Cage

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  They walked side by side up the slope, to where the moorland petered out and the undergrowth became so thick they had to go in single file. Gunnar went in front with the petrol can in his hand, Anton behind with the pack on his back. The birches were still leafless, but the buds were starting to show, indicating that before long the woodland would take on the green hue of spring. The air was too cold to carry any scent of the woods, but Anton still felt that he sensed an aroma of spring. It reminded him of his childhood, and an image appeared in his mind of his father by a lake with a fishing rod, and somewhere close at hand his mother sitting on a blanket with their picnic at her side. In between them ran a younger version of himself, small and happy. His mother hadn’t always hated his father. He had memories of them kissing, laughing, dancing cheek to cheek in the living room. But somewhere, at some time, something had gone wrong, and the suspicion that it was his fault gnawed at his conscience.

  ‘Right!’ Gunnar said, once they were over the ridge and into the valley, out of sight of the road. ‘What shall we start with?’

  Anton delicately removed the pack from his shoulders and looked around. This was a good place. There was stony ground on the slope, so there was no chance that they would set fire to any peat or heather. Not far away was a cliff face, and in front of it were a few respectable boulders behind which they could take shelter.

  ‘Let’s start with the Molotov cocktails,’ Anton said, knowing this would make Gunnar happy. He would be relieved to have the petrol out of the way so he could concentrate on the serious stuff without an overexcited Gunnar constantly prodding him.

  Anton pulled out the four vodka bottles he had taken from under the kitchen sink – his mother no longer bothered taking the empties down to the basement to the recycling box – and unscrewed the caps. He held the funnel and Gunnar poured the petrol. With the bottles filled, they stuffed rag strips into each one.

  ‘Ready?’ Gunnar asked, clicking the lighter in his hand.

  ‘Hold on!’ Anton said. ‘This is how we do it; you light one and throw it as far as you can, and we go behind those boulders up by the cliff. All right?’

  ‘OK,’ Gunnar agreed as he lit the first rag.

  Soaked in petrol, it burned fast.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Anton muttered, as he ran for the rocks. He hadn’t expected Gunnar to be in quite such a hurry.

  There was a clatter of breaking glass followed by the rush and roar of the petrol igniting. He just managed to throw himself behind the rock, a hand over his head. He was considerably more frightened than he had expected to be.

  ‘Woohoo!’ Gunnar whooped, performing a joyous war dance a few metres away. He hadn’t got behind a rock, but had turned to see the explosion. ‘It rained sand, man!’ he crowed. The grin on his face stretched from ear to ear. ‘Did you see that?’

  Anton had to admit that he hadn’t seen the explosion, so, to make amends for his own fear, he picked up the next bottle and took his lighter from his pocket.

  ‘We throw two at once,’ he said. ‘One, two, three!’

  They lit the rags and threw the bombs together. Anton had to call on all his willpower to stand and watch the explosion and not to run away. The bang was twice as loud this time, as the bottles smashed one after the other and dissolved into a firestorm, which subsided as a black cloud rose into the air. It was more impressive than he had imagined. He felt his face burn with shame as he thought how he had run as fast as his legs would carry him away from the first explosion. Gunnar, on the other hand, appeared to be in his element. He picked up the last bottle, lit it and hurled it.

  It had just gone off with a bang when an angry voice rasped behind them.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  There was a furious expression on the man’s face. Again Anton had the urge to run and hide.

  ‘We’re just messing about,’ he said apologetically, reaching for his backpack and shouldering it.

  ‘Get the hell out of here, you and your racket,’ the man growled. ‘We’re trying to enjoy our meal in peace and quiet.’

  He waved a hand towards the cliff face, where a whole group of people sat around a red blanket. Anton couldn’t understand how he had managed to miss them when he and Gunnar came down the slope. His only explanation was that they hadn’t been there then. But now he saw they were in the middle of their meal, and had even brought their best china with them. The blanket was as loaded with delicacies as the table at home was when his mother was in the mood for entertaining.

  The pack on Anton’s back shook as they jogged in silence further down the valley. Once they were out of sight of the group of people, they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘Shit! That was a surprise!’ Gunnar gasped. ‘I thought it was the cops at first.’

  Anton slipped the pack from his shoulders and dropped breathlessly to the ground.

  ‘Who has a picnic when it’s this cold,’ he puffed through his laughter.

  He felt a sense of relief. At first he had thought the man had to be a policeman, or a county sheriff or something, because he was wearing a coat with two rows of silver buttons and his voice was imperious, as if he owned the valley.

  ‘It looked like they were drinking out of little trophy cups,’ Gunnar laughed. ‘What a weirdo! This tourist boom just gets crazier all the time. They’re really taking the piss if they’re taking tourists out for that kind of weirdness.’

  ‘It must be some kind of a role-playing club,’ Anton said. ‘No tourists dress like that.’

  May 2017

  28

  ‘Please, let me out.’

  Sonja stood with the keys in her hand and looked at the man in the cage. The smell coming off him was so strong she could hardly breathe, but at least he was no longer shivering and sweating. He grasped the bars with both hands and wept. Sonja knew from experience that having spent days in there, he would have trouble standing upright when she finally released him. She had sometimes wondered whether she ought to replace the cage with one that was taller and more suitable for humans, but that would probably make imprisonment less effective. And anyway, everyone knew about the tiger that had once lived in the cage and what its role had been, which meant that it carried a certain notoriety, and evoked a certain fear.

  She drew the tablets from her trouser pocket and handed them to him.

  ‘Take these, Thorgeir. When they’ve started to work and you’ve calmed down, I’ll come and let you out,’ she said.

  He snatched the pills and gulped them down with a mouthful of water from the bottle at his side.

  ‘Please, don’t close it,’ he pleaded, his voice shrill, as she shut the door to the store room.

  She would give him thirty or forty minutes, and by then he would be in a decent enough state to take a shower and get dressed. This was a day too early, and she knew it, but she had to clear the house and have everything ready. Tomorrow Tómas would come home to the rambling mansion that had once belonged to Mr José and Nati, the Mexican drug kingpins who had each come to a violent end right here in the living room, before being fed piece by piece to the tiger that had been the cage’s previous occupant.

  She shivered with anticipation as she thought of Tómas, and immediately the knot of trepidation tightened in her belly. She still had to organise the trip home, and that was always a headache. The route couldn’t be too easy to anticipate, but neither could it be so long and complex that Tómas would become exasperated.

  ‘How is he?’ Alex asked as she appeared in the living room.

  ‘He’s past the cold-turkey stage,’ Sonja replied. ‘But he’ll still need to deal with all the mental stuff. He just cries and cries. He needs a little more time, really, but I have to get him out of here. It would be great if you could clean the cage before you go.’

  ‘OK, I’ll do that,’ Alex said.

  ‘Then there’s the journey home,’ she said. ‘I’ve planned a route for you – Switzerland via Amsterdam. There’ll
be a hire car waiting for you in Zürich to drive to the school.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘When you’ve picked Tómas up, drive to Lucerne and take a domestic flight back to Zürich, then come back here via Copenhagen.’

  Alex nodded. He knew better than to protest or grumble. He was aware that she could easily change the itinerary tomorrow, and again after that. To begin with he had complained about all this fuss, saying that these complex routes to bring Tómas home from school were unnecessary. He had tried to convince Sonja that his experience as a bodyguard was such that he would sense if they were being followed. But then, two years ago, he had saved her life by throwing himself between her and an armed killer sent by a competitor. This incident had convinced him that the dangers were real.

  29

  María jammed the water bottle between her thighs and unscrewed the cap. The car was hot, so the water was already warm. She was already regretting not having gone to a more reputable car-hire firm. She could have gone for a top-class 4×4, or even a basic car that had aircon, as Agla was covering everything, but somehow she had fallen back on her habit of keeping costs to a minimum, and found a small, cheap company. The car demonstrated why the rental was so low.

  She had driven round and round the vast warehouse, which seemed as big as a sports stadium, with a goods-in entrance on one side and a goods-out exit on the other. She had seen a few trucks disappear into the front of the building and reappear at the far end, so there had to be something going on, even though there were only eight cars in the staff car park, each one with a couple of empty spaces around it, as if the owners wanted to make the most of having more than enough room.

  Sitting in the car, María sent Agla a short email to say that the metal storage unit existed, and that it was a large building emblazoned with the Meteorite Metals logo, and not just the brass-plate company Agla had suggested. Then she drove into the empty car park marked VISITORS and pulled up, the hand brake squealing in protest as she yanked it hard to be sure the car wouldn’t roll away.

  When she got out, she found that the temperature was the same outside as it had been in the car, but now she could feel her skin burning in the sun’s glare. She had never been able to tolerate too much sunshine, unlike Maggi, who would happily spend days outside in the garden, becoming nicely tanned. She just burned red in the sun. She shook off thoughts of Maggi’s naked body, and pushed open the door marked OFFICE, coughing deliberately.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ the receptionist said in an amiable, almost musical voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

  She had a stately hairdo piled on top of her head, and for a moment María wanted to ask whether it was a wig or had the woman put a lot of effort into dyeing and curling real hair. Instead María introduced herself and showed her press card.

  The friendly smile instantly became a suspicious scowl.

  ‘I’ll call the manager,’ the woman said, picking up the phone and putting it to her ear without taking her eyes off María. She waited for a moment, then told the person on the other end of the line to send Donald down. ‘There’s a journalist here at reception,’ she said, although her tone of voice and the expression on her face suggested she was announcing that there was a rat down here with her.

  The Donald in question seemed to have much the same feeling; hardly a minute had passed before he burst through a side door into the reception area.

  ‘What do you want here?’ he said aggressively.

  This hostile reception took María by surprise, and she coughed again and began her speech, explaining that she was a journalist from Iceland and ran a small online news outlet.

  But Donald interrupted her before she’d finish her sentence.

  ‘We don’t talk to journalists here.’

  ‘I’m just looking for some background information about aluminium trading—’ she began, before Donald again firmly interrupted her.

  ‘You can leave now.’

  ‘I’d really like to talk to the manager of this company,’ she said.

  ‘Then you need to talk to Meteorite Metals International. We don’t talk to journalists here.’

  ‘And your name is, Donald … what?’

  ‘Call security,’ Donald snapped at the receptionist, placing his feet wide apart and folding his arms in a clear indication that he had nothing more to say.

  It was obvious that this was as far as she was going to get. María decided that this probably wasn’t the moment to ask if she could use the toilet. She’d just have to hold it in.

  ‘I can find my own way out,’ she said, just as two security guards appeared, each taking her by an arm and escorting her through the car park to her car.

  She got in stiffly, relieved to be out of their hands, and reversed out of the space. The two guards walked behind the car all the way to the gate, where they stopped and watched as she drove away.

  As soon as she was out of sight, María stopped by the side of the road and got out of the car, where she pulled down her jeans and pissed into the roadside dust. Her breaths were coming fast, and she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. The dramatic reaction to her arrival confirmed Agla’s suspicion that there was something strange about this metal storage unit. There was something very strange about the whole thing.

  30

  Elísa’s bank statements offered an insight into her life – the further Agla dug back into them, the clearer her mental picture of the young woman became. Now that she had access to her online banking details, having completed her tax return for her, Agla hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to check through her card transactions. What was clear was that Elísa was hooked on ice cream, and had seemed to buy some every evening, often after paying for a meal at some fast-food place.

  Looking at her, there was no indication that these were her preferred eating habits – endless pizzas, noodles, burgers and all kinds of junk food. Most evenings seemed to end at a cinema, where Agla guessed Elísa shovelled down sweets, as there were usually two or three transactions made at the snack bar.

  Then there was a long period with no transactions, followed by the single large payment she had made herself, and shortly after that a transfer to a woman called Katrín who, according to her personal ID, was twenty-five years old and whose legal residence was abroad. It seemed that whenever Elísa came into some money, she gave it to this woman. The same pattern had been repeated for more than two years, right up until Elísa had been jailed in Holland a few months previously.

  Agla thought over everything she’d discovered, and however much she tried not to let it prey on her mind, the question kept coming up: who was this Katrín and why did Elísa give her almost all her money? Surely she had to be a dealer.

  The warder appeared, ready to take her back to the kitchen for lunch.

  Elísa sat there, as usual telling the other women a story.

  ‘It all started when I got a loan,’ Agla heard her say as soon as she entered the kitchen.

  ‘All problems start that way,’ the bookkeeper said.

  Agla stopped herself from snorting in derision. She had found out all about the bookkeeper and knew she had embezzled money belonging to the shipping company she had worked for. It had started with a few small amounts, according to the court documents Agla had found online.

  ‘I knew that this guy was well dodgy,’ Elísa continued. ‘But I was completely skint. I didn’t know what to do, and they were about to throw me out of the room I was renting. I’d already been to the guy who’d paid me pretty well to fuck me before, but he’d found someone else. So I ended up hunting through garbage bins for bottles to sell so I could buy cat food – the cat was wailing, it was so hungry, you see. Then, when I’d scraped together enough for a tin, he just turned his nose up at it and walked away. That was when I lay down and cried.’

  ‘And?’

  To Agla’s ears it sounded as if both the bookkeeper and Vigdís demanded the answer at the same moment. They seemed captivated by Elísa’s tales
of woe.

  ‘Well, I met this guy at a party that evening and asked if he could lend me a hundred thousand krónur. He said “yeah, no problem”, and we went back to his place and he just got the money out of a drawer and handed it to me.’

  So back then she hadn’t yet figured out that nobody does anything for nothing? Agla thought, but said nothing.

  ‘And I was going to pay the rent and buy cat food and all that stuff, but the next day the money was all gone.’

  ‘How on earth did that happen?’ Agla heard herself say, surprised at her own reproachful tone of voice. She was standing at the worktop with the butter knife in her hand, staring at Elísa, who had a look of satisfaction on her face. Maybe she was just pleased that Agla had spoken to her for the first time in days.

  ‘Like you said,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘I’m a junkie. And junkies need junk.’

  Agla wanted to bite her own tongue. She had not meant to speak to Elísa or any of the others. Her plan had been to take her sandwich and cup of coffee to the common room to eat there, as she had made a habit of doing since that awkward evening when Elísa’s attitude had upset her so deeply.

  ‘Of course,’ she muttered, still surprised at her own sudden need to express her opinions on this young woman. It was as if an inner bitchiness had welled up, and before she knew it, she had spat out something she had had no intention of allowing to be heard.

  ‘All the same, it’s called alcoholism these days,’ Elísa said. ‘I’m an alcoholic. If I didn’t drink, then I wouldn’t do dope. I do dope simply so I can drink more.’

  Agla had to admit this was a tendency she was familiar with. In the past she had made a habit of snorting coke, just so she wouldn’t get too drunk. But her circumstances were very different to those of this slip of a girl.