The Boy in the Suitcase

by Lene Kaaberbøl

It took a moment before Jan realized that the order was meant for him. His whole body felt alien to him, as if everything was dissolving, inside and out. He took a step forward, not toward the money but toward Anne. He saw the man raise the gun, but it had ceased to matter. Even when he saw the flash from the barrel and felt the impact to his chest, it still didn’t really matter.

  THE DANE FELL heavily, across the money. Jučas turned and raised the gun again, this time to aim at the wife. But she was gone. He could hear her running footsteps somewhere, in the hall perhaps. And, of course, she had taken her son with her.

  He glanced down at the man to decide whether he should shoot him a second time, but he looked like a goner, and right now it was more important to get the wife and the kid before they succeeded in calling for help. Shooting the boy would be no fun at all, but he knew it was necessary now. He had to do some house cleaning here, make sure there was no one left who could identify him. The little one he could take with him, seeing that Barbara was so keen on it, but the older boy had to go. He had eyes in his head, he would be able to remember and tell others what he had seen. Jučas didn’t want to wake up one morning in Krakow to find the police pounding on his door.

  Four or five quick strides brought him to the door. The hallway was empty, the front door still closed and locked. Where had they gone? He opened another door and found a huge kitchen with shiny white cupboards and black marble work tops. But no woman and child. He withdrew to the hall again and wondered whether they had fled down the stairs to the garage. A good thing he had sabotaged the gate; they wouldn’t be able to get out in a hurry.

  Then he heard a soft bump overhead. Excellent. Now he knew where to look. He headed up the stairs to the second floor.

  The first room was a bedroom, probably the parents’. He switched on the light and looked under the bed. Checked the bathroom. Nothing. He continued along the landing to a sort of feminine office, with a blonde-wood desk and a small chintzy sofa by the window. Also empty.

  In quick succession, he opened two more doors. A bathroom and a boy’s bedroom. He had to spend precious time opening wardrobes and knocking over a playhouse shaped like a medieval castle, but still no sign of the woman or the boy. Then he attempted to open the second to last door along the landing.

  It was locked.

  He raised the Glock and aimed at the lock. The shot rang in his ears but did less damage to the door than he had expected. Despite his temporary deafness he heard a muted cry, but it sounded as if it came from above. Possibly he was shooting at the door to the attic stairs? He fired one more round, and this time the door began to give way when he put his shoulder against the woodwork. One more shot ought to do it.

  At that moment, something hit him from behind. Something heavy, sharp-edged and hard. It drew a line of fire across the back of his neck and made him stagger briefly. He was turning as the second blow came, but he was off-balance, and he didn’t even have time to raise his hands. The one shot he did get off went wild, smashing into the banister. Then the bloody toolbox hit him directly in the face.

  He was lying on his back staring up at the little one’s mother. Her eyes looked completely wild, and a strip of duct tape still dangled from her plaster cast. She could only hold the toolbox with one hand, but she swung it as though it were a handbag.

  This time it smashed into his right arm, and he lost all feeling in his fingers and couldn’t even feel the gun anymore. The crazy bitch dropped the toolbox and went for the Glock.

  She’ll bloody kill me, he thought. If she gets hold of it, she’ll kill me.

  He grabbed a handful of light brown hair with his left hand and pulled her all the way down to the floor. She wasn’t screaming, but she fought like a woman possessed. She kneed him in the chest, and he still couldn’t use his right hand. Then he felt something punch him in the leg, but it wasn’t till the bang registered that he realized that she had shot him. He had no idea how bad it was. He only knew that if he didn’t finish her right now, anything could happen. He rolled over so that his full weight held her pinned to the floor, and with his left hand—unfortunately more clumsy than his right—reached for her head in order to pull it sharply back and to one side, a swift jerk so that the neck would snap.

  He didn’t understand why it didn’t work. He only felt another punch, this time on the side of the neck. From the wet heat he understood that he was bleeding. And from the manic racing of his heart, he understood that it was a lot. Strange. It felt almost like the throbbing pump he loved to feel in his body when he was training.

  But the throbbing grew fainter. More distant. As though he was moving away from himself. Suddenly he saw the dream family quite clearly. The mother, the father, the two children. They were sitting around the dinner table, laughing. He wanted to call out to them, shout at them, but they couldn’t hear him. He was outside, and he could not get in.

  EVEN BEFORE NINA pushed open the door to the hall, she knew the house was enormous. The stairs winding up through the stairwell would not have been out of place at some corporate domicile built to impress, and yet there were enough domestic details to suggest that this was actually a private home—a collection of outdoor boots, neatly lined up on a rack, winter coats and scarves on pegs in the wide space under the stairs, two footballs in a net.

  Everything else was white, including the staircase itself, and Nina stood for a moment, trying to adjust to the glare of a multitude of halogen spotlights.

  There was a strange silence, as if the house had swallowed everything living and was now busy digesting. She sensed movement, but the sounds that did reach her were muffled and diffuse. Running footsteps, a door being opened and closed, the muted clicking of heels or toes against floorboards. But there had been a shot. Straining to hear, Nina felt adrenalin invading every single tired cell in her body.

  Nothing.

  Or, no … something. Something closer than the footsteps she had heard. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and listened again. A liquid moan reached her through a set of double doors leading off the hallway. She recognized the sound of human pain and felt automatic emergency reflexes kick in, forcing her own pounding headache into the background. Someone was injured. She needed to know whether there was one or more, how critical the injuries were, the priority of treatment.

  She checked her watch.

  It was 9:37 p.m., later than she would have guessed.

  She pushed open the door and entered an enormous living room.

  A man and a woman lay on the floor. The woman was immobilized by wide strips of duct tape, but apart from an arm in a cast, which obviously had already been treated and was therefore irrelevant right now, she appeared to be uninjured. Frantic, but unharmed. Nina ignored her and focused on the man instead. He lay partly on his side, limbs outflung, like a fallen skater. Around him, a bizarre number of dollar bills lay scattered across the stone floor. Blood from the sternum area had soaked through his white shirt and run down to mix with the big wet stains of sweat under his arms.

  ABC, she thought. Airways, Breathing, Circulation. She knelt next to him, tilting back his head a little to check his mouth. No blood, which was encouraging, and no obstructions. He blinked and gazed at her with eyes that might be unfocused and shocky, but still seemed reasonably present.

  “What happened?” she asked, not only because she wanted to know but also to establish contact and to find out whether he could answer.

  He didn’t even attempt to reply, just closed his eyes again, but it seemed more dispirited than actually comatose. He wasn’t unconscious, in her estimation; his breathing was fast and pain-afflicted, but unhindered, and his hands reasonably warm. There seemed to be no catastrophic hemorrhage going on, inside or out. She pulled the bloodied shirt to one side. He had been shot high in the chest, above the heart. The entrance wound was not enormous, but she could see no exit wound, which suggested that the projectile was still somewhere in his body, possibly lodged against the scapula. That, too, was to
his advantage right now. Exit wounds were messy. Cautiously, she pushed back the lips of the wound. She could see splinters of bone in among the bleeding tissue. The man’s collarbone had been shattered. The sharp fragments worked like shrapnel inside his shoulder, increasing both the bleeding and the pain, but the shot must have missed all major arteries, and he was not lethally wounded. He was beginning to rock back and forth, probably in an effort to escape what was no doubt a significant level of pain.

  “Hold still,” she said. “Moving makes it worse.”

  He heard her. He stopped rocking, even though his eyes stayed firmly closed.

  Nina glanced around for anything that might be used as an emergency compress, but this was not the kind of home that had tablecloths and cozy plaids and decorative cushions on the couch. In the end, she took off her own shirt and used it for a makeshift bandage; there was nothing she could cover him with to alleviate the effects of the shock, and the only thing she could use to pillow his head were the blood-spattered dollar bundles.

  She had done what could be done for him. She turned her attention on the woman.

  She was struggling feverishly against her bonds. Her smooth brown hair stuck damply to her forehead, and she had obviously been crying. There was something familiar about her, but Nina couldn’t quite pinpoint what.

  Nina had pushed the cries of the younger woman from her consciousness while tending to the injured man, and this might have given her the impression that Nina didn’t care and wouldn’t help her. At any rate, she had stopped shouting. But now her eyes glittered wetly, and she spoke, in slow careful English.

  “Please. Help me.”

  Nina spotted a box cutter in the jumble of tools, wires, and whatnots scattered on the coffee table from an upturned toolbox. She used it to cut the tape that held the woman down. The minute she was free, the woman catapulted off the floor and exploded into motion with a speed that seemed out of sync with her short, square, unathletic figure. She seized the toolbox with her good hand and ran out of room.

  At that moment, shots rang out from above. Two shots, close together.

  Nina suffered a brief moment of doubt. She glanced at the injured man. She wasn’t sure how stable his condition was, but there was little else she could do for him now. She wiped both hands across her face. They were trembling, she noted, little sharp jitters she couldn’t control. She checked her watch again to steady herself, and at that moment her subconscious finally came up with the answer, and she knew who the woman must be.

  It was 9:39 p.m. Nina gave the injured man one last look, then she got up and followed Mikas’s mother.

  SIGITA COULDN’T GET clear. The man lay across her, pinning her to the floor, and one hand had closed around a handful of her hair. He was heavy. In a brief flash it reminded her bizarrely of sex with Darius, but this would not end in laughter and release. The gun had slipped from her hand, and she had no idea where it was. The massive body on top of her made it harder and harder to breathe. She knew people died in this way in nightclubs and football stands, but could one be crushed to death by the weight of a single person? It felt like it.

  Where was the panicked strength that had driven her a moment ago? She had swung that toolbox at his head as if she meant to knock it clear off his neck. He had taken Mikas. And even though she had pleaded and begged, lying on the stone floor of that absurd ballroom of a living room, he had not told her where her child was. Not even when he took the Dane and returned so quickly that she understood Mikas must be nearby. He had just snarled at her that if she wanted the kid to survive, she had better shut up, and she had dared ask no more questions after that.

  Now her head filled with the nightmare visions she had tried to keep at bay these last long days. What if Mikas had been hidden away in a box somewhere, or in the trunk of a car, every breath he took? Or worse. She saw his tiny body in the cargo hold of a refrigerated van, cold and blue and gutted like an animal. Who said he was even still alive? How could she trust anything the man had said? They only needed his kidney, they didn’t care about the rest— his dark blue eyes, his bubbly laugh, the eagerness in his face when the words came tumbling out so quick and jumbled even she could not make heads or tails of them.

  The man didn’t move. Was he dying? She began to struggle again, even though she barely had breath left in her heaving lungs.

  Then, suddenly, someone was helping her, rolling the heavy form to one side, so that she could sit up. She gasped and drew blessed air in long, shivery sobs, watching while the skinny shorthaired woman who had cut her loose knelt beside the big man’s trembling body. She had no shirt on, only a white bra, and it looked as is someone had sprayed her with red paint. No, not paint. Blood. There was blood on the wall, too, a long red arc like graffiti painted with a spray can. The woman was pressing her hands against the man’s neck, but Sigita could see how the blood spurted between her fingers. One side of the man’s neck had been torn open, and she slowly realized that this was something she had done. She had fired the gun blindly and felt it kick twice in her hand, but she had had no idea if she had hit him, or where. It seemed she had. In the leg, and in the neck. If he died now, she would have killed him.

  “Mikas?” she asked, with what little breath she had.

  “He is okay,” said the dark-haired woman without looking up, and Sigita had no breath to ask what do you mean, okay, where is he, is he hurt, is he scared?

  The battered door eased open a fraction, and Anne Marquart poked her head out. It looked almost comical.

  “Was anyone else hit?” asked the dark-haired woman sharply.

  “No,” said Mrs. Marquart, staring at all the blood, and at the massive body on the floor. “We’re … we’re okay.”

  The dark-haired woman bent even further over the man who had taken Mikas, and said something Sigita didn’t hear. He didn’t answer. After a while, a sound did come from him, but it was just a sort of hissing sigh. The blood was no longer spurting quite so forcefully. Sigita got up slowly. She realized that she was smeared with blood, too, covered with it, in fact, in her hair, on her neck, down the front of her shirt. His blood. It made her skin crawl. Somehow, it was worse than if it had been her own. She felt dirtier. She could hear Anne Marquart saying something in Danish, possibly to Aleksander, who was still somewhere on the other side of that shot-to-pieces door and, Sigita hoped, couldn’t see any of this.

  “Is there anything we can do?” asked Sigita belatedly. The woman didn’t answer right away, just crouched there with both hands pressed against the man’s neck. Sigita could count every vertebrae in her curved spine, could see the effort that made the skinny, bare shoulders tremble.

  Then the straining shoulders slumped, and the woman straightened.

  “He is dead,” she said.

  Sigita stared at the big, heavy body.

  “I shot him,” she whispered. She wasn’t quite sure how that made her feel. She suddenly remembered what she had promised herself if they harmed Mikas. If you hurt my boy, I will kill you. Does an act have to be conceived in the mind before it can happen? And once one had thought of it, did that bring it closer to reality? She had thought it. And now, she had done it. The calm she had felt then seemed very distant now.

  “I think you are wrong,” said Anne Marquart quietly, bending to pick up the gun. “I think I was the one who shot him.”

  Sigita stared at her in confusion. What did she mean by that?

  Anne looked utterly calm. She raised the gun carefully.

  “Watch out,” she said. And fired a deliberate shot into the doorframe.

  “It might be better that way,” said the dark-haired woman thoughtfully. “The police will have no trouble believing her statement.”

  Finally Sigita understood. She was a stranger here, a foreigner without credibility, money, or connections. She remembered how hard it had been to make Gužas believe her at first, and they at least spoke the same language.

  “I had to do it,” said Anne, nodding at the big m
otionless body. “It was self defense.”

  Sigita swallowed. Then she nodded.

  “Of course,” she said. “You had to defend your child.”

  Something happened when they looked at each other. A silent agreement. Not a trade-off, more a sort of covenant.

  “Not Mikas,” said Sigita. “But me. He can have mine. If it’s a good enough match.”

  “You had better leave now,” said Anne. “But I hope you’ll come back. Soon.”

  “I will,” said Sigita.

  Suddenly, the dark-haired woman smiled, a brief intense smile that made her dark eyes come alive and banished all the jagged seriousness.

  “He is downstairs in the garage,” she said. “In the gray van.”

  MIKAS WAS STANDING in the doorway with the darkened garage behind him. He was holding on to the doorframe with one hand, as if he had only just learned to walk. When he caught sight of her, an expression slid across his face that was neither happiness nor fear, but a mixture of both. She couldn’t lift him, the stupid cast was in the way. But she squatted down beside him and pulled him into her embrace with her good arm. His little body was warm, and smelled of fear and pee, but he clung to her like a baby monkey and hid his face against her neck.

  “Oh, my baby,” she murmured. “Mama’s little baby.”

  She knew there might be bad dreams and difficult times. But as she crouched here, feeling the warmth of Mikas’s breath against her skin, she felt that something—life, fate, maybe even God—had at last forgiven her for what she had done.

  THERE WASN’T MUCH time, thought Nina. In a little while, it would all begin—police, ambulances, paramedics, all the things that followed in the wake of death and disaster. They had exactly the time it would take for the first cars to reach them from Kalundborg.

  Anne Marquart had made the emergency call, from her son’s mobile. She had lent her own dark-blue stationwagon to Mikas and Mikas’s mother. It would be better if they simply weren’t here when the authorities arrived, she had said. Jan Marquart was still lying on the living room floor, but now as comfortable as she could make him, with pillows, blankets and proper bandaging.