The Boy in the Suitcase (24 page)

She felt too much, and she knew it. Especially where the children were concerned, her skin felt tender and brittle, like the thin, pink, parchment-like new growth that spread to cover healing wounds. It had been bad after Ida’s birth, but when Anton arrived, her sensitivity to the children of the Coal-House Camp had taken on monstrous proportions. It was her imagination, of course, but sometimes it felt as if their gazes clung to her, spotting her vulnerablity, tearing through her pitiful defenses and into her soul.

Unaccompanied children would usually be older than the boy from the suitcase, thought Nina, from about ten years of age and up. Often, the staff would have time to form only the most fleeting of impressions. Some of them, particularly the Eastern European ones, had been sold by their parents and trained by backers to beg and steal, and they were instructed to escape the refugee centers at the first opportunity if they were picked up on the streets. The moment their mobiles rang, they were off on the next suburban train, disappearing back into the metropolitan underworld they had come from. Other children might continue on to Sweden or England, where relatives awaited. Still others were obviously alone in the world, brought to Denmark for the sole purpose of making money for their owners. All in all, more than seventy percent would disappear from the camps without anyone ever really knowing what became of them.

But the suitcase boy was surely too young to be of use to even the most cynical gang of thieves. Might he be some kind of hostage? Or was he meant to be part of a social security scam? That had happened before, particularly in the UK, she had heard.

He was beautiful, thought Nina suddenly. She didn’t know how much that meant among pedophiles, but somehow it made him seem more vulnerable. It was all too easy to imagine that some pervert bastard somewhere had ordered a small European boy for a night’s pleasure. Or several nights. She looked at the boy standing in front of her with his T-shirt back to front and the new sandals carefully strapped to his small, narrow feet, and the thought of him sharing a bed with some unknown adult man was sickening and utterly unbearable.

Nina forced herself to smile at him.

Where would he end up if she delivered him to the police? Some orphanage in Lithuania? Or perhaps with a relative who would merely sell him again to the highest bidder? Perhaps with a crewcut, bear-shouldered stepfather, whose huge hands had beaten Karin to death? Nina felt a shudder deep in her abdomen. She had to know more. She had to know.

She pushed open the changing-room door and took the boy’s hand in a firm grip. She must find them some breakfast, and then work out which church might be the one the girl from Helgolandsgade had meant when she talked about the Sacred Heart.

T
HE ADDRESS WAS
in Denmark. Naturally. Sigita didn’t know why she had assumed that the Dane lived in Lithuania. She stared down at the carefully penned block capitals and wondered what to do.

Gužas had called half an hour before Julija did. He wanted to know whether she had changed her mind about the TV appeal, and whether there had been any attempt at contact from the abductors. She had told him no. And she had said nothing about Julija and the Dane.

I’ll have to go to Denmark, she thought. I have to find that man and ask him what I must do to get Mikas back.

But a sickening little thought kept worming its way into her mind. What if there was nothing he wanted her to do? What if he already had what he wanted, and didn’t give a damn about her?

He collects my children, she thought, with a chill of horror. Now he has two.

The other child had come into her dreams during the few hours when sleep had finally claimed her. It had come out of the darkness, large as an adult, but with the face of a fetus, blind and hairless, and a naked, sexless body. It held out its arms to her and opened a toothless, unfinished mouth.

“Mama… ,” it whispered. “Mammaaaaaaah… .” And she drew back from it in horror. But suddenly she saw that it was holding something in its arms. Mikas. The long bluish limbs glistened wetly with embryonic fluid, and Mikas struggled in its grasp like a fish in the tentacles of a sea anemone.

“Mikas!” she screamed, but the fetus child was already distant. It retreated further and further into the dark, taking Mikas with it.

She woke up with her nightgown twisted about her, sticking damply like an extra layer of skin.

Sigita called the airport. There was a flight leaving for Copenhagen at 1:20, and a single ticket would cost her 840 litu. Sigita tried to recall the state of her bank balance. There would be enough for the ticket, just, but what about the rest? It would be difficult to manage in a foreign country with little or no money. And everything cost more abroad, or so she had heard.

Might Algirdas give her an advance on her salary?

Perhaps. But not without asking questions. Sigita bit her lip. I have to go, she thought. With or without money. Unless I call Gužas now and leave it all to him. And if I do that, they may harm Zita. She thought about the small, shattered family, of Zita’s clawlike hands on the piano keys, and Julija’s terror and despair. She couldn’t do anything to make it worse. She mustn’t. And it might not be just Zita, either. It could be Mikas too. She couldn’t stop thinking about the torn-off nail Julija had received in an envelope. And that was nothing.
Nothing
compared to what people like that were really capable of.

1:20. It would be hours before she could leave for the airport.

She decided to visit her Aunt Jolita for the first time in eight years.

BANG, BANG, BANG
, bang. The big yellow pile driver was pounding the foundations of the new building into the earth with resounding thumps, and a little further off, a huge crane was raising yet another prefabricated concrete element into its place. It appeared that someone had decided that there was room for a new apartment building on the green square of grass framed by the old gray and white Soviet-era blocks. Dust and diesel fumes permeated the air, and the pavement was being ground into the mud under the weight of caterpillar vehicles. Sigita felt a pang of pity for the original inhabitants. Pašilaičiai, where she lived, had barely existed ten years ago, and she often felt it was not so much a neighborhood as a constant building site. Only recently had such luxuries as streetlights and sidewalks been reestablished after the latest round of construction mayhem.

Once she was through the door, the appalling noise receded a little. She walked slowly up the stairs to the third floor and rang the bell.

A thin, gray-haired woman answered. It actually took a few moments before Sigita recognized her aunt. Jolita stared at her for several seconds, too.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I need to ask you some questions.”

“Ask away.”

“Can’t we do this inside?”

Jolita considered it for a moment. Then she stepped aside, letting Sigita into the narrow hallway.

“But be quiet,” she said. “I have a tenant who is a bartender. He works until four or five in the morning, and he gets furious if you wake him up before noon.”

The bartender lived in what used to be the sitting room, it turned out. Jolita preceded her into the small, elongated kitchen instead. At the tiny table, an elderly woman was seated, having coffee. A further two unused cups were set on the table in constant readiness, upturned on their saucers to protect them from dust and flies, just like Sigita’s mother always did. The aroma of percolating coffee rose from a brand-new coffee machine, still sitting next to the box it had come in. On the table, too, were a bottle of sherry and a platter full of marzipan-covered cupcakes.

“This is Mrs. Orlovienė,” said Jolita. “Greta, this is my niece, Sigita.”

Mrs. Orlovienė nodded, with a certain degree of reserve.

“Mrs. Orlovienė rents the back bedroom,” Jolita continued her introduction. “So you can’t just move back in, if that’s what you are thinking.”

“No,” said Sigita, somewhat taken aback. “That’s not why I’m here.” Whatever had happened to the Aunt Jolita she remembered? The coal-black hair, the colorful makeup, the jazz music and the professor’s cigarettes? About the only remnant of that Jolita were the golden pirate-style hoops that still dangled against her wrinkled neck. They now looked absurd rather than exotic. How on earth could a person age so much in eight years? It was frightening.

“Perhaps you’ve come to apologize, then?” suggested Jolita.

“
What?
”

“Oh well, I was just thinking. It wasn’t completely inconceivable that you should finally feel a little guilty about the way you have spat in the face of a family that only ever tried to love you and help you.”

Sigita was so stunned that at first she couldn’t even defend herself.

“You … you … I… .” she sputtered. “I never spat in anyone’s face!”

“Eight years without a single word—if that’s not spitting, what is?”

“But… .”

“At first I felt sorry for you. In trouble like that, at such a young age. I wanted to help you. But you did to me exactly what you did to your parents. Disappearing like that, without ever looking back, without so much as a thank-you.”

Sigita stood there with her mouth open. She suddenly noticed how bright-eyed the little Mrs. Orlovienė had become, watching the drama with parted lips as if it were a soap opera.

“Your Granny Julija died, did you know that?” said Jolita.

“Yes,” Sigita managed. “Mama … Mama sent a letter.” Two weeks after the funeral. That had hurt, badly, but she had no intention of letting her aunt know that.

“Coffee?” offered Mrs. Orlovienė, holding out one of the unused cups. “Is it broken?” She nodded at the plaster cast.

“Yes,” said Sigita automatically. “And no, thanks. Jolita, did someone come here asking about me?”

“Yes,” said Jolita without blinking. “There was a man here, some weeks ago. He wanted to know your last name, and where you lived.”

“And what did you do?”

“I told him,” said Jolita calmly. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“He was quite polite,” nodded Mrs. Orlovienė. “Not entirely what I would call a nice young man, but quite polite.”

“What did he look like?” asked Sigita, although she was fairly certain she already knew.

“Big,” said Mrs. Orlovienė. “Like one of those—what are they called now?” She raised both skinny arms to mime a bodybuilder pose. “And hardly any hair. But quite polite.”

At long last, Sigita’s thoughts began to line up in an orderly fashion instead of tumbling over each other in random chaos. She knew that Aunt Jolita would never have taken in tenants unless she had been forced to. There was obviously no longer any Professor on Mondays and Thursdays. Probably no job, either. And yet here were sherry and cakes and a brand new percolator.

“Did he give you money?” she asked Jolita.

“Is that any of your business?”

That meant yes. Sigita spun and seized the old coffee tin Jolita usually kept noodles in. Noodles, and certain other things.

“Sigita!” Jolita tried to prevent her, but Sigita had moved too quickly. She hugged the tin against her chest with the plaster cast and wrested the lid off with her right hand. When Jolita tried to tear the tin away from her, it clattered to the floor, sending little macaroni stars shooting off in all directions across the worn linoleum. Sigita instantly put her foot down on top of the brown envelope that had also been in the tin.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she screamed, suddenly beside herself with fury.

“Shhhh!” hissed Jolita. “You’ll wake him.”

“A complete stranger wants to give you money to tell him where I am. He looks like a gorilla. What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you realize that he has taken Mikas?”

“That’s hardly my fault!”

“You made it easy.” Sigita’s voice was shaking. “You sold me. Without even warning me. And then they took Mikas!”

Mrs. Orlovienė sat with her mouth open, on the point of dropping her coffee cup. At that moment, the door flew back on its hinges. In the doorway stood a young man, dressed only in black boxers and a foul temper. His hair had been dyed blue and stuck out in odd directions, still coated with several layers of gummy styling gel.

“Stop that fucking racket,” he snarled. The two older women were instantly silenced. Mrs. Orlovienė slid a little lower in her chair, as if being smaller would help. Jolita stood her ground, but her hands had begun the nervous rubbing movement Sigita knew so well. The young man transferred his furious glare to Sigita.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

“This is my niece,” said Jolita. “She came for a visit. But she’s leaving now.”

“I fucking hope so,” said the bartender. “Some of us are trying to sleep.”

He withdrew, slamming the door as he went. A few seconds later, the living room door was slammed with even greater force. The walls trembled slightly.

Sigita bent to retrieve the envelope. It contained eight five-hundred-litu bills and a few lesser bills Sigita couldn’t be bothered to count.

“Four thousand litu,” she said. “Was that the price?”

“No,” said Mrs. Orlovienė. “At first he only wanted to pay three thousand, but in the end he agreed to five.”

Jolita made a violent shushing gesture in Mrs. Orlovienė’s direction.

“I don’t quite see the reason for all this high-minded outrage,” she told Sigita. “If some idiot is willing to pay five thousand litu for something you can look up in the phone book, why should I turn down good money?”

“He didn’t know my last name till you told him” said Sigita, fishing three thousand litu from the envelope.

“What are you
doing
?”

“This is your contribution,” answered Sigita. “I need it in order to get Mikas back.” She let the envelope with the rest of the money fall to the floor. Mrs. Orlovienė was the one who snatched it up, ferret quick. Jolita remained where she was, staring at Sigita. Then she shook her head.

“You feel so put-upon, don’t you?” she said. “Poor little Sigita who has had such a hard life. But did you ever pause to think what it’s been like for your mother? You taking off like that, not even leaving a note? She lost a daughter. Did you ever think about that?”