The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “You’re my only true friend,” Vadim would say, drunk and crooked, with love pouring from his entire body. “A friend isn’t there for the money, but because you’d do anything . . .” Here he would narrow his eyes and sniff. “Because you’d do anything for each other, right?”

  “Okay,” he muttered. “Let’s do it then.”

  “Do you know how to equalize the pressure?” Vadim looked at him. His gaze was concentrated and inward looking.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Good. Do it often. Don’t wait until you feel the pressure.”

  Vadim sat on the edge of the boat with his back to the water. He pulled off one of his gold rings and held it out. The wide one that he wore on his thumb.

  “An inheritance from my grandfather,” he said. “His wedding ring. He used to wear it on his ring finger. American. He was as big as Victor.”

  Victor nodded approvingly and opened cola number two.

  “Big men wear big jewelry.”

  “Yes, and that’s what we are diving for,” said Vadim.

  He pulled his mask over his face, and it was impossible to read his expression when he held his hand out and let go of the ring right above the anchor line.

  Vincent stared at him.

  “Are you crazy?” he said. “It’ll be impossible to find down there.”

  Vadim nodded.

  “Yes, if we don’t hurry. Sand moves quickly on the bottom. Hurry up and put on those weights or you’ll have no chance to make it. Come on.”

  Vincent buckled the lead belt across his hips and fumbled with the plastic lock on the dog collar–like chain that was supposed to improve his balance in the water. It felt impossibly heavy.

  Vadim nodded briefly, swung himself over the edge and slowly lowered himself into the water. His long, lean biceps rippled under his dark, sun-chafed skin. He inhaled deeply a couple of times, rolled forward and dove under the surface with powerful strokes. Then he began to pull himself downward on the anchor line. Vincent could see him as a vertical line in the water, heading straight for the bottom, his white swim trunks bright in the gradually darkening blue.

  Vincent threw a quick look at Victor. His friend’s face was stone calm. His sunglasses were pushed up on his forehead, and he had his hand on the boat’s tiller.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said, spreading his arms. “You and he are the ones who do the stupid stuff. I just come along. And . . . he’s probably got it under control.”

  “You’ll keep an eye on us, right?”

  “Yes,” said Victor. “But there’s not much I can do if something goes wrong. Stay here. He’ll come up again when he needs air.”

  How long had it been? Thirty seconds, a minute?

  He could see Vadim swimming along the bottom. Calm, lazy movements of the flippers. He was so far down that he looked like a child.

  Vincent tipped himself over the boat’s railing, and the water closed around him with a fierceness that instinctively made him fight his way upward. Or try to. The lead belt was too heavy, and even though he worked with both arms and legs, he sank slowly but surely toward the bottom. He reminded himself that this was in fact the idea and turned so he could work with it rather than against it. Direction down. Stiff kicks. Sunlight from the real world above him formed luminous columns in the clear water.

  He could already feel that he needed to breathe. His initial hopeless struggle to reach the surface had used his oxygen. He thought about taking just one deep breath, and about the fact that he couldn’t. There was a pressure in his chest, and knowing he couldn’t take that one breath only made it worse.

  Think of something else. Find that fucking ring and reach the surface again.

  He observed with a certain relief that his long fall was over. The bottom was right beneath him now. He could stretch out his hands and touch the sand around the small, sharp anchor and the line that went up to the boat high above them.

  He turned over and caught sight of Vadim a little further away. He lay calmly, almost apathetically, above the sandy bottom and let his fingers run across it, making long, soft lines which were erased almost the second he drew them.

  Vincent rolled over on his stomach and began to do the same. Every time he moved there was the sound of thunder in his ears. A couple of sizeable fish floated lazily past him. Blue-finned jacks and scorpion fish with empty, staring, flat eyes and mouths that opened and closed with hypnotic slowness.

  How long could Vadim hold his breath? Two or three minutes, maybe more. He himself felt a massive pressure against his head and chest, but the initial panic had subsided.

  He let his fingers glide through the sand. Felt warm water and small, fine grains under his fingertips and then, he could hardly believe it, something smooth and round that glimmered dully and got away from him when he first tried to grab it. Could he be that lucky on his first dive?

  He let his hand run across the place again, but in his eagerness he stirred up a cloud of sand which swirled slowly in the warm water and for a moment made it impossible for him to orient himself. He felt . . . high. New fish glided by him, smaller this time, a school of golden, streamlined creatures that circled around him. The pressure in his chest grew and grew, but the sand was settling and had left the bottom a bit darker, so the bright ring could now be made out with the naked eye.

  He reached out his hand, carefully this time, and had just placed the ring solidly on his own thumb when his chest gave an involuntary and cramp-like jerk, an attempt to breathe and even the pressure. He was just barely able to fight his body’s intense impulse.

  The world around him had turned a dusty grey. He had left the bottom and was surrounded by water on all sides now and in a brief confused and panicked moment he lost his sense of up and down. Then he saw Vadim’s body floating in the sunlight above him—on his way up.

  Vincent had stayed down too long.

  His chest kicked again, and he instinctively reached his arms above his head and stretched toward the light. Lashed out with his arms and legs. But nothing happened. He stayed where he was, floating right above the bottom of the sea.

  The lead belt, he thought. I have to get that belt off.

  He fumbled with the buckle, which slipped under his soft and slippery fingers. Impossible to open. Fucking impossible. He hurt inside now, and someplace far, far down in his consciousness he began to cry. Because he was lost. Because he was going to die and would never see Bea again.

  An enormous school of black-and-white-striped damsel fish danced around him now, and his chest gulped in a bit of salt water. He couldn’t prevent it. Dark blotches began to creep across his vision. Then something hard and living hit his shoulder and knocked him backward the second before all light disappeared from the world.

  “You’re an idiot. You know that, right?”

  Vadim’s voice and the blue sky. A boat that rocked beneath him, and a painful contraction in his abdomen which made him curl up and vomit. The taste of saltwater and stomach acid.

  “Vincent?”

  Victor’s face slid in front of the blue sky. His gaze was serious, and he placed his fingers against Vincent’s throat and counted his pulse beats quietly out loud with the sun surrounding his head like a halo. The light was so sharp that Vincent had to squint.

  “It was Big V who got you up,” said Vadim. He stood right behind Victor and fiddled with the diving gear. “What on earth were you doing, fumbling around down there on the bottom? You could have got yourself killed.”

  “The belt . . .” It hurt his throat to talk. Actually it hurt in his entire skull and also in his chest. “I couldn’t get the belt off.”

  Vadim lifted his head and looked at him with a half smile.

  “But you got the ring, my man. Well fought. Brothers in arms, eh!”

  “We’re not at war.”

  Victor’s voice sou
nded cold and severe, unusually so.

  Vincent closed his eyes and remained lying in the bottom of the boat, letting the sun bake his body while they drifted across the shallow part of the reef. Vadim jumped in with his harpoon and reappeared shortly afterward with two large silver-colored milkfish that still wriggled on the spear when he threw them down to Vincent on the bottom of the boat. The long, powerful tail fins flapped against the hull.

  Vadim climbed out with the water dripping from his slippery body and his knee-length bathing trunks and then, as on a sudden impulse, he bent over Vincent and tousled his hair.

  “I love you, man,” he said darkly. “Never doubt it.”

  They sat silently on the way home across the darkening oil-smooth water.

  Hello, Nina-girl.”

  He came in the door, hung his windbreaker on the hook, and then opened his arms as wide as he could, as if there had to be room not just for her but also for the rest of the world. His eyes were warm and happy. It was a good day.

  “Daddy?” Her heart did an uncertain summersault, because she thought . . . there was something . . . wasn’t he . . .

  But her longing wiped away all reservations. She melted into an embrace that pushed both the fear of dying and the headache into the background. His hands were warm. He smelled a little of sweat and even more of freshly worked wood. He must have come directly from his shop class, the subject he liked to teach best of all. That was where he let loose and charmed even the most uncertain students into using a hammer and a plane with self-confidence and the joy of creation.

  “What’s wrong with you, little one?” he asked. “You look so sad.”

  “Where have you been?” she asked instead of answering. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Yes, but I’m here now. Didn’t you think I’d come back?”

  She clutched at his shirt, clenching her hands around fistfuls of soft material.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t,” she whispered. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

  “Sweetheart. You know you can trust me. You won’t get rid of me that easily.” He laughed quietly and ruffled her hair with one hand without loosening his embrace.

  Oh, to be so loved. To be held like this. To be safe like this.

  “Our Father,” he whispered into her hair. “Who art in heaven . . .”

  A rush of sheer terror raced through her. She tore herself loose and stared up into his face. He smiled so the wrinkles around his eyes appeared. She wanted to ask him why he did it, why he was praying for her, he who had never so much as said grace before dinner through her entire childhood, but another voice broke in and made her sense of reality totter.

  “Nina Borg?”

  She opened her eyes with difficulty and felt a nauseating physical dislocation. Dream, it was a dream. There was no smell of fresh wood here, only disinfectant and bedpan pee. For a terrible, teetering moment she tried to hold on, but he was gone. The naked, raw loss hit her as if she had only just been told that he was dead. The loss and the fear, the terror she had felt . . . Our Father. Why? Her feelings were sloshing around chaotically, and she fumbled for some slight grip on reality.

  “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “What is it?”

  “My name is Caroline Westmann. I’m a detective sergeant with the Mid-West Jutland Police. I wondered if I might speak with you?”

  Nina lay motionless for a moment while she waited for her focus to improve. Detective sergeant? Head trauma. She had been hit on the head, they said. Assaulted.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  She was young, the detective sergeant. Short, chestnut-brown hair, freckles and the charming hint of an overbite that had defied all attempts of overzealous orthodontists to correct it. An eager, alert gaze. Jeans and a vaguely nautical red-and-white-striped sweater.

  “First and foremost, I’d like to know what happened.”

  Nina closed her eyes again. It was too hard to keep them open.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I remember absolutely nothing.”

  “You had been grocery shopping,” persisted the detective sergeant. “In the Saint Mathias Mall. Do you remember that?”

  Viborg. She was in Viborg again. Home again. Was that why her father appeared in her dream?

  “More or less,” she admitted. “I . . . we were out of milk. I was cooking. My mother is unfortunately seriously ill.” The last part sounded stiff and wrong, as if it was an excuse she had fabricated herself for some teacher’s note.

  Stop it. She wasn’t in school any longer. Teacher’s note? Damn it, Nina. No one even wrote notes any longer; these days you used the school’s intranet.

  She tried to capture her floundering thoughts. Honestly, it was as if all rationality and capacity for concentration had leaked out of her along with the brain fluid they said she had lost.

  “Nina’s mother is being treated for breast cancer,” Søren prompted from someplace in the room. “Nina is here to support her through the chemotherapy. Normally we live near Copenhagen.”

  We? Since when had she become a part of such an inclusive and intimate plural? Anyone would think they cohabited . . . But she didn’t protest. She was glad he was here.

  “You had shopped at SuperBest, we could see from your groceries. And then you went down to the parking deck . . .”

  Sounds and images returned stickily and reluctantly. The slam of a car door echoing between concrete walls. Small, greasy pools of oil and rainwater glinting in the fluorescent tube lights. The SuperBest bags held lean ground beef, peppers, and canned tomatoes, and she wondered whether they had onions or whether she should have bought some.

  That was it. The film ended.

  “I remember shopping,” she said. “I remember that I went down in to the parking garage. But no more. There is no more.”

  The microsounds from Westmann’s side of the bed took on a touch of resignation—a faint creaking from the frame of the visitor chair, an intake of breath that wasn’t quite a sigh but still deeper than normal.

  “You still had your wallet,” said the detective sergeant. “But we couldn’t find a cell phone. Could it have been stolen?”

  “Maybe. No, wait—I was charging it. At the clinic where I work. I must have forgotten it. It’s probably still there.”

  “Did you have anything else valuable with you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Could there be a motive other than robbery?”

  “How would I know?” she snarled. “I wasn’t the one who did it.”

  A hand covered hers. Not the detective sergeant’s; it was Søren, who was trying to rein in her antipathy. The first time they met each other, he had warned her that he had the power to put her in jail as a hostile witness if she didn’t cooperate. How on earth had they gotten from that to the relationship they had now—whatever that might be?

  The warmth from his hand created a fixed point, something she could respond to physically in the midst of her uncertainty and powerlessness. She slowly turned her own hand so that their palms met.

  “I don’t know,” she said, a bit more politely. “I can’t imagine any other reasons. It has to be random. Sometimes people are just attacked randomly, for no good reason. Aren’t they?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Chair legs scraped against the floor, and Nina opened her eyes again. The detective sergeant had risen to her feet. “I’d like to come back when you are feeling a little better,” said Caroline Westmann. “I hope that will be soon.”

  She left. Nina turned her head—this time without feeling as if it was falling off—and looked at Søren. He was tired. His shoulders slumped, his skin somehow fell more heavily around the bones of his face. She felt a sharp and unexpected tenderness, a desire to make everything all better. But at the heels of the tenderness came a renewed sense of loss and sorrow because you co
uldn’t kiss away all the pain, no matter how long and how desperately you tried.

  He had taken off his glasses and sat polishing them distractedly in the dark blue fabric of his T-shirt.

  “Is it true you don’t remember anything?” he asked. “Or was it just that you didn’t feel like answering?”

  “I have a fractured skull,” she snapped. “I can’t remember shit.”

  “Okay. Just asking.”

  The tears came suddenly and intensely, without giving her the chance to control them, and the longing opened in her like a hopeless abyss, a doomsday hole in the world that everything could disappear into. Her father was dead; he wasn’t coming back. Dreams lied. A damned, corrosive lie that shook her more than the head trauma, the basal fracture and the leaking brain fluid could explain.

  Søren handed her a paper napkin. Without saying a word, thank God.

  The flowers arrived an hour after Søren had left.

  “Should I put them here?” asked the nursing assistant. “Or is the window ledge better?”

  “This is fine,” said Nina and quickly moved a newspaper and a glass to make room. “Who are they from?”

  The NA smiled professionally. She was around fifty, grey-haired and steely, but in a friendly way.

  “There was a card, I think,” she said. “It must have fallen off when I put them in water . . . Just a moment, I’ll find it.”

  She disappeared out of the room and Nina could hear her Crocs pattering down the hall. The bouquet was enormous, an explosion of waxen white calla lilies wrapped in pink tissue paper. They looked like something made out of marzipan and the heavy scent they emitted prompted a mixed association of florist, funeral parlor, and air freshener. Perhaps she should ask to have them placed in the window after all.

  The NA came pattering back and handed her a small white card.

  “I found it!” she said triumphantly. “I knew I had seen it . . .”