Death of a Nightingale

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  In the middle of the grounds, Rina suddenly stopped. She gave a little tug on Nina’s hand.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “He’s dead,” said Rina.

  It took Nina a moment before she managed to reply, quietly and calmly. “Who?”

  “Poppa Mike.”

  Poppa Mike? Did she mean Michael Vestergaard?

  “Why do you think that?”

  “That’s what they said. The police.”

  The wind raced across the open square. Pin-sharp flakes that were more ice than snow bit Nina’s cheeks and forehead, and she suddenly felt as if she were standing in an arctic desert, icy and isolated, infinitely far from warmth, shelter and human contact. Rina stood next to her and stared with great concentration at the strawberry ice cream, as if conquering it were a task she had set herself. She wasn’t crying—in fact, her face was devoid of expression—but Nina was not fooled. She quickly checked the time—12:31—and looked up at the slate-grey sky with the apparently irrelevant thought that the weather would make it difficult to fly. Only a few seconds later did she understand why flying conditions suddenly seemed to matter. Whenever the situation had escalated from desperate to hopeless in one of the hellholes and disaster areas of her misspent youth, the skies had been her only hope. It was from above that help might arrive.

  Unless Rina had misunderstood something, Natasha’s former fiancé was dead—the man Natasha had once tried to murder with a hunting knife. And it had happened while she was on the loose after having brained a policeman with a cobble.

  “Rina …”

  “They are both dead,” said Rina and took a determined bite of the strawberry ice cream. “Poppa Mike and Daddy.”

  Jesus. Poppa Mike and Daddy?

  Nina realized that she knew absolutely nothing about Rina’s biological father. She had placed a single-mother-from-Ukraine label on Natasha without giving it a lot of thought. “Are you sure, sweetie?” she asked carefully.

  “That’s what they said.” Rina’s voice shrank, got smaller and thinner, not because of Nina’s doubt, it turned out, but because the next thing was what had made her world shake. “They said Mama did it.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, that Mama killed them. Both of them.”

  Suddenly the Mondeo brigade’s size made more sense. They weren’t hunting a woman found guilty of a single—relatively ineffective—homicide attempt. They thought that Natasha was a double murderer.

  Nina was all at once extremely conscious of Rina’s hand resting in her own. The girl’s delicate fingers were trembling, not just from cold and fear, but because the asthma medicine was affecting her. Anton’s hand was different, more solid and square and usually more dirty.

  Anton was with Morten now, in the apartment in Fejøgade. Maybe they had made pancakes; Morten sometimes did that when he had the time and energy and was in a good mood. Maybe they were all three still sitting at the kitchen table while Morten lingered over an extra cup of coffee and talked about music with Ida, and the checkered oilcloth got more and more spotted by Anton’s marmalade fingers. Only Nina was missing.

  I’m not sure I can do this, she thought, without completely knowing what “this” was, just sensing that the war had started again, and she was too tired, too old and not suited to fight it. I wouldn’t mind if someone came to rescue us right now.

  Rina gave her hand a little tug, this time because she wanted to continue. “I’m cold,” she said.

  “No wonder,” said Nina. “It’s freezing out here. Let’s get you inside.”

  Somewhere behind them, the two Mondeo men had halted. Now they started moving again. Was it one of them who had said that “Poppa Mike” was dead? And that Natasha had killed him? How could they say such things while Rina was listening? No hope of rescue from that quarter, that much was certain. But who else was there to turn to?

  Søren recognized the number right away even though he hadn’t called it in over six months.

  He stopped in his tracks, and another runner on the path had to swerve around him. His pulse was at 182 and his breathing so labored that he had to let the telephone ring several times before he took the call, but he didn’t for a second consider not answering.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s Nina. I don’t know if you remember me. I was the one who—”

  “Yes. I know who you are.”

  He saw her with crystal clarity in his mind’s eye. The first time he had met her, she had been sick as a dog with radiation poisoning, frightened and furious. The hospital’s patient uniform didn’t fit her any better than it did anyone else; she was stick thin and smelled faintly of vomit, and her short, dark hair covered her scalp like a matt of shaggy and untended fur. Only her eyes had revealed that there was still life in the ruins—the intensity burned through clearly in spite of the fact that the rest of her had to be categorized as “more dead than alive.”

  She had been difficult, uncooperative and suspicious, and he had to threaten her with prison, a moment during the interrogation that he wasn’t very proud of. She probably had no idea that he had later done his best to shield her—her and her pretty illegitimate network. In his eyes, people like Nina were perhaps a bit too trusting toward some of the illegal immigrants and other borderline cases they supported with medical aid, shelter and other emergency essentials. But damn it, people should not be prosecuted for basically doing a good deed.

  Another runner trotted by him in the tense staccato style people tended to adopt when the going couldn’t be trusted. Even on this disgustingly cold winter afternoon, there were lots of joggers on the path around Damhus Lake. The route was too short; he had circled the lake four times, which made him feel a bit like a hamster in an oversized wheel, and even though the council did clear the paths of snow, they were still slippery and greasy with a grey-brown mixture of gravel, slush, goose shit and salt. He would have preferred the woods of Hareskoven or some other, less crowded place, but the snow made the forest paths more or less impassable, and when he had tried to exchange his running shoes for cross-country skis a few weeks ago, his old knee injuries had protested so violently that he’d had to toss the skis back up on the carport rafters again.

  The phone had gone quiet, long enough for his pulse to drop to around 140.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked at last.

  “Forget it,” she said suddenly. “I shouldn’t have called.”

  The background noise and the faint whistling disappeared. She had hung up.

  He stood looking at the phone for a few seconds. There was a limit to how long he could stand still. He was already getting cold, and a harsh wind blew over the lake’s frozen surface. An open hole in the ice was teeming with screaming, quacking, cackling waterfowl—mostly ducks and graylag geese, but there were also five or six swans and a raucously aggressive gang of black-headed gulls.

  He pressed the DIAL button. She answered at once. “You must have had a reason for calling,” he said.

  She still hesitated. “It was mostly because … you’re not an idiot.”

  An ironic “thank you” was about to slip out, but he stopped himself. Irony wasn’t what was needed here. “What’s happened?” he asked instead.

  “You are the twenty-six-year-old mother of a little girl,” she suddenly said, in a peculiarly rushed staccato tone. “You’ve escaped from Ukraine; you get engaged to a Danish man; he’s a sadistic bastard, but you tolerate it because you are more afraid of being sent back than of what he does to you. Not until you catch him with his fingers in your little daughter’s underwear do you snap. You buy a knife and stab him in the throat. He survives, but you are found guilty of attempted murder and sent to jail.”

  She stopped, but he just waited, his muscles getting stiffer, the cold creeping across his skin along with the sweat. He stood perfectly still. He sensed that if he as much as shifted his weight, she would fly away again.

  “You spend sixteen months in Vestre Prison doing noth
ing but what they tell you to do. Passive. Easy to handle. And then you suddenly attack a policeman and escape. And this is where it gets really weird. You don’t go to get your daughter. Instead you head directly for your ex-fiancé, and then you kill him.”

  He could hear her breathing now that his own was calmer. Hers was stressed and shallow. Forced.

  “Does that make sense?” she said. “Is it logical?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Too much of the picture is missing.”

  “But your first impression?”

  “I can’t say,” he insisted. “It would be pure speculation.”

  “Okay. Forget I called.”

  “No, wait. I just said that I didn’t know enough.”

  She sighed. “That’s something. The police here think that they know everything. They are apparently convinced that Natasha murdered both the sadistic bastard and Rina’s father.”

  Rina’s father? Who the hell was that? Nina wasn’t making it easy to follow her.

  “Where are you?” Søren asked.

  “The Coal-House Camp. Rina—that’s Natasha’s daughter—she … Damn it, she can’t take this!” The anger rose in her voice. “They’re using her as bait in their Natasha trap, and they don’t give a shit if she’s up to it or not.”

  He would probably have done the same thing—kept an eye on the girl with the assumption that the mother would contact her sooner or later. He didn’t tell Nina that.

  “What’s Natasha’s last name?” he asked.

  There was a pause.

  “I don’t remember,” she admitted. “Something … something Ukrainian. Wait. Dimitrenko or something like that. I don’t remember how you spell it.”

  The computer was not particularly forgiving of alternative spellings, but on the other hand, how many Ukrainian women could there be who had just escaped from Vestre?

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Søren promised recklessly. “I’ll call you later.”

  “When?”

  “It’ll take awhile. At least a few hours.”

  “But you’ll call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  The tension in Nina’s breathing was gone. The relief made her voice younger and lighter, and he felt a prick of conscience. There probably wasn’t anything he could do, and his only reason for trying was deeply unprofessional.

  He wanted to see her again.

  Police. of course, there would be police.

  Natasha felt Katerina’s proximity tug at her core. There she was, right on the other side of the fence, not in the family barrack where they had lived together before Michael, but in the rooms reserved for unaccompanied minors. She was there; she had to be there, even though Natasha couldn’t see her.

  But the police lurked like big, fat barn cats, just waiting for the stupid mice to scurry out of the hay.

  “As long as it’s light, you have no chance.” She once again heard Anna’s voice, a voice that calmly and sensibly forced her to listen even though Natasha wanted to run over and throw herself against the wire fence. She wasn’t sure when she had stopped thinking of Anna as a real-world source of solace and good advice, and instead turned her into this odd inner fairy godmother who kept an eye on Natasha and made sure she didn’t behave too stupidly. Perhaps it was since that night a year and a half ago when she had attempted to stab Michael in the throat with a knife. Was it then?

  Natasha was glad Anna was there. It made her feel less alone.

  She walked back through the deep snow, well over half a kilometer, to the little clearing where she had parked the dark blue Audi. She might as well try to sleep a little.

  She brushed extra snow onto the car’s license plate to be safe. She didn’t think Robbie would report it stolen for the time being. He was probably still asleep, and when he woke up, he would find the note she had placed next to his pillow: I’ll be back. ♥, Katerina.

  Right now she wished she had called herself something else.

  In the Audi’s trunk she found a blanket and a thick tarp. She took them both into the backseat and cocooned herself inside. A sleeping bag would have been better, but she didn’t have a sleeping bag.

  THE BED IN the apartment in Kiev had been a revelation in several ways. Clean and white and delicious smelling, full of pillows, comforters and smooth, light sheets—Egyptian cotton, Pavel had said, and she just nodded. She had never before lain on a mattress that received the body in this way, firm and soft at the same time. At home in the room in Kurakhovo, you could feel the bed slats through the worn foam rubber.

  And Pavel, Pavel, Pavel, Pavel.

  He had driven into her life in a shiny red Alfa Romeo one day as she was trudging along the road between Dachne and Kurakhovo. She had missed the bus and would rather walk to the next stop than stand waiting in the cold. When he slowed down and asked if she wanted a lift, she had ignored him at first. She didn’t want him to think she was one of those girls. But he had kept rolling along next to her, apparently indifferent to the trucks that roared by him honking and all the vulgar gestures and shouts from the passing drivers. He had spoken to her just as if they were walking along next to each other on the sidewalk, although they did, of course, have to shout more loudly. He was a journalist, he said, and was writing an article about safety in the coal mines. Did she know anyone who worked there? Or anyone who once had? “Everyone does,” she said. There were practically no other places you could work in Kurakhovo; it was the mines or the power plant or unemployment. Her father had lost his job two years ago; her mother still worked in the plant cafeteria. “And what about you?” he had asked. It had gone on like that all the way to Kurakhovo, and finally when they had reached the outskirts of town, she had gotten into his car. Because by now her feet hurt and because she was getting hoarse from shouting, and because … because Pavel was Pavel.

  She had insisted on a church wedding so that everyone could see that she had married well, to a husband who had both money and culture. An intellectual, as her father said, at once contemptuous and satisfied. Pavel didn’t drink vodka. Not even at the wedding party, where he wore a dark Armani suit. Few of the guests could appreciate such details, but that wasn’t important. Pavel looked like what he was. A success. At the same time, he had shown everyone else up for what they were and would always be. A bunch of drunken, shabby bumpkins with foolish grins and yawning gaps in their teeth. Uncles and aunts and cousins, and girlfriends from school who arrived on the back of their boyfriends’ scooters.

  None of them drove an Alfa Romeo. And none of them had an apartment in Kiev with a view of the National Museum.

  The first night in Kiev, she had felt like the princess in a fairy tale.

  “Come on. There’s something I want to show you!”

  Pavel smiled at Natasha, and she couldn’t help smiling back. Genuine smiles that could be felt all the way to the heart, and she thought that it felt precisely like love in the movies and that she adored every detail of his face. The nose, which curved slightly, and the blond hair she knew he had inherited from his Galizien mother, who had been ethnic German. Pavel himself spoke fluent German and also English, and earlier in the evening, he had ordered in a restaurant with the same confidence as the men in the American movies.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  On purpose she let herself stumble clumsily into his arms. Her breasts under the new bra and the soft silk blouse grazed his chest, and she wanted to get closer, feel his weight and the strength of his arms. In fact, she thought, and felt shameful and happy at the same time, she would undress him all the way tonight and look at him before they did it. In the big white bed, on the sheets of crackling Egyptian cotton. She didn’t know if it was normal to think like this, but she didn’t care. The night sky turned above them, and she laughed lightly and giddily.

  “Take it easy.” Pavel gently pushed her away and dexterously placed his arm between them, so that their bodies were no longer touching. “Act like a lady, my sweet. We�
��re in a public place.”

  The rejection smarted, but only for a moment. Then she let herself be led farther up the steep path toward the lookout in Maryinsky Park.

  Pavel took her hand and drew her to an opening in the trees. They were at the park’s highest point now, and above them stretched a gigantic shining arch, all the way across the square. The evening air was pleasantly warm against her skin.

  “Arka Druzhbi Narodiv. The People’s Friendship Arch,” said Pavel and pointed at two stiff statues under the arch. “Those are the two brothers. A symbol of Russia and Ukraine. The statues are cast in bronze, and the bow is pure titanium. As strong as steel, but much lighter.”

  Natasha nodded but didn’t know what to say. Or what he expected her to say. She was much more interested in a little enclosure with bumper cars and pounding techno music on the other side of the titanium rainbow.

  “Can we?”

  “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

  Natasha pouted and deliberately put on a disappointed face. But he didn’t budge. He just dug into his pockets and found a few bills that he placed in her hand.

  “I’m too old for bumper cars, but you go ahead, sweetheart. Then I’ll show you the view afterward.”

  Natasha had already changed her mind. It wasn’t going to be fun. Not when Pavel stood there next to the ring like an adult waiting for a child. The little lecture about the statues had already made her feel like a schoolgirl on a class trip. But it was too late now. In her newly purchased high heels, Natasha tottered over to a neon-yellow car and got in, knees folded almost all the way to her chin. Pavel stood a few meters from the railing and lit a cigarette, a brand with a sweetish tobacco that left a wonderful taste on his soft lips. He’d buried his hands in the pockets of his long black pants. So much for the creases, but that was okay. She’d take care of that for him.