Death of a Nightingale (Nina Borg #3)

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Comrade Semienova said it was the dirt-hole people’s own fault that they were starving, and that was another truth. Olga knew that it was true. Still, it was nasty that they were there, and she was happy when Oxana described how everyone would be fine as soon as the next five-year plan was put into action. Uncle Stalin would make the country so rich that even the Former Human Beings would acknowledge their mistakes and receive salt pork and butter on their bread every day. Oxana was certain because she knew it from Comrade Semienova, who told her things that were not said in class. Great things were on the way, she said and winked teasingly.

  “Soon, little Olga, you’ll be able to stuff yourself. You’ll become so fat that Sergej will need longer arms if he is to reach all the way around you when you kiss.”

  Olga couldn’t help laughing and swatted at Oxana, who broke into a clumsy gallop toward the house. Oxana’s bark shoes sank into the mud with small, soft squelches, and she lifted her dress so you could see her thin, stockinged legs and large, bony knees.

  For a brief moment, she turned her head and looked back at Olga. Her blue eyes glittered savagely and exuberantly above narrow rose-colored cheeks. Behind her, the chestnut’s wine-red leaves and the yellowing birch trees shone vividly, and all at once Olga felt a choking fear shoot up, paralyzing her as she stood in the muddy wheel track. A sort of premonition.

  “Oxana,” she said, “don’t go.”

  But Oxana didn’t hear her.

  Søren found his boss in the well-equipped exercise rooms under PET’s headquarters in Søborg. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service believed in keeping its employees fit. Søren knew Torben didn’t like to be disturbed in the middle of training, but they usually came to an understanding more easily in person than over the phone. Torben did put down his weights and listened with at least some patience while Søren sketched the circumstances surrounding Natasha’s escape and the killing of her ex-fiancé. Then he leaned back on the bench and grabbed the weights again to complete another set before answering.

  “Spot me?” he asked. “I’ll try for twelve.”

  “Okay.”

  Søren positioned himself so he could help with the last repetitions if necessary. Lips pursed, Torben breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, in time with the motion. The weights shot up in an explosive press. Then he lowered them slowly, very slowly, to the outer position. Then up again with something that sounded like a snort. The Adidas shirt was dark with sweat and could probably be wrung out. At the ninth repetition, his extended arms began to shake, but Torben didn’t give in, and when Søren moved to put a hand under his elbows at twelve, he hissed an angry “no” and took it by himself.

  He lay on the bench, hyperventilating for a few seconds, before he sat up and gave Søren a triumphant look. “Not bad, huh?”

  Søren handed him the water bottle without commenting. He knew he should offer a friendly “Well done” or something like that, but he couldn’t quite do it. It felt increasingly false, like a scratchy old record that should have been thrown out long ago. He no longer felt at home in that sweaty, towel-swiping changing room community but didn’t know what to replace it with. Perhaps it was just that he didn’t have much in the way of relationships outside of work. Maybe he had made a mistake all those years ago when he hadn’t just agreed to have children with Susse. Maybe they would still have been together. Now she lived with her jazz musician husband in a bungalow with a white fence and cocker spaniels and pear trees in the yard, and her youngest had started high school. They were still friends—that much he had salvaged from the fire. And he wasn’t exactly envious of the family idyll, just … a bit pseudonostalgic. That could have been me. But it couldn’t have been, of course, because with him it would have been a different story.

  He wrested his concentration back to the case, if it could be called that. Right now, there wasn’t much PET meat on it, he knew.

  “I’ve called police headquarters,” he said. “They have a Ukrainian policeman sitting there who doesn’t speak English. From GUBOZ, apparently.” GUBOZ was the special division that dealt with organized crime in Ukraine. That was pretty much the only alibi Søren had for looking into the case. Fighting organized crime was, after all, a PET concern.

  Torben considered him over the top of the water bottle with his cool steel-grey gaze. “That’s right. You used to be a language officer,” he said.

  “Russian and Polish. Nineteen eighty-one and nineteen eighty-three.” Possibly the most intensive schooling Søren had ever been subjected to—a bombardment of words that approached brainwashing, constant tests, an eternal rhythm of classes, homework, physical training, sleep—classes, homework, physical training, sleep …

  “Yes, today they’re learning Arabic and Afghani,” said Torben and screwed the lid onto the bottle again.

  “Pashto. Or Farsi, depending.”

  “Yes. Is your Russian still usable?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Torben nodded and dried his face, neck and shaved head with an often-washed greyish-white towel.

  “Okay. Go ahead and give them a hand, since you’re so curious. And why is that, by the way?”

  It was stupid to try to lie to Torben. As Søren’s boss, he took that kind of thing very badly, and besides, they considered each other old friends. That Søren had begun to doubt whether constant physical competition really could be called a friendship didn’t change the fact that they had known each other for over twenty-five years. “Natasha Dmytrenko’s daughter apparently lives in the Coal-House Camp. And Nina Borg, you know, the nurse from …”

  “Yes, I remember her.”

  “… Nina called because she was worried about the girl. And about the mother too.”

  “What did she imagine you could do? Save mother and child from the cruel Danish police?”

  Søren shrugged. “Something like that, I guess.”

  Torben shook his head. “Aren’t you a little too old to be playing Don Quixote?”

  “Don Quixote is old. Or at least middle-aged. That’s the point.”

  Torben got up and returned the weights to the rack. “Thank you,” he said. “If there are other literary niceties I need to have explained, I’ll be sure to tell you. The point here, my friend, is that you are getting involved in something that most likely doesn’t concern either you or us.”

  “I know. But the man is from GUBOZ, and that must mean—”

  “That there is some suspicion of organized crime, yes, thanks, you don’t need to spell it out. Okay. Talk to the Ukrainian if you absolutely have to get involved. And if there’s something in it, it goes directly to our own OC boys. I want my group leader back on his counterterrorism perch by Monday at the latest. Understood?”

  With PET’s usual fondness for English terms, OC was the accepted abbreviation for the Center for Organized Crime.

  Søren mentally clicked his heels and saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  Torben gave him a look but otherwise ignored the sarcasm. “Want to grab a brew later?”

  That was Torben’s way of dealing with the boss/friend issue. The beer invitations usually came when he had been most boss-like.

  “Maybe. Or … There probably won’t be time.”

  “Up to you. You can join us for dinner if you feel like it. Annelise is doing a roast.”

  “Thank you. But … maybe another time.”

  “Mmm. Okay.” Torben had already turned around and was making his way over to the pull-down machine. Søren suddenly realized that Torben hadn’t for one moment expected him to say yes.

  “I need a word with you.”

  It sounded more like an order than a request, Nina realized, but she didn’t care. The policeman was so young, he automatically started to obey. He was on his feet before it occurred to him that a nurse was not actually above him in the chain of command. But by then it was too late for him to sit down again without looking like an idiot. He was also young enough that not looking like an idiot was pretty h
igh on his list of priorities.

  “What about?” he asked.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said.

  Rina looked at them with the alertness of a wounded animal, and the policeman apparently realized—much, much too late in Nina’s opinion—that there were certain things you didn’t discuss while an eight-year-old was listening. He followed her into the hall. Rina’s eyes trailed them the whole way. She sat on her bed with the Moomintroll-patterned comforter pulled all the way up to her chest. Nina had found her a Donald Duck comic, which she dutifully had looked at, but judging by the random page turning, she wasn’t getting a lot out of the story.

  “We’ll be right outside, sweetie,” said Nina, and she didn’t know if that sounded like a comfort or a threat to the child. Her anger swelled another notch, and she closed the door carefully before letting loose on the policeman.

  “I understand that Rina’s stepfather is dead.” She didn’t like to give the bastard the legitimacy of having any kind of place in Rina’s life even now, but Rina had called him “Poppa Mike.” Whether Nina liked it or not, he was, in fact, a part of what Rina had lost after Natasha’s ill-considered attempt at homicide.

  “May I ask where you received that information?” asked the young policeman, possibly in an attempt to regain his authority.

  “From Rina, who got it from you.”

  He actually blushed. The color rose along his neck and washed over his well-defined cheekbones. He couldn’t maintain eye contact.

  “Fuck,” was all he said.

  “Yes,” Nina said and felt her attitude soften. He didn’t try to explain it away or apologize, and that was something. “How could that happen?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “We didn’t think she spoke Danish,” he said. “She didn’t answer when we asked and didn’t say anything at all to anyone. We were told that she was mute.”

  “Mute?” Nina’s voice rose again.

  “No, that probably wasn’t the word. ‘Speech issues’ is what I think they said.”

  “That just means she has a hard time talking to strangers,” said Nina. “And that she often can’t speak in stressful situations. And no matter how little she says, she hasn’t lost her hearing.”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “When was he killed? And how?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the case with … anyone.”

  “A little late for that, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Did it happen after Natasha escaped?” asked Nina. “Is she a suspect?”

  “I can’t comment on that.”

  “And what about Rina’s father? Is it true that he was murdered too?”

  But if there had been an opening, it had closed again. He was once more annoyingly police-like and looked as if the word “fuck” had never crossed his lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t comment on that.”

  “Well, then comment on this,” she said, irritated. “I don’t want you in Rina’s room. I don’t want any of you in there. She’s traumatized enough already, and as long as you are there, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of talking with her about it or getting her to relax. We can easily make it an official medical order if that’s necessary and outline precisely why your presence has already had a powerfully negative effect.” The last part was pure coercion.

  He squirmed. “I have to consult,” he said.

  “Consult all you want,” she said. “As long as you do it out here and not in there.”

  She turned her back on him and went back into Rina’s room.

  The Donald Duck comic lay on the floor like a discarded prop. Rina sat with an old, broken cell phone, the only toy she had brought with her to the camp when she had arrived at the age of not-quite-six.

  The psychologist had found it interesting, Nina remembered. “Does she ever speak into it?” he’d asked.

  “She whispers,” Nina had said. “Mostly she just presses the buttons and listens. But sometimes she whispers as well.”

  “Is there any pattern to when she does it?”

  “I think it’s mostly when she’s feeling sad,” said Nina. “Perhaps it distracts her.”

  “I think it’s encouraging that she attempts to communicate her feelings,” the psychologist had said. “Even if it’s not with us. You should definitely let her keep it.”

  Now, more than two years later, Rina still had her phone and clearly needed it more than ever. Her bitten nails pressed the buttons with almost manic intent.

  Nina picked up the Donald Duck comic and placed it on the little dresser next to the bed. “Would you like another ice cream?” she asked.

  Rina looked up. She shook her head silently and finished dialing. She held the telephone up to her ear and listened.

  It occurred to Nina that that was precisely what she was doing—listening. She wasn’t pretending; this wasn’t an act-like-the-grown-ups game. She was listening in earnest. For the first time, Nina wondered what it was Rina expected to hear.

  She sat down on the desk chair and pretended to look out the window, but she was really keeping an eye on Rina’s expression, and that was why she saw it.

  Suddenly the girl’s face opened, and she smiled. A completely open smile that, for some reason, gave Nina the chills. She felt like grabbing the phone out of the child’s hands but held herself back. As the psychologist said, it was good for Rina to attempt to communicate with someone.

  But what did you do if this “someone” began to answer?

  There was no doubt in Nina’s mind that Rina had indeed heard a reply, and it was highly unlikely to be because the defective phone had suddenly started working.

  There was a quiet knock on the door. The young policeman stood outside.

  “I’ve spoken with the chief,” he said. “She says that it’s okay for us to be in the room next door on the condition that you and your colleagues have someone with the girl at all times. Press this if you notice anything alarming.”

  He handed Nina a little black box with a red button. A personal attack alarm. Nina remembered that not long ago, they had discussed whether the night shift at the center should be equipped with them.

  “Okay,” she said. Not an insignificant victory. “Thank you.”

  Rina looked at the policeman with her animal gaze until Nina closed the door again. The cell phone had disappeared into her pink backpack. The psychologist would probably consider that a step backward, but Nina couldn’t help feeling relieved.

  The walls were a calming dove blue; the chairs and tables of light wood and lacquered steel all looked like something you might find at a high school from the ’70s. But the fact that the tall patrician windows were covered with bulletproof glass cooled the atmosphere a bit, Søren noticed, and made it impossible to characterize the police headquarters’s combined coffee-and-lineup room as cozy.

  “He speaks almost no English,” said the detective inspector, discreetly flipping his thumb in the direction of a young man who sat drumming his fingers impatiently on his jean-clad thigh. “And the other one, the one we could at least speak to, seems to have vanished into thin air.”

  “The other one?” asked Søren. Until now he had heard only about one man.

  “Yes, there were two of them. They came to speak with the fugitive—well, at that point she wasn’t a fugitive yet, but …”

  “So you’ve lost both an inmate and a foreign police officer?” Søren spoke with a certain coolness. He knew that the safety involving the transport of inmates wasn’t ironclad, at least not unless the so-called “negatively strong” inmates were involved. If one of the more peaceful ones got away, it was usually pretty anticlimactic. They often turned up on their own when they had taken care of whatever it was that was so important to them, or if not, you could collect them undramatically a little later in the day at the home of a much-missed girlfriend or at the birthday celebration of some family member. The system responded with an
extra thirty days and the revoking of a few privileges, and that was that.

  But this was different. Natasha Dmytrenko didn’t miss her fiancé—she had done her best to kill him once before, and now he was dead. It also worried Søren considerably that a member of the not ill-reputed Ukrainian militia appeared to have given his hosts the slip.

  The DI grew defensive. “We can’t just lock our foreign colleagues in a cage,” he said. “He got pretty upset when he heard that she had escaped, and suddenly he was gone as well.”

  Søren regarded the one Ukrainian policeman they still had under control. The man had short brown hair and a face broader than the average Scandinavian ones Søren was used to seeing. There was a restless, coiled energy in the drumming fingers and the tapping heel. A dark tie and a white shirt lent a bit of formality to the jeans getup and the ’70s hippie suede jacket that hung over the chair back behind him. He must be around thirty, Søren estimated, young but no kid.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Symon Babko, police lieutenant in some subdivision of the criminal police.”

  Søren just nodded and elected not to tell the young assistant criminal policeman that this “subdivision” could swallow the entire Danish police force more than once without even noticing.

  Even though it wasn’t said very loudly, the Ukrainian policeman must nonetheless have picked out his name through the ambient noise of chair scraping and cafeteria talk. He raised his head—what a chin, Søren thought; there was a warrior-like determination to that chin—and looked directly at Søren.

  “Dobry den,” said Søren, holding out his hand and presenting himself. “Søren Kirkegard, PET.”

  “Hello,” said Babko.

  He had unusually large hands, Søren noticed. They looked out of proportion to his thin, knobby wrists. As if someone had attached an inadequately thin handle to a spade.

  “I’m sorry. I speak only Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Søren.

  Babko laughed. It was an amazing volcano eruption of a laugh that started far down in his skinny middle, moved up through his entire body and made his shoulders shake before finally rolling out across the cafeteria landscape with such power that conversations around them ceased.