The Boy in the Suitcase (21 page)

He is testing me, thought Sigita. He still doesn’t believe me.

“No,” she said. “But if it’s dangerous for Mikas, I won’t do it.”

“It’s a question of weighing the options,” he repeated. “I am not saying it is completely without risk, but in our estimation, it is our best chance of finding Mikas right now.”

Sigita could hear her own pulse. How could one decide something so vital when it felt as if one’s head belonged to someone else?

“We can of course make the broadcast without your consent,” he finally said, when the silence had gone on for too long.

Was that a threat? Suddenly, anger roared through her.

“No,” she said. “I won’t do it. And if you go ahead without me, I’ll… .” But there was no way to finish. What threats could she make? He had all the weapons.

She sensed a sigh somewhere at the other end of the connection.

“Mrs. Ramoškienė, I am not the enemy,” he said.

Anger left her as suddenly as it had arrived.

“No,” she said. “I know that.”

But once she had disconnected, she couldn’t help but wonder. What was more important to an ambitious young officer like Gužas? Arresting the criminals, or saving the victims?

Her blouse was sticking to her back, and she decided to wrap a plastic bag around the cast and attempt a shower. She had to squirt the shampoo onto her scalp directly from the bottle, instead of measuring a suitable dollop into her palm, and it was equally impossible to wrap the towel around her head in the usual turbanstyle afterwards. When it was time for the late news, she turned on the television with a fresh attack of nerves. Despite Gužas’s words there was no dramatic report on three-year-old Mikas Ramoska, missing since Saturday. And then of course all her doubts came rushing back. Should she have done it? Was there someone out there who had seen her little boy? Someone who might help?

When the phone rang, she snatched at it with such clumsy haste that it clattered to the floor. She retrieved it with another snatch and pressed “Accept Call” even though she didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Er … who?”

“Tomas.”

She nearly said “Who?” once more before she realized that the caller was her little brother. She had never heard his grown-up voice, only the first hoarse cracks of puberty. He had been twelve when she fled from Tauragė, and they had not spoken since.

“Tomas!”

“Yes.”

A pause. Sigita had no idea what to say. What does one say to a brother one hasn’t talked to in eight years?

“We heard from Darius’s mother that Mikas is … that he has disappeared,” Tomas eventually said.

“Yes.” Her throat tightened, and only that one word escaped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “And … er … I was just thinking. If there’s anything I can do … ?”

An unexpected wave of tenderness washed through her. It stole what little strength she had in her arms and legs, so that she slumped down onto the couch with the phone in her lap, while tears burned their way down the side of her nose yet again. Normally, she never cried. Today, she had long since lost count.

“Sigita?”

“Yes,” she managed. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I am so glad you called.”

“Er, you’re welcome. I hope they find him.”

She couldn’t say another word, and maybe he realized. There was a soft click as he hung up. But he had called. She had only ever had sporadic news from home, and since she and Darius had separated, her most reliable source of Tauragė information had dried to a trickle. And right now there were a thousand things she wanted to know. What Tomas had been doing since leaving school. If he was still living at home. If he had a girlfriend. How he was.

If he had ever forgiven her.

But perhaps he had. He did call her, after all.

SIGITA WENT TO
bed, but sleep was a hopeless enterprise. The hideous sense of imagination she had suddenly developed kept tossing images up inside her eyelids, and she didn’t know how to turn it off.

If you hurt my boy, she thought, I will kill you.

It was not an outburst of anger, as when two drunks yell at each other—“I’ll fucking kill you!” or the like. It was not like that.

It was a decision.

Somehow, it made her calmer. She could almost believe that the kidnappers would be able to sense her decision and realize what the price of harming Mikas would be. Just because she had determined that it should be so. This was of course hopeless nonsense, as the rational part of her well knew. Nonetheless, it helped:
If you hurt him, I will kill you.

In the end, she went out on the balcony and sat in the white plastic chair she kept there. The heat absorbed by the concrete during the day was being released now that the air was cooler, and there was no need to put anything on over her night dress. She thought of Julija Baronienė, who had her child back. She thought of Gužas, and of Valionis. Had they gone home, or were they still at work? Was Mikas important enough? Or were there so many missing children that no one would work twenty-four-hour shifts just because another one had disappeared?

They wanted me to go on television, she thought. That must mean that he is important. She remembered the little English girl who had disappeared, but couldn’t recall her name. It had been all over the news for months, and even the Pope had become involved. And still the girl had not been found.

But Mikas will come back, she told herself firmly. If I believe anything else, I won’t be able to stand it.

A taxi drew up in the parking lot in front of the building. Sigita automatically looked at her watch. It was past 2 a.m.—an unusual time to arrive. A woman got out and glanced around uncertainly. Clearly a visitor, trying to get her bearings. Then she headed for Sigita’s block.

It’s her, thought Sigita suddenly. It’s Julija!

She leapt to her feet so quickly that she stubbed her toe on the doorframe. It hurt, but that was irrelevant. She hopped to the intercom and pressed the lock button the moment the buzzer sounded. She limped out into the stairwell and followed Julija Baronienė with her eyes, all the way up.

Julija stopped when she caught sight of Sigita.

“I had to come,” she said. “Aleksas wouldn’t hear of it, and I had to wait until he was asleep. But I had to come.”

“Come inside,” said Sigita.

H
OW PECULIAR THAT
one still says things like “Have a seat” and “Would you like some coffee?” even when life and death and heart’s blood is at stake, thought Sigita.

“May I call you Sigita?” asked Julija, twisting the coffee cup nervously in her hands. “I still think of you like that, even though you are a grown woman now.”

“Yes,” said Sigita. She had seated herself in the armchair, or rather, on the edge of it. Her right hand was clenched so hard that the nails bit into her palm, but she knew somehow that trying to rush the woman on the couch would be a bad idea. She suddenly remembered Grandfather’s carrier pigeons. How they sometimes landed on the roof of the coop and wouldn’t come all the way in, so that their recorded flight time would be minutes slower than it might have been.

“No use trying to hurry things,” her grandfather would say. “Sit on the bench beside me, Sigita, they’ll come when they come.”

Grandfather had died in 1991, in the year of the Independence. Granny Julija didn’t care about the races. She sold the best pigeons to a neighbor and left the rest to their own devices until the roof blew off the coop during a winter storm five or six years later.

Sigita looked at Julija and forced herself to sit quietly, waiting.

“You mustn’t tell the police,” said Julija in the end. “Do you promise?”

Sigita promised. It still didn’t seem to be enough.

“He was so angry because we had called them. He said he had had to hurt Zita because we told, and that it was all our fault.” The hand that held the cup was trembling.

“I won’t say anything,” said Sigita.

“Promise.”

“Yes. I promise.”

Julija stared at her unremittingly. Then she suddenly put the coffee cup down. She raised her hands to the back of her neck and bent her head so that she could take off a necklace she was wearing. No. Not just a necklace. It was a crucifix, thought Sigita. A small golden Jesus on a black wooden cross; despite the miniscule size, the pain in the tiny face was evident.

“Do you believe in God?” asked Julija.

“Yes,” said Sigita, because this was not the time to mince the nuances of faith and doubt.

“Then swear on this. Touch it. And promise that you won’t go to the police with anything I tell you.”

Sigita carefully put her hand on the crucifix and repeated her promise. She wasn’t sure that this meant more to her than the assurances she had already given, but it seemed to ease Julija’s mind.

“He gave us an envelope. So that we could see what we had made him do, he said. Inside was one of her nails. An entire nail. I knew it was hers, because I had let her play with my nail polish the day before.” Julija’s voice shook. “He said that if we went to the police later on, he would take Zita again, and this time he would sell her to some men he knew. Men of the kind who enjoy having sex with little girls, he said.”

Sigita swallowed.

“But Julija,” she said. “If he is in prison, he can’t take Zita.”

Julija shook her head wildly.

“Do you think I can risk that? People don’t stay in jail forever. And besides, I know for a fact that he is not alone.”

Sigita thought it a miracle that Julija had come at all.

“I didn’t know he would do that,” whispered Julija, almost as if she could hear Sigita’s unspoken words. “I didn’t know he would take your child.”

“But you got Zita back,” said Sigita. “How did you do that?”

Julija was silent for so long that Sigita grew afraid she wouldn’t answer.

“I gave him you,” she whispered, in the end. “He wanted to know your name, and I told him.”

Sigita stared at Julija in utter bafflement.

“He wanted to know my
name
… ?”

“Yes. You see, we never register the girls. At the clinic, I mean. Their names aren’t recorded anywhere, because the parents—that is, the new parents—all get a birth certificate that makes it appear that the child is their own.”

A deep pain burned somewhere in Sigita’s abdomen. I was right, she thought blindly. This is God’s punishment. This is all my fault because I sold my firstborn child. There was a kind of black logic to it that had nothing to do with reason and the light of day.

“But why … what did he want with me?”

Julija shook her head. “It’s not really him. He is just the one who actually does things. It has to be the other one. The Dane.”

“What do you mean?”

“He came to the clinic some months ago. He wanted to know who you were, and he was willing to pay a fortune to find out, but Mrs. Jurkiene couldn’t tell him because nothing was written down. But he recognized me because I had been the one to hand over the baby, back then. Yours, that is. And he asked me if I didn’t remember something, anything, about who you were and where you came from. And of course I did remember, because you nearly died, and I looked after you for so many days. But I told him I didn’t.”

Julija was crying as she spoke, in a strange noiseless fashion, as if her eyes were merely watering.

“He didn’t want to believe me, and he kept offering me all this money if only I would tell him something. And all the while the other man stood there in the background with his arms across his chest, and it was so obvious that he was there to look after the Dane and all his money. You know, like a bodyguard. I didn’t understand why he wanted to find you after so many years. And in the end, he went away, and I thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.”

“The Dane.” Sigita tried to bring her wildly straying thoughts into some sort of order. “Was he the one who… .”

“Yes. He was the one who got your child. The first one, that is.” Julija looked at her with bright, dark eyes. “We thought we were doing a good thing, you understand? For the girls, and for the babies. They were always rich people, because getting a child that way is very expensive. We thought they would be good to them and treat them like they were their own. Why else was it so important that no one should think they were adopted? And the women were always so very happy. They would cry and cry, and hug the babies tight. But with the Dane, it was just the man who picked up the baby, and I never saw the wife. I’ve thought about that afterwards.”

“You said you
thought
they would be good to them… . Don’t you think so anymore?”

“Yes. In most cases, anyway. But I’ve given the clinic my notice. I don’t want to work there anymore. It won’t be easy, because the salary was good, and Aleksas is a schoolteacher and doesn’t make very much. But I don’t want to work there anymore.”

“But I don’t understand. Was it the Dane who took Zita?”

“Not directly. It was that bodyguard. I don’t know his name. And it was more than a month later, when I had almost forgotten about the Dane. But the bodyguard didn’t believe I couldn’t remember about you. And he had Zita. So I told him your name was Sigita, but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know your last name, too, and where you lived. I didn’t know anything about that. That was too bad for Zita, he said, because she really, really wanted to come home to her mama again. So in the end, I searched the files until I found it. The receipt for your money. It wasn’t your name on it, it was your auntie’s. But it must have been enough, because he let Zita come home.”

Ass. herbs for the production of natural remedies: 14.426 litai
.

Oh yes, Sigita remembered the receipt. But she couldn’t make head or tails of the rest.

“If you do as they say,” said Julija, “don’t you think they’ll let you have your little boy back? Like Zita?”

“But I don’t know what they want me to do,” wailed Sigita desperately. “They’ve told me nothing!”

“Maybe something has gone wrong,” said Julija. “Maybe the bodyguard can’t get hold of the Dane, or something.”

Sigita just shook her head. “It still makes no sense.” Then she suddenly raised her head. “You said you don’t register the girls. But what about the people who get the babies—does it say anything about them?”