The Boy in the Suitcase

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “Hi,” she said. “Have you been burgled?”

  “Why do you ask that?” said Morten, his fear still crouched right behind his teeth.

  “I saw a police car parked outside this morning.”

  “Oh. I see. Er, could Anton stay with you for an hour or so? It’s quite a long story, but I’ll tell you all about it later.” He deliberately dangled the tale in front of her like a steak in front of a hungry dog, because he knew that curiosity was one of the more powerful driving forces in Birgit’s life.

  She wasn’t thrilled that she would have to wait for her titbit, but perhaps she sensed his curbed tension.

  “Okay,” she said. “Mathias, you can show Anton that new game of yours.”

  “Yessss!” said Mathias, and Anton brightened too. They scurried along the corridor to Mathias’s room.

  “Thanks,” said Morten.

  Birgit remained in her doorway, discretely trying to look past him and into the flat as he opened the door again, but he didn’t think she saw much before he closed it behind him.

  He avoided the bloodstain and stepped across the milk and pee puddle. Glanced into the kitchen and the living room. No one there. Ida’s room was also deserted; she was with her classmate Anna this afternoon, he remembered. But in the bedroom a dirty T-shirt had been tossed across the bed. Nina’s T-shirt. She had been here.

  He stood very still, trying to collect his chaotic thoughts. What had happened? The bloodstain was ominously large. It could not have come from some trivial injury like a cut finger. And pee—where did that come from? Vague memories of a forensic TV series rose in his mind. Something about traces of urine and feces because all muscles let go at the moment of death.

  Moment of death. No.

  No.

  He fumbled for his mobile. He had to call the police.

  Then he heard a faint sound. A heave, or a sobbing breath. He tore open the door to the tiny bathroom.

  On the lid of the toilet sat a woman he had never seen before in his life. She looked a wreck. She had obviously been weeping hard, and there was a quality of surrender about her. Her shoulderlength fair hair had slipped from what looked to be an immaculate chignon, but even under these circumstances, there was an unconscious elegance to the slender neck and the long legs.

  Morten stood there gaping.

  “Where is Nina?” he asked.

  The woman looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen with grief.

  “Juz po wszystkim,” she said. And then in uncertain English, “Is over. Everything is all over.”

  Morten’s pulse roared in his ears. Nina. What the hell had happened?

  SHE WOKE BECAUSE she was drowning. She couldn’t breathe. Something wet, black and sticky clung to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and with each breath she tried to take, she drew in only crackling darkness. No air. There was no air.

  Panic had already seized her body before she had come completely to her senses again. Her hands clawed purposelessly at the darkness in front of her and encountered something soft and heavy. A blanket, perhaps. She tried to pull it off her body, but it tangled around her shoulders and arms, and she struggled like a trapped diver trying to get back to the surface.

  Her chest hurt now. And still the darkness clung to her face. She gasped for breath in hard short heaves, and some part of her brain registered a perfumed smell of roses. An omen of death, it seemed. The smell of roses and lilies always reminded her of burials. Finally, she freed one hand from the blanket and raised it to her face.

  A plastic bag.

  First she tried to rip it. Then to claw holes in the plastic with her fingers, so that she might breathe. Air. Everything in her was screaming for oxygen, and her lungs cramped painfully. Again, she clawed at the bag, and this time, something gave. The bag loosened enough so that she felt a touch of air.

  Easy. Breathe slowly.

  Her thoughts slipped and wandered, and she had to struggle to get a grip on them in the curious black and milky gray place that was her brain.

  Someone had pulled a bag over her head. All she needed to do to be able to breathe again was pull it off. She reached above her head and yanked the bag all the way off, and finally, she could breathe freely, in long noisy gasps.

  The darkness around her was still deep and black. For the first few dizzy seconds she was unsure whether she actually had her eyes open, and an absurd impulse led her to feel her eyelids, just to check.

  “You’re not dead, Nina. Take a breath, and get a grip.”

  It helped.

  The words sounded real in the darkness, and Nina raised herself up on one elbow and turned her head a little. It hurt to move. Particularly one side of her face and head, which felt heavy and tender at the same time. Something wet and sticky lay like plastic wrap over her cheekbone and throat. Blood, she thought dispassionately, and recalled how the man from the railway station had stormed into the flat, gun in hand. She felt vaguely surprised that he hadn’t killed her then, on the hallway floor. But for some reason, he must have decided to wait.

  She turned her head the other way, and for the first time noted a slim crack of light in the middle of all the darkness. That, and a low, persistent whine, like that of a trapped animal.

  Mikas.

  She knew right away that it was him, but his crying was so muted that it sounded as if it was being transmitted to her from another planet. Where was he?

  Nina fumbled with one hand in front of her, and came up against a smooth cool glassy surface. A car window. She was in the back of a van, she thought. The floor beneath her was covered with some kind of felt, prickly and new under her hands. She felt her way along the side of the van until her fingers closed around some kind of wire mesh. A dog barrier? Her eyes were getting used to the darkness, and she could just make out a seam of light around what looked like garage doors. A carpark or a garage, she thought, picking up the oily smell of tires and fuel. She had no sense that the man was here, but the sound of Mikas’s crying leaked back to her through the mesh.

  He was afraid.

  “Mikas!”

  Nina listened in the darkness. Waves of nausea rolled over her, and her tongue felt huge and shapeless when she tried to talk.

  She called again, shaking the mesh testingly.

  “Mikas, don’t be scared. I’m right here.”

  She reminded herself that he wouldn’t understand, but she hoped the sound of her voice would at least reassure him that he was not alone. Perhaps he did actually recognize it. He was silent for a few moments, as if listening. Then the faint, toneless weeping continued.

  She got onto her knees and felt along the bottom of the car, probing and sliding her fingers into every space and crevice she encountered. A flattened ring caught her interest. She pulled at it, and felt the lining beneath her shift and move. There was a hatch beneath her, and she suddenly realized that this was the kind of car that had a spare wheel embedded in the bottom of the cargo space. She managed to pull back the lining and open the hatch, and there, beside the spare, was the folded plastic package she was hoping for. The car’s tool set.

  She felt a rush of triumph. If the man from the train station thought she was just going to lie there and die with a badly tied shopping bag over her head, he was much mistaken. And he was also mistaken if he thought locking her in the back of a van would keep her captive much longer. Nina felt a pang of contempt mixing with the fury that was growing in her belly. Weren’t they all like that? The vultures that fed on the flesh of the weak. The pedophiles, the rapists, the pimps. All the damned lowlifes of this world. This was what they were really like. Such stupid little people.

  This man was no exception. He wasn’t getting Mikas. And he wasn’t getting her.

  She drew a wrench from the package and hefted it. She didn’t know where the man had gone, but leaving Mikas here presumably meant he was coming back. The boy was what he had come for. The property he had come to reclaim. Smashing the window might be too risky, and too noisy. Instead, she made h
er way back to the mesh. The screws that fastened it to the car were easy to find even in the dark, and in the tool kit was a screwdriver that was a close-enough match.

  Suddenly, light flooded the garage outside the van, and she instinctively cowered to the floor. She thought she heard voices. If help was within reach, she ought to bang and kick the sides of the van; but somehow, she didn’t think that whoever was out there had come to rescue her.

  If he came back, could she pretend she was still unconscious? She reached for the plastic bag, but couldn’t bring herself to pull it over her head again.

  Then the lights went out, and darkness descended once more. She crouched, still waiting. But no one came.

  Loosening all the screws took a while, and she had to pause twice to fight back nausea. But finally the mesh came free, and she slid it to one side.

  “Mikas?”

  Silence reigned up there. She wormed her way past the head rest of the driver’s seat and tumbled forward into the cabin. She could feel the boy move beside her, in trembling jerks, but she couldn’t see him properly. Quickly, she opened the driver’s door, and light from the overhead bulb flooded the cabin and revealed Mikas’s face, frightened and blinking. Did he even recognize her? She wasn’t sure. He had been strapped into a child’s car seat, the way one would normally secure a three-year-old child for a trip to visit a grandmother, or an outing in a park. Nothing else was necessary. Mikas’s soft short fingers picked at the buckle, which he couldn’t undo, and his lips moved in a murmur of weeping.

  She undid the buckle for him, with a soft click.

  Then she heard the shot.

  ANNE AND SOME other woman were lying on the stone floor in the living room with their arms raised like the victims of a bank robbery. One of Jan’s own toolboxes had been upended on the coffee table so that pliers, bits of wire, screwdrivers and duct tape were scattered over the glass surface. It was only then he realized, in his daze, that Anne’s hands and feet had been taped to the floor so that she couldn’t move from her odd position. Her face was completely expressionless. She didn’t look frightened or angry, just … he wasn’t quite sure what to call it. “Determined” seemed too weak a word. Her eyes were the color of shadows on snow.

  The other woman lay in much the same way, except that one arm was in a cast. That, too, had been forced to one side and stuck down with tape at a different angle. She looked a bit like Aleksander, he thought. And then a pounding shock went through his diaphragm as he realized who she must be. He had no idea how or why, but it had to be his son’s biological mother who was lying there.

  He felt a trickle of blood from one nostril on his upper lip and wiped it away reflexively. He had to get a grip. He had to get control of this situation, not just let himself be dominated. He turned to the Lithuanian.

  “This isn’t necessary,” he said, slowly and carefully in English, wanting to make sure the man understood. “What is it you want?”

  “What you owe me,” said the man.

  “Okay. But what about your end of the deal?”

  The man stood still for a moment. Then he jerked his gun hand in the direction of the door. “That way,” he said.

  The other woman, Aleksander’s Lithuanian mother, started to shout something incomprehensible. The man snarled at her, and she fell abruptly silent.

  For a moment, Jan hesitated. But getting the man out of the room Anne was in had to be a good idea. If only he would also let go of Aleksander. He could see Aleksander was scared to the point of panic. His eyes looked huge in his pale, thin face, and there were tear tracks on his cheeks. Jan attempted a smile, but knew it came out wooden.

  “It’s okay, Sander,” he said. “The man will leave in a minute.”

  “Shut up,” said the Lithuanian. “Speak English. I don’t want you to say things I don’t understand.”

  “I just told the boy not to be frightened.”

  “Don’t do it again.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Don’t anger him. Or … don’t anger him more. The man’s suppressed fury was vivid in every move he made.

  They went into the hallway and down the stairs to the back door, which the man made Aleksander open. With his gun hand, he flipped the switch and turned on the light in the garage. There was an unfamiliar car in there, some kind of van. And inside, on the front seat, a child.

  It was him—the boy from the photograph. Jan recognized him immediately. But what was he doing here? It wasn’t the child Jan had paid for. Just one of his kidneys.

  “What is he doing here?” he asked the Lithuanian. And at that moment the truth began to dawn on him, like a series of flashes at the back of his mind. The Lithuanian had never meant to deliver a neat little transplantable organ. How could he? He didn’t have access to the doctors or the technology for an operation like that. The suitcase Karin was supposed to pick up at the railway station … it had never contained an organ box. It had contained a living child.

  Karin.

  No wonder she had freaked.

  A rush of pain went through him, and a bizarre image invaded his mind. It was as if he had ordered a steak at a restaurant and had been presented with a cow and a meat cleaver instead.

  “Not like that,” he said to the Lithuanian, hoarsely. “You didn’t say it was a living child.”

  “Perfect match,” said the Lithuanian. “Same father, same mother. Now you pay.”

  “Of course,” said Jan, somehow managing to keep any sign of tremor from his voice. “Let’s go upstairs again. You’ll get your money.”

  The Lithuanian switched off the light. The child hadn’t moved at all, and Jan felt a stab of pity for the poor kid.

  “DOLLARS,” SAID THE man. “Not … that.” He pointed the gun at Jan’s laptop.

  “But I can transfer the money to an account only you have access to,” tried Jan, but he could see that it was useless. Glowing numbers on a computer display wasn’t money in the Lithuanian’s world. “I don’t have that much cash lying around!”

  The man came closer, still with Aleksander in his grip. Casually, as though Aleksander were a toy he had almost forgotten about.

  “You said you had the money ready.”

  “And so I did. But Karin took it.”

  “Karin?”

  “The one you—” he stopped himsef short of saying “killed.” It might not be a good idea to bring that up now. “The one at the cottage. She had it. It’s not my fault that you couldn’t find it.”

  Out of the corner of his mind, he saw Anne stir. Don’t move, he thought, as if he could reach her telepathically. Don’t make him see you, don’t make him notice you right now.

  The other woman said something in Lithuanian. She wriggled, trying to get free, he supposed. The man snapped something at her, and she stopped struggling. She too had been crying, he could see.

  “She didn’t know where it was,” said the Lithuanian, facing Jan once more. “She would have said.” He raised the gun and pointed it at Aleksander’s head. “Last chance. Don’t fuck with me.”

  Jan opened his mouth, but no words came, no sound. Aleksander may die because this idiot doesn’t understand about money transfers, he thought, feeling his world shift beneath him. He crouched a little lower and considered a flying tackle; go for the gun, make him let go of Aleksander, something, anything, anything except this suffocating feeling of helplessness.

  “I know where the money is,” said Anne suddenly, in crystal clear and perfect English.

  The Lithuanian looked at her rather than Jan now. Possibly considering whether Anne might be telling the truth.

  Dammit, Anne, thought Jan. Can’t you see that this is not the kind of man you can bluff?

  “It’s not true,” he said quickly. “She doesn’t know anything about any of this.”

  But the man had taken a box cutter from the tool box wreckage. He cut the duct tape so that Anne could sit up. Blood was trickling down one wrist from an accidental cut, but she didn’t even seem to notice it.

&
nbsp; “Show me,” said the giant.

  Anne nodded. “I’ll get it,” she said. “It won’t take a minute.”

  A few moments later she was back with two heavy yellow manila envelopes. Jan looked on in disbelief as she upended them and let thick green bundles of thousand-dollar notes tumble out onto the floor.

  Anne had taken the money. Not Karin. The discovery made the blood pound in his ears.

  “Anne … what … why?”

  The Lithuanian was staring down at the money, and for the moment, at least, didn’t seem to care that they were speaking Danish.

  “It’s now been two years since I decided to leave you,” said Anne. “Do you know why I couldn’t go? Because of that bloody kidney machine in the basement. But when I saw that case on Karin’s bed with all that money inside, things just fell into place. I had no idea what you needed so much cash for, but I had the feeling you wouldn’t call the police if it disappeared. I could take it. And then I would be able to look after Aleksander without your help.”

  “But.…”

  “And you still don’t get it, do you? Right now you’re wondering if it is because of your pathetic little affair with Karin. Oh yes, I know. But that’s not why. Don’t you realize? You nearly killed Aleksander. You had to give him the kidney he needed. You would take care of everything. Because God forbid anyone should know. You nearly killed Aleksander because you didn’t want my father to know that you couldn’t give me a child. This marriage was always more about my family than about me, wasn’t it? My father was the one you really wanted. Well, fine. You can have him. But I’m getting out.”

  Jan heard the words, but they didn’t really register. He saw the Lithuanian let go of Aleksander. The boy gave a sob and ran to Anne, who put her arms around him without noticing that the blood from her wrist smeared his fair hair.

  “Pick it up,” ordered the Lithuanian. “Put it back into the envelopes.”