The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “Don’t you dare get between me and my children,” she finally said. “Just stay out of it! Just how brilliant were you as a mother? On a scale of one to ten?”

  She saw the sting go in. Hanne Borg froze for the briefest of seconds and appeared unable to reply.

  Five minutes later Nina regretted it, of course. She usually did. It was so easy to think good, loving thoughts about her mother from a distance; it was the hand-to-hand combat that did her in. She stood at the window and watched Hanne Borg leave the hospital and walk through the park toward the visitor’s parking lot in the gathering autumn gloom. She was leaning into the wind, walking more slowly than usual. Not tottering, exactly, but without her usual stubborn energy. Damn it. Exactly how rotten a person did you have to be to take out your own frustrations on your cancer-stricken mother?

  The parka-clad person on the bench got up—as soon as he moved, she could see that it was a man—and raised his hands to his face in a gesture that only made sense when Nina saw the tiny burst of light from a photographic flash. Then he followed Hanne Borg’s stooping figure.

  Nina’s heart jumped, and she dug frantically in the robe pocket for her cell phone before she remembered that it was in her room. She sprinted down the hall as fast as her newly upright legs permitted, tore open the drawer and had to fiddle her way through the entire “on” procedure, pin code and everything, before she could call her mother’s number.

  “Mom!”

  “Yes?” The wind was whistling and scratching in the phone, but Hanne Borg’s voice sounded calm and normal and slightly annoyed.

  “Is . . . is someone following you?”

  “Following me?” her mother repeated. “Why on earth would you think that?”

  “A man. A man in a green-and-brown coat, kind of camouflage colored.”

  “He just walked past me,” said Hanne Borg. “Nina, what’s wrong? Are you mixed up in something?”

  “No,” said Nina. “I’m not. But . . . I saw him through the window. He took a picture of you and then he followed you!”

  “He was probably just going the same way! He’s gone now, Nina. You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.”

  “He took a picture of you.”

  “No, he didn’t. He took a picture of the beautiful maple tree. Nina, stop it.”

  Only now did it occur to Nina that her panic didn’t have any obvious or rational basis. The realization didn’t make much of a difference to the alarm level in her traumatized nervous system.

  “I’ll call Søren,” she said.

  “You don’t need to. He’s already here; I can see the car.”

  “Then let me talk to him!”

  It took forever, she thought, before she could hear a car door open and her mother’s voice explaining.

  “. . . thinks she saw a man take a picture of me . . . you’d better . . .”

  And then finally Søren.

  “What did he look like?” he just said. Totally calm. Without offering doubting questions or accusations. Her body reacted to his voice with a mixture of endorphins and warmth, and the relief made her legs tremble.

  “I couldn’t see much more than the coat. He had the hood up, one of those fur-edged parka hoods . . .” she explained as precisely as she was able.

  “Could you say how tall he was?”

  “Not really. Taller than my mother, but . . .”

  “Okay. Did he take more than one picture?”

  “I only saw one flash, but I don’t know if he took any without flash.”

  “And he was alone?”

  “Yes.”

  She heard the car door slam, an engine starting.

  “Nina, I’m going to drive your mother home now. I can’t see him anywhere, and I think he’s left the area. I’ll mention this to Caroline Westmann when I speak with her the next time, but . . .”

  “But she’ll think I’m a paranoid trauma case who sees ghosts in the middle of the day.” Nina had no trouble finishing the sentence for him.

  “Maybe not quite,” he said. “But there’s not much to go on, and it could be a coincidence.”

  If he had tried to minimize it, she would probably have insisted. But she could hear that he was taking her seriously, and it calmed her unease. He was a professional, she told herself. He knew how to evaluate a risk.

  “Søren,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Am I just paranoid? Because of the blow to the head and so on . . .”

  “I don’t have sufficient evidence to say. There might well be a connection. We don’t know why you were attacked, and we don’t know whether there are individuals who continue to have hostile intentions—and might therefore possess a motive for obtaining knowledge about you and people close to you.”

  Hostile intentions. It should probably have alarmed her even more to hear him present that possibility, but paradoxically her pulse dropped a further few beats. Maybe it was just the relief at dragging the ghosts into the light.

  “You don’t think it was a random robbery?”

  “I prefer to take my precautions,” he said, still completely neutral, as if they were discussing the weather forecast. “And that’s why you can’t leave the hospital until I come to get you. Not even to go across to the newsstand or the like. Can we agree on that?”

  He wasn’t asking casually. He had previously given her security instructions only to have them point-blank ignored.

  This time it was different. This time the target was not another human being whom she felt called to protect. If there was a target at all, it was her. It was an unusual and paralyzing sensation.

  “Okay,” she said because he was waiting for an answer.

  “I mean it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

  THE PHILIPPINES, THREE YEARS EARLIER

  He regretted it as soon as they were in Diana’s car on their way to Las Pinas City, but especially when she parked the car and they got out. All three of them.

  Vincent, Victor, and Diana.

  A very small and badly equipped army on its way to fight . . . poverty. Nothing less. Diana had made it clear to them both that they had a responsibility, as medical students, as Filipinos, as Christians, and as human beings. Perhaps they could not relieve the suffering of the millions of poor on their own, but they could damn well—and here she had cursed—at least respect their fellow human beings enough to look them in the eye, and not just turn their backs on the whole shitty mess.

  Vadim couldn’t come. Obligatory family dinner. Something about his father’s candidacy for the mayor’s office of Manila. Business and politics were the same thing in the Philippines, Vadim said. Diana had given him a disapproving look, of the kind that made him curl up completely. Diana and Vadim’s father were clearly a rock and a hard place to be caught between.

  “But you two,” said Diana and placed her beautiful, soft arms around Victor and Vincent. “You can come. Then I’ll show you the clinic where I work on the weekends.”

  They had left at six in the morning to avoid the worst of the heat and traffic, and now they were standing here on the edge of chaos. A wall of low tin shacks, plastic tarps, crumbling brickwork, laundry on clotheslines, garbage, cables, and all-pervasive mud lay in front of them. The way into the shantytown was a series of claustrophobically narrow alleyways penetrating ever deeper into the whole stinking mess.

  Vincent had never been this close to the slums.

  He had seen beggars in the street, of course, and the squatters on the sidewalk in front of crumbling houses in Manila, but this was different. This was . . . hell. The final station for those who hadn’t managed to take off their lead belts and rise to the surface.

  “Intense, right?”

  Diana looked as if she had read his thoughts.

  “All these shacks, or rather the s
craps of ground they are sitting on, are owned by middle-class or rich families. It’s good business to rent them out. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head.

  “My father owns a strip all the way down by Manila Bay,” said Diana. “It’s his finest property, as he says. My jeans are paid for by these people.”

  She had a cigarette in her hand. She almost always did. She had once said that her father didn’t like her smoking. Vincent felt fairly certain that this was why she did. Now she marched with determination among the tin shacks, zigzagged in a familiar fashion around naked children playing; old, crook-backed women; squatting men in shorts and worn flip flops; and laundry that hung like colorful garlands in the midst of all the grey and brown.

  It had rained yesterday evening and even more during the night, and a fat, yellowish stream had carved a path between the houses and was oozing sluggishly toward the bay. It smelled of human excrement, and the air hung in the small passages between the houses, heavy, wet and stagnant. Vincent and Victor followed Diana as best they could. Twice Vincent almost crashed into children who were playing between the houses and darted out in front of him like small, quick-footed animals. An old toothless man sat in a doorway guarding a wicker cage filled with downy chickens that had been dyed red and purple and green. He raised the birds toward them as they walked by.

  “For your children,” he said and grinned encouragingly. “For the little children. Or for a funeral?”

  A woman was lying on a worn couch behind him, fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. Further on, a couple of teenage boys were hanging out by a small shop window from which dried fruit, water, rice, and cola was sold.

  “Here we are,” said Diana and pointed at a hut that, like most of the others, was cobbled together from sheets of corrugated steel; this one, at least, had been painted at some point in recent memory. White with a red cross on one wall. Diana unlocked the solid padlock and ushered them in.

  There was an examination couch. Shelves with bandages and medicine. Mostly over-the-counter stuff, pain-relief and such, but also a little penicillin and some birth control pills. The refrigerator that stood right next to the couch contained tetanus vaccine, said Diana. That was all she had been able to get ahold of this time around.

  “Make yourselves a cup of coffee.”

  She handed them the instant coffee and cups from a cabinet and began to arrange her things. Her ponytail swung energetically while she worked.

  Vincent cautiously ran a hand over the packages with bandages and antibacterial wipes.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “I started a year ago. It’s the Young Christian Diamond project—they pay for the rent and most of the supplies, and I come here two days a week to put Band-Aids on lacerated feet, vaccinate when we have any vaccines, or to sew a few minor cuts and things like that. A couple of people from the tenth semester are also part of it. And a nurse from the General Hospital.”

  She looked around with a satisfied glint in her eye.

  “Sometimes kids come all the way from the dump. They have eczema and asthma and infections. I can’t do much about the asthma. But the rest . . . I do have creams. Cortisone and antibiotics.”

  “And birth control? Aren’t you afraid of being attacked by the devout?”

  Diana shrugged defiantly.

  “People here are fairly pragmatic when it comes to that kind of thing. Kids are starving. That’s an argument that the pope can’t really refute. But I don’t have enough. I only give them out to very young girls and mothers who have already had four children. In the accounts I call them iron tablets.”

  Victor nodded and Vincent knew that helping out here was was a dream scenario for his huge friend. He still spoke with a heavy peasant accent from Angeles and up-country, and in spite of his top grades he was often clearly uncomfortable among the wealthier students. More so than Vincent. Here, fumbling with the ramshackle clinic’s electric kettle, his shoulders relaxed and he was visibly more at home.

  Vincent, on the other hand, felt on edge. Poverty made him uncomfortable. It made everything ugly. Even the people who lived in it. The smell was so ripe it made nausea rise in his throat and caused him to break out into a cold sweat so that he had to sit down on the chair next to the refrigerator. He wondered if his mother and father ever thought about the fact that the profession they had so carefully chosen for him would involve him sticking his fingers up grown men’s rectums, examining warts and cysts and bloody eczema in the groin. Seeing people in pain and with open cuts on their arms and legs. He doubted it. Like himself, they must have had a picture in their heads of doctors as they looked in the ads for Manila’s many private clinics. White-coated, perfectly poised men and women on polished marble floors. Respectable people. People whom it was difficult to connect with a skin cancer that had completely eaten away the bridge of some poor guy’s nose and was on its way up into the eye socket.

  No, he didn’t have the stomach for it. He would have to do something with children. Their bodies were smooth and free of defects, none of the hairiness and powerful body odors of adults. Pediatrics, or surgery in cool and sterile surroundings. Organs that were cut free and placed on steel trays, so all you could smell was iron and rubbing alcohol.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to envision this enchanted future. Saw himself emerging from a shiny white hospital, with his little patients waving and smiling from the ward’s windows high above, no trace of any but the vaguest ailments showing in their glowing faces. Outside the sun was shining, and the leaves on the trees had fiery fall colors, like in a film from New York. Central Park.

  Diana’s voice brought him back to his foul-smelling reality.

  “If you’ll receive the first ones who show up, I’ll go talk to the guy who watches the house when I’m not here. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  She strolled out the door. Shorts, flip-flops and a yellow T-shirt. No makeup. But even without the upper-class trappings she emitted an enviable air of calm authority. She was a woman with a mission and the ability to carry it out.

  Vincent had trouble imagining cozy family dinners with her and her slum-owning father. On the other hand, that same father was the one who was paying for her education, so maybe even Diana had to shut up once in a while.

  Victor sank down onto a white plastic stool and looked around with a calm smile.

  “This, Vincent. This is the life. This is what I want to do, I think.” He straightened the pill boxes in the cabinet a bit. “Those clinics where everything is so polished and shiny . . . where the rich go. I don’t think I could stand it.”

  I could, thought Vincent. But not out loud.

  “But what about money?” he said instead. “Your education costs a fortune.”

  “I’m still free,” said Victor. “My uncle doesn’t expect me to pay back the money. Not even to take care of Mom and Dad. He’ll take care of them, he says. We’re a small family.”

  Victor had had the incredible luck to be sponsored by a childless uncle in Switzerland. First through private school, and then seven years of medical school with all expenses paid. Because, as his uncle said, he was a smart boy with a good heart.

  “You’re lucky,” mumbled Vincent, and meant it.

  “You are too. Family can be a good thing too, right? They take care of you, and you take care of them. That’s how it should be.”

  Victor slapped him in a friendly way—the rare audience with the silent peasant boy was clearly finished.

  A scream outside sliced the humid air into a thousand slivers.

  Vincent had never heard anyone scream in that way; he couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or a woman. It sounded most of all like an animal. The scream slowly grew fainter and faded away, but only for a moment. Then it began again, and this time Vincent felt sure that it was a man. It had become a long, deep, and desper
ate roar.

  Excited voices could be heard outside the clinic, and Vincent and Victor barely had time to get up before a man stumbled through the door. He stank of alcohol. That was the first thing that Vincent noted. Only afterward did the visual details start to sink in. The man was small, and his dirty white T-shirt hung flatly over a bony chest. In his arms he cradled an infant who was barely more than six months old. Its arms hung limply and unnaturally from the half-naked body.

  “Take him.”

  The man handed the boy toward Victor, who took the child without hesitation, placed him on the examination couch, and carefully checked his pulse and breathing. Vincent could immediately see what Victor was thinking.

  The child was dead.

  But for some reason, perhaps out of respect for the man who had begun to moan and cry convulsively, Victor nonetheless bent over the infant and rhythmically squeezed the boy’s chest. Tried to blow air into the nonfunctioning lungs. The tiny ribs, sharply drawn under the skin, rose and sank with each of Victor’s attempts, but as soon as he stopped to return to the cardiac massage, any motion ceased.

  A little group of curious bystanders had gathered in the doorway and angrily commented on the proceedings.

  “Why don’t they do something?”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “He’s soused. Probably just came home from the bar and strangled the whole family.”

  Vincent observed the man who was presumably the child’s father. His tears had drawn pale lines down the dirty face. He might have worked a night shift somewhere, but had clearly had a beer on the way home. Probably more. His gaze roamed desperately over Victor and the child to finally settle on Vincent.