The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

And sure enough, there was Marco. Curled up and inert.

  Carl lifted him up and carried him into the shed and found a blanket on which to lay him, while Assad and the other guy clattered around among all the scrap metal.

  Pulling up Marco’s sleeve, Carl ascertained that if there was a pulse at all, it was terribly weak.

  Carl felt despair welling inside him. After all, it was his fault this had happened.

  He got down on his knees beside the seemingly lifeless figure and began to attempt resuscitation. It was years since he’d done it last, and on that occasion the girl in question, the victim of a traffic accident, had died. Now the whole experience came back to him. The girl’s smooth skin, the mother’s anguish as she looked on. The paramedics who had gently pulled him away and taken over. It had taken Carl weeks to get over it, but if Marco died on him it would stay with him forever. He knew that now, as he knelt there, pumping the boy’s fragile rib cage.

  He turned his head as a movement caught his eye, and saw the giant mask vibrate slightly in the draught from the entrance so it looked like the ex–prime minister’s mouth was moving. How strange to notice something so irrational and inconsequential in a situation like this, he mused.

  “Come on now, Marco,” he whispered, as Assad hurled rusty junk out of his way and his Christianite helper rummaged about in the office above his head.

  “He’s not up here,” the guy called down through a window.

  “And there are no other exits down here, so he must still be here somewhere,” Assad shouted back from the far end of the shed.

  Carl continued his efforts, now performing mouth-to-mouth. If only someone would come and help him.

  Then he resumed the heart massage.

  “Call an ambulance, Assad,” he yelled. “I’m afraid we’re losing Marco. He’s very heavily sedated. He may even be dead already.”

  And then came the faintest of whispers from beneath him: “Owww, that hurts . . . !”

  Carl looked down into Marco’s open, anguished face.

  “You’re breaking something inside me,” the boy gasped, half suffocated.

  At that moment the mouth of the great mask on the wall above them opened, and the African tumbled out, falling two or three meters to the floor below.

  He seemed stunned as he lay there, but only for a couple of seconds.

  “He’s here, hurry!” Carl barked, climbing to his feet.

  “Stay lying there, Marco,” he said, and turned to face the African, prepared for combat.

  When the man got up, Carl saw he had a gun in his hand, and that his finger was curled much too tightly around the trigger.

  I’m going to die now, he thought, and was at once filled with a singular feeling of calm. He raised his arms in the air and watched as the African came toward him, then lowered his weapon and aimed it at Marco.

  A shot rang out, giving Carl a start, the sound implanting itself deep inside him. And then he saw the blood on the African’s hand. The gun was gone.

  He lifted his head and looked up at the office under the roof and saw the Christianite standing in the window with a pistol still smoking in his hand.

  Only then did Carl recognize him. He was an undercover narc from Station City.

  “I’m coming down,” he shouted, disappearing from view.

  “Look out!” cried Marco from the floor, as Carl spun around in time to see the African lunge at him with a knife in his unwounded hand.

  The shadow that came flying from out of nowhere was just as unexpected.

  It was Assad. Enraged and utterly without fear, he aimed a high, flying heel-kick at the African’s chin, but his adversary was skilled in the same art and managed to spin around so the bones of their feet clashed together in kicks and parries. Assad tumbled backward, but the African remained on his feet and raised his hand to hurl the knife at Marco.

  He’s insane, Carl managed to think, before the guy suddenly went limp and dropped the knife on the floor. There hadn’t been a sound.

  Carl didn’t know what was happening. The African staggered sideways, clutching at whatever was at hand to stay upright. Finally, he slid to the floor in what seemed like slow motion, down-for-the-count unconscious.

  Carl turned to Assad and the undercover drug-squad officer. Assad smiled and extended his palm. In it was a heavy metal nut.

  “If he gets up he can have another one. There’s plenty more where it came from,” Assad said, thrusting his hand into a box of rusty nuts, bolts, and assorted odds and ends.

  By now Marco had raised himself onto his elbows, white as a sheet, but alive and kicking.

  “Tilde?” was all he could say.

  “She’s OK. Rose is with her.”

  The smile that appeared on the boy’s face was almost unnatural. “I want to go to her,” he said.

  If a person ever needed someone to look up to, this boy was Carl’s number one candidate at the moment.

  He looked out through the doors where a group of tourists were standing, seemingly enraptured. Maybe they thought they’d come just in time to catch the day’s Wild West show. Whatever it was, a couple of them burst into enthusiastic applause.

  Only the enormous black woman from the cruise party who stood in their midst seemed rather less exhilarated. Gripping her bag tightly, she stormed off.

  “Mikkel Øst, drug squad,” said the undercover officer, shaking hands with Assad and Rose with a look in his eyes that said he was less than satisfied with how the situation had developed.

  He would have to turn in his weapon until the internal investigation of the shooting was concluded. Most likely he was relieved and annoyed at the same time. A four-month undercover stint in Christiania’s drug underworld wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially when you were interrupted just before results began to show.

  Carl thanked him. “If we run into each other again, let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, yeah?” And then both Mikkel Øst and the ambulance containing the African were gone.

  By now Tilde had appeared with Rose and was standing with Marco, their arms wrapped around one another. What each of them had just been through was apparently best dealt with jointly.

  “There’s something we have to do,” said Tilde, when eventually she seemed more or less recovered. “Will you phone my mum, Carl, and tell her we all need to meet at the house in Brønshøj? Marco and I have something to show you.”

  —

  Half an hour later Tilde and her mother were hugging each other in the driveway of Stark’s house.

  “What did they do to you, Tilde?” her mother asked, deeply shaken.

  “They stuck a needle in me, and then I was gone until they woke me up. I sat on a bench by a shawarma stall for ten minutes out there before I could walk. It felt just like when they give me an anesthetic at the hospital. You feel a bit nauseous afterward, but I’m OK again now.”

  “And what about you?” Malene asked Marco.

  He nodded. “I’m OK, too, even though my legs still feel like they’re asleep.”

  Be thankful it’s not a lot worse, thought Carl.

  “What is it you want to show us?” asked Rose.

  Tilde took a deep breath before letting go of her mother and leading them up the drive to the back garden.

  “You do it,” she said to Marco.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “No more secrets. We’ve kept this one long enough.”

  So Marco lifted the flagstones one by one, placing the buried treasures in a row as he explained to them how they’d been discovered.

  Five white plastic containers. Five testimonies from a dead man.

  Carl shook his head and looked at Rose and Assad. How extraordinary to think it had all started with a missing persons notice, and now it was ending with a code written inside a safe and some plasti
c boxes buried in a garden. Sometimes police work was like a lottery. You checked your ticket stubs, hoping you have drawn at least one winning number.

  I don’t think we need to show them everything, Marco’s eyes seemed to be saying to Tilde, but she took the containers one by one and explained what was in them.

  Malene Kristoffersen needed a chair. There she sat with the jewelry and the little notebook in her lap, along with the certainty of how systematically the man she had loved had committed fraud. Even when Tilde began to speak in his defense, her hands remained clenched, her face a picture of shame and disappointment. Clearly, she felt betrayed.

  “I think you should make sure all this gets into the right hands,” she said finally, handing Carl the bundle of documents bearing the foreign ministry’s logo.

  Carl studied the uppermost sheet for a moment, then nodded. It was just as they’d thought.

  If William Stark had embezzled from his ministry and the Danish state, he was but an amateur compared to his superior. Eriksen’s signature was everywhere.

  Carl handed the bundle to Rose. “We’ll go through this later, OK?” he said, then pointed at the last box.

  “What’s in this one?”

  “Nothing of much use to us, as far as I can see,” said Tilde. “It’s William’s will.”

  “His will?” Malene whispered.

  Tilde nodded. “He was leaving everything to us, Mum. All his money, the house. Everything.”

  That’s when they saw the cracks appearing in Malene’s facade. All the noble qualities she had attributed to her partner through the years came flooding back now. She was confused, embarrassed, and full of grief and anger all at once.

  “You’re right. His will’s of no use to us now, Tilde,” she said tearfully. “William’s estate will be confiscated to cover the costs of his fraud.”

  She lowered her head and allowed her tears to fall unhindered.

  Then Marco stepped forward and whispered something in Carl’s ear.

  The lad was definitely imaginative, he’d give him that. Carl nodded.

  “OK, Malene and Tilde,” he said. “I think I’d better ask you to hand over the notebook and the documents. Would you please give them to Assad?”

  The girl nodded and gently picked up the notebook from her mother’s lap, hugging her briefly. Then she gathered together the papers that documented Stark’s deceit and handed it all to Assad.

  Carl looked around, then pointed over to a pile of bricks stacked up behind the bike shed.

  “Over there, Assad.”

  Assad stared blankly for a moment at his boss, but as Carl produced a pack of cigarettes and his lighter, the penny dropped.

  “Oops,” said Carl, as he set fire to the stack of papers with the notebook on top. “I’m afraid there’s been a little accident. Would you happen to have some water handy, Rose?”

  He gave her a penetrating look until the frown on her brow smoothed.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, cottoning on. “There’s the lake down there, of course. But I’m afraid it’s too far because this bucket’s got a hole in it.”

  —

  Marco was silent most of the way back to police HQ, and Carl understood him well.

  Judging by what the lad had told them, this had been the worst and the best day of his life rolled into one.

  “What’s on your mind, Marco?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why won’t Marco say anything, Assad?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “I think perhaps he is trying to assess his situation at the moment,” came the reply.

  Carl looked at Marco in the passenger seat. “Is that right, Marco? Are you wondering what’s going to happen now?”

  The lad seemed smaller than ever.

  “Is that it?”

  Marco lowered his gaze and nodded his head slowly.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking that all the things I dreamed about are never going to happen. Now they’ll put me in a detainment center and then I’ll be thrown out of the country.”

  Carl frowned and looked into the rearview mirror, where Rose and Assad were exchanging glances. Marco’s state of mind was clearly affecting them.

  “That’s not at all certain, Marco,” Carl replied, trying to ease Marco’s mind. With his sparse knowledge of state policy regarding illegal immigrants, he realized this wasn’t much consolation.

  “What would you do if you could decide for yourself?”

  Marco sighed. “I just want to be completely ordinary. Go to school, study, look after myself.”

  It wasn’t much to ask, and yet.

  “You’re only fifteen, Marco. You’re too young to look after yourself.”

  The boy turned his head to look at Carl with raised eyebrows. Of course I can, his expression said.

  “Where would you live, Marco?” Carl went on.

  “Anywhere. As long as I can be left in peace.”

  “And you think things would work out? Without going back to crime?”

  “I know it would.”

  Carl looked out at the traffic crawling along Bispeengbuen, and at the surrounding buildings. Out there among the twinkling lights were thousands of human lives that failed to make the grade when society needed them. So what better chance did this boy have?

  “What makes you think you’ll be able to take care of yourself when so many others can’t, Marco?”

  “Because I have the will.”

  Carl glanced into the rearview mirror again. The two of them were just sitting there, surprisingly passive. This wasn’t an easy situation to deal with on his own, dammit.

  He took a deep breath and let out a sigh as he thought back to the look on Malene Kristoffersen’s face when they said good-bye, the way she’d stood there with William Stark’s last will and testament in her hand. It was a document that would change their lives significantly. Tilde would be able to continue her treatment, and they’d be given the freedom to do as they pleased.

  All because he’d happened to have a lighter and lit a little bonfire.

  Carl nodded and caught Assad’s eye in the mirror.

  “Assad! That bloke you know, the one who’s good at forging identity papers, do you still have any contact with him?”

  He felt a pat on each shoulder, and now both of them were all smiles.

  But then when he turned to Marco, he saw that the boy was shaking all over.

  “Is something wrong, Marco?”

  The boy leaned forward in his seat, trying to make his limbs obey and his body relax, but he couldn’t.

  “I’m not sure I understand, Carl,” he said after a moment. “Do you mean . . .” And then he began to cry.

  Carl reached out and stroked the boy’s back.

  “Rose and Assad, you tell him. He’ll believe it from you.”

  “It’s all up to you, Marco,” Assad pronounced.

  “Yeah,” Rose added. “But we don’t want to know where you are until you’ve found a proper place to live. We don’t want to hear that you’ve taken root in some Dumpster in some town in Jutland, you get it?”

  And now they heard the boy laugh. Apparently he was beginning to believe in it himself.

  “But listen, Marco,” Carl added. “Not a word about this to anyone, understand? Not even your kids or grandkids, OK? In return, we expect you to tell us everything you know about Zola and the clan in Kregme, and all the stunts you were pulling out on the streets. If you do that, our colleagues back in town will have something new and concrete to go on, and it’ll be a big win-win situation all round.”

  Marco nodded and was silent for a moment. “What will happen with Miryam?” he asked.

  “We’ll have to see. She’s probably not the one who will be the hardest for us to help. She
’s been very cooperative.”

  “OK, then I’ll be cooperative, too.” He sat still for a while and stared out over the city. “Is it really true, all this?” he asked eventually.

  They nodded, all three.

  “I just don’t get it,” Marco said, shaking his head. “But thank you so much.” Then came another slight pause. “Can we make a detour to Østerbro?” he said. “There’s something I need to do first.”

  —

  They pulled up in front of a doorway where a pair of teenagers stood making out. Marco asked Carl, Rose, and Assad to go in with him.

  There was no answer when they rang the bell, so Carl pounded his fist against the door.

  “Police!” he shouted, loud enough for everyone in the apartment building to hear.

  It did the trick.

  The two occupants seemed both frightened and reluctant when they saw four people standing at their front door, but at the sight of Marco their expression turned to intense anger.

  “That one, we won’t let in. Or you either, for that matter. Where’s your ID, anyway?” one of them demanded, full of skepticism.

  Carl pulled out his badge and stuck it in front of their faces. The two men exchanged glances, still shoulder to shoulder and unwilling to let them in.

  Then Rose stepped forward. “We’d like a bit of consideration here, so if you gentlemen don’t mind, please step aside so as not to inadvertently prevent three officers of the law from carrying out their duty. The pair of you seem a bit slow-witted if you ask me, but I’m pretty sure you can understand that excessive denseness can easily be rewarded with correspondingly large doses of rage and nice, tight handcuffs.”

  Carl was thunderstruck. It was almost like listening to himself.

  The upshot was that the two men frowned simultaneously, then thought the better of it and stepped back to allow the frothing goth inside.

  Then Marco beckoned them on to the little bedroom that could have fit into Assad’s cubbyhole at HQ three times over.

  He opened a drawer and rummaged about until finding what he was looking for: an old-fashioned metal comb. He raised it in the air before getting down on his knees at the wall opposite the narrow bed.

  Placing the comb in the groove between the floor and the baseboard, he ran it back and forth until he located the indentation where the comb found purchase.