Death of a Nightingale (28 page)

During the night Mother finally stopped screaming, which was both a relief and a source of new fear, because what if she died of sorrow? Olga knew it was possible, because her own soul felt like it was twisting inside her and attempting to escape her body. Olga had heard that there was no greater sorrow than the one a mother feels when her child dies. And Mother had lost two children at once, and maybe that was more than heart and lungs and intestines and all the other things inside the body could endure.

Olga curled up, listening for Mother’s breath in the darkness. She finally caught the sound, the kind of small, hiccupping gasps that small children sometimes made when they had cried deeply and for a long time. It was impossible to tell if Mother was sleeping or if she was awake. But at least she wasn’t dead. Not yet.

Oxana would never sing again, and Kolja was done playing family and fighting great battles for the Red Army. Now he lay dead in the headquarters of the GPU. Olga suddenly wondered if all the lice on his head would follow him into the ground. The thought nauseated her, but she couldn’t stop herself. Pictures kept popping into her mind, pictures of Kolja with his throat cut and lice that crawled slowly across his cold, pale scalp; of Oxana’s sparklingly happy blue
eyes that day when she had learned that she would sing at the Pioneer meeting in Kharkiv.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Oxana,” Olga whispered into the mattress. “I told you not to go.”

In a few quick frames of the footage, Rina slid down from the couch and under the coffee table. It took less than six seconds. Another camera had caught her at the garage and a ways down the sidewalk, a sequence of twenty-one seconds. Both recordings were almost two hours old.

“She’s alone,” said the Cud-Chewer and searched on among the not-an-iPad’s stored pictures. “It’s not a kidnapping.”

“I thought you were watching her,” said Nina. “I thought you were fucking professionals. What good is all that equipment if you can’t even keep track of one little girl? She’s eight, damn it!”

“The camera is set so that it registers ordinary movement in the room. I wasn’t expecting her to worm her way across the floor!”

“Did she see you place the camera?”

The Cud-Chewer was practically chewing his jaw off its hinges. “Maybe,” he admitted. “I thought she was asleep.”

“Why exactly is it that people think she is deaf, blind and dumb just because she doesn’t say very much?” Nina snarled.

Mikael Nielsen didn’t answer. He was making a call, presumably to his boss.

The trick of placing a couch pillow under the comforter so that it looked as if there were still a sleeping girl there—Rina might have picked that up from countless television films. The ruse with the
stuffed socks was all her own—it had probably been easier for her than to make than something that looked like a head.

Nina stared blindly out the window at the snowflakes that glittered whitely in the light from the streetlamp. It was freezing out there. Pitch dark. And Rina was alone.

Mikael handed her the telephone. “He wants to speak with you.”

She took the phone silently.

“You know Rina,” said Søren. His voice sounded calm, almost as if the world hadn’t exploded around them. “Where would she go? Where would she think of going?”

Nina thought desperately. “The Coal-House Camp, maybe. One of the policemen out there was kind enough to point out that it was where her mother would look for her first.”

“Okay. How would she get out there? Does she know how to take the bus?”

“Maybe. She doesn’t know her way around the city as such, but she knows the right bus number.”

“Would she talk to strangers? Ask for help?”

“I don’t think so. You’ve met her. She barely speaks to people she’s known for years.”

“Other places?”

Nina tried to imagine Rina’s mental map of Denmark. Where had she actually been? Not a whole lot of places other than the camp.

“Vestre Prison. We visited her mother there. But she knows Natasha isn’t there anymore. Michael Vestergaard’s house, of course. Hørsholm. It’s close to Hørsholm.”

“I know. Other places?”

“Not a lot. Tivoli, that kind of place. The National Aquarium. I think they once did a project about fish with the Coal-House children. I don’t know!”

“That’s fine. That’s a good start.” She could hear the professional,
calming tone she herself had often used. Praise made people relax—and it worked on her too, even though she knew perfectly well why she was being praised.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“We’ll check the places you have given us, and the routes there, focusing primarily on the camp and Hørsholm. We’ll send people out to look in nearby areas too—garden sheds, tree houses, that kind of thing. Does she have any money?”

“I think so. They get an allowance. Natasha has sent her a little as well, and she doesn’t really use it.”

“And she doesn’t have a cell phone other than the old broken one?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Søren.”

“Yes?”

“She used your telephone.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, the one in the living room. I thought she was just dialing randomly; she said the old one didn’t work anymore. The policeman had said it was broken. I don’t know if it was you or … or your colleague she meant.”

“Okay.”

“I thought she just wanted to speak with her father, but what if that wasn’t what it was? What if she called someone? In real life, I mean.”

“Let me talk to Nielsen,” he said, and she handed the telephone back to the Cud-Chewer.

Nina zipped up her jacket. Luckily, she could open and close it with her left hand.

“Hello—where are you going?” asked the Cud-Chewer.

“I’m going to look for her in the neighborhood,” she said through clenched teeth. “She may not have been able to get very far.”

“Wait.” Magnus had followed her. “Wait a second, Nina. We can’t just run around randomly.”

“It’s urgent,” she said.

“Yes, but we need to be a bit systematic. You go this way”—he pointed toward Kløverprisvej—“and I’ll go this way. We’ll meet again at the corner in half an hour.”

Nina nodded, desperate to get started. Rina had run away before; they had done this before. And we found her then, she told herself. We will this time too!

She had spoken to two neighbors and looked in three garages when the realization hit her.
You have reached Anna and Hans Henrik Olesen. We can’t come to the phone now
 … Because of the male voice she hadn’t put two and two together. But the wife’s name was Anna. Like Neighbor Anna. The Anna she had met, the Anna who had taken such loving care of Rina the night Natasha had decided to try to kill her fiancé.

“Olesen, that’s what she was called,” she said aloud to herself.

On the other side of the street, going in the direction of Hvidovrevej and Damhusdalen, was a taxi. The green
FREE
sign shone like a signal in the dusky gloom, and before she had time to think, she had leaped into the road with one arm in the air.

Sometimes when you have to do a really hard thing, you can’t let yourself think. No looking down and discovering how deep the drop is beneath your feet, and no looking ahead either. You balance on a wire, and it can be ten or a hundred meters long. It doesn’t matter, because you can’t run anyway, and you can’t jump the last bit to make it across the abyss. You can’t cheat. All you can do is place one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.

Natasha was kneeling in the snow between the dense bushes, gazing out at the parking lot. The afternoon darkness had turned the snow grey. The sky above her was dark blue with faint, glowing streaks of light in the west, and she could feel the temperature dropping in the air around her, burning her fingers and toes.

She hadn’t made a real plan. She knew it, but the simplicity of her idea still gave her a kind of solace, because she only needed two minutes. Maybe less.

One hand rested lightly on the tire iron from the car’s trunk. It was heavy enough. More than heavy enough, she thought. And the wait would soon be over.

A group of half-grown boys crossed the farthest end of the parking lot. They ducked in turns, shoveling little piles of frosty snow together with clumsy mittens and throwing loose handfuls of it at one another in fun. The snow was probably too powdery for real
snowballs. The sound of their shouting and laughter cut through the clear air, but besides that there was no sound except the faint rush of cars on the distant main road. Kastrup Fort, with its old fortifications and dungeons, lay deserted and empty in the winter dusk.

She knew the place from her time with Michael. He liked to bring them here when the weather was good, her and Katerina. There was a playground at the bottom of the grounds and a few beat-up, green-painted toilets with lots of graffiti. A bit higher up lay the restaurant with the large green clover lawn and the view over the ramparts, where weeds grew dense and wide-leaved in the summer and smelled sharp and sweet at the same time.

Michael and Katerina had played hide-and-seek on the steep stairs and labyrinthine paths that wound through the thicket of whitethorn and bramble on their way to the top of the fort. Once there had been lookouts here, soldiers and cannons. Now only bare cement circles were left. Natasha knew that it would be a good place to meet your enemies, exactly as it had been in the past. There were only two real bridges over the moat, but today that didn’t matter, because the moat was frozen and covered with snow, so she could theoretically disappear in any direction. Theoretically. Whether she got away or not was of little importance. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.

T
HE CAR ROLLED
into the parking lot ten minutes before the agreed-upon time. Natasha recognized it from the woods behind the Coal-House Camp, long and black and shiny, like a hearse. The license plates were no longer Ukrainian but Danish, she noticed. The Witch might be a queen in Kiev, but here in Bacon Land, her power was reduced, and she had to hide like the freak that she really was. Natasha felt a fleeting sense of cold triumph as she crouched even lower behind the cover of the bushes. She hoped that her
tracks in the snow wouldn’t be too visible in the dusk and that the man and woman in the car would not be too on their guard.

A broad, slightly hunched figure got out and remained standing for a long moment with his hands on the car roof, looking around. She knew exactly what he could see because she had paced the parking lot herself several times: On one side, naked trees and dense shrubbery sloping down to a snow-covered moat. On the other, the old dungeon which Michael had said once held ammunition for the fort’s four cannons. The stairs up to the meeting place she had suggested were narrow and icy, and as the man took the first step, he slipped and had to grip the steel railing in order not to fall.

He returned to the car and opened the door for the woman in the backseat. It was too far for Natasha to see anything but a shadow moving behind the man’s back and a glimpse of a pale, upturned face. He said something, and Natasha knew what it was. Or at least she thought she did.

“You can’t come up there with me. The stairs are slippery, and you’re old. I will go up to the top and meet her alone.”

That was about what he said, because that was how she had planned it. The old woman would probably resist. She wanted to come, thought Natasha, because what she wanted from Natasha meant so much to her that she had dragged her old, rotting body all the way up here through half of Europe.

Natasha held her breath while the man bent down to the old woman. Gestured. Eventually, it seemed, the old lady accepted. She moved farther into the backseat with her hands pulled up to her fur collar to shield herself from the cold. The interior light hit the sharp features of her powdered face for a second. Then the man slammed the door, and the old woman became nothing more than a dark profile behind the car window.

The man looked at his watch. It was hard to determine his age at this distance, but he wasn’t young, thought Natasha. It was the heft that she noticed, the width in his body that didn’t belong to a young
man. Nonetheless, he moved up the stairs with surprising speed. She would not have long to enact her plan, most likely not more than a few minutes. That would have to be enough.

When Natasha could no longer see him because of the thicket of thorn bushes, she carefully counted to thirty. He should be approaching the meeting place. He wouldn’t turn around at once, he would think that she was on her way, that she would appear from the sheltering bushes up there any moment.

It was quiet around her now, and she closed her hand more tightly on the tire iron. It felt heavy and cold and right.

One foot in front of the other.

Springing to her feet, she sprinted across the parking lot. The distance to the car seemed to stretch elastically, and twice she almost stumbled on the packed ice under the new snow, but she stayed on her feet and tried to increase her speed. She ran with the tire iron hanging like a dead weight in her right hand. Not until she reached the car did she raise it and hit the car window with full force. A hard, flat thump resounded in the silence, and her fingers lost sensation from the blow. Still, there wasn’t much to see other than a long, thin crack that ran across the side window. The Witch’s face had turned toward her. The eyes were narrow black slits, the lips pulled back in a grimace that revealed long, crumbling teeth. Natasha imagined how thin the skull would feel under the soft fur hat and the thin, downy hair. What it would sound like on impact. Like a nut being cracked inside a fur bag.

She raised the tire iron again, and this time she used both hands to follow through. There was another odd, dead thump, and the pain in her hands raced all the way up to her wrists. The face behind the window was now partially obscured by a white cloud in the glass. But the window remained intact, and the woman in there stared directly at her, as if Natasha were an interesting natural phenomenon of the kind you can go to see in a safari park.