The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (10 page)

Thus Zola maintained his grip as undisputed leader by acts of vengeance and other demonstrations of power, and no one withdrew from his circle without knowing they would be wise to stick to the unwritten laws and above all keep their mouths shut. But now he had encountered a problem that compelled him to submit to the decisions and motives of others, and here he wanted no witnesses. Not even Chris. For that reason, Zola locked himself in his bedroom at the appointed time and waited for the phone to ring.

“We have a renegade,” was the first thing he said when his contact called.

His words were followed by an uncomfortable silence.

Although the man at the other end hired Zola’s people to do his dirty work, he was more than capable of doing it himself if the need should arise, as Zola knew from several of his informants. The deal had been unequivocal from the start. If anything went wrong it would be Zola’s responsibility and his alone. And if Zola proved unable to fulfil his responsibility it was he who would have to suffer the consequences.

“Our relationship exists within a web,” the man had said when they entered into agreement. “It is a web of unanimity, silence, and loyalty from which we cannot and must not withdraw. And if in spite of this you should be tempted to try, the threads of this web will run with blood. That is the condition, and I shall assume we are in agreement.”

There were no ifs, ands, or buts. Zola realized the man was capable of anything.

“A renegade,” said the voice. “Would you be so kind as to explain to me how this occurred?”

Zola considered his reply. There was no other way than to tell it like
it was. “One of the boys in the clan has run away. By chance, during his flight he hid himself in the grave we dug for William Star—”

“Careful what you say,” warned the voice immediately. “Where is the boy now?”

“We don’t know. I’m organizing a search.”

“How well do you know him?”

“He’s my nephew.”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“Not at all. He will be treated like anyone else.”

“Description?”

“Fifteen years old but looks younger. Approximately five foot five but still growing. Black curly hair, green-brown eyes, rather dark skin. No distinguishing marks, I’m afraid. He ran off in his pajamas, but we can assume he’s managed to change since then.” Zola laughed nervously with no response. “We know he took a necklace from the body. African origin. We might hope he decides to wear it himself.”

“A necklace? You left a necklace on the body? Are you stark raving mad?”

“We meant to retrieve it, but we never got round to it.”

“Idiocy!”

Zola clenched his teeth. It had been years since he had been spoken to like this. Had the man been a member of the clan it would have cost him dearly.

“And the boy’s name?”

“Marco. Marco Jameson.”

“Jameson, right. Does he speak Danish?”

“That and several other languages besides. He’s clever. A bit too clever.”

“Track him down and bring him back in. Where is he likely to have gone?”

Zola rubbed his brow. If only he knew. What the hell was he supposed to say? That Marco could be just about anywhere by now? That he had learned well and could be as inconspicuous as a chameleon in a rain forest?

“No need to worry,” Zola replied, as convincingly as he was able. “Our
network covers the whole of Sjælland. We’ll take Copenhagen district by district, street by street, day and night. We’ll keep at it until we have him.”

“Are you up to it? Who’s on the job?”

“Absolutely everyone. Everyone in the clan, the Romanians, the boys from Malmö, my Ukrainian fence. His organization is especially widespread.”

“OK. I don’t need to know everything.” A brief silence ensued. “I’ll be following this closely, do you understand?”

And then he put the phone down.

Yes, Zola definitely understood.

Marco mustn’t have a chance.

It was imperative.

Spring 2011

The shadows were long
and heavy when Carl finally pulled into a space in Rønneholtparken’s parking lot. Normally the sight of the light from the exhaust hood over the steaming pots and casseroles would have given him a sense of comfort at having returned to the nest, but not today. Crap days at work always had their price.

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment as Morten, his lodger, waved to him at the window. But for once he wished the house had been empty, devoid of all life.

“Hey, Carl, welcome home. Fancy a glass of wine?” were the first words of greeting, as he dumped his jacket onto the nearest chair.

One glass?
This was one of those evenings he could drink a whole bottle, no bother.

“Your dear ex-wife, Vigga, called,” was Morten’s second offering. Carl groaned. “She says you owe her mother a visit.”

Carl glanced at the bottle. Unfortunately it was already half empty.

Morten handed him a glass and was about to pour. “You’re looking a bit peaky, Carl. Didn’t the trip go well? Is it one of those nasty cases again?”

Carl shook his head, took hold of his lodger’s wrist, and carefully removed the bottle from his grasp. He’d pour the stuff himself.

“Oh, like that, is it?” Morten wasn’t always the brightest of souls when it came to gauging Carl’s moods, but today seemed to be an exception. He turned and went back to his cooking. “Dinner’s in ten minutes.”

“Where’s Jesper?” Carl asked, downing the first glass in one gulp with scant attention to bouquet, oak-wood aging, or vintage.

“You might well ask. God knows.” Morten spread his fingers in the air and shook his head. “He said he was off to do some homework,” he tittered.

Carl found this rather less funny, his stepson’s final exam being only a month away. If he didn’t pass it would be a new Danish record for uncompleted preparatory exams and what would a lad of twenty-one do then, the way the world was shaping up these days? No, there was damn little to laugh about.

“Aloha, Carl,” came a voice from the bed in the middle of the living room, indicating that Hardy was awake.

Carl switched off the perennial drivel emanating from the flat-screen TV and went over to sit at Hardy’s bedside.

It had been a few days since he’d studied his friend’s ashen face so closely. Was that a little sparkle in the paralyzed man’s eyes? Certainly there was something there he hadn’t noticed before. It almost reminded him of someone whose love life was suddenly looking up, or perhaps a promise that had just been fulfilled.

But besides that, Hardy was equipped with a built-in prism that served to filter the moods of his surroundings and that most probably had evolved through years of experience in the questioning of criminals. It was as if he possessed the particular ability to draw all the colors from a person’s aura that represented his state of mind and emotions. It was through this filter he now looked at Carl.

“What’s up, mate? Things not go well in Rotterdam?” he asked.

“Can’t say they did, no. I’m afraid we’re no closer to clearing up the case, Hardy. Their reports were like a bad movie script. No substance, poor groundwork, and very little reflection in any of it.”

Hardy nodded. It obviously wasn’t what he’d been hoping for, yet strangely enough he didn’t seem bothered. What’s more, he’d called him
mate
. When had he last done that?

“Anyway, I was going to ask you the same thing, Hardy. What’s up with you? Something’s happened, I can tell.”

Hardy smiled. “OK. Well, in that case maybe you can also make a swift assessment and tell me what you reckon, Mr. Detective, though it
may not be that obvious at the moment. Let’s just call it a party game, shall we?”

Carl took a sip of his wine and scrutinized Hardy’s long frame. Six feet, nine and half inches of ill fate under a duvet cover as white as only a home-health-care nurse could procure. The shape of his immobile size 14
¹
/
₂
feet and bony legs that had once been so muscular. A torso that in days gone by could press anyone resisting arrest into submission. Arms as thin as spaghetti that were once more than a match for the flailing haymakers of weekend drunks. Yes, this was but the shadow of a whole person lying before him. The lines of his face, etched by endless days and nights of grief and worry, were ample evidence.

“Have you had your hair cut?” he asked idiotically. He couldn’t see anything at all out of the ordinary.

A cry of hilarity went up from the kitchen. Morten never missed a thing.

“Mika!” shouted Morten. “Come upstairs a minute and give our detective here a clue, would you?”

Ten seconds later and Mika was up the stairs from the basement.

He was decently dressed this evening. There were days, even when the frost lay thick on the bike shed outside, when Morten’s muscle-bound physiotherapist had no qualms about going around in outfits more appropriate to a gay beach in San Francisco. Unlike Morten, he had the body for ridiculously tight trousers and T-shirts, but still. If any of Carl’s colleagues or his soon-to-be boss, Lars Bjørn, happened to stop by unannounced they’d never be able to look Carl in the eye again.

Mika nodded briefly to Carl. “OK, Hardy. Let’s show Carl how far we’ve gotten.”

He pushed Carl gently aside, then pressed a pair of fingers into Hardy’s shoulder muscle. “Concentrate now, Hardy. Concentrate on the pressure I’m exerting and focus. Come on!”

Hardy’s lips curled, his gaze seemed to turn inward, as though he were in pain. His nostrils flared. And thus he lay for a minute, perhaps two, before a smile appeared.

“It’s coming now,” he said, his voice stifled.

Carl’s eyes darted over the figure of his friend. What the hell was he supposed to be seeing?

“Blind as a bat,” said Morten.

“Who? Me?”

And then he realized what they were talking about.

It was as if a light breeze ruffled the cover of the bed, about halfway down. Carl looked back over his shoulder, but the patio door and the kitchen window were both shut, so it couldn’t be a draught. He reached out and pulled the cover aside and understood immediately what it was they were all so eager to show him.

Inevitably, his astonishment was accompanied by a mournful flight back in time to the moment when Anker was killed and Hardy was hit by the bullet that paralyzed him. The moment when he felt Hardy’s towering frame come tumbling down on top of him. Then to the days of Hardy begging to be liberated from the torment his life had become. And finally back to the present, where Hardy’s left thumb was moving, if only slightly. Four years of Carl’s despair and shame tossed away by the flutter of a couple of finger joints.

If he had not felt so oppressed and annoyed by the day’s events he could have burst into tears of joy. Instead, he merely sat there as though turned to stone, trying to comprehend the significance of these almost imperceptible body movements. They were like beeps from a display measuring a heart rate. Tiny movements that represented the difference between life and death.

“Look, Carl,” said Hardy softly, accompanying each movement with a sound.

“Dit, dit, dit, dah, dah, dah, dit, dit, dit,” he said.

Fucking hell, this was amazing. Carl pressed his lips tight. If he didn’t hold back he was going to start crying like mad. But he simply didn’t have the energy at the moment. He swallowed a couple of times until the lump in his throat receded.

The two men looked at each other for a while, both clearly emotional. Neither of them had ever believed things would progress this far.

Carl collected himself.

“Hardy, for Chrissake. You Morsed the SOS signal with your finger. You did, didn’t you? You Morsed, you big daft bugger!”

Hardy nodded, his chin colliding with his chest, exalted as a boy who had just overcome his reluctance and yanked out a loose baby tooth.

“It’s the only Morse code I know, Carl. If I could . . .” He pressed his lips together and stared up at the ceiling. This was a momentous occasion for him. “. . . I would have Morsed a great . . . hurrah!”

Carl reached out and ran his hand gently over his friend’s forehead. “This is the best news of the day. Of the year, for that matter,” he said. “You’ve got your thumb back, Hardy. Just what you wanted.”

Mika gave a grunt of satisfaction. “There’ll be more fingers yet, just you wait and see, Carl. Hardy’s so good to work with, there’s none better.”

With that he planted a kiss on Morten’s lips and disappeared off to the bathroom.

“What happened, actually?” Carl asked.

“I can feel things if I try hard enough.” Hardy closed his eyes. There was so much he had to think about now. “Mika has made me able to sense that my body isn’t completely dead, Carl. If I work at it hard enough, I might learn to use a computer again. Maybe move a joystick with my finger. Perhaps even operate an electric wheelchair without needing helpers around me.”

Carl smiled cautiously. It all sounded so promising and yet a little too improbable.

“What’s this on the floor?” came Morten’s inquisitive voice from the kitchen. “A silk pouch! Is this yours, Carl?”

He turned to his boyfriend, who was nonchalantly doing up his trousers. “Have you seen this, Mika? I do believe romance is in the air in our humble abode.” They gazed lovingly at each other and hugged with less inhibition than was warranted.

“Can we have a look?” they asked in unison, looking like they weren’t going to wait for an answer.

Carl got to his feet and prized the pouch carefully from his lodger’s peach-soft hand.

“You lot keep your mouths shut about this if Mona calls, yeah?” he said.

“Oooh, a surprise! A super-lovely romantic surprise! And you’re quite sure she hasn’t caught on?”

Morten had become ecstatic. Inside, he was most likely already thinking about the get-up he could wear that would best match the bride.

“Absolutely positively not.” Carl smiled. Their enthusiasm was catching.

“
Hey-ay, Mona! Ooo-ooo,
Mona! Tell you, Mona, what I wanna do . . . !
” they inevitably began singing. In falsetto.

They didn’t need to be
that
enthusiastic.

Dinnertime was all about Hardy. Only a single sour note served to dampen the euphoria.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Morten, his face a perspiring moon lit up by smiles, announced that from now on he and Mika would be pooling their resources. Morten’s Playmobil collection had been packed away for online auction and, as everyone could see, Mika had already moved in. Carl considered wearily that by rights such vital matters might be discussed beforehand, but what good would it do to mention it now? Aside from the fact that Jesper now preferred crashing at his girlfriend’s to sleeping at home, the domestic population had thereby gone up by twenty-five percent. And now Mika was sorting out his and Morten’s wardrobes in the basement, so their acute shortage of space could be ameliorated by donations to the town’s Red Cross shops.

No doubt he’d be keeping his pink sweater.

—

Rose was in a phase of hers that involved dressing from head to toe in black, albeit with the exception of an off-yellow scarf. For a time, the department would be treated to knee-length, black laced boots, tight cut-off pants, angular black eyebrows, and more metal stuck in her ears than there was in a medium-sized office stapler. It might have been all right for a punk gig back in the seventies, but it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate outfit when knocking on doors in a murder investigation.

Carl gave a sigh, staring at her ears and explosive hair. If nothing else, she was keeping the hair-gel manufacturers in business. “Haven’t you got a cap or something, Rose? We’re going out on a little job.”

She looked at him as if he’d just come home from Siberia.

“It’s the eleventh of May and sixty-eight degrees out there, so what would I want with a cap? Sounds like you need to adjust your inner thermostat, if you ask me.”

He sighed again. Clearly, there was nothing he could do. Staples in her ears or no.

On their way to the car, Gordon “just happened” to come charging over from the direction of the duty desk with more than one indication that he had been sitting in the window on the third floor, keeping an eye out for a situation like this to arise.

“Well, I never! Are you on your way out, too? How riotous! Where are you off to?”

He failed to notice the venom in Rose’s eyes. It had been there since Carl told her what the day’s job involved. As if he didn’t know she preferred to choose her own assignments.

Rose’s gaze descended the length of Gordon’s spindly legs. “I’d say it was more relevant to ask you how far into town you’re thinking of going without any shoes on your feet. Dickhead!”

The man stared down self-consciously at a loose pair of size 13 socks that already appeared in dire need of a wash. Then, looking like a turkey trying to jab its head in all directions at once, he endeavored in vain to conceal his reaction. “Humiliation” was too tame a word for it.

“Oops. Must have had my thoughts elsewhere,” he proffered lamely.

Rose pinned him like an insect with her kohl-black eyes. “Moron,” was all she said. And it stung.

Though Carl could hardly refrain from passing comment on her less-than-desirable young suitor, he stuck professionally to the job at hand and filled her in on the details as they drove toward Østerbro.

“So this Sverre Anweiler’s never been arrested?” she asked, staring at the man’s photo in her hand.

“Yes, he most certainly has,” Carl replied. “He’s been done for loads of things before this, but only minor offenses. Passing off false checks, renting out apartments that didn’t belong to him. Deported from Denmark for five years at one point.”

“Charming bloke. How could anyone ever point a finger at such a nice guy, I wonder.”

“The victim who burned to death on the boat was a woman who had left her husband a note only hours before, telling him she’d found someone else. There’s a statement to that effect from a witness.”

Rose looked again at the photo of the man as Carl parked the car at the curbside.