“For God’s sake shut up,” he said. “Not all the neighbors are deaf.”
“Andrius,” she begged. She looked as if she were dissolving. Tears and mucus made her look swollen, damp and unattractive. Yet some of the old tenderness returned.
“Hush,” he said. “Stop crying, can’t you? Go back to the hotel, and I will pick you up later. Once we get the money, Dimitri has a new car ready for us. And then we leave for Krakow.”
She nodded, but he couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.
WHEN HE GOT back to the car, he saw that the boy-bitch had moved. The blanket had slipped, so that one could see a little of her face and shoulder. Damn it. But it was best just to get out of here, now. He could always stop later and cover her up again. He put the boy into the kid’s car seat still fitted between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. Just as well he hadn’t removed it yet. He fumbled with the straps and buckles—this had been Barbara’s department until now—but luckily the child made no move to resist him. He turned his head away and wouldn’t look at Jučas, but apart from that he was a life-sized doll, limp arms, limp legs, no more screaming defiance.
Barbara came out just as he was finishing, but he merely slid into his own seat and drove off, steadfastly ignoring her. He couldn’t bring her.
He knew that he would probably have to kill someone. The boybitch at the very least, but perhaps also the Dane. And he didn’t want Barbara to see.
JUČAS DROVE PAST the house twice just to get his bearings. There was a wall, but the wrought-iron gates were wide open, so there was really nothing to prevent him from driving straight up to the front door. Was it really that simple? It was hard to believe. In Lithuania, rich people had to guard their money better.
The third time, he turned into the gate and continued up the driveway. He let the car coast to minimize the noise of the engine and didn’t stop in front of the main entrance. Instead, he followed the driveway around the house and into a huge garage at the basement level. Here, too, the doors were wide open. There was space enough for five or six cars, but right now the only occupants were a dark blue Audi stationwagon and a low sportscar silhouette shrouded by dust sheets. He parked next to the stationwagon and turned off his engine.
The kid had stayed quiet during the ride, never looking at Jučas. Every once in a while he cried softly, with barely a sound. No screaming and sobbing, just this timid, hopeless crying, which was worse, in its way. Jučas felt like assuring the boy that he meant him no harm, but he knew it couldn’t be helped. He knew that from now on the monster in that little tyke’s nightmares would be him. And what about Barbara? The look she had given him back in the flat … as though she, too, were becoming scared of him. Hell. I’m not the kind of bastard who would hit a woman or a child, he told himself.
Completely unwelcome, the memory of the other one came back to him. The blonde. Crouched on the bed, with wide unfocused eyes that no longer understood he was in the room. The uncertain, labored voice, calling. “Ni-na. Ni-na.”
He sat motionless for a moment, still with his hands on the wheel. What’s the bloody use, he thought. What’s the use of running from Klimka and his world, where fear is a bludgeon you use to batter people into compliance. What’s the use of dreaming about Krakow and a house with a lawn and Barbara sunbathing on a quilt, when all this shit stays with you.
He got out of the car. Reached for the rage because it was the only thing that might get him through the next bit. He opened the rear door and looked down at the boy-bitch, still huddled in a boneless pile without any spark of consciousness. It was all her fault, he told himself. Her and the filthy swine who was trying to do him out of his money. It was them. They did it, and he was not going to let them get away with it. You don’t fuck with me.
And the rage came. Like a wave of heat, it washed through his body, made hands and feet prickle and shake a little, but in a good way. It was best done now, while she was still just an object. He took the plastic shopping bag and emptied out all the stuff that Barbara had brought—bananas, lukewarm cola, some kind of soap she had liked because it smelled of roses and lily of the valley. Even though he didn’t really feel like touching her, he climbed into the back of the car to the bitch. He grabbed her shoulders and rolled her limp body into his lap. She weighed nothing at all, he thought. No more than a child. He pulled the bag over her head and then realized he had nothing to tie it with. Instead, he tied the handles themselves into a knot under her chin, which would have to do. When he saw the plastic cling closer to her face with each breath she took, he knew it was enough. By the time he came back, it would be over.
He pushed her away with disgust and wiped his hands on his trousers, as if touching her had somehow contaminated him. The bitch got what she deserved, he told himself carefully, clinging to the strength the rage gave him. And as he went to pull down the garage doors, it wasn’t her face that swam before his eyes. In the sudden darkness, other images forced themselves on him, the Pig, the Pig from the orphanage who pushed little boys up against rough, damp basement walls, down in the dim semi-darkness that smelled of pee and petrol and unwashed old man.
Filthy bastard swine, he thought, they were all filthy swine, and he was going to show them that nobody did such things to him. Hell, no. Not to him. He found a light switch and turned on the fluorescent overheads until he had found what he was looking for—the automated gate system that such a filthy rich bastard had to have. He yanked the wiring right out of the box with hardly any effort, leaving the bared copper threads bristling and exposed. So far, so good.
There was a door that had to lead into the house, but it was locked. He considered kicking it down, but decided that it was much simpler to ring the bell and wait for someone to let him in. He glanced back at the car. The boy sat there, still strapped to his little seat, staring at him through the windshield. Jučas slammed his palm against the light switch so that both boy and car disappeared in the garage darkness.
SIGITA WAS SHAKING all over.
“You can’t!” she screamed, and for a few moments didn’t register that she was screaming in Lithuanian. She searched desperately for the English words this woman would understand.
“You can’t take a kidney from a three-year-old child! He is too small!”
Anne Marquart looked at her in astonishment.
“But Mrs. Ramoškienė. Of course not. We … we’re not going to.”
“Why did you take him, then? Why did people come to Vilnius and steal him from me, and take him to Denmark?” She didn’t know for certain, but it had to be that way. Didn’t it?
“I don’t know where your little boy is, or why he is gone. But I assure you, we could never ever harm… .” She broke off in the middle of the sentence and stared blankly out at the ocean for a while. Then she said, in a completely different tone of voice: “Would you excuse me? I have to call my husband.”
These people are rich enough to buy anything, thought Sigita. They bought my first child. And now they have paid someone to steal the second.
“He’s only three,” she said helplessly.
Di-di-da-da-di-di-diiih… . The unsuitably gay little tune from a different doorbell made them both freeze. There was the sound of child-light running feet from the hallway, and Aleksander’s voice called out something in Danish.
“He always wants to get the door,” said Anne Marquart absently. “With him in the house, there’s no need for a butler.”
Then, too quickly for natural speed, the door to the living room slammed back against the wall, and a man stood there, in the middle of the floor. He took up all the space, thought Sigita, and left no room for anybody else. It wasn’t just that he was big. It was his rage that made everything around him shrink. He held on to Aleksander with one hand. In the other was a gun.
“Get down on the floor,” he said. “Now!”
Sigita knew at once who he was, even though she had never seen him before. It was the man who had taken Mikas.
&
nbsp; ALEKSANDER STRUGGLED AND tried to twist free of the man’s grip. The man grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked the boy’s head back, so the child emitted a thin sound of pain and fright and outrage.
“Don’t hurt him,” begged Anne Marquart. “Please.” She said something in rapid Danish to the boy, and he stopped struggling. Then she lay down on the floor, obediently.
Sigita didn’t. She couldn’t. She stood there, stiff as a pillar, with the noise of her own blood crackling in her ears like a bad phone connection.
“Where is he?” she asked.
The man didn’t like that she wouldn’t do as she was told. He took a step forward, then raised the barrel of the gun against Aleksander’s cheek.
“Who?” he said.
“You know damn well. My Mikas!”
“Don’t you care about this one?” he said. “Is the little one the only one that matters?”
No. No, it was no longer only about Mikas. It had never been only about Mikas, she knew that now.
“Lie down, bitch,” he said. “It will be better for all of us if I don’t lose my temper.”
He didn’t say it in any menacing tone of voice, he was just offering information. Like the little signs by the predator pits in Vilnius Zoo: Please don’t climb the fence.
Sigita lay down.
“What are you saying?” asked Anne Marquart in English. “Why are you doing this?”
The man didn’t answer. He merely forced Aleksander down onto the floor next to them, then slid his hands over Anne’s body, not in any sexual way, just professionally. He found a mobile phone in her pocket and bashed it against the stone floor till it broke. He then upended Sigita’s bag, fished her mobile from the wreckage, and treated it to a similar destructive bang.
“He took Mikas,” explained Sigita. “My son Mikas. I think your husband paid him to do it.”
The man looked up.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. But he will.”
IT WAS NEARLY half past eight in the evening before they let him go. Jan felt as if he had been run through a cement mixer.
“Go home and try not to think too much about it,” said his lawyer, as they shook hands in the parking lot.
Jan nodded silently. He knew it would be impossible not to think. Think about Anne, and about Inger and Keld. Think about Aleksander, and about an organ cooler box somewhere, with a kidney inside that had a maximum of twelve useful hours left before it became just so much butcher’s waste. Think about the Lithuanian and Karin, who was dead whether he could get his head around it or not.
They had shown him pictures. They had meant to shock him, he knew, and it had worked. Even though he had seen her at the Institute of Forensics, it was somehow worse to see her in the place where she had died, crouched on a bed, blood in her hair. Crime scene photos. It made the violence of what had been done to her too real and unclinical. You could see the power behind those blows, the force that had killed her. He thought of the Lithuanian and his huge hands, and the words on the phone when he had tried to end it. Not until you pay. Fear tore at his stomach.
Nor had the police lost interest in him. He hadn’t told them about the Lithuanian or about Aleksander and the kidney he so desperately needed. Even though Jan had rid himself of the stolen Nokia, the photo of the boy, and the blood sample with the perfect DNA match, he still clung to hope, irrationally and beyond all realism.
Perhaps they sensed the lie and all the things he left unsaid. Perhaps that was why they kept coming at him for such a long time, even after he had sacrificed his self-respect and told them about Inger’s visit. And of course, they had sent someone to the villa in Tårbæk to check the usefulness of this alibi. Thinking about it was almost unbearable. He imagined Keld frowning and putting down his pipe. Getting up to perform polite handshakes with the cop. Hearing about Karin and the fact that Jan was a suspect. For a wild moment, he even thought that Keld might get into his old black Mercedes and drive directly to the house by the bay to take Anne away from him.
But of course, he wouldn’t do such a thing. They were married, and Keld had a lot of respect for that institution. Which didn’t mean he also had to respect the man his daughter had consented to marry, and Jan knew that that respect would now have evaporated. If it had ever really been there. In the midst of his general misery, that knowledge hurt with its own specific pain.
“You’ll be all right,” said the lawyer, patting him on the shoulder. “You have at least a partial alibi, and they have no physical evidence linking you to the scene. Almost the opposite, I believe. And the other thing … well, it will be very difficult for them to lift the burden of proof on that one.”
Jan nodded, and got quickly into his car.
“See you tomorrow,” he said, slamming the car door shut before the man had time to say anything else.
The other thing.…
It was the man in the blue pullover who had said it. The one that looked like a railway clerk. “People like you, Mr. Marquart. People like you don’t have to kill anyone themselves. After all, it’s so much easier to pay someone else to do it.”
That was an accusation that clung worse than a direct murder charge. Not least because it was much too close to the truth. He had tracked Karin. And he had offered the man money to go and get her. That he had never meant for the man to kill her—how does one prove that when she did in fact die?
THE WAY HOME felt long, even though he didn’t actually want to get there. After several weeks of clear skies and sunshine, clouds had begun to roll in from the west, darkening the twilight. A strong wind made the pine trees sway so that it looked as if they were trying to fall on top of the house. The automated garage door failed to work, again. He was too tired to get annoyed and merely left the car on the gravel outside. He could smell the sea even though he had smoked three cigarettes during the drive. The sea, and something else—the ozone-heavy damp smell of rain that hadn’t quite arrived.
He had barely inserted his key in the lock when the door slammed open, so abruptly that it tore the bunched keys from his hand. Something hit him in the face, and he was knocked backwards, ending up on his back in the gravel at the foot of the stone steps.
The Lithuanian stood there on the threshold, with the light at his back so that he looked barely human, a giant form towering above him, filling Jan’s entire field of vision. He had a gun in one hand. The other clutched the back of Aleksander’s head like the timber grab on a bulldozer. An involuntary sound shot up from the depth of his diaphragm. Please no. Not Aleksander.
“For God’s sake,” he whispered, not realizing that he was speaking Danish and that the giant would not be able to understand. “Let him go.”
The Lithuanian was looking down at him.
“Now,” he said, in a voice that made Jan think of rusting iron. “Now you pay.”
ANTON WAS TIRED and surly. “Peepy” was Morten’s mother’s idiosyncratic term for it—possibly an amalgam of peevish and sleepy, and in any case a word that admirably covered the fit-for-nothing-yet-unready-to-sleep state with which his son struggled on a regular basis.
If only Nina hadn’t taken the damn car, thought Morten. Today of all days he could have done without the trek from the daycare to the Fejøgade flat, dragging along an uncooperative seven-year-old. Anton considered it beneath his dignity to hold hands like a toddler, but he kept lagging behind if Morten didn’t chivvy him along. She had called her boss, but not him. Magnus had relayed her assurances, almost apologetically.
“She’s okay,” he said. “She said you shouldn’t worry.”
Of course it was nice to know she wasn’t lying dead in a thicket somewhere in Northern Zealand, but apart from that, it wasn’t very helpful. She was still out there somewhere, in that alternate reality to which he had no access, where violence and disaster always lurked just around the corner. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Nina had somehow single-handedly managed to drag that world back with her to Denmark, distur
bing the coffee-and-open-sandwiches tranquility of the family picnic he would have liked his life to be.
“I’m hungry,” whined Anton.
“I’ll make you a sandwich when we get home.”
“On white bread?”
“No. On rye.”
“I don’t like rye,” said Anton.
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t! It’s got seeds in it.”
Morten heaved a sigh. Anton’s pickiness came and went. When he was rested and happy and secure, he cheerfully wolfed down fairly advanced foods such as olives and broccoli and chicken liver. At other times, his repertoire shrunk alarmingly, and he would balk at anything more challenging than cereal and milk.
“We’ll fix something,” he said vaguely.
“But I’m hungry now.”
Morten surrendered and bought him a popsicle.
THERE WAS A smell in the hallway that warned him the second he was about to cross the threshold. He stopped. Two floors below, Anton was making his way up the stairs by a method that involved taking two steps up and hopping one step down. Apparently, it was essential to perform the hops with maximum noise.
Morten switched on the lights. The semi-twilight of the hallway fled, and dark huddled silhouettes became coats, scarves, shoes, boots, and a lonely-looking skateboard. But on the worn wooden floor, there was an alarming pool of congealing blood. And a little further on, a cereal bowl lay on its side in a puddle of spilled milk and cornflakes. And something else—the something that caused most of the smell: urine.
“Anton,” he said sharply.
Anton looked up at him from the landing below without answering.
“Go and see if Birgit is in. Perhaps you can play with Mathias.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“Do as I say!”
Anton’s eyes widened in alarm. Morten wanted to comfort and reassure, but at the moment he simply couldn’t. The fear that rose inside him left room for little else. He closed the door to the flat and rang the doorbell on his neighbor’s side of the landing. Mathias opened, but Birgit was hot on his heels.
The Boy in the Suitcase Page 23