The game may be simple, but people never are. Bang bang bang.
15
Vidar Rinnius
It won’t be long before the staff at Beartown School hold their first planning meeting in advance of the autumn term. They will discuss budgets and teaching plans and the rebuilding of the gym, as usual. But then a teacher will ask about a pupil named Vidar who has suddenly appeared on the register for one class. The headmaster will clear his throat uncomfortably. “Yes, he was a pupil here before, and now he’s joining us again. We’ve only just been informed . . .” The teacher will wonder where this pupil has been in the meantime. Has he attended a different school? “Well, Vidar has been in . . . an alternative educational system,” the headmaster will concede. “You mean youth custody?” the teacher will ask. “I think it’s more of a . . . clinic,” the headmaster will say. The teacher seems neither to understand nor to care about the difference.
A teacher toward the back of the room will whisper, “Assault and drugs charges. He tried to beat a police officer to death!” Another will snap, “I don’t want that psychopath in my class!” Someone will ask, in a louder voice, “Wasn’t Vidar given a longer sentence?” but will get no answer. Another will ask nervously, “Vidar? What’s his surname?” The headmaster’s eyelashes will flutter like a hummingbird’s wings when he replies, “Rinnius. Vidar Rinnius. He’s Teemu Rinnius’s younger brother.”
* * *
Elisabeth Zackell scratches her head. It’s hard to tell if her hair has been fashioned by a stylist or by mistake. She steps out through Sune’s door in shoes made for freezing temperatures and feet at least two sizes larger and lights a cigar. Peter follows her, clearly worried now. “What are you doing?” he asks.
Zackell, evidently not very good at reading people’s intentions, assumes he means the cigar. “This? Oh . . . I don’t know. I’m a vegan, I don’t drink alcohol or coffee. If I didn’t smoke, no normal person would ever trust me,” she says, not as a joke but as if she’s given the matter serious consideration.
Peter sighs deeply before he starts to cough. “You can’t just show up here and take for granted that you’re going to get the job of coach without telling me what you’d do with our team!”
Zackell fills her mouth with smoke and tilts her head to one side. “The team you’ve got right now?”
“Yes! That’s the team you’d be coaching!”
“What, your A-team? Hopeless. A bunch of has-beens who are too old and useless for anyone else to want them.”
“But can you make them good? Is that what you’re saying?”
Zackell chuckles. Not in a friendly or charming way, just patronizingly. “No. Dear me, no. There’s no way of making a useless team good. I’m not Harry Potter.”
Peter gets smoke in his eyes and loses his temper. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
Zackell pulls a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. She blows the smoke away from Peter, hesitantly, as if she doesn’t really want to apologize for smoking and instead regrets that he doesn’t smoke. “Are you angry?”
“I’m not . . . angry,” Peter says, pulling himself together.
“You look a bit angry.”
“Well I’m not . . . just leave it, okay?”
“I’ve been told I’m not good at dealing with . . . people. Feelings, stuff like that,” Zackell concedes, but her face is still completely expressionless.
“You don’t say? I can’t think why!” Peter says sarcastically.
Zackell hands him the sheet of paper. “I’m a good coach, though. And I’ve heard that you’re a good general manager. If you can get the names on this list to give me their all on the ice, I can make a winning team out of them.”
Peter reads the names: Bobo. Amat. Benji.
“They’re just teenagers. One of them is only sixteen years old. You’re going to build the A-team out of them?”
“They’re not going to build the A-team. They’re going to carry it. That one’s the new team captain,” Zackell says, cutting him off.
Peter stares at her, then at the name she’s pointing at. “You’re going to make him captain? Of the A-team?”
She replies as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “No. You’re going to. Because you’re good with people.”
Then she hands him another piece of paper. On it is the name “Vidar.” Peter takes one look at it, then exclaims, “NOT A CHANCE!”
“So you know Vidar?”
“Know him?! He . . . he . . .”
Peter starts shaking and actually turns right around, like a crazy egg timer. Sune is standing in the doorway with coffee. Zackell turns down the proffered cup but is given it anyway. Sune grins at the note. “Vidar? That boy, yes. He probably can’t play in your team. For . . . geographic reasons.”
Zackell’s voice is matter-of-fact rather than smug when she replies, “I’ve been assured that he’s being released soon.”
“From the clinic? How’s that happening?” Sune splutters.
Zackell doesn’t say “Richard Theo.” She just says, “That’s not my problem. My problem is that I need a goalie, and he seems to be Beartown’s best goalie.”
Peter is literally hugging himself with anger. “Vidar is a criminal and . . . and a psychopath! He’s not playing on my team!”
Zackell shrugs her shoulders. “This isn’t your team. It’s mine. You asked me what I want? I want to win. And I can’t do that with a few old A-team players no one else wants. You have to give me more than that.”
“What?” Peter grunts, leaning disconsolately against the wall of the house.
Zackell blows out a cloud of cigar smoke. “A gang of bandits.”
* * *
Teemu Rinnius walks into the Bearskin. Ramona leans over the bar and pats him tenderly on the cheek. He’s carrying two bags of groceries, one of them largely filled with cigarettes. When Holger left her, Ramona stopped going out. Teemu has never criticized her for that; he’s just made sure she’s never gone short of anything. So she very rarely criticizes his life choices. Morals can always be debated, but the two of them know that most people are only trying to get through the day. As Ramona usually says, “Everyone’s wading through their own shit.”
Teemu can look almost harmless, with his neatly combed hair and clean-shaven chin. And Ramona can look almost sober, if you get there early enough in the morning.
“How’s your mother?” she asks.
“Okay, she’s okay,” Teemu says.
His mother is always tired, Ramona knows that. She’s rather too fond of sleeping pills and difficult men. Once Teemu got old enough, he was able to throw the men out, but he’s never been able to do anything about the pills. In his blue eyes he carries all the lives he wishes his mother could have had, and perhaps that’s why Ramona has allowed herself to care more about Teemu than all the other men who have wandered into and out of the Bearskin over the years. But today those blue eyes are lit up with something else as well: hope.
“Vidar just called! You know what he said?” he exclaims.
There are police investigations that claim that Teemu Rinnius is lethally dangerous. There are plenty of people who say he’s criminal. But there’s one pub in Beartown where he’ll only ever be a little boy, uncertain and eager.
“What is this? Some sort of quiz? Just tell me, boy!” Ramona snaps impatiently.
Teemu laughs. “They’re letting him out! My little brother’s coming home!”
Ramona doesn’t know what to do with her feet and ends up dancing around in circles twice before she gasps, “We need better whisky!”
Teemu has already put a bottle on the counter. Ramona hurries around the bar and hugs him. “This time we’re going to take better care of your brother. This time we’re not going to let go!”
The old bartender and the young fighter laugh. Today the pair of them are too happy to ask themselves: Why is Vidar being released so early? Whose hand is turning the key?
* * *