God’s punishment, a voice whispered inside her.
“Shut up,” she said under her breath, but it did no good.
She hadn’t attended mass since leaving Tauragė. Not once in eight years. She didn’t want to believe in God, but it was as if it wouldn’t let her go—the hot, waxy scent of the candles, the old women who could barely kneel but insisted on doing so all the same, the flowers on the altar, the sense of solemnity that had made her sit quietly even when she had been so young her legs dangled from the pews in white stockings and shiny black shoes—that one day of the week one should make the effort, her mother said, and dress in one’s best. Her first communion … she had felt so grownup, so important. She was old enough to sin. The word unfolded inside her, releasing a scent of darkness and sulphur, of guilt and lost souls. But above all, sin was interesting. Interesting like Mama’s sister, Aunt Jolita, who lived in Vilnius and had done things that no one would explain to Sigita. Sinners were far more interesting than ordinary people—it even said so in the Bible. Now this world of sin and confession had opened to her, too. It was peculiarly intoxicating to be a part of the chorus of response when the congregation murmured its “Esu kaltas, esu kaltas, esu labai kaltas.” I am guilty, I am very guilty. She went at it with a will.
“Shhhh,” said her mother, twitching her scarf into place. “Not so loud!”
By and by she learned the correct volume—not self-promotingly loud and shrill, nor so low that it sounded reluctant; a sincere murmur reaching the nearest without echoing through the dome. Esu kaltas. There was a beauty, a sweetness to it.
Until the day when she actually had something relevant to confess and couldn’t bring herself to say it. At first she had tried for teenage rebellion by stating flatly that she wasn’t going. Had it been only her mother, she might have carried it off. But when Granny Julija looked at her and asked her if anything was wrong, her weak attempt at mutiny collapsed. No, there was nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Granny Julija had patted her arm and told her that she was a good girl. It was all right to doubt a little sometimes, she said. God could take it. Then Sigita had had to hurry up and change into her Sunday best, so that they wouldn’t be late. On the outside, everything was the way it had always been. On the inside, the world had come to an end.
THE CHURCH OF St. Kazimiero was silent and nearly empty now. Two older women were busy cleaning. Volunteers, probably, like they would have been at home in Tauragė, thought Sigita. One of them asked if Sigita needed anything.
“Thank you, no,” said Sigita. “I just want to sit here for a while.”
They nodded kindly. The need to “sit for a while” was understood by any true believer. Sigita felt like a fraud. She was no longer a believer of any kind.
If that is so, what are you doing here? whispered the voice inside her.
She couldn’t explain it. She felt as if she was standing at the edge of an abyss, but she was in no way counting on God to rescue her. On the contrary. I don’t believe in any of it. Not anymore. But when she looked up at the image of the Holy Virgin, she could no longer hold it back. The Madonna cradled the Baby Jesus tenderly, her face aglow with love. And Sigita fell to her knees on the cold flag stones and wept helplessly, hard involuntary sobs that echoed harshly under the vaulted ceilings. Esu kaltas. Esu labai kaltas.
SHE HAD ONLY just left the church when her mobile phone started vibrating in her bag. She fumbled through the contents onehandedly, with the bag hanging from her plaster-encased lower arm, until wallet and makeup purse and throat lozenges tipped out onto the pavement and rolled in all directions. She had eyes for nothing except the phone. The call was from Darius, she noticed, as she snatched it from the ground.
“What’s up with you?” he said in his usual happy warm voice. “You’ve called about a mllion times.”
“You have to bring him back here. Now!” she snapped.
“What are you talking about?”
“Mikas! If you don’t bring him back, I’ll call the police.” She neglected to tell him that she had in fact already done so. They just didn’t want to know.
“Sigita. Sweetie. I have no idea what you’re talking about. What is wrong with Mikas?”
Years of training had made her an expert. She was able to tell, by now, if he was lying or telling the truth. And the confusion in his voice sounded one hundred percent genuine.
Strength drained from her legs like water from a bath tub, and she dropped to her knees for the second time, in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by the debris from her bag. A distantly tinny Darius-voice was shouting at her from somewhere: “Sigita. Sigita, what is it? Where is Mikas?”
She was no longer at the edge of the abyss. It had already swallowed her. Because if Darius did not have Mikas, who did?
5:10 P.M.
Whose turn was it to pick up Anton today? Suddenly Nina couldn’t remember, and felt a long, cold tug in the pit of her stomach, as though she was about to be pulled under by some deep, chill current. The after-school child care program provided by the city would have closed at 5:00. Her son might be standing by the gate right now, accompanied by a seriously cross member of the staff.
She had seated herself on the couch with the unknown boy half in her lap, his bare white body curled against her. A few damp streaks had appeared in his hair. His skin felt warmer now, and after the fluid had begun to run into him, he seemed more alive. Not awake, but alive, at least. Once, he whimpered in his sleep, turned a wrist, moved his leg a bit. It had to be a good sign, thought Nina. She had done the right thing in staying away from the hospital, and even though she had felt her resolution firm every time she thought of the furious man at the railway station, it was still an enormous relief. The boy hadn’t died. He lived, and she could tell by the tiny twitches beneath his eyelids that he was on his way back up from the deep darkness he had rested in.
Yet mixed with the relief was a new sense of panic, as thoughts beyond mere survival started to surface. What on earth had she been thinking since she fled from the railway station?
Not a damn thing, she thought sardonically, running a finger under the strap of her wristwatch to ease it away from the overheated skin underneath. There hadn’t been a single thought in her head apart from the panicked urge to get away. Bring him to safety. And now she would soon have a wide-awake naked boy in her arms, and absolutely no idea what she was going to do with him.
She needed to buy time. She leaned over and tugged her bag toward her, fumbling inside for her mobile. Thank God Morten was home this week. He would have to deal with things until… .
Her finger hovered over the Place Call-button for a few seconds while she prepared herself as best she could. She had never been particularly good at lying to Morten, and time hadn’t improved her skills, despite frequent practice. It wasn’t that she wanted to be able to lie to him about important things. Just little everyday fibs that would make life run so much more smoothly. Like being able to say that her new top had cost 200 kroner rather than 450, or that it hadn’t been she who had forgotten the picnic invitation from Anton’s school. Other people got away with such things, why couldn’t she? She was an adequate liar with everyone but Morten, she thought. But Morten saw through her feeble attempts in seconds. Somehow, she lacked her usual protective coloration when she was with him. It seemed to her that he could look directly into the bubbling mass of unfinished thoughts churning inside her. It was why she had fallen in love with him, and why he was so hard to live with now. Sometimes a lie would go by without comment, but it didn’t feel like success; it was more as if he couldn’t really be bothered to discuss it with her. He let her off the hook.
Nina touched the call button tentatively; the phone was already damp from the heat of her hands. Then she pressed it, and raised the phone to her ear, careful not to disturb the boy with her shift of position.
There was a tiny click as he answered, followed by a faint, surf-like noise. She could hear Morten’s fumbling with the phone, and distan
t children’s voices in the background. Thank God. He was picking up Anton, then. It might even be his turn today. Her mind felt curiously blank when she tried to remember.
“Yes.” Morten’s voice succeeded in being angry and resigned at the same time. “Where are you?”
It was the voice of a man who felt that she no longer deserved to be talked to as an equal. Or even as an adult.
Nina moistened her lips, looking down at the child in her arms. She had to come up with something not too far from the truth, she thought, or he would slice her explanations into ribbons before they were half finished.
“Karin called me, earlier today,” she finally said. “She wasn’t feeling very well. She really needed help. I’ve had to stay with her so that I can take her to a doctor if it becomes necessary.”
Silence at the other end. Then she could hear shouting again, and Anton’s thin voice asking for something.
“No,” said Morten without putting down the phone, “No ice cream. It’s Monday, and you know the rules.” In the background Nina could hear Anton’s voice rising, getting ready for the full campaign. Which might be her good luck.
“Okay,” said Morten. “But I didn’t think the two of you were that close anymore?”
He didn’t sound angry anymore, just a little tired.
“I’ve known her for fifteen years. With history like that, you don’t just turn your back on people.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “But perhaps you might have called me, instead of leaving that to the staff here.”
Damn. Nina shrunk a little. It had been her turn, had to have been, and somehow she would have felt better about it, more secure, if Morten had thrown a fit. Now there was just the unrythmic rattle of the receiver and the indistinct snatches of a new heated argument between Morten and Anton. Morten had already forgotten she was there.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, trying to press her ear more closely to the phone. “I just forgot.”
“Yes, I suppose you did,” he said, his voice cold and weary. “I thought things were better. I thought you were going to stop forgetting your own family. Any idea when you will be home?”
Nina swallowed. The boy had turned slightly, and one small hand opened and then closed around her arm. His eyes were still closed.
“Oh, I suppose I can leave here around eight,” she said, trying to sound carefree and unworried. “It won’t be very late, I promise.”
Again the static hiss of wind and a connection on the point of breaking up.
“I’ll see you when I see you,” said Morten, the last few words nearly lost in the roar of the wind and the sound of Anton’s eager pestering. “Or not. It’s up to you.”
Morten’s voice had gone dark and distant. Then there was just silence, real silence, as the connection was finally severed.
Nina exhaled soundlessly and let the phone slip back into her bag on the floor. Then she eased herself away from the boy and stood up. Her heart beat a hard, cantering rhythm, and she needed to move, as if the disquiet she felt could be dispelled by mere motion. She stooped to snatch up the phone once more and pressed a new number while pacing up and down, imposing her own restlessness on the whole room.
He was listed merely as “Peter” in her phone book, and actually that was almost as much as she knew about him, except that he lived somewhere in Vanløse. He was the only contact in the network whose number she had. Normally it was the other way around—they called her. The people the network looked after could not saunter into the office of their local GP, or take their children to the emergency room if they were ill. Could not, in fact, approach authority in any form. So when there was need, Nina was sent for, or Allan. Or so it had been. Might she perhaps ask Magnus to step in, if Allan was serious about quitting? Unfortunately, though, Magnus did not have access to a handily secluded private practice in Vedbæk.
“Hi, this is Peter,” announced a happy-sounding voice, and Nina nearly said “Hi” herself when the voice went on without pausing: “I am on holiday from the fifteenth of August to the twenty-ninth, so you’ll just have to do without me!”
Bloody hell. Nina rested her forehead against the wall, closing her eyes for a minute. She had never done this bit before. Not with an unaccompanied child. The network would sometimes find some basement room or empty summerhouse for a family to stay in, or help them across to Sweden—that wasn’t too complicated. Such people could, after all, look after themselves in most respects. But was there anyone out there who would take on an abandoned three-year-old? And if there was, how would she find them?
Nina opened her eyes, examining the boy in a slightly different way. He could come from anywhere, she thought. Anywhere in Northern or Eastern Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany. She drew a hand through her own short, dark hair, which felt sticky and damp in the humid air. She would be wiser once the boy woke up, she supposed; meanwhile, she just had to get hold of Karin. She was the one who had started all this, and Nina had no doubts that Karin knew more than she had been willing to say when she’d sat there in Magasin’s cafeteria, nervously twisting her coffee cup.
This time, she let the phone ring until it stopped, but Karin still didn’t answer, and Nina brushed at the faintly lit display with a restless finger, as if to clear away invisible dust.
The boy stirred, and the blanket slipped to reveal a naked shoulder.
Clothes, thought Nina, and felt relief at having a practical solution to focus on. She had to get some clothes for the boy so they wouldn’t draw any more attention than they had to. She peered at the IV bag. Nearly empty, which meant she would be able to get out of here soon.
She tried Karin once more. Same depressing lack of results.
Why the hell couldn’t the woman just answer her phone?
JUČAS KNEW HIS rage was both a weakness and a strength.
When he was training he could sometimes use it to wring the last reserves from his body, and achieve those explosions of force that made his blood throb in a way that was almost better than sex. Following a set like that, he could see it: the veins lay on top of his muscles like plastic tubing, and the pump was visible, bang bang bang, just as he felt it in every fiber. God, he loved that feeling. In such moments he felt strong, and he had to supress a desire to leap onto the bench and yell out his invulnerability to the world, like some action hero from the American films he liked to watch: You don’t fuck with me, man.
At other times, the rage helped him do things he didn’t really like doing. It was always there, just under the surface, a hidden power he could call on at need. Then the men became swine, and the women bitches, and he could do what had to be done. But it was dangerous to unleash it, because it also meant a loss of control. He couldn’t always stop once he had started, and he didn’t think as clearly as he normally did. Once he had hit the man who was the swine at that moment so hard that the guy never really recovered, and Klimka had told him that if that happened again, Jučas would be fired. In the most permanent way. It was just about then that he realized the rage could kill him one day if he wasn’t careful, and he had actually stopped taking both the andros and the durabolines immediately, because they made the rage that much harder to control. It was around that time he had met Barbara, too.
When he was with Barbara, the rage was sometimes so distant he could pretend it had gone away. It might even be gone one day, he thought, when he never had to work for Klimka again, when he and Barbara had their house just outside Krakow, and he could spend his days doing ordinary things like mowing the lawn, putting up shelves, eating dinners Barbara made him, and making love to the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
But there hadn’t been any money. Every time he thought of the empty locker, fury sent accurate little stabs through him like a nail gun. God, he could have smashed the bitch’s skull in.
He had deliberately chosen a locker in the dead-end passage; there were fewer people, and it was out of sight of the staff in the security booth. At first he ha
d taken up position in the actual basement, so that he would be able to see when the suitcase was picked up, and by whom. But he had been there only about ten minutes when the security staff began to get nervous. He could tell they were watching him, taking turns at it, first one, then the other. They put their heads together and talked. Then one of them reached for the phone. Damn. He got out his own mobile and held it so that it shielded part of his face as he went past their window and up the stairs to the central hall.
In the end, he’d had to station Barbara there, while he himself tried to watch both the other two exits from the car. It was far from perfect. If only it had been the Dane himself, whom he knew by sight. But now it was to be some female Jučas had never laid eyes on. Oh, well. He would be able to recognize the suitcase, at least.
Twelve o’clock came and went with no suitcase-dragging woman in sight. He kept phoning Barbara, just to be sure, but he could hear that he was only making her nervous. He decided to give it an hour; after all, the Dane had had to make contingency plans, so some delay was understandable. But in the end, he had to send Barbara down to check on the locker.
A few minutes later, she came up the stairs by the street exit, and he could see it a mile off: something was wrong. She was walking with tense little reluctant steps, her shoulders hunched.
“It wasn’t there,” she said.
So he had to go see for himself, of course. And she was right. Somehow, the woman must have gotten past either him or Barbara. The suitcase was gone, and no money had been left in its place. When he saw that, he lost it for a moment so that the uniformed piglets got all scared, and he had to smile and pay to calm their frightened little hearts.
And in the middle of all that, he had felt it. Her eyes on him. She might have been any old tourist except for the intensity of her gaze, but he picked her out of the crowd immediately. The woman. She had been scared, too. And more than that. He had seen her note what locker it was he had been smashing. When she turnd and ran, he was sure. She was the one. She had taken the suitcase. But why had she come back? Did she think she could come here to gloat, and he wouldn’t know? He would show her differently. Even through the rage, he saw her clearly. Thin as a boy, with very short dark hair; for a moment he imagined sticking his cock into something like that, but who would want to, unless they were queer? Bloody boy-bitch. He would stick her, all right, but with something else.
The Boy in the Suitcase Page 6