His mom bent down and kissed the back of his neck. "Hello, Helsinki!" she whispered in his ear.
Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the one thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he really knew.
5
Failure in Finland
They took the long trip back to Stockholm, the way they had come--then sailed from Stockholm to Helsinki, an overnight voyage through the Gulf of Finland. It was so cold that the salt spray froze on Jack's face if he stood outside for more than a minute. Undaunted by the weather, some Finns and Swedes were drinking and singing songs on the icy deck until midnight. Alice observed that they were also throwing up--with best results to the leeward side of the ship. In the morning, Jack saw some Finns and Swedes who had suffered the misfortune of throwing up to the windward side of the vessel.
Alice found out from the drunks, many of them young people, that the hotel in Helsinki best suited to a 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 slee
ping 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 she was the tattoo artist at the Hotel Torni. But they hadn't been hard to figure out. In Helsinki, who else fit the description of a young woman and a little kid who spoke American-sounding English?
"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.