Aleksander himself had disappeared again, she knew not where to. Anne Marquart had said something to him in Danish; his face had lit up in a pleased grin, and an enthusiastic “Yesssss!” had hopped out of his mouth. Sigita had the feeling he was being allowed something that was otherwise strictly regulated. Video games? Computer? It was obvious that they were wealthy enough to provide him with anything he wished for. Sigita felt a peculiar pain. If Mikas ever found out what kind of life his brother was living, would he be envious?
The thought brought back all her fear for him.
“I am not here because of Aleksander,” she said. “But because of Mikas. My own little boy. Is he here? Have you seen him?”
Anne Marquart seemed taken aback.
“A little boy? No. I… . You have another child, then?”
“Yes. Mikas. He is three, now.”
Something was going on inside Anne Marquart. She was staring into her teacup, as if any moment now a profound and essential truth would be revealed there. Then she suddenly raised her head.
“Same father?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Sigita, not understanding the intensity with which Anne Marquart endowed the question.
“Oh God,” said Anne Marquart softly. “But he is only three… .”
Amazed, Sigita saw silent tears on Mrs. Marquart’s face.
“It’s not fair,” whispered Aleksander’s mother. “How are we expected to bear this?”
“I don’t understand,” said Sigita hesitantly.
“You have seen that he is ill?”
“Yes.” One could hardly avoid it.
“He suffers from something called nephrotic syndrome. He has hardly any kidney function left now. He needs dialysis twice a week. We have a small clinic in the basement so that he doesn’t have to travel all the way to Copenhagen for treatment, but still … he hardly ever complains, but it’s tough on him. And … and eventually, it will stop working.”
“Can’t he get a transplant?” asked Sigita.
“We tried. My husband gave him a kidney, but … but we are not … biologically related, of course. And Aleksander rejected it, despite all the medication, and now he is worse than before… .”
At that moment, Sigita finally realized why Jan Marquart had come looking for her. And why her son had disappeared.
THE BOY WAS sitting with his eyes half closed and showed no reaction when Nina parked the car in Fejøgade. The police car had gone, and the windows of the third floor flat were empty and closed. Morten might not be home yet, thought Nina distractedly, or he could have taken the children to stay with his sister in Greve. He liked to get them out of the way when a crisis was brewing. He didn’t want them to see that there was anything wrong, didn’t want them to see him losing control. And at the moment, he was probably half out of his mind.
Nina closed her eyes and felt the worm of conscience gnawing at the back of her mind. Tonight, she would have to put everything right. Rest her head against his shoulder and run her hands over his face while she told him why there was nothing more to be afraid of now. They could let the children stay overnight with Hanne and Peter and pick them up in the morning.
She lifted Mikas from the car and carried him up the stairs. He was awake, but tired and limp, as if he had spent everything he had on the beach. He didn’t stir as she eased the keys out of her pocket. She could hear the muted roar of a video game the Jensen children were playing, and the rattle of pots and dinner preparations behind the Jensen door. But she didn’t feel like answering her neighbor’s curious questions—which would, no doubt, be endless—and so she unlocked her own front door soundlessly and slipped inside.
The flat was quiet and cool, and for the first time since she had picked up the suitcase yesterday, Nina felt a genuine pang of hunger. She kicked off her sandals in the hall and walked barefoot into the living room. Mikas slid willingly from her hip onto the couch and subsided there in a small heap of three-year-old exhaustion.
The remains of breakfast were still scattered across the little coffee table in front of the television. Two bowls of souring milk and soggy cornflakes. An unopened, unread newspaper. A meal on the run, diagnosed Nina, taking the bowls into the kitchen where she pitched the contents into the bin and loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. She put fresh cereal into a new bowl for Mikas, adding an extra spoonful of sugar. The boy had eaten only a couple of ice cream cones, a breakfast roll, and a few slices of untoasted bread in the time he had been with her. He had to be just as weak at the knees as she was. And she was acutely aware, now, of the lightheaded feeling that came from not having eaten for too long.
She cut herself two slices of dark rye and sandwiched a thick wedge of salami between them. Cornflakes bowl in one hand, glass of milk in the other, and her solid sandwich clenched between her teeth, she returned to the living room. A strange flickering feeling of happiness settled in her stomach. Home. It felt fantastic. Now all that was missing was Morten and the children.
But there was no rush, just as there was no need to hurry the necessary call to the police. She placed the cereal bowl in front of Mikas and dropped into the armchair next to the couch with a muted thud. Slowly, she chewed her way through the soft rye and the sharp spiciness of the salami, eyes closed, mind gently drifting. When she was done, she climbed to her feet and went into the bedroom, where she pulled off the damp, dirty T-shirt and put on a crisp, clean shirt instead. From the living room, she could hear the rattle of Mikas’s spoon against the bowl.
THE DOORBELL RANG.
It wasn’t the muted scale of the door phone, but the insistent ring of the old-fashioned push-button on the door frame itself. Anton used it when he wanted to announce his presence, though his usual noisy progress up the stairs generally made any other signal redundant. No, it was probably Birgit next door, who must have noticed her arrival after all.
She might even know that the police were looking for Nina. Birgit was nice enough, really, but her curiosity was boundless, and sometimes Nina wished the walls between the flats were just a little thicker. Particularly now, when she could have done with a few more minutes on her own with Mikas.
Resignedly, she reached for the lock catch, but something made her hesitate. It was too quiet out there, she thought. Anton would have been bouncing off the floor, if not the walls, and Birgit usually had the door to her own flat open, yelling over her shoulder at her own children. It was silent out there. No scrabbling feet, no throatclearing or nose-blowing. It was not a natural silence.
Automatically, she put the security chain on the door before opening it enough so that she could see whoever it was. A slender, fair-haired woman stood there on the landing, smiling politely, yet somehow reticently.
“Please,” she said, bending forward slightly. “I think you know my son. I am Mikas’s mother. May I come in?”
Instantly, Nina’s mind was flooded with the fantasies she had entertained earlier, in the car. Mikas’s mother, holding her hand and thanking her, as only one mother could thank another. Her happy ending. It was here, now.
But even as she slid the chain off the lock, she knew something wasn’t right. The woman pushed open the door herself, with a smile that had grown oddly apologetic. As if she didn’t really want to come in, thought Nina. And then she saw that Mikas had come into the hallway behind her. He stood there, still wearing his nice new sandals and holding the breakfast bowl, while a pool of dark yellow pee formed around his feet.
Smiling still, the woman held out her hand to him. He jerked from head to foot, and the bowl slid from his hands and hit the pine floor with a sharp clack.
There was a man behind the fair-haired woman. He must have been standing against the wall on the landing, out of sight until now. His massive shoulders in the too-hot leather jacket filled the doorframe, and she recognized him at once. The neo-Nazi haircut, the fury in his eyes, the huge, closed fists. In one hand he held a smooth black gun. There was no haste in the way he moved, noted Nina; it was all v
ery calculated and precise, the routine actions of a man who had done this dozens of times. A single powerful stride brought him into the flat. He took the time to close the door behind him, and Nina heard the click of the latch with a peculiar lack of fear. She backed a couple of steps, and felt her foot slip in the puddle of warm urine, milk and cornflakes.
Idiot, she told herself, in the long stretched second that followed. Of course she’s not his mother. You didn’t have time to call anyone. Then the blow fell, and turned the world dark red and swirling. Then black.
BARBARA WAS CLINGING to his arm.
“Don’t hit her anymore,” she said. “Jučas. Don’t do it!”
Jučas.
Not Andrius.
He lowered the gun. The boy-bitch lay in a heap at his feet, one side of her face completely covered in blood.
“Don’t kill her!”
Barbara was as pale as a sheet. She didn’t look young anymore, and for the first time he considered what the difference in their ages would mean in ten years, or twenty. When she turned fifty, he would be only just past his fortieth birthday. Did he really want to come home to a fifty-year-old woman then?
“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to kill her,” he said, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with her if he didn’t. He shook off Barbara’s hand and stepped across the crumbled form. Where had the kid gone?
Barbara found him crouched next to the toilet, squeezed into the corner as if he was trying to push himself through the wall. A sound was coming from him now, a sort of squeaky whine, with every breath he took.
“But baby,” said Barbara, kneeling down in front of him. “We’re not going to hurt you!”
The child didn’t buy that particular lie anymore. He screwed his eyes shut and whined even more loudly.
“Make him be quiet,” said Jučas.
Barbara glanced at him.
“He’s just scared,” she said.
“Then give him some of that damn chocolate. Do you have any eyedrops left?”
“No,” she said. But he thought she might be lying.
“Stay here,” he said. “And keep the damn kid quiet!”
THE BOY-BITCH HADN’T stirred. He grabbed her shoulder bag, the only thing she had had with her apart from the child, and emptied it into the kitchen sink. Wallet, Kleenex, a fuzzy old roll of mints, car keys, two other sets of keys, and a dog-eared diary. No mobile. He took all the keys with him, and went quietly down the stairs to look for the red Fiat. He found it half a block away, hidden behind a big green-plastic container meant for recycling glass. On the backseat was a smelly blanket and two shopping bags, one containing kid’s clothes, the other full of apple cores and bread and beach toys. That was all. The boot proved equally uninteresting; there was a plastic crate full of starter cables, sprinkler fluid, an aerosol can of puncture-repair foam, and other first-aid items for unreliable cars, a bin liner that turned out to contain empty bottles, a pair of gumboots, and a flashlight.
He took the blanket and left the rest, and locked up the Fiat once more.
She didn’t have the money. He felt the certainty of it in his gut. And the other one, the blond one with the boobs, she hadn’t had it either. She would have told him. In the end, she would have told him.
Which meant only one thing.
He was now completely sure that the Dane had lied to him.
There were still a number of things he didn’t understand— what the boy-bitch was doing with the kid, for instance. And how and why the blond one was mixed up in it at all. But he knew enough. And he knew how he was going to make the Dane pay what was owed.
HE DROVE THE Mitsubishi onto the pavement and parked it right by the front door. Upstairs, Barbara had at least managed to extract the boy from the toilet. She was crouched next to him and had her arms around him, gently rocking him back and forth. It seemed to be working; he was quiet again.
The boy-bitch was still lying where he had dropped her. But she was breathing, he noticed.
“She’s fine,” he told Barbara. “I’m taking her down to the car.”
Barbara didn’t answer. She just looked at him, and her eyes were almost as wide and frightened as the boy’s.
“I’m doing this for you,” he said.
She nodded obediantly.
He rolled up the bitch’s limp body in the disgusting blanket and eased open the door with his hip. The stairwell was still deserted. What would he say if he met someone—she’s had a fall, we’re taking her to the hospital? But no one came. He maneuvered her into the back of the Mitsubishi and covered her completely with the blanket, then parked the car in a more legal and less noticeable spot. So far, so good.
When he got back to the flat, he could hear Barbara murmuring to the boy. In Polish, not Lithuanian.
“Stop that,” he said. “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Jučas didn’t either, and he didn’t like it when Barbara spoke in her native language. It gave him a feeling that there was a part of her he couldn’t access.
When they got to Krakow, she would be speaking Polish with everyone, he suddenly realized. Everyone except him. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? But he hadn’t. He had only been thinking about the house, about Barbara, and the life he imagined them having together.
The Dane would make it all possible. The Dane and his money. He could still recall the fizzy feeling of triumph when he had realized how easy it would be.
It had been Klimka who had told him to look after the Dane, and had emphasized that there would be no funny business. This man was a good client, with businesses not only in Vilnius but also a couple of places in Latvia, and he paid Klimka good money—very good money—to keep the other sharks at a distance. Now he was in Vilnius himself and wanted only a single bodyguard to follow him around. Discretion was essential.
And so Jučas had played the nanny from the moment the man got off the plane with his ridiculous little trolley that turned out to contain an unreasonable number of U.S. dollars. They had gone directly to some kind of private clinic, where the Dane tried to buy information about some Lithuanian girl or other who had apparently given birth to a baby. When Jučas had seen the sum he had offered the head of the clinic, he had begun to feel jumpy. It was as if the Dane had no idea what it was he was waving in the woman’s face. A tenth would have sufficed; would, actually, have been too much. People had been murdered for less.
He called Klimka to ask for backup. Klimka refused—the Dane had specified one bodyguard. Jučas would just have to handle it for now, but if things looked tricky, he could call, of course.
Yeah right, though Jučas. If the shit really hit the fan, he needed his backup with him, not a couple of phone calls away. He walked around with his senses tuned to max all day, paying precious little attention to whatever the Dane was saying and doing, because he was too busy scanning the surroundings. When the nurse more or less slammed the door in their faces and they had to return to the hotel, Jučas heaved a sigh of relief.
Premature, as it turned out. In a bout of depression, the man downed most of the contents of the minibar, then went for the hotel bar, already so inebriated that the bartender refused to serve him. After which performance the idiot staggered out the door, without the dollar trolley, thank God, but still with enough of a wad in his wallet to get into every kind of trouble. There was nothing Jučas could do except curse and follow.
That proved only the beginning of a very long night. But as the booze went in, the story came out, little by little, mixed with the drinks. And Jučas listened, at first indifferently, but then with growing interest. Fledgling plans formed in his mind. And the next morning, when he poured a sizeable but unbruised hangover onto the small private Danish plane, it was with almost tender feelings that he buckled the guy’s seatbelt for him and made sure a good supply of puke bags were in reach.
It had taken a little while to make the nurse tell him what she knew, but he had, after all, had some experience in mak
ing people do things they didn’t really want to do. And when he discovered that Sigita Ramoškienė actually had a second child, everything had fallen brilliantly into place.
He had sent his first package to the Dane, and made him an offer. The price was easy to remember, and non-negotiable: one million U.S. dollars.
HE STILL DIDN’T understand why things had come apart the way they had. But one thing, at least, was very clear. The Dane was not going to put one over on him now.
“I’ll take him,” he said to Barbara, reaching for the boy.
She hugged the child even closer.
“Can’t we take him with us?” she said. “He is so small. He could easily become ours.”
“Are you insane?”
“He’ll forget all the old stuff quickly. In a year, he will think he has always been with us.”
“Barbara. Let him go.”
“No,” she said. “Andrius. It’s enough now. We can take him and leave for Poland right now. You don’t have to hit anyone anymore. No more violence.”
He shook his head. The woman had gone completely insane. He should never have brought her here. But he thought she might get them into the flat without any fuss, and so she had. Now he wished he had just kicked in the door.
“The money,” he said.
“We don’t need it,” she said. “We can live with my mother, at least to begin with. And then you’ll find a job, and we can get a place of our own.”
He had to breathe very calmly and carefully to keep the rage at bay.
“You may want to live like a sewer rat for the rest of your life,” he said. “But I don’t.”
Resolutely, he seized the boy’s arm and tore him from Barbara’s grasp. Luckily, the kid didn’t scream. He simply went limp, as though he had suddenly lost consciousness. Barbara was the one doing the whining.
The Boy in the Suitcase Page 22