Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (13 page)

“Feel free to.…”

Søren impassively watched Khalid.

“I mean, if you want to smoke.…”

Khalid tried his host’s smile one last time, but it stiffened before it made it all the way up to his eyes, and instead he lit his cigarette with an uneasy glance toward the door. As if he were considering his escape options.

This was all good.

Søren took a deep breath and calmly leaned in further over the table.

“We need your computer, Khalid. And our tech people are having a little trouble understanding your explanation as to why we can’t see it. So I’d just like to hear it one more time.”

“I didn’t give them any explanation. It’s my computer. That’s why.”

Khalid stuck his chin out in defiance and stared at Søren. A bright lad, Søren guessed. It wasn’t so much what he had said so far, but Søren thought he could see it in his eyes, in the effortless way he had moved, and the reasonably civilized behavior he was exhibiting in the circumstances. That kind of thing required self-control and a certain mental capacity.

“Are you a Muslim, Khalid?”

“What business is that of yours?”

Søren gave a smile of acquiescence.

“I just want to know a little more about you. It’s a straightforward question.”

Khalid blew a narrow column of smoke out of his nose and for the first time turned to look directly into Søren’s eyes with every indication of contempt.

“Look at me, man. What do you think?” Khalid challenged.

“Practicing?”

Khalid shrugged, fell back in the booth, and inhaled another batch of smoke into his lungs.

“Is that what this is about? Religion? Do you think I’m a fucking terrorist or something?” His shoulders sank a bit, and he smiled sardonically as he held his hands out to Søren. “Hey, I love all Danes, man. I love Denmark. I’m totally harmless. Me tame Muslim.”

He said that last line coldly, with a sneer and an exaggerated accent. He was more indignant than insecure right now, and Søren wasn’t sure how to interpret that. If Khalid was up to something dangerous, shouldn’t he be feeling scared?

Khalid turned restlessly in his seat, eyeing him expectantly with a mix of contempt and physical discomfort.

“You can’t look at my computer, because you guys are fucking racists. I don’t give a damn what you’re looking for. You’re coming after me because you think I’m a towelhead. Don’t you think I know how it works? There were other people at school that night. But you pick on me because I’m Arab.” Khalid’s voice cracked several times from anger. “I’ve heard about all the crap you people get up to with the CIA. Sending innocent people to torture prisons in Egypt and wherever.”

Søren shook his head slowly.

“We just want to talk to you about what you were doing on those arms sites you visited. Maybe you were just window shopping for a nice piece to put under your pillow. We’re the PET. We don’t care about trifles like that. If you have a good explanation, I just want to hear it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Khalid got up, stumbled a little over his black backpack before he pulled it out from under the table, and started edging his way out from behind the table. Søren could feel his control of the conversation slipping through his fingers.

“Khalid!” Søren calmly placed a firm hand on the young man’s shoulder. “A little more cooperation would be a smart move right now. For your own sake as well as ours.”

Khalid stopped and directed a furious, icy look at Søren.

“Leave me alone. You can’t have it.”

Søren slowly removed his phone from his pocket and browsed through
the menus. There it was. A text message from Christian, sent just ten minutes ago.

“We picked up your computer as soon as you left the apartment. Your mother even invited my colleagues in for tea while they took a look at your room.”

Khalid stood there, swaying in the wind like a tree in a storm.

“What do you mean? It’s my computer. You can’t just take it. It’s mine. I’m studying for an exam.…”

Søren stepped past him and started to leave.

“You’ll be hearing from us as soon as we’ve looked at it. It may take a little while.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. Khalid stood frozen with one hand on the flimsy café table, as if he needed support. His black backpack hung heavy and motionless from his other hand.

O
UTSIDE IN THE
twilit street, Søren dialed a familiar number as an elevated train thundered by overhead. His first impression of Khalid was mixed. The boy could scream and shout all he wanted about racism and rights violations, but that didn’t change the fact that he was hiding something. Søren had no doubt about that.

“Yes?”

Christian sounded grumpy and rushed on the other end of the line. From the background noise, Søren guessed he was still stuck in traffic somewhere on his way back to base.

“Did you get what you needed?”

“Yes, frightened mother, angry father, cute kids, and one laptop that at least looks like the one on the security footage. Everything went as expected.”

“Check it out as soon as possible,” Søren said. He glanced around before unlocking his car and slipping into the driver’s seat, an old paranoid habit from his own days of working in the surveillance service.

“Yeah, get in line.” Christian’s grumpiness was uncharacteristic, but it was after all almost 9:30 at night, and he had two young children at home. Søren recalled seeing the family photos in Christian’s ground-floor office.

“Just one more thing, Christian, then I’ll let you go for the day. Khalid. You put a trace on that mobile of his, right? I want to see who he talks to tonight.”

HEY RELEASED SÁNDOR
four hours before his exam. He stood on Falk Miksa Street in the morning sun, outside the vast concrete beehive that was the headquarters of the NBH, and it felt like the sidewalk was swaying beneath his feet. He had been wearing the same clothes for almost three days, and he knew he reeked. People in suits and business attire rushed past him, skirting around the first meandering tourists with skill and irritation. The antique stores were just opening up. Traffic slid by, shrouded in a cloud of gas fumes.

He was an island in the middle of this stream of everyday activity and normality. No, not an island, an island was big and solid. He was just a foreign body, neither a Hungarian nor a tourist. A filthy Gypsy still stinking of the sweat of the interrogation room.

Pull yourself together, he told himself. But there wasn’t much conviction to his internal voice.

He took the streetcar home. It was faster than a cab, despite the distance he had to go on foot on his wobbly rubber legs, but that wasn’t why. He would have gladly sacrificed the extra minutes and also the money if he had believed he could sit in peace in the air-conditioned back seat and be treated like a human being. A paying customer, a member of society.

He didn’t run into anyone he knew on Szigony Street. Even the bathroom was empty, and he stood there under the warm, yellowish stream of water for almost half an hour. The foam formed fleeting, white coral shapes around his feet. He lathered himself up again and rinsed, lathered and rinsed, and finally the drain couldn’t handle any more. He had to turn the water off to avoid flooding the floor.

He shaved meticulously and splashed two handfuls of aftershave lotion onto his cheeks, chin, and neck. The alcohol stung as if the bottom half
of his face were one big scrape, but that didn’t matter. Then the deodorant. He lingered in front of the mirror and suddenly thought the crop of thick, black hair in his armpits and on his chest looked offensively beastlike. He quickly slathered himself with shaving cream and attacked it with the razor, clearing pale swaths through the thicket of hair, first one way, then the other, until there was only a shadowy stubble left. He cut himself twice, small stinging nicks because he was being too fast and too vigorous, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t want to look like an animal, not even under his shirt.

Then he got dressed. The suit he had worn to the baptism, a bright white shirt, a tie, black socks and shoes—despite the heat. He slicked his hair back with the expensive gel he used only rarely and looked in the mirror one more time.

You don’t even look like a Gypsy
, Lujza had said. But he didn’t look like an average Hungarian, either. He looked like what he was—a mixture. Right now, his suit most of all ressembled a costume.

He thought about Tamás and the defiant confidence he radiated, from the pointy tips of his boots to his long, black hair. I don’t even have that, he thought. Not even that.

There was a slip of paper on his desk.
CALL
, Lujza had written in big, desperate capitals. There were also more than twenty unanswered calls on his phone, but he wasn’t up to that right now. Did she know they had released him? Otherwise she was probably on her way to the prosecutor’s office with a loaded paint gun, or at least a letter of protest and a mass of signatures she had collected.

All that would have to wait, he decided. The most important thing now was passing his exam.

T
HERE WAS A
pervasive smell of cheroots in the high-ceilinged office. Legal texts and books in tall mahogany bookcases, the heavy green velvet curtains, the moss-green carpet, everything was impregnated with cheroot nicotine. The professor was smoking with an arrogant disdain for the university’s no-smoking rules. The office was his and had been for twenty years; any claim that it was actually public property was meaningless.

In honor of the occasion, there were a couple of folding tables and chairs for the students who were preparing for their oral presentation. The flimsy steel and plastic constructions looked completely out of place
in the midst of all the sturdy mahogany, and none of the three examination victims looked like they felt particularly welcome either.

“Sándor Horváth.”

Sándor gathered his notes and got up from his own plastic chair. There was no chair for the candidate being examined. He or she stood on the floor in front of the professor’s desk, armed solely with the handful of sweaty notes compiled during the preparation period. Mihály had once said that he imagined himself pleading a case in a courtroom when he took his exam. That made standing up feel different—it was a way of gaining authority and rhetorical power, instead of a constant reminder that you were worth less than the examining professor. Sándor tried to employ this pleasant concept, but without much success.

Professor Lorincz regarded him with hostile eyes, Sándor thought. They hadn’t had much to do with each other before. Sándor was one out of maybe 150 students who had attended a series of lectures, that was all. Lorincz was about fifty, a skinny man with long hands, long fingers, and slicked-back, medium-brown hair that was almost as Hugh Grant-like as Ferenc’s, albeit a version more advanced in graying. He had a habit of holding his slender Spanish cheroot between the little finger and the ring finger of his left hand, which was apparent from the discolored condition of his skin. He was good, but intellectually arrogant, and students who faced him ignorant and unprepared received no mercy.

But you are neither, Sándor reassured himself. What was it Ferenc had called him? The best-prepared student in the history of the law school?

“Say what you have to say.”

The order was short and sudden. No greeting, no pleasantries, not even a question. Sándor was thrown completely off balance. Say what he had to say? Of the two oral exams he had witnessed while he was preparing for his own, he had gotten the impression that Lorincz style was more of a cross examination.

A vaguely condescending grimace slid over the professor’s face, as if silence was what he had expected. He raised his fountain pen and made a note on the yellow pad that lay in front of him. Sándor had the sickening sense that this was hopeless, that nothing he could say or do would alter the professor’s verdict.

The man raised an eyebrow.

A tiny, defiant spark of rage ignited somewhere within Sándor. He had
worked for this. And he knew he could do it. Or, at least some of the time he knew that, when he wasn’t allowing himself to be reduced into a speechless, nervous wreck just because a man behind a desk looked at him with disdain.

He took a nervous, gasping breath and ventured into an explanation of supranational legal theory. His account was concise, well-structured, and laid out in order of priority. He put treaty law over common law, debated peremptory norms with himself, put forward hypotheses and arguments, drew conclusions. He talked and talked, and the professor didn’t interrupt him even once. He spoke for so long that he lost his sense of time, but eventually he sensed a certain restlessness among his fellow students seated behind him. Was there anything else to add? Not without moving off-topic, he decided. He repeated a couple of his main points by way of a summary, and then fell silent. Relief had already begun to spread through his body, and he was not without admiration for the arrogant, old academic behind the desk. With his seeming indifference, he had forced Sándor to give an independent presentation at a very advanced level, instead of steering him around the circus ring with questions. Sándor’s performance had been better for it, he conceded. But dear God, it had been uncomfortable in the beginning.