“Goddamn it! No one was even on her.”
Nina followed. She tried to ignore that distinctive jolt it caused because it was Ida. Of course nothing serious had happened to her. Of course not. She squatted down next to Ida in front of the goal. She probably just got the wind knocked out of her, Nina thought, her wrists and hands ought to be pretty well protected by her equipment. She cautiously touched her daughter’s shoulder.
“Try to stretch out a little,” she said. “It’ll help.”
Ida glared at her angrily.
“You keep out of this,” she said, rolling away from Nina with a stubborn groan. “What the hell are you even doing here?”
The other Pink Ladies were there now. Anna and the new one, Josefine. They helped Ida to her feet, shooting awkward glances at Nina.
“We thought you couldn’t make it,” Anna said in a tone that Nina couldn’t quite interpret. “It took forever to find a cab. And with all our equipment.…”
“Look, I’m really sorry, but.…”
With a jerk, Ida turned her back and skated slowly back toward her team’s goal. Nina was left to deliver her apology to Anna and the empty space where Ida had been.
THEY HADN’T FOUND Rina until 3:45 P.M. The owner of an allotment garden in Gladsaxe called after seeing the girl sitting for more than twenty minutes, curled up next to the fence along the highway, her school bag still on her back. That was how far she had been sure of which way to go, Nina thought. At the Ring 3 overpass, she must have become discouraged. Rina cried when Nina came to get her, but apart from being generally exhausted from a day without food or water, there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing more than usual, as Magnus flatly remarked. He had volunteered to watch Rina for the rest of the afternoon, and Nina had driven off to the hockey rink as if her life depended on it, or at least as fast as rush-hour traffic would permit on the congested roads. Shit, shit, shit.
The girls won by a landslide, but Ida painstakingly avoided meeting her eyes as she rolled off the rink and started taking off her gear. Nina wasn’t even permitted to pack it up for her.
“My mom will be here soon,” Anna said, talking to Ida. “We don’t really have time for a shower.”
Ida was still struggling with her shin guards, but Nina didn’t need any help interpreting what was going on. Ida had arranged for another ride home.
“But it would be easier for you to ride with me since I’m here,” Nina said.
Ida turned her head and looked at her.
“No thanks,” she said and at first attempted an icy, arrogant stare. Then the corners of her mouth began to wobble and she looked away quickly.
“We were late for the match. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was? For all three of us? They almost didn’t let us play.”
Nina quickly glanced at Anna. She wished that Anna would give them a little space, but Anna stayed where she was. She was obviously uncomfortable, but she stayed put.
“Come on now.” Nina hoisted up Ida’s equipment and jacket. “I need to have a look at those bruises anyway, once we get home.”
“No.”
Ida yanked her jacket out of Nina’s hands.
“You’re a shitty mother. You know that? Just a shitty mother. I’m spending the night at Anna’s.”
NINA WATCHED THEM go with annoyance.
Ida was bent over a little as she walked, as if she were still in pain, with Anna and Josefine attending her like silent, slightly awkward squires. Anna’s mom turned and gave a single wave before they drove out of the parking lot.
Nina hoisted Ida’s equipment bag and tossed it into the backseat. She had heard from certain optimistic and bubbly colleagues that there was a life beyond the teenage years. She would, in other words, survive this. And so would Ida.
OU WANT A drink?”
Søren gave the young man waiting for him at the café table a surprised look. Khalid had suggested the their meeting place, Café Offside, himself—a little sports bar awash with nicotine, crammed in next to Nørrebro Station, and clearly one of Copenhagen’s few remaining smokers’ sanctuaries. Also sufficiently Khalid Hosseini’s home turf that he was the one to order the drinks. Søren decided to ignore this slightly provocative act and nodded briefly.
“Yes, please. A club soda.”
Khalid, who had occupied the innermost corner of the booth, deftly got up and zigzagged his way through the busy café’s crowd of standing patrons, laid a bill on the bar counter, and returned shortly afterward with a club soda in one hand. He slipped back into his seat and smiled at Søren with his eyebrows raised. A perfect saint, Søren thought sarcastically, wondering for a moment whether he should have turned up unannounced at Khalid’s home address instead, just to catch him off balance. These young men were never quite so cocky when they had their gloomy father sitting next to them on the sofa. On the other hand, the family could also have been an extremely disruptive element, and Khalid had three younger siblings and a mother, who would presumably either lament reproachfully or dart back and forth with tea and sticky cakes that were far too sweet. Søren leaned back in the flimsy café chair and tried to maintain eye contact with his young host.
He was nineteen. Long-limbed, skinny, and smooth-shaven if you ignored a pair of neatly trimmed sideburns. He was wearing a tight, orange shirt that appeared to be fairly expensive. The same was true of the dark, high-end jeans and white sneakers.
It took a while, but finally he met Søren’s eyes.
“What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
Søren didn’t answer. He waited, slowly pouring his club soda into the glass and watched out of the corner of his eye as the young man’s façade began to crumble. Young people weren’t used to lulls in a conversation, and certainly not to long periods of silence. Khalid’s eyes darted away from Søren’s club soda before moving back to the cola he had sitting in front of himself on the table. He took a swig and was then inspired to fish his cigarettes from his black backpack under the table. His fingers trembled slightly as he pulled the cigarette out of the packet, then he half-heartedly held out the pack to Søren, but stopped midway through the gesture and let it drop down onto the table between them instead, in a sort of clumsy invitation.
“Feel free to.…”
Søren impassively watched Khalid.
“I mean, if you want to smoke.…”
Khalid tried his host’s smile one last time, but it stiffened before it made it all the way up to his eyes, and instead he lit his cigarette with an uneasy glance toward the door. As if he were considering his escape options.
This was all good.
Søren took a deep breath and calmly leaned in further over the table.
“We need your computer, Khalid. And our tech people are having a little trouble understanding your explanation as to why we can’t see it. So I’d just like to hear it one more time.”
“I didn’t give them any explanation. It’s my computer. That’s why.”
Khalid stuck his chin out in defiance and stared at Søren. A bright lad, Søren guessed. It wasn’t so much what he had said so far, but Søren thought he could see it in his eyes, in the effortless way he had moved, and the reasonably civilized behavior he was exhibiting in the circumstances. That kind of thing required self-control and a certain mental capacity.
“Are you a Muslim, Khalid?”
“What business is that of yours?”
Søren gave a smile of acquiescence.
“I just want to know a little more about you. It’s a straightforward question.”
Khalid blew a narrow column of smoke out of his nose and for the first time turned to look directly into Søren’s eyes with every indication of contempt.
“Look at me, man. What do you think?” Khalid challenged.
“Practicing?”
Khalid shrugged, fell back in the booth, and inhaled another batch of smoke into his lungs.
“Is that what this is about? Religion? Do you think I’m a fucking terrorist or
something?” His shoulders sank a bit, and he smiled sardonically as he held his hands out to Søren. “Hey, I love all Danes, man. I love Denmark. I’m totally harmless. Me tame Muslim.”
He said that last line coldly, with a sneer and an exaggerated accent. He was more indignant than insecure right now, and Søren wasn’t sure how to interpret that. If Khalid was up to something dangerous, shouldn’t he be feeling scared?
Khalid turned restlessly in his seat, eyeing him expectantly with a mix of contempt and physical discomfort.
“You can’t look at my computer, because you guys are fucking racists. I don’t give a damn what you’re looking for. You’re coming after me because you think I’m a towelhead. Don’t you think I know how it works? There were other people at school that night. But you pick on me because I’m Arab.” Khalid’s voice cracked several times from anger. “I’ve heard about all the crap you people get up to with the CIA. Sending innocent people to torture prisons in Egypt and wherever.”
Søren shook his head slowly.
“We just want to talk to you about what you were doing on those arms sites you visited. Maybe you were just window shopping for a nice piece to put under your pillow. We’re the PET. We don’t care about trifles like that. If you have a good explanation, I just want to hear it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Khalid got up, stumbled a little over his black backpack before he pulled it out from under the table, and started edging his way out from behind the table. Søren could feel his control of the conversation slipping through his fingers.
“Khalid!” Søren calmly placed a firm hand on the young man’s shoulder. “A little more cooperation would be a smart move right now. For your own sake as well as ours.”
Khalid stopped and directed a furious, icy look at Søren.
“Leave me alone. You can’t have it.”
Søren slowly removed his phone from his pocket and browsed through the menus. There it was. A text message from Christian, sent just ten minutes ago.
“We picked up your computer as soon as you left the apartment. Your mother even invited my colleagues in for tea while they took a look at your room.”
Khalid stood there, swaying in the wind like a tree in a storm.
“What do you mean? It’s my computer. You can’t just take it. It’s mine. I’m studying for an exam.…”
Søren stepped past him and started to leave.
“You’ll be hearing from us as soon as we’ve looked at it. It may take a little while.”
He glanced back over his shoulder. Khalid stood frozen with one hand on the flimsy café table, as if he needed support. His black backpack hung heavy and motionless from his other hand.
OUTSIDE IN THE twilit street, Søren dialed a familiar number as an elevated train thundered by overhead. His first impression of Khalid was mixed. The boy could scream and shout all he wanted about racism and rights violations, but that didn’t change the fact that he was hiding something. Søren had no doubt about that.
“Yes?”
Christian sounded grumpy and rushed on the other end of the line. From the background noise, Søren guessed he was still stuck in traffic somewhere on his way back to base.
“Did you get what you needed?”
“Yes, frightened mother, angry father, cute kids, and one laptop that at least looks like the one on the security footage. Everything went as expected.”
“Check it out as soon as possible,” Søren said. He glanced around before unlocking his car and slipping into the driver’s seat, an old paranoid habit from his own days of working in the surveillance service.
“Yeah, get in line.” Christian’s grumpiness was uncharacteristic, but it was after all almost 9:30 at night, and he had two young children at home. Søren recalled seeing the family photos in Christian’s ground-floor office.
“Just one more thing, Christian, then I’ll let you go for the day. Khalid. You put a trace on that mobile of his, right? I want to see who he talks to tonight.”
HEY RELEASED SÁNDOR four hours before his exam. He stood on Falk Miksa Street in the morning sun, outside the vast concrete beehive that was the headquarters of the NBH, and it felt like the sidewalk was swaying beneath his feet. He had been wearing the same clothes for almost three days, and he knew he reeked. People in suits and business attire rushed past him, skirting around the first meandering tourists with skill and irritation. The antique stores were just opening up. Traffic slid by, shrouded in a cloud of gas fumes.
He was an island in the middle of this stream of everyday activity and normality. No, not an island, an island was big and solid. He was just a foreign body, neither a Hungarian nor a tourist. A filthy Gypsy still stinking of the sweat of the interrogation room.
Pull yourself together, he told himself. But there wasn’t much conviction to his internal voice.
He took the streetcar home. It was faster than a cab, despite the distance he had to go on foot on his wobbly rubber legs, but that wasn’t why. He would have gladly sacrificed the extra minutes and also the money if he had believed he could sit in peace in the air-conditioned back seat and be treated like a human being. A paying customer, a member of society.
He didn’t run into anyone he knew on Szigony Street. Even the bathroom was empty, and he stood there under the warm, yellowish stream of water for almost half an hour. The foam formed fleeting, white coral shapes around his feet. He lathered himself up again and rinsed, lathered and rinsed, and finally the drain couldn’t handle any more. He had to turn the water off to avoid flooding the floor.
He shaved meticulously and splashed two handfuls of aftershave lotion onto his cheeks, chin, and neck. The alcohol stung as if the bottom half of his face were one big scrape, but that didn’t matter. Then the deodorant. He lingered in front of the mirror and suddenly thought the crop of thick, black hair in his armpits and on his chest looked offensively beastlike. He quickly slathered himself with shaving cream and attacked it with the razor, clearing pale swaths through the thicket of hair, first one way, then the other, until there was only a shadowy stubble left. He cut himself twice, small stinging nicks because he was being too fast and too vigorous, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t want to look like an animal, not even under his shirt.
Then he got dressed. The suit he had worn to the baptism, a bright white shirt, a tie, black socks and shoes—despite the heat. He slicked his hair back with the expensive gel he used only rarely and looked in the mirror one more time.
You don’t even look like a Gypsy, Lujza had said. But he didn’t look like an average Hungarian, either. He looked like what he was—a mixture. Right now, his suit most of all ressembled a costume.
He thought about Tamás and the defiant confidence he radiated, from the pointy tips of his boots to his long, black hair. I don’t even have that, he thought. Not even that.
There was a slip of paper on his desk. CALL, Lujza had written in big, desperate capitals. There were also more than twenty unanswered calls on his phone, but he wasn’t up to that right now. Did she know they had released him? Otherwise she was probably on her way to the prosecutor’s office with a loaded paint gun, or at least a letter of protest and a mass of signatures she had collected.
All that would have to wait, he decided. The most important thing now was passing his exam.
THERE WAS A pervasive smell of cheroots in the high-ceilinged office. Legal texts and books in tall mahogany bookcases, the heavy green velvet curtains, the moss-green carpet, everything was impregnated with cheroot nicotine. The professor was smoking with an arrogant disdain for the university’s no-smoking rules. The office was his and had been for twenty years; any claim that it was actually public property was meaningless.
In honor of the occasion, there were a couple of folding tables and chairs for the students who were preparing for their oral presentation. The flimsy steel and plastic constructions looked completely out of place in the midst of all the sturdy mahogany, and none of the thr
ee examination victims looked like they felt particularly welcome either.
“Sándor Horváth.”
Sándor gathered his notes and got up from his own plastic chair. There was no chair for the candidate being examined. He or she stood on the floor in front of the professor’s desk, armed solely with the handful of sweaty notes compiled during the preparation period. Mihály had once said that he imagined himself pleading a case in a courtroom when he took his exam. That made standing up feel different—it was a way of gaining authority and rhetorical power, instead of a constant reminder that you were worth less than the examining professor. Sándor tried to employ this pleasant concept, but without much success.
Professor Lorincz regarded him with hostile eyes, Sándor thought. They hadn’t had much to do with each other before. Sándor was one out of maybe 150 students who had attended a series of lectures, that was all. Lorincz was about fifty, a skinny man with long hands, long fingers, and slicked-back, medium-brown hair that was almost as Hugh Grant-like as Ferenc’s, albeit a version more advanced in graying. He had a habit of holding his slender Spanish cheroot between the little finger and the ring finger of his left hand, which was apparent from the discolored condition of his skin. He was good, but intellectually arrogant, and students who faced him ignorant and unprepared received no mercy.
But you are neither, Sándor reassured himself. What was it Ferenc had called him? The best-prepared student in the history of the law school?
Invisible Murder Page 9