Gordon shook his head and shrugged. “It’s nothing. He’s my dad’s best friend, that’s all.”
“I see. That would explain a lot. Public school chums, I shouldn’t wonder. And let me guess, you went to the same school as well, yeah?”
He nodded.
“Right. So Bjørn wants to do your dad a favor and takes you on as his private spy so he can keep tabs on me. He’s a bit of a control freak, in case you didn’t know. Typical of beanpoles and second-raters.”
Here the kid’s defiance bubbled to the surface in spite of himself. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, apparently. Bjørn’s tougher than anyone here.”
Carl thrust his head back. What the hell was that?
“Are we talking about the same man? The teacher’s pet with the perfect creases in his slacks? What could possibly be ‘tough’ about him? Go on, enlighten me.”
“Ask him to roll up his sleeves. You’ve never seen scars like that in your life. Could you withstand a month of constant torture, I wonder? Well, Lars Bjørn could, and I could tell you a lot more besides.”
“I’m all ears.”
Gordon hesitated, but in his youthful arrogance he was unable to resist temptation.
“You won’t know what BCCF stands for, obviously.”
“Can’t say I do,” Carl replied, hands held up in submission. “But let me hazard a guess. Bjørn’s Comical Ca-ca Face, perhaps?”
“You haven’t a clue. What it stands for is Baghdad Central Confinement Facility, or what Saddam Hussein called Abu Ghraib prison.”
“OK, and now you’re going to say Bjørn worked there, right?”
“Worked? No.”
What did he think this was, Trivial Pursuit? “Go on, then,” Carl said, sharpening the tone. “What’s Bjørn got to do with Abu Ghraib?”
“What do you think? Why do you suppose I told you to get him to roll up his sleeves?”
Carl stared at the floor, drumming his fingers on the desk. He didn’t like what he was hearing now. He didn’t like it one bit.
“What else, Gordon?”
He looked up at the lad and saw to his surprise that his face had turned red.
“I can see you’ve already told me more than Bjørn would approve of, am I right?”
He nodded.
“And you’re not even supposed to know that much about him, are you? It’s something you heard the folks talking about at home, isn’t it?”
He nodded again.
“OK, Gordon. I think we’re back on track. I’ve got enough on you now to bounce you out of HQ on your ass. Bjørn’s been protecting you so far, but my guess is he won’t be much longer if I go upstairs and ask him to roll up his sleeves at your request. Am I right?”
“Yes,” he squeaked.
“So from now on, you only tell Bjørn things about Department Q that I want you to tell him. Are you with me?”
“Yes.”
“Right, it’s a deal.”
Carl got up, thrust out his hand and gave Gordon’s a squeeze that made his eyelashes do a river dance.
“Now, get yourself upstairs to Bjørn and tell him you’ve discovered we’re dead close to clearing up a very interesting case, and that this Carl Mørck bloke is simply the most brilliant thing since sliced bread.”
Gordon’s mouth twisted with uncertainty. “Do you really mean it?”
“Yes, I do. Be sure to remember the word, ‘brilliant.’ And after that, you phone René E. Eriksen at the foreign office and ask him to stay behind after work. We want another word with him.”
“Why? We’re seeing him on Monday anyway.”
“Because I get the clear impression the man knows a hell of a lot more than he’s telling us, and that right now he’s probably putting a story together about why those official trips he and Stark made within days of each other couldn’t just as well have been combined into one.”
—
“Do you know if forensics are turning anything up in that grave outside Kregme?” he asked Tomas Laursen.
Laursen wiped his hands in his chef’s apron an extra time for good measure. It was a sad sight to see the man who was once the force’s best forensic technician with remoulade remains all down his front.
“Yes, they’re finding a bit. Hair, skin, clothing fibers. A couple of fingernails.”
“Loads of DNA, then?”
Laursen nodded. “In a couple of days you should know if it matches what they’ve collected from William Stark’s home address.”
“It will. I don’t need their results. Just knowing there was a human corpse in that grave is enough for me. I’m absolutely certain it’s our man.”
Laursen nodded. “Pity the body isn’t there anymore. Any idea where it might be?”
“No, and my feeling is we’re not going to find out either. You don’t bury a body and dig it up again just to put it somewhere else where it can be found. It’s been chopped into bits and chucked into very deep water, if you ask me.”
“You’re probably right. It’s been seen before, anyway.”
He wiped his hands again and began kneading the lump of dough lying in front of him. New success story: fresh-baked bread first thing in the morning had become all the rage at police HQ. The man was doing his utmost for the cafeteria’s survival.
“One more thing, Tomas. I’ve learned a few things about Bjørn’s time in Iraq, and I’ve a feeling you can pitch in with more. Am I right?”
Laursen paused with a frown. “I think you’d better ask him yourself, Carl. It’s none of my business.”
“So you do know something.”
“You can interpret it as you wish.”
“He was put in prison. Do you know what for, and when?”
“I’m not the one to ask about it, Carl.”
“Can’t you just tell me when it was? Was it right before Saddam Hussein was brought down?”
He tipped his head from side to side.
“A bit before, then?”
No reply.
“A year?”
Laursen smacked his clump of dough onto the counter. “Lay off, will you, Carl? It’s not worth our falling out over.”
Carl nodded and left the man in peace, but inside him there was anything but.
Assad was in the process of questioning a man downstairs.
Department Q’s little charmer, Assad, an untrained policeman whose employment at police headquarters seemed more and more to be thanks to the good graces of Lars Bjørn. A man who was now Carl’s acting superior and who had previously been imprisoned in a notorious Iraqi jail under the rule of Saddam.
Carl stopped halfway down the stairs.
For God’s sake, Assad, he thought. Who are you, anyway?
—
He found him standing outside the interview room with a big smile on his face.
“What are you doing here, Assad?” he asked.
“I’m taking a break. They should not have to look at one all the time, should they? They must have the chance to think things over. It helps get them talking, you know? In the end they blurt it out, log, stick, and barrel.”
“Lock, stock, and barrel, Assad. Who have you got in there?”
“Romeo. The one with the burn on his face who then would not say his name.”
“But you got it out of him?”
“Yes, I was a bit persistent.”
Carl tipped his head to the side. “How so?”
“Come inside and I will show you.”
The guy was sitting on his chair. Without handcuffs, with no trace of anger, and without the protective loathing of officialdom one otherwise always encountered. What remained was a nice young man in a suit.
“Say hello to Carl Mørck, Romeo,” Assad instructed.
He lifted his head. “Hello.
”
Carl nodded.
“Tell Inspector Mørck what you told me before, Romeo.”
“What part of it?” came the reply, in a heavy accent.
“The part about Zola and Marco.”
“I don’t know why, but Zola wants Marco killed. We’re all looking for him, and not just us. He’s got other people helping him, too. Estonians, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Africans. We’re all looking.”
“And why do you tell me this, Romeo?”
The man who looked up at Assad was exhausted. Why wasn’t Assad?
“Because you promised me that then I can stay in Denmark.”
Assad looked at Carl with a gleam of triumph in his eyes. Simple as that, his expression seemed to say.
“You can’t just promise him that, Assad,” said Carl, once they were back outside. “Tomorrow he’s going to be remanded in custody, maybe even put into isolation, if he really knows as much as he was just jabbering on about. And what happens when he’s no longer in isolation? How are you going to protect him and keep your promise then?”
Assad shrugged. It wasn’t his problem, Carl could see. A pretty hard-boiled attitude for his taste.
“I asked him if he knew William Stark, and he did not. Then I asked him if Marco was abused sexually in Zola’s house, which he denied most adamantly. This, at least, they were not subjected to.”
Carl nodded. It was all useful info.
The means justified the ends, as people usually said while washing their hands.
35
Never had Marco felt the cold as much as he did that night.
He had clung to the side of the sightseeing boat when it put in at Holmen’s Church and Nyhavn, but hadn’t dared let go as long as he was still within the city center where Zola’s people were stationed. For that reason he had allowed himself to be drawn through the icy water across the city’s inner harbor, on through the canal past the Opera House, and didn’t release his grip until when the boat passed the Little Mermaid. There he clambered ashore, so wet and exhausted that a couple of the day’s final tourists tried to grab him, yelling that someone should call an ambulance, while the rest blitzed him with rapid-fire digital cameras as if he were some mythical marine creature. The Little Mermaid herself paled in comparison.
“Go away!” Marco cried, shoving them aside and limping off along the concourse, then on through the Frihavn harbor toward the Svanemølle marina.
This time, finding shelter among the moored boats wasn’t so easy. Another warm May weekend had brought out the sailing fans in force, and a great many watching eyes followed the pathetic, shivering boy as he made his way along the jetties in the twilight. Welcome, he certainly was not.
—
He was still wet when he woke up inside the little covered motorboat, but a warm breeze coupled with bright sunshine was sufficient to coax him forth.
He squinted up at the sun and figured it was still early enough for him to get to Kaj and Eivind’s apartment before they went off to work.
The last twenty-four hours had shaken him up. The two African boys had been so close. If he shut his eyes he could still clearly see the one with the knife in front of him, the other with his yellow-white eyes staring at him under the water.
Now all he wanted was to get away. Away from Copenhagen, away from Denmark. He dare not stay here any longer. He’d take the train to Sweden and try to begin afresh. A country so sparsely populated and so expansive that from north to south was the same distance as from Copenhagen to Rome had to be a place in which it was possible to disappear. He’d often heard the Swedish language on the streets and realized it wasn’t so different from Danish. That, too, he would learn.
The way things had developed the last twenty-four hours, taking revenge on Zola meant less to him now. All he wanted was to survive.
By the time he got to Kaj and Eivind’s flat, he was dry and utterly determined not to leave the place until his money was in his hand. This time, he wasn’t about to let them stop him.
He knocked on the door a couple of times before Eivind came and opened it. He was a changed man, a pale, unshaven shadow of himself, though fortunately not hostile like last time. In fact, his face seemed to light up when he saw who it was.
“Marco, my goodness,” he exclaimed. “Where have you been, my boy? Kaj and I have been worried sick. Look at the state of you, you look dreadful. Come in, I’ll find you some clean clothes.”
Marco felt his body relax a bit. His lips began to quiver. Being here felt so nice, and what a relief it was to hear kind words and to see Eivind smile.
“Guess what, Kaj?” Eivind shouted. “Marco’s come back, can you believe our luck?”
Then he heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock behind him.
Instinctively he wheeled round to see Eivind with the key in his hand and a quite different, threatening look in his eye, his body bent forward as though he were about to charge at him.
Marco turned immediately to make a dash for the kitchen, but was stopped in his tracks by a blow to the head that sent him to the floor in a heap.
“Hold him down, Eivind,” Kaj commanded, getting down on his knees, pulling Marco’s arms toward him and winding something tightly around his wrists.
Marco tried to focus, but inside his head a blitzkrieg of light all but filtered out his surroundings, making them appear blurred and distorted.
Reflexively he tried in vain to draw his arms in toward his body and twist round, only to hear a rush in his ear as a flurry of blows rained down on him.
“Ow!” he cried, and then began sobbing. “Why are you doing this? I haven’t done anything. I’ll go again, don’t worry, I just wanted to fetch . . .” But the pummeling continued.
Now he felt Eivind’s bony knee digging into his rib cage, making it almost impossible to breathe.
“OK, we’ve got him,” came the sound of Eivind’s voice above him. “Come straightaway, and hurry.”
Marco saw the two men clearly now. Eivind with the mobile in his hand, straddling his midriff, and Kaj crouching in front of his head with a tight grip on his lower arms. Kaj didn’t look well. His face was swollen and battered, with dark bruises fanning out over the delicate skin of his neck.
Marco lay still and felt the tears running down his cheeks as he looked into Eivind’s desperate eyes. Eivind, of whom he had been so fond.
He, too, had abandoned him.
Perhaps it was the tears, or perhaps the fact that Marco seemed so small and helpless, lying beneath the two men. All of a sudden it was as if Eivind saw him for who he was: their boy, whom they had taught to write and speak better Danish and play cards, and to believe that he had a future ahead of him like everyone else.
As this dawned on him, Eivind’s tired features transformed from furrows of anger and frustration to searching eyes and quivering lips. Then, finally, tears burst forth to follow their path through the lines of his aging face.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to them, Marco,” he stammered between sobs. “But if you don’t vanish from our lives for good, they’ll come back again, and we’ll never be able to cope with it. That’s why we have to hand you over to them. I hope to heaven they do you no harm.”
Kaj showed less compassion. “I hope they do to you what they did to me. Do you understand, Marco? They’ve destroyed our lives. We’re too frightened to even go to work anymore and it’s all your fault.”
Marco shook his head. They were mistaken. That wasn’t how it was. It wasn’t like that at all.
He squeezed his eyes shut and wriggled his body slightly so Eivind could tell he would remain still if only he wouldn’t press his knee so hard against his chest.
He knew that in five minutes they would be here because they were all over the neighborhood. Slavs, Balts, Africans, Zola’s people, it didn’t matter which of the gangs came
, the result would be the same. Zola had demonstrated with the utmost clarity to what lengths he was prepared to go, and the people working for him certainly had as well.
He turned his head to the side as slowly as he could, his eyes scanning the room for possibilities. They were few.
On the wall above him was a little shelf with a lamp on it, a pair of leather gloves and an oval-shaped bowl containing a few coins and the keys to the storage room in the basement. He knew this shelf well. The cord of the lamp ran up the wall adjacent to his knee, and by his feet were galoshes and the slippers Marco had always worn indoors. Nothing of use to him here.
Now he could tell how Eivind’s position above his body was growing uncomfortable for him because he kept shifting his weight, turning his knees outward until his lower legs were almost resting flat on the floor.
Marco lay quiet as a mouse. Any moment now, Eivind would try to adjust his position once more and then he needed to be ready, for he would have no other chances.
He breathed deeper, and deeper still, tensing his buttocks and abdomen slowly so Eivind wouldn’t notice, and at the same time he cautiously drew his arms inward, prompting Kaj to tighten his grip. Everything depended on Kaj not letting go.
At the same moment the toes of Eivind’s shoes made contact with the floor, Marco thrust his hips upward with all his might and wrenched his arms to his sides. The result was enormous, as was the sound of the two men’s heads colliding above him.
Eivind slumped to the side, toward the shelf, dislodging its contents onto the floor, while Kaj sank backward, his legs buckled beneath him. Both howled with pain, but their wailing did nothing to stop Marco as he kicked Eivind hard in the shoulder, sending him sliding against the baseboard.
Now he was free and leaped to his feet.
Kaj reached out to grab his leg, but Marco kicked his arm back against the wall.
Then he heard a car screech to a halt outside. By the time its door slammed shut he was already in the kitchen. Here, with his heart pounding in his chest, he realized the door to the back stairs was locked and the key wasn’t sitting in the keyhole. So he grabbed a kitchen knife, climbed onto the counter, opened the window onto the backyard, and jumped.
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 41