Jack saw were beautiful—and he had no experience with whether or not they were brave—many of them, as well as even more of the boys, were courageous about being tattooed. But in the tattoo business, drunks are bleeders; in Helsinki, Jack saw his mother go through a lot of paper towels.
In a week’s time, Alice was earning almost as much money as she’d made at Tattoo Ole’s in the Christmas season. Jack often fell asleep to the sound of the tattoo machine. Once again you could say they were sleeping in the needles.
At the restaurant called Salve, Jack and Alice took an opinionated waitress’s advice—they ordered the poached Arctic char instead of the fried whitefish or the freshwater pike-perch. For a first course, they politely tried the reindeer tongue, largely because it was an increasing burden to avoid it; to Jack’s surprise, the tongue was not rubbery and tasted good. And for dessert, he had the cloudberries. They were a dark-gold color, and the slight sourness of the fruit contrasted nicely with vanilla ice cream.
Jack’s mom waited until he’d finished his dessert before she asked the waitress if she knew where to get a tattoo. It was not the answer Alice expected.
“I hear there’s a woman at the Hotel Torni,” the waitress began. “She’s a guest at the hotel, a foreigner—a good-looking woman, but a sad one.”
“Sad?” Alice asked. She seemed surprised. Jack couldn’t look at her; even he knew she was sad.
“That’s what I hear,” the waitress replied. “She’s got a little boy with her, just like you,” she added, looking at Jack.
“I see,” Alice said.
“She hangs out at the American Bar, but she does the tattooing in her hotel room—sometimes while the kid’s asleep,” the waitress went on.
“That’s very interesting,” Alice said. “But I was looking for someone else, another tattoo artist—probably a man.”
“Well, there’s Sami Salo, but the woman at the Torni is better.”
“Tell me about Sami Salo,” Alice said.
The waitress sighed. She was a short, stout woman whose clothes were too tight; her feet appeared to hurt her. She squinted whenever she took a step, and her fat arms jiggled, but she wasn’t much older than Jack’s mother. Under her apron, she kept a dish towel with which she commenced to wipe the table down.
“Listen, dearie,” the waitress told Alice in a low voice. “You don’t want to bother Sami. He already knows where to find you.”
Alice seemed surprised again; maybe she hadn’t realized that the waitress knew
“I want to meet Sami Salo,” Alice said to the waitress. “I want to ask him if he’s tattooed someone I know.”
“Sami Salo doesn’t want to meet you,” the waitress told her. “You’re putting him out of business, and he’s not happy about it. That’s what I hear.”
“I’m impressed by all you manage to hear,” Alice said.
The waitress turned her gruff attention to Jack. “You look tired,” she told him. “Are you getting enough sleep? Is all the tattooing keeping you awake?”
Jack’s mom stood up from the table and held out her hand to her son. The restaurant was noisy and crowded; Finns can be loud when they eat and drink. The boy didn’t quite catch what his mother told the waitress. He could only guess it was something along the lines of “Thank you for your concern”; or more likely, “If you want to stop by the Torni some evening, I’ll be happy to tattoo you where it really hurts.” Alice might also have given the waitress a message for Sami Salo; that the waitress and Sami were friends was pretty obvious, even to Jack.
They didn’t go to Salve again. They ate at the Torni and called the American Bar their home.
But what about the church? Jack would wonder, as he was falling asleep. Why weren’t they asking someone about the particular organ his father might be playing in Helsinki? Where were the destroyed young women who’d had the bad luck to meet William here? And what about Sibelius?
Jack wondered if his mom was growing tired of looking for his dad—or, worse, if she was suddenly afraid of finding him. Maybe it had occurred to her how awful it would be to finally confront William, only to have him walk away with a shrug. Surely William must have known they were looking for him. Church music and tattooing were both small worlds. What if William decided to confront them? What would they have to say for themselves? Did they actually
Helsinki is a hard place to be afflicted with self-doubts. Alice appeared to be unsure of herself. She would not get up at night to go to the bathroom without waking Jack and forcing him to walk down the hall with her; she wouldn’t let him leave the hotel room by himself, either. (Some nights Jack peed in the sink.) And those evenings when she roamed the American Bar, soliciting clients, Jack often watched her from the crow’s-nest perspective of the iron-grate elevator, which was frozen in seemingly permanent disrepair on the floor above the bar.
Whenever a prospective client decided to get a tattoo, Alice would look up at the out-of-service elevator and nod her head to Jack, who was suspended in it like a boy in a birdcage.
Jack would watch Alice lead the client to the stairs. Then he exited the elevator and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor ahead of them. He was usually waiting by the door to their room when his mother brought the tattoo customer down the hall.
“Why—fancy seeing you, Jack!” his mom would always say. “Is it a tattoo you’ve come for?”
“No, thank you,” Jack would always reply. “I’m too young to be tattooed. I’m just an observer.”
It may have been a silly ritual, but it was their routine and they stuck to it. The client recognized that they were a team.
By their third week in Helsinki, Jack had forgotten all about Sibelius. Two young women (brave-looking girls) approached Alice in the American Bar. They asked her about a tattoo—one they wanted to share. In the elevator, one floor above them, Jack couldn’t really hear what they were saying.
“You can’t share a tattoo,” he thought his mother said.
“Sure we can,” the tall one replied.
Maybe the short one said, “We shared you-know-what together. Sharing a tattoo can’t be that bad.”
From the broken elevator, Jack saw his mom shake her head—not her usual signal. He’d seen her say no to young men who were too drunk to be tattooed, or to two or more men; she wouldn’t take more than one man at a time to their room. These two women, Tall and Short, were different; they made Alice seem awkward. Jack thought that his mother might already know them.
Alice abruptly turned and walked away. But the brave girls followed her; they kept talking to her, too. Jack got out of the elevator when he saw his mom start up the stairs. Tall and Short came up the stairs behind her.
“We’re not too young, are we?” the tall one was asking.
Alice shook her head again; she just kept walking up the stairs with the two young women following her.
“You must be Jack,” the short one said, looking up the stairs at the boy. It seemed to Jack that she even
