Sorry, Karin, she silently told her friend. You ask too much, this time. She pulled the blanket a little higher so that it was not immediately obvious a child was asleep beneath it. Rolled down the window just a notch, so air would get into the car. Locked the Fiat and left, walking with long, quick strides she knew were nearly as fast as running.
SHE CUT THROUGH
the central hall of the railway station, heading for the green and white sign that proclaimed the local police presence. She entered the small office, wondering what one actually said in such a situation. Good afternoon, I’ve just found a child?
The officer at the reception desk looked tired. Not the easiest job in Copenhagen, probably.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Err … I have a child in my car—”
Nina’s hesitant explanation was interrupted by a crackle from the woman’s radio. Nina couldn’t hear what was being said at the other end, but the officer snapped a hasty “Copy that. I’m on my way,” and headed for the door at a run.
“Please wait here,” she called over her shoulder, but Nina had already followed her back into the central hall. She watched the officer and one of her uniformed colleagues fairly sprint for the stairwell leading down to the left luggage lockers. Following still further, into the basement, was not actually a conscious decision.
She heard the racket as soon as she started down the stairs. Everyone in the facility had stopped their various baggage maneuvers, and some had already gathered at the entrance to the passage where locker number 37-43 was situated. Nina felt a warning flutter along her spine, like an insect moving over her skin, but she still had to look.
A man was kicking at the metal doors with frightening ferocity. She caught a brief glimpse of the back of his head, hair clipped so short it looked almost shaved, and of a set of enormous shoulders encased in a shiny brown leather jacket that was surely too hot for this weather. When the officers reached him, he shook off the first one as if she were a child he no longer wanted to play with. Then he seemed to collect himself.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, rolling his r’s in a way that almost made them into d’s. He stood quite still, letting the police officers calm down from violence alert to dialogue mode. “I pay. Is broken, I pay.”
Then he suddenly turned his head, looking directly at her. She didn’t know what made him pick her out of the crowd, but she saw his muscles bunch tensely as fury tightened his face and narrowed his eyes. He remained still, and didn’t speak, but even so she sensed the violence he was holding in check.
What had she done to deserve such rage? She had never seen the man before.
But of course the locker he had been kicking to pieces was not just any locker. It was number 37-43. And she suddenly knew where the rage had come from.
She had taken something that was his.
SHE HAD TO
employ every shred of self-control she possessed to stop herself from running all the way back to the car. He won’t be able to follow, she told herself, the police are there. She walked as quickly as she could without turning heads.
But she remembered how he had shaken them off like a dog shakes a flea from its fur, and the only plan she was able to form was that they had to get away, she and the boy, as far away from that man as they could possibly get.
W
HEN THE STOLEN
Nokia beeped in his briefcase more than three hours later, Jan’s plane was still sitting on the pavement, and he was still in his business class seat, sweating like a pig. This time no flight attendant swooped down on him when he pulled out his phone. Cabin personnel had long since given up on that particular score, and at least twenty other people around him were engaged in multilingual phone calls, explaining why they would be delayed.
“Mr. Marquart.” In spite of the hiss and crackle of a bad connection, the man’s fury came through loud and clear, not so much in his words as in his tone of voice.
“Yes… .”
“I delivered. As agreed. The woman came and took the goods. But she left no money. You did not pay.”
What?
Jan protested. He himself was stuck in a plane, he explained, but he had directed his assistant to go in his stead, and he was sure she had followed his instructions.
“Mr. Marquart. There was no money.”
Jan tried to imagine what could have happened.
“There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. “As soon as I get back, I’ll clear it up.”
“That would be a very good idea,” said the man, and cut the connection. The very restraint of his phrase sent a chill through Jan even in the midst of the overheated cabin. It signaled that this was a man who did not have to resort to threats. A man best not angered.
Jan jabbed out Karin’s number with some ferocity. She didn’t answer, and he left no message apart from a curt “Call me!”
He stared sightlessly at the back of the seat in front of him. Sweated. Sipped the water, and the lukewarm gin and tonic he had accepted a few hours ago when he thought he had accomplished a feasible Plan B. It took him nearly half an hour to accept that he would have to call Anne.
“Have you seen Karin?” he asked. And listened, while Anne’s soft voice told him that yes, Karin had returned, but had left again rather quickly. She had been in her flat above the garage for only a few minutes.
“Was she carrying anything?” he asked. “When she arrived? And when she left?”
“I really don’t know,” said Anne vaguely. “Were you thinking of anything in particular?”
“No,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’ll have to wait till I get back.”
As the plane finally started to taxi out onto the runway, he leaned back against the blue leather upholstery, wondering feverishly how he could have been so wrong about her.
I should have done it myself, he thought bitterly. But that is just so typical. You make immaculate plans. You are in control. And then a fucking
seagull
wrecks it all.
T
HE VILLA IN
Vedbæk was perfectly situated, thought Nina.
It had neither ocean view nor idyllic woods in the background, but for privacy it couldn’t be matched. Neatly clipped hedges screened the sprawling redbrick and the graveled parking lot from prying eyes, and the surrounding well-to-do family homes oozed respectability. Whether that had been at the front of Allan’s mind when he chose to buy his way into this particular general practice in the northern suburbs was dubious, as it had never really been part of his plan to moonlight as a medical resource for illegal immigrants; but it suited Nina’s purpose beautifully.
She checked the rearview mirror. The boy hadn’t moved in all the time she had had him in the car, nor made a sound. The blanket was undisturbed, and only a few wisps of blond hair poked from its folds.
Tock, tock.
A measured rapping against the window glass made Nina jerk. It was Allan. His tall, gangly form cut off the sun as he bent to peer into the car. Then he rapped on the glass once more, but before she had time to react, he moved on, and was now trying to open the rear door, in vain. She must have locked it without thinking. She realized she was still gripping the steering wheel, fingers locked whitely around the rim, and it took her a second to make her hands unclench. She reached back and unlocked the rear door with stiff fingers, then got out of the car herself.
Allan had already lifted the boy gently out of the car, the blanket still wrapped around him. He held the child against his shoulder.
“What do you know?”
He was headed for the house, and Nina had to lengthen her stride to keep up.
“Nothing. Or almost nothing. Someone left him in a suitcase!”
Nina closed the door behind them and followed Allan as he strode towards his office. Jolly children’s drawings decorated the walls, and behind his computer sat a small gnome-like clown doll, obviously intended for the cheering up of young patients.
The clown would not serve them now. The suitcase boy hung limply in Allan’s arms, like one of Ida’s cast-off Raggedy Anns, thought Nina, with a familiar taste of metal in her mouth. It was her personal taste of fear. It always came to her when adrenalin rushed through her body, into every last cell of it, reminding her of the camps at Dadaab and Zwangheli and other hellholes in which she had lived and looked after the children of others. (And it reminded her of the day he died.)
Nina pushed away the thought as soon as it entered her mind and instead locked her focus on Allan and the boy. Allan had rolled the small, soft body gently onto the couch, his middle and index finger resting against the side of his neck. His face was alight with concentration, and she saw a single bead of sweat trickle down his throat and into the open neck of his white shirt. This was not the time to talk to him.
The sphygmomanometer sat on Alan’s desk, within handy reach, but the cuff was much too big for the boy’s thin arm. She found a smaller one and attached it. The child did not react to the highpitched whine, or to the pressure from the inflating cuff. 90/52. She turned the display so that the digital numbers were visible to Allan.
Allan frowned and slid his hand across the boy’s chest, setting the stethoscope against the smooth, white skin of the chest, and then, in a quick precise move, to the abdominal cavity. He then rolled the boy onto his side with a gentleness that, for a moment, caused a strange tender warmth in Nina’s own chest. He listened again, and finally let the boy slip down to his original position, resting on his back with his arms spread wide.
Still this disturbing lack of life, thought Nina. As if he were caught in some limbo, neither dead nor alive, simply a thing. Allan cautiously lifted one eyelid and shone his pen-sized flashlight at the boy’s pupil.
“He has been drugged,” he said. “I don’t know with what, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly life-threatening.”
“Should we give him naloxone?” asked Nina.
Allan shook his head.
“His respiration is okay. Blood pressure is a little on the low side, and he is somewhat dehydrated, but I think he will simply sleep off whatever it is and wake naturally. And in any case, we can’t give an antidote when we have no idea what the original substance was.”
Nina nodded slowly, dodging Allan’s gaze. She knew what he had to say next.
“You will of course take him to a hospital.”
“But you said he would wake on his own… .”
Allan gestured, indicating his collection of medical reference books.
“There’s a million drugs out there that someone could have given him, and I have no idea what is really wrong with him, nor do I have the facilities to do the proper tests. You simply have to take him to Hvidovre.”
Nina made no reply at first.
She had had so little time to look at the child. At first she had thought him to be barely three years old, but now, examining his face, she thought he was merely small for his age. Closer to four, perhaps. She touched his cheek gently, tracing the soft lines of the mouth. His hair was short and so fair it was nearly white, the skin parchment thin and almost bluish in the light streaming through the blinds.
“I don’t know where he’s from,” she said. “I don’t think he is Danish, and I know someone is looking for him. Someone who wants to … use him for something.”
Again, Allan frowned.
“Pedophilia?”
Nina shrugged, trying to recall as much as she could about the man who had been kicking at the locker. Huge. That was the main impression. Perhaps thirty years old, with hair so short it hardly left an impression of color. Brown, perhaps? Like the weatherinappropriate leather jacket. She tried to imagine the police issuing an APB and knew immediately that this description would match any number of large men. And she pictured the boy, alone in a hospital room, while some social worker or child care specialist sat in the staff room filling out endless forms. Would they be able to protect the boy against the rage she had seen in the man’s eyes? Once he woke up, what would the Danish authorities do with him? Send him to some institution or refugee center like the Coal-House Camp? Nina suppressed a shudder. Natasha’s bastard of a fiancé had sauntered straight into the camp to pick up Rina without anyone even noticing she had gone. Far too many of the socalled unaccompanied minors simply disappeared from the camps after a few days. They were collected by their owners.
“I’m not letting them take him to the camps,” she snapped, glancing around the office. “Children vanish from them almost every day. He’s not going to any of those places.”
Finally she saw what she was looking for. Behind the matte glass doors of the cabinets by the door she made out the contours of Allan’s special emergency kit, which she knew to contain a couple of bags of IV fluid.
Last year, Allan had gone with her to attend an elderly man who had fled the Sandholm asylum center and was hiding with some relatives in the city. He had been due to be sent back to some refugee camp in Lebanon, but instead he was slumped on a mattress in a loft above an old tenement flat in Nørrebro. It was at least 115 degrees Fahrenheit up there under the rafters, and in other circumstances it might have been a rather trivial case of heat stroke. But because they didn’t have the range of equipment an ordinary ambulance would have had, they nearly lost him. Since then, the infusion sets had been a fixture in Allan’s emergency bag. As yet, he had not had to use them, as far as she knew. He wanted out. In fact, he had wanted out for a long time, but there was not exactly a waiting list for the unofficial post of MD to the illegal immigrants that the network struggled to aid, and Nina had hung on to his phone number. Just in case, she thought with a sardonic inner smile that didn’t quite reach her lips. Just in case she came across a three-year-old boy in a suitcase.
She grabbed the infusion set and the IV bag off the shelf and felt a sense of calm descend as the familiar equipment came into her hands. She had done this a thousand times. Torn the clear wrapping in a single jerk, freed the needle, uncoiled the plastic tubing. She cast around for something to place the bag on, so that it would be higher than the boy, and finally cleared a space for it on the shelf above the couch, where various toys resided. Then she took hold of the boy’s inanimate arm, exposed the veins under the white skin, and let the needle slide in.