Tsukuru shook his head. “No, it wasn’t that kind of relationship. We belonged to the same group of friends. That’s all. But we were very close.”
She inclined her head a bit. “Good friends in high school are hard to come by. I had one good friend in high school. We still see each other often.”
Tsukuru nodded.
“And your friend married a Finnish man and moved here. You haven’t seen her for a long time. Is that correct?”
“I haven’t seen her for sixteen years.”
Olga rubbed her temple with her index finger a couple of times. “I understand. I’ll try to get her address without mentioning your name. I’ll think of a good way. Can you tell me her name?”
Tsukuru wrote down Kuro’s name in her memo pad.
“What’s the name of the town your high school was in?”
“Nagoya,” Tsukuru told her.
Olga took his cell phone again and dialed the number given on the answering machine. The phone rang a few times, and then someone answered. Olga spoke to the person in Finnish, using a friendly tone. She explained something, the other person asked her a question, and again she gave a concise explanation. She said the name Eri several times. After a few rounds of this, the other person seemed convinced. Olga picked up her ballpoint pen and noted something down. She politely thanked the person and hung up.
“It worked,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
“Their last name is Haatainen. The husband’s first name is Edvard. He’s spending the summer at their lakeside cottage outside a town called H?meenlinna, northwest of Helsinki. Eri and the children are with him, of course.”
“How did you find that out without mentioning my name?”
Olga smiled impishly. “I told a tiny lie. I pretended to be a FedEx delivery person. I said I had a package addressed to Eri from Nagoya, Japan, and asked him where I should forward it. Her husband answered the phone and didn’t hesitate to give me the forwarding address. Here it is.”
She passed him a sheet from her memo pad. She stood up, went over to the concierge desk, and got a simple map of southern Finland. She spread the map open and marked the location of H?meenlinna.
“Here’s where H?meenlinna is. I’ll look up the address of their summer cottage on Google. The office is closed now, so I’ll print it out tomorrow and give it to you then.”
“How long would it take to get there?”
“Well, it’s about 100 kilometers, so from here by car you should allow about an hour and a half. The highway runs straight there. There are trains, too, but then you’d still need a car to get to their house.”
“I’ll rent a car.”
“In H?meenlinna there’s a lovely castle by the lakeside, and the house where Sibelius was born. But I imagine you have more important matters. Tomorrow why don’t you come by the office whenever’s convenient for you? We open at nine. There’s a car rental place nearby, and I’ll take care of renting a car for you.”
“You’ve been a big help,” Tsukuru said, thanking her.
“A good friend of Sara’s is a friend of mine,” Olga said, and winked. “I hope you can meet Eri. And that she’ll be surprised.”
“I hope so. That’s really why I came here.”
Olga hesitated for a moment, then said, “I know this is none of my business, but is there something very important that made you come all the way here to see her?”
“Important to me, perhaps. But maybe not to her. I came here to find that out.”
“It sounds kind of complicated.”
“Maybe too complicated for me to explain in English.”
Olga laughed. “Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
Tsukuru nodded. Coming up with witty sayings about life seemed, after all, to be a trait shared by all Finns. The long winters might have something to do with it. But she was right. This was a problem that had nothing to do with language. Most likely.