She set the plastic cup of lukewarm coffee with cream down on the scratched table. “What’s the address?” she asked.
Taghi glanced at his watch. Wasn’t it about time she got here? He was out of his league here, he wanted so badly to hand over this woman and baby and the contractions and birth to someone trained for it. He was a man, damnit. He shouldn’t even be here.
He heard a sharp metallic click, and suddenly the whole apartment was bathed in a piercing white light from the spots set into the ceiling.
The woman crouching on the floor grabbed desperately for his arm. Taghi heard Djo Djo and Farshad swearing softly out in the kitchen area. A second later they stood beside Taghi in the small bathroom, where they both squeezed their way in behind the wall, the only thing shielding them from being in full view from the street outside.
Someone had walked into the hallway, and Taghi immediately assumed it was the police, and thought that the residency permit he’d worked so hard for was about to go up in smoke right now, right here, in front of the entire fucking district of Ørestad. Someone had turned on the building’s electricity and the harshly lit apartment made him feel like a fish in a very small aquarium. The bathroom was the only place to hide. He caught Djo Djo’s eye and held his index finger to his lips, warning him.
The footsteps outside rapped sharply against the tiles. Whoever they were, they weren’t afraid of being heard. They walked past the door and stopped farther down the hallway. There were at least two of them, maybe more.
The dark-skinned foreigner on the floor fidgeted and held both hands over her eyes, as if to protect herself from the whole world. Another contraction was on its way. Her backbone formed a round, taut bow underneath her summer jacket, Taghi noticed; soon she would be moaning again. Soon they would be discovered.
If they nailed him for theft they would send him back to Iran, or at the very least back to the refugee center. To the knotted-up feeling of not knowing where he would be the next day or the rest of his life. The letters from his lawyer, from the state. The stiff white sheets of paper folded perfectly with knifesharp edges. How would he take care of Laleh and Noushin then?
Taghi caught the woman’s eye when the next contraction overtook her and she moved to get back on her knees. As if she was trying to flee from the source of the pain. He stopped her halfway and pulled her head against his chest while shushing her, the way you would shush a young child.
Now the men outside were arguing. It was impossible for him to hear what it was all about, but one of them yelled that the other was an asshole. Then their voices were muffled by the creak of an elevator door, which slid shut and swallowed the rest of the argument.
Quiet.
“Shit.”
Djo Djo was the first to stand up; he slapped the light off in the kitchen area. The snow outside swirled in the cloudy yellow spotlights illuminating the building’s façade. Taghi rose and moved to the window facing the street. Farshad came to stand beside him.
“Why don’t we just get out of here?”
Farshad looked warily over his shoulder at the bathroom door. He was more afraid of the woman than the men, Taghi thought.
Farshad was nineteen and Djo Djo eighteen. Childbirth was obviously not their strong suit.
Taghi’s pulse was pounding in his temples.
“Okay, you called that woman,” said Farshad. “Time to split. Me and him, we’re out of here for sure.” He gave a jerk of his head in the direction of Djo Djo.
“And leave her here alone?
Na baba
. You’ve got to be kidding.” Taghi nodded fiercely and pointed out to the van.
A metro train whistled past on the tracks above the black canal. No conductor—it was some kind of new technology they had installed when the metro was built. It was all automated. The light from the windows of the empty cars reflected in the water.
He supposed the shadow came first, hurtling past the window, but it was the sound that Taghi reacted to. A hollow, wet thud, like the sound of a very large steak being slapped down on a cutting board.
The man had landed on the stack of wet sheetrock less than a yard from the window and was definitely dead. Taghi didn’t need to go outside to check. He was lying on his belly, with his neck twisted back and to one side, so that they could see his forehead and his eyes. Or rather, eye. The part of his face that was resting against the sheetrock had been crushed so completely that it was just a pulped mess. His one identifiable eye was staring at Taghi, Farshad, and Djo Djo with a strangely irritated expression.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck. What the fuck do they think they’re doing?” Farshad’s voice stumbled, shrill and pitched too high in the dark behind them, and Taghi knew right then that Farshad was a bigger problem than the woman in the bathroom.
Her eyes were wide, but she had stopped talking. He couldn’t even hear her breathe. He felt the shock himself, like a strap tightening around his chest. Despite this he managed to reach out and clap his hand over Farshad’s mouth.
“
Khar.
Shut up, you big idiot,” he hissed.
Farshad thrashed around like a drowning man under Taghi’s right arm. Now they heard quick steps on the stairs. The front door opened and slid shut with a quiet click. A moment later a pair of headlights swept over the glass façade. The car took off and the sound died behind the thick thermal windows.
Taghi slowly removed his hand from Farshad’s mouth. He wasn’t sure that Farshad was completely calm yet, but at least he wasn’t shrieking like some old woman. In the bathroom the woman had begun to groan again. It sounded like she was calling out for someone. She no longer had the strength to crouch, she was rolling on the floor, trying to curl up as the contractions grew stronger. Her lips formed a fluid and nearly silent stream of words, and her long, slim hands clutched at thin air and then grabbed a corner of his sweat-soaked T-shirt.
“Jacob?”
Taghi rubbed a hand across his eyes. He needed to think.
Djo Djo had stepped right up to the window to get a better look at the corpse.
“What the hell we do now, Taghi? He’s dead. The police will come. They’ll be looking for us and they …” Djo Djo spoke slowly, searching for his words, as if the reality of the situation first struck him as he talked about it. “Maybe they’ll think we did it. Then we’re fucked. They’ll throw us out, they’ll kill us.”
Taghi had been thinking the same thing.
Their fingerprints were all over. Farshad’s gloves dangled from his pants pockets. One in each pocket. Djo Djo hadn’t even brought any. All they had planned on doing was liberating a couple of fucking sinks. That’s not something they nail you for—not seriously, anyway.
The woman had another contraction. They came every few minutes now. She was pulling him down, as if all she really wanted was someone she could drown with. She was crying.
“You have to find something to cover him up with.”
Djo Djo glared silently at Taghi. Then he grabbed Farshad’s shoulder and dragged him toward the door. Farshad stumbled, found his feet again, and trudged off behind Djo Djo, who was as agile as a cat in the dark.
A second later, Taghi saw the two brothers standing outside the window, struggling with the green tarp from the van. The wind grabbed the tarp, making it look like a dark, flapping sail against the multitude of brightly lit windows on the other side of the canal.
The woman on the floor loosened her grip on Taghi a bit, and as he straightened up he noticed a thin figure walking their way, leaning into the wind, hands over her face to shield herself from the big wet flakes.
She had arrived.
Nina zipped her down jacket all the way to her nose before getting out of the car.
Brave new world. The streetlights’ reflections shimmered in the black water of the canals, and the elevated railway looked like something from a sci-fi film. Trees and bushes didn’t belong in this vision of the future, the general impression was that organic life forms were unwelcome here. How in the world did an African woman about to give birth end up here?
Brahge Living,
a big sign said, illuminated by a powerful floodlight.
24 exclusive condominiums—for sale NOW!
The colorful, optimistic drawing of the finished development formed a sharp contrast to the muddied mess of construction and the toppled wire fence.
Brahge, she thought to herself, hitching up her shoulder bag. He was the man who went broke. One of the most publicized bankruptcies in recent times, because Torsten Brahge had been regarded as one of the best and brightest, having just been awarded some business prize a few weeks earlier. Investor megabucks were in danger of evaporating. She had seen the man’s slightly chubby, Armani-clad figure on the front page and in several self-pitying television interviews, though she couldn’t remember what he had said. Usually she quickly grew tired of hearing wealthy people moan about the financial crisis and the real estate collapse.
A battered-looking van was parked beside the fence, and she caught sight of two young men grappling with a green tarp just outside the building. Life in the desert, she thought, and lifted her arm in a stiff, frozen wave
“Is Taghi here?” she yelled.
Both of them stared at her as if she were some monster that had crawled out of the canal. But one of them nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Are you the doctor lady?”
“Nurse,” she corrected.
He shrugged his shoulder,
whatever
. “He’s inside. Ground floor to the right. You’d better hurry.”
She found them in the apartment’s tiny guest bathroom, the woman on her knees in front of Taghi, clinging to him with both hands. The quiet hope Nina had been nourishing that it might be false labor and a touch of hysterics immediately disappeared. The woman’s coat and skirt were soaked with amniotic fluid. If there were any complications, Nina decided, she’s off to a hospital whether she likes it or not.
At that moment the woman’s eyes flew open, and she looked straight at Nina.
“Hi,” Nina said in English, in her most reassuringly professional voice. “My name is Nina, and I’m here to help you. I’m a nurse.”
“Doctor,” the woman gasped. “Secret okay doctor.”
“Just say yes,” Taghi said. “I don’t think she understands much English. Her name is Chaltu.” Taghi didn’t look so hot himself, Nina observed. Anxious, nervous, but that wasn’t so surprising, either. She had a good idea what he was doing here. Or anyway, what he would have been doing had a woman giving birth not gotten in the way.
He tried to stand up, but Chaltu kept clinging to him.
“No go,” she said. “Jacob no go.”
“Sometimes she calls me Jacob,” Taghi said. “Don’t ask me why.”
Nina touched Chaltu’s arm. Her fingers were bloodless and gray, her skin icy cold. She let go of Taghi with one hand and swatted at Nina, who was trying to see how far she had dilated.
“Chaltu,” Nina ventured. “I must look. Look to see if baby is coming.”
“No baby,” Chaltu groaned. “No baby here. In Sweden.
Jag söker asyl.
” And she pressed her legs together so hard that her thigh muscles quivered.
Jesus, Nina said to herself, and took measure of the woman’s desperation. If it was possible to delay a childbirth by will alone, this would turn into a very long night!
“We have to get her someplace where we can keep warm,” Nina said. “Is that your van?”
Taghi looked toward the window facing the parking lot, and Nina followed his eyes. She saw the two young men outside, pulling a blue nylon rope through the green tarp’s grommets. A violent gust of wind rammed them. One of them slipped in the mud and lost his grip on the tarp. It flew up, flapping like a bird trying to fly away. Underneath lay a dead man.
It took her only a few seconds to recognize him. The Armani suit had had a terrible day, and the man inside a worse one. There was no doubt, however, that it was the head of Brahge Living lying there, very much dead.
The two young men got the tarp under control and tied it down, and the well-dressed corpse disappeared from sight. But it was too late. Nina had seen him. And Taghi knew it.
They stared at each other over Chaltu’s head.
“We didn’t do it,” Taghi said. “The guy just went flying past us and—wham!”
Nina nodded. She also stuck her hand in her pocket and began pressing numbers on her cell phone blindly, not bringing it out. But he noticed. He tore away from Chaltu, who screamed in a burst of fright, and suddenly he had a knife in his hand. The blade was barely two inches long. A pocketknife, Nina thought, no murder weapon, and he didn’t hold it as she imagined a murderer would. It looked more as if he were about to sharpen a stick to roast something over a fire.
All the same. He had a knife.
“Give me your phone,” he said. “Now!”
She thought about what was at stake for him if the police came. Everything he stood to lose. She gave him the phone.
Chaltu looked back and forth between them with eyes that could hold no further terror. Taghi plopped Nina’s Nokia into the toilet. Then he brought out his own cell phone and punched a few numbers. Through the window she watched one of the young men let go of the tarp and put his hand to his ear.