The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  On the other hand, it might just be that he didn’t like littering. Or hadn’t decided yet.

  “Go to that tree.” The Taser pointed at a young birch tree nine or ten meters from the car. “Lie down. No, on your stomach. Hands over your head.”

  Søren estimated distances and options. The Taser’s range was probably about thirty meters at the most, depending on the model, but it required a clear line of sight. Both the little harpoon-like darts had to hit their target in order for the cables that connected them to the gun to send the charge through him. If just one of the darts snagged on a branch, it would take time to get the pistol ready to shoot again. He didn’t think much of his chances of outrunning the parka-man, who seemed a good deal younger and hadn’t just sustained a lengthy electric shock with attendant injuries from the fall, but might Søren be able to overpower him while he was trying to get the Taser ready? It was clear that the man felt he needed the weapon, that it was this that gave him the upper hand. Consequently, he would feel at a disadvantage if he lost it . . .

  He walked toward the birch tree, but continued on.

  “No. Stop. That tree!”

  “Which one?” he said without turning around. “That one?” He pointed pretty randomly solely to win time.

  “Stop! Turn around!”

  Søren skidded sideways instead and zigzagged through the trees. He heard the Taser crackle and turned around. As he had hoped, the darts had hit the tree instead of him. Unfortunately they hadn’t embedded themselves. One cable, though, had snagged in the shrubbery, and that would have to be enough. He charged at the parka-man while still mentally rehearsing the kick to the solar plexus, the follow-up to the back of the neck, the sleeper hold that would stop the blood flow to the brain . . .

  The parka-man wasted several split seconds on shock. His mouth gaped; the eyes glinted whitely under the hood. Then he took a step backward and with a hard tug jerked the Taser cables free of the shrubbery. Søren leaped, kicked, connected . . . not well enough; he knew that at once, but there was no way back now; he went for the strike just as the Taser crackled one more time.

  The darts hit him in the thigh this time, not the chest, but the effect was almost as overwhelming. Intense pain, paralysis, helplessness . . . He was on the forest floor with his face half-buried in the fall leaves, and though he didn’t lose consciousness this time, movement was again impossible.

  “Aouuuhhhh, aouhhhhh, aouhhhhhh . . .”

  The half-choked moaning sound didn’t come from him; it came from the parka-man. He had fallen over as well. He had dropped the Taser and was on his back rolling from side to side, his knees pulled up to his stomach.

  Pull the darts out, Søren silently ordered his hands, but they just trembled in unhelpful spasms.

  The parka-man managed to get up on his knees. The moaning continued, but he looked around until he spotted the Taser and began to crawl toward it.

  Get those fucking darts out! snarled Søren to himself, and this time he managed to make his left hand close around one of the cables.

  The parka-man picked up the gun and fired. The pain was just as bad as the first time, and it went on for longer.

  When Søren could sense anything again, he was lying at the foot of the birch tree. A long thin metal chain was attached to the tree with a padlock. The other end of the chain was fastened snugly around Søren’s right wrist with yet another padlock.

  The parka-man was sitting in a camping chair under a sun sail that was attached to one side of the camper. In one hand he held a Coke bottle. In the other the damned Taser.

  “Tell me who you are,” he said. “And who you work for.”

  THE PHILIPPINES, FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

  The explosion that leveled the first housing block could be felt all the way to nearest bit of urban development three kilometers away.

  In the grainy video on the news one could see a brief flare off to the right, and then the building went down on its knees like an old man. Left side first, where the explosion had been, then the right side followed. The five upper stories remained standing for a moment, balancing in a cloud of dust and flying debris, then they too subsided. They disintegrated from the bottom to the top as they melted into the ground.

  Vincent glanced at Vadim, grabbed the remote, and shut off the television. The only sound was the enervating hum of the air conditioner. Manila had been hit by a historic heat wave with asphalt melting in the streets and a smog level that had led the authorities to warn the population not to go outdoors for any length of time.

  Vincent and Vadim had sought refuge in the apartment with a good supply of beer and PlayStation games when the call came from Vadim’s office in Makati City. Then they had seen the news.

  “Who do you think it is? Muslims?”

  Vadim hid his face in his hands. His hair was an unruly sweaty mess.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Muslims, enemies of the project, enemies of the government, enemies of my father . . .”

  “How many people were in the building?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated. “Eight hundred, maybe a thousand, it happened in the middle of the night, so everyone was sleeping. Damn it . . . I should go out there.”

  He got up and began to frantically collect his cigarettes, wallet, and cell phone from the coffee table.

  “Are you coming?”

  It wasn’t a question that called for an answer. Vadim was his job. He armed himself with four water bottles and a pack of crackers and followed Vadim out to the elevator onto the diesel-stinking parking deck.

  It felt oddly apocalyptic, sitting here in Manila’s traffic on their way to a catastrophe. The sky over the bay was yellow with smog, and the hot caustic sunbeams that did burn their way through formed a shimmering white veil against the murky background. Vincent had been drunk yesterday for the first time in a long time, and he could still feel the alcohol as an intense discomfort in his entire body. His brain felt white and blank. He had been unfaithful to Bea.

  The girl had been a pretty, gentle-looking first-year law student. Not one of those self-confident stiletto girls. Just sweet and young, with fine, round breasts under a thin, blue dress. She was a lot like Bea, before Carlito and all the lies. He had presented himself as a medical student, as he always did, and she had placed a hand on the back of his neck and told him he had sad eyes.

  The sex part had been awkward, in a hotel room on Juan Luna Street. She hadn’t been sure, he could tell, but he had not managed to stop, and she hadn’t said no. Afterward she held him and said she was in love. Mary Jane. He had thrown her phone number out in order not to be tempted to call and fuck everything up even further.

  It wasn’t because he didn’t love Bea anymore, but because they were no longer in the same place. Even when he was on one of the rare visits, all the things he couldn’t talk about came between them. Bea had finished her nurse’s training last year and had prepared to move to Manila. He had postponed it, evaded the subject, and fooled around until she stopped asking and became glum and silent. Now she worked at the public hospital in San Marcelino.

  Vadim and Vincent sat silently in the car for most of the way out of the city.

  Vadim distractedly maneuvered the beautiful royal-blue Porsche through the mass of men and children selling water and flowers and dried mango. On the sidewalk in front of a narrow shop that sold spare parts and car scrap metal, a woman stood washing a fat, naked boy of six or seven. She held a water hose over his head, and the water ran in a soft, lazy arc over the boy’s black hair and dark-brown body. The rest of the family slouched on plastic chairs and clapped-out couches, under frayed canopies. Vincent looked out at the crumbling plasterwork and the mess of telephone wires, faded advertising posters, washing lines, and beat-up bikes. And children, children, children. He saw Carlito’s face everywhere. After a while he had to lower his gaze and began to scroll throu
gh the music selections on his phone instead.

  The slums retreated, and they entered the no-man’s-land at the outskirts of the city—the enormous billboards shouting about “new luxury accommodation,” perfume, furniture, Armani suits . . . and behind them the fields and the peasants trudging along the hard-stomped paths through the rice paddies.

  Vadim had turned on the radio and listened with clenched teeth to the most recent updates.

  The first estimates said two hundred dead, but neither Vadim nor Vincent dared believe that number. It was always that way when a typhoon or an earthquake or a flood hit. The authorities began by saying ten killed, and it ended up being ten thousand. They were digging in the ruins, the radio said. All available medical personnel were on their way to the area, and the remaining slum dwellers along Pasig River had begun to stir. There was insurrection in the air. The police had turned out with batons and guns.

  “It’ll be bad,” said Vincent.

  Vadim didn’t answer.

  Vadim’s construction site was unrecognizable when they finally reached it.

  They had had to leave the car almost three kilometers away because of the roadblocks. Only ambulances, police cars, trucks and diggers were allowed past the barrier, but Vadim managed to talk his way in by showing his ID and giving the guard five hundred pesos.

  “Those are my houses,” said Vadim. “I have important information for the rescue workers.”

  The guard shrugged. He had gotten his money and didn’t need any further information.

  “But you’ll have to walk,” he said sourly. “There’s barely enough room for our own vehicles.”

  Walking three kilometers in the smog and glaring sun was exhausting, but it was the sight of the collapsed building that really finished Vincent. It was like a mountain, and the rescue workers who climbed around the rubble and the bristling steel supports looked like ghosts. The red, green, and yellow helmets, safety equipment and gloves were white from dust. There were also ordinary people, men and women digging with their bare hands among the cables and the distorted steel. Sweat and tears drew dark lines in the dust on their faces, necks and naked backs.

  All these people worked silently and with concentration, only interrupted by scattered shouts when something emerged from the mountain’s interior. The first bodies had already been placed in neat straight rows, covered with white sheets.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  Vadim walked over to a helmeted man holding a walkie-talkie.

  The man shook his head.

  “I just brought the dogs,” he said. “The police are over there.”

  Vadim narrowed his eyes and looked in the direction the man was pointing. A couple of uniformed policemen had placed themselves at a safe distance from the actual digging and dragging and had spread some official-looking maps over the hood of a civilian car. With them stood a man in plain clothes, but his light-blue shirt and blue pants made Vincent guess that he had been promoted out of uniform and was either lacking in imagination or missed the visible signs of his rank.

  They walked over, Vadim in front with his cell phone in his hand. Vincent tried to shut it all out. A casualty had been found somewhere in the ruins. He could hear the rescuers bark short instructions to each other. Lift. Careful. Stop. A little more. A moaning scream from a child or a woman who was being lifted free of the rubble. Vincent couldn’t help looking after all. The limp figure being carefully maneuvered on to a stretcher was covered in blood and dirt. One leg dangled loosely before it too was also lifted up and arranged on the stretcher. A thin European woman in shorts and a T-shirt looking as if she was responsible for this part of the operation gave short and precise orders on the way down to the waiting ambulances.

  Then she turned around and directed her attention to the next victim being carried out of the ruin. She stuck out, thought Vincent, and not just because she was European. People calmed down around her and followed her lead. Whoever she was, she had clearly done this before.

  Chaos.

  She knew it and went with the flow. And as if she could feel his eyes on her, she turned her head and met his gaze for a brief moment. Her eyes shone intensely under the too-large red helmet she was wearing. Then she moved on.

  So did Vadim.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  He was standing in front of the two policemen with all the authority his twenty-four-year-old persona could muster. “My company built these buildings, so I would appreciate being informed.”

  The plainclothes guy nodded; he was a middle-aged man who clearly had some kind of rank here. He had an enormous birthmark over his right eyelid which Vincent found it hard not to stare at.

  “If you can provide us with plans of the building, we can talk,” he said. “But so far we know nothing besides what’s already on the news. There’s been some kind of explosion. The ones we have dug out so far are mostly women and children. Hellish work. We think there must have been about a thousand people in the building.”

  “I’ll call my office and ask them to send the building plans out here at once,” said Vadim. “Thank you for your trouble.”

  The officer sent him a sharp look. Then he scrawled something down on a slip of paper and handed it to Vadim.

  “Commissioner Roberto Abiog, Philippine National Police, counterterrorism. Here’s my number. I’ll try to keep you informed to the best of my ability,” he said, rubbing his meaty fingers together in a telling gesture. Vadim nodded.

  “Thank you,” he said shortly. “I’ll be in the area for the rest of the day.”

  The wounded were divided among several nearby hospitals, and still there was a crush and chaos everywhere. When they finally managed to find Diana in an overcrowded hallway at Christ the King General Hospital, she barely had time to look at them. She stood bent over a man who had clearly broken a leg, but otherwise appeared more or less unharmed.

  “He wasn’t in the building,” said Diana shortly. “A piece of wall fell on him while he was digging for his wife. It’s a complete mess out there; no one knows what the hell they’re doing.”

  Vadim spread his arms.

  “Is there anything we can do here?”

  Diana glanced up at him, surprised. Then she smiled crookedly.

  “You can give me a cigarette,” she said. “And then you can find Victor for me. I need some help for this guy, and we’ve got several seriously wounded coming in any minute.”

  Vadim produced a cigarette, lit it and took a couple of drags himself before he placed it between Diana’s lips.

  “Victor? Is he here too?”

  Sighing, Diana pushed back a drifting lock of black hair with one wrist “I don’t want to discuss this now, Vadim. Victor came yesterday to visit me and see the hospital. He’s thinking of doing some volunteer work here.”

  “Okay,” said Vadim. “Fine, we’ll find him.”

  They left. Vincent nearly had to jog to keep up with Vadim’s long, rapid strides. There was quite a bit of activity along the external gallery. Nurses and doctors had to force their way through a constantly growing group of confused and despairing relatives clustered in front of the battered reception desk.

  Vincent tried to shut it out. The shouting and the weeping that emerged as high-pitched moans and screams. The clutching hands, and the figures on the gurneys just emerging from three ambulances in the bumpy parking lot in front of the hospital.

  The first two were children. Vincent couldn’t help looking as they were rushed past him. A glimpse of a bloodied faces. One completely without signs of life, the other drawn in a silent scream of pain. Delicate white teeth exposed in something that looked like a snarl. He tried to catch sight of Victor in the tumult. The nausea and chills that had lurked inside him ever since he got out of the car in front of the collapsed ruin had begun to overwhelm him.

  He had to get away from t
his. He had to find a place where he could throw up without anyone noticing, where he could get something to drink, but the mass of people around him kept growing and made it difficult to move.

  “Come on.” Ahead of him, Vadim gestured impatiently with his chin. Forward. Onward. Vincent made a halfhearted attempt to fight his way through the chaos, but his progress was blocked by the third gurney being ushered past him, so close that his hand brushed the nearly severed arm of the victim. Astonishingly enough, the man’s face was untouched except for a narrow cut above his right eyebrow. He was conscious but clearly submerged in an ocean of pain that made his gaze distant, dull and wandering. Vincent recognized him with a few seconds’ delay. The engineer. Lorenz Robles.

  It was Victor who was accompanying the stretcher. And the European woman Vincent had noticed earlier in the rubble.

  “Diana is looking for you,” said Vincent, but Victor didn’t hear him. He was too busy with his mutilated patient. He didn’t even react when Vadim caught his arm, except to absently shrug himself free. His huge body was intensely focused on the wounded man. His right hand was buried somewhere in the bloody mess under the man’s gaping shoulder.

  The engineer turned his head and for a brief moment focused on Vadim behind Victor, and something happened in his face. A brief moment of presence and a jerk of the body, as if he was attempting to reach out to Vadim with the damaged arm.

  “Not a bomb,” he said. “It wasn’t . . . a bomb.”

  Someone pulled on the gurney and it rolled on past them. Vincent stumbled in the sudden emptiness in front of him, and Vadim hauled him back to his feet and out into the blazing heat, where he threw up behind a huge acacia tree. When he was done, Vadim settled him into the car’s front seat, turned on the air conditioning and found a bottle of water in the trunk.