The Considerate Killer

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  “He’s an asshole,” Vincent repeated to himself. “He wants to destroy everything.”

  “Yes?”

  The man who opened the door looked surprisingly calm.He was wearing glasses now, the modern kind that you saw in American commercials, and he had changed into knee-length shorts. He crossed his arms and regarded them with a neutral gaze. He was a couple of inches taller than Vincent. From behind him came the sounds of a couple of teenage boys arguing mildly in front of the television.

  Vincent cleared his throat.

  “Vadim asked me to tell you that you’re to keep your mouth shut and stay away from his buildings.”

  The man shifted his stance. Made himself broader. He had a wide jaw and was chewing on something. Gum, maybe. His eyes narrowed as he considered Vincent through his specially made high-index lenses.

  “You’re a couple of tough guys, you and your pal. Am I supposed to be scared now?”

  Vincent felt like saying no. He didn’t like this. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat.

  “Tell your boss that I’ll keep this up as long as it is necessary,” said the engineer. “He asked for it.” He took a step backward and prepared to close the door.

  Vincent’s shoulders slumped. If he was supposed to scare this man, he clearly wasn’t doing a very good job. He had thought it would be different. A quick exchange during which the man would reveal himself as a first-rate asshole, would bluster a bit, and then cower in terror. Vadim, after all, was not just anybody. Most particularly, his father was not just anybody in this city.

  “Don’t count on getting any work again,” he shouted through the closing door. The engineer paused to bare his teeth with a haughty snarl.

  “You’re a dog. A mangy, cowardly dog,” he said. The voice was cold and steady, and for a brief moment Vincent felt as if the man had X-ray vision and could see right through him. Could see all the dirt and dishonesty. The boys in the living room had turned up the volume on an Elvis song they’d found someplace out there in the crackling electronic universe. “I’ll remember you.” Soft voice, slow calypso. Vincent’s grandmother loved Elvis.

  He closed his eyes and wanted to turn away. Disappear. Then he felt a movement next to him. Martinez, who shot forward and kicked the door open the second before the lock clicked.

  “I’ll kill you,” he shouted. “I’ll fucking kill you, you big asshole.” The engineer tumbled backward into the hallway, cradling one hand. Martinez grabbed him by the neck and hammered his knee into the engineer’s face.

  There was a faint crunch, of spectacles or cartilage or both, and the engineer sank to his knees with a long sigh.

  Elvis crooned on.

  “Did you have trouble understanding anything my friend just told you?”

  Martinez kicked him in the face again, so the crumpled glasses flew to one side and slid along the tiled floor.

  The engineer remained on his knees, curled over to protect his body and face. He didn’t look up at them. Blood and saliva dribbled between his fingers.

  “What are the names of your boys in there? And your wife? Is she good in bed? A sweet little pinay with a shaved pussy? Cameltoe? Make sure it’s shaved. That’s how I like it, even when it’s an older lady. If you have a daughter, that’s fine too.”

  Martinez was still bouncing on the balls of his feet, raring to go, like a boxer waiting for his opponent to get up after a knockout. When the engineer showed no sign of answering or rising to his feet, Martinez concluded his display by firing off a large spitball into the man’s sweaty hair.

  The living room had gone quiet. It was as if the entire world was holding its breath along with Vincent, paralyzed by Martinez’s insane dance.

  Then Martinez turned away, shot a crooked smile at Vincent and pounded him on the shoulder, before striding off toward the elevator, beefy arms swinging.

  “Come on. We’re out of here.”

  Vincent didn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off the engineer on the hallway floor. He was stirring now. Wiped one hand across his face, and looked up. Two teenage boys had appeared behind him and stood staring at Vincent and their father. Their mother shouted something from another room, but no one answered her.

  The engineer’s bloodshot eyes rested on Vincent.

  “I’m actually trying to help your boss,” he said. “It’s important for you to understand that. There’s still time. Tell Vadim that.”

  And then, as if this was the signal he had been waiting for, Vincent could suddenly move again. He turned and ran toward the waiting elevator without looking back.

  “That took you long enough,” said Martinez.

  He pressed the button for the lobby and pounded some kind of idiotic drum rhythm on his thigh all the way down. He was clearly in a good mood and was feeling generous enough to leave twenty pesos for the guard in the lobby. Outside in the parking lot he threw a shiny, glass-like look at Vincent and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Do you want to grab a beer? The night is young.”

  Vincent took an involuntary step back and fervently wished the warm darkness would swallow him. Let him disappear out of the world as easily and unconsciously as he had entered it.

  “No, thank you,” he mumbled.

  “Need a lift?”

  Martinez gestured toward a beat-up red Mazda that had clearly seen some heavy infighting in Manila’s traffic. The license plate was crooked, like the mouth of someone partially paralyzed by a stroke.

  “I’ll walk,” said Vincent, but that was a lie. He ran.

  Come on. Breathe. Don’t die!”

  Die. Søren wasn’t planning to. Hands took hold of his face, tipped his head back, then pinched his nostrils closed, which didn’t seem to gel with the command to breathe. Seconds later, he felt a wet, onion-smelling mouth close on his own while the mouth’s owner blew a lungful of recycled air into him.

  Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Why was someone trying to resuscitate him? A cramped cough loosened something tight and strange in his abdomen, and the first-aid fanatic mercifully retreated. Søren opened his eyes and saw the bulky camouflage-colored parka above him, with a person inside, presumably, but the enormous fur-lined hood covered most of the face.

  The hood and face disappeared out of his field of vision.

  “Don’t move. Don’t scream. If you do, I have to kill you.”

  A few minutes after giving me mouth-to-mouth? Make up your mind. Søren had received several much more convincing death threats in his career, but there was a buzzing, singing lack of response in his body when his brain tried to send instructions to his muscles. The Taser. The man had shot him with a stun gun. He could see the thin cables and feel a sharp soreness in his chest where those fiendish little metal darts had entered. He tried to lift one hand to feel if they were still there, but produced only a single, random movement of his arm. He had a long way to go before motor control could be said to be reestablished.

  Instead, he concentrated on his senses. His vision was a bit cloudy, probably because he lacked the muscular control to focus properly, but he was able to open his eyes, and that had to be a good sign. He was lying, he realized, in the back of the Land Cruiser, in a narrow passage between the galley and the dining nook, made narrower still by various boxes of equipment.

  Why had the man given him mouth-to-mouth? Had he really stopped breathing? Was his heart . . . had his heart stopped? Taser shocks were normally designed to affect the striated skeletal musculature more than the heart, but as one of the department’s more legendary action types had once said—after experimenting on himself, naturally—“being shot in the chest really sucked.” The closer to the heart, the greater the risk.

  The man in the parka grabbed his wrist. For a brief moment, Søren thought it was to check his pulse, but then he felt the sharp contours of a cable strip. He attempted to free his
arm, sit up, and try a bit of self-defense, all to no avail. His arm was pulled over his head and his wrist attached to something fixed and metallic—perhaps the front seat’s frame. The maneuver was repeated with his left arm. His already sore abdomen tightened unpleasantly, and he hoped the parka-man didn’t plan on making this a permanent arrangement.

  “Hey . . .” he tried to say, but he only managed a wheezing exhalation that was totally drowned by the roar from the Land Cruiser’s powerful diesel engine. The car moved, and Søren had to acknowledge that he hadn’t just been disabled and tied up, but was now officially abducted as well.

  He couldn’t help wondering what Torben would say if he knew what was happening to his anti-terrorist group leader. Anti-terrorist group leader on sick leave, but still.

  Nothing nice, probably. And almost definitely something that involved an international array of expletives. Søren’s own reaction was somewhat less varied.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  He obviously couldn’t see his wristwatch, and his sense of time and place was still a bit distorted. As the Taser paralysis faded, a splitting headache joined his collection of symptoms, and he remembered the unpleasant crunching sound caused by his collision with the parking lot asphalt. Did he have a fractured skull to match Nina’s? It was, of course, an alternative to matching jogging outfits, but still . . .

  Pull yourself together. With a huge effort, Søren dragged his chaotic thoughts back to the starting point. How long had passed since the Land Cruiser had left the parking lot by the Swim Center? In which direction were they headed? Where on his mental map of Denmark should he place the little red pin?

  Half an hour? More? Less? His sense of direction was normally well tuned, but today it failed him. They had stayed on asphalt for the first twenty minutes, he thought, but now it was gravel and forest tracks, and maybe not even that—the Land Cruiser rocked from side to side, and its four-wheel drive was working overtime. Branches and twigs slapped against the car’s sides and roof, and the engine’s sound was erratic—light and even one moment, strained and shrill the next.

  The rocking sensation nauseated him, but to throw up now would be potentially life threatening. He swallowed. And swallowed again. There had to be a limit to how long one could drive through the woods of Viborg? This wasn’t exactly the Black Forest, or northern Sweden’s vast expanses of dark pine.

  His cell phone rang somewhere on the floor behind his head. He didn’t know if the parka-man could hear it—he hoped not. The longer it remained undiscovered, the better. His original, relatively low-tech plan had simply been to use the “Find my iPhone” app to trace the parka-man, but the police in general—and the PET in particular—had more advanced tracking options, as long as the phone remained on and traceable.

  That, of course, required that they knew they should begin searching. How long would it take for Nina to miss him?

  Perhaps he needed to rephrase the question, because he wasn’t sure whether Nina would miss him. Once the worst of the crisis had passed, it had clearly been awkward for them both that he was already installed at her mother’s and had presented himself to her children as her “friend.” All of it didn’t matter; he was prepared to eat a substantial portion of awkwardness as long as he felt certain that his being there was helpful. But that certainty had crumbled after she had come home from the hospital. It was as if she vacillated between intimacy and . . . and a place that was colder than outer space, and just as remote. It disturbed him deeply. Was that why he had felt so driven to play the bodyguard? Was that why he felt such a need to tackle the enemy that threatened her? To justify his own presence?

  My God. How pathetic was that?

  But even if she didn’t exactly miss him, there would still come a point where she would wonder where he had gone. Would she raise an alarm? Contact the local police? Caroline Westmann, maybe? And how would they react?

  He was neither a minor nor an aging family member suffering from dementia. The alarm bells wouldn’t sound right away. And because of the stupid sick leave his absence wouldn’t be noticed at the office either.

  The depressing truth was that several days could easily pass before anyone reported him missing. Unless of course the kidnapper himself called attention to the situation, and he would probably only do that if he thought Søren had some value.

  Did he?

  It had seemed so random. The parka-man had reacted to something he might justifiably consider an attack. He could have driven off without Søren and have left him in the parking lot, with or without a heart attack—Søren still had a hard time believing that all that first-aid nonsense had really been necessary, just for a Taser. Instead he had hauled Søren into the Land Cruiser and had revived him. Only then had he driven off. It could hardly be called a well-planned, well-executed abduction. The man must realize that Søren had some kind of relationship with Nina—he had, after all, been up there on the balcony photographing them together. But other than that, did he know who and what Søren was? And how should Søren try to present himself if he didn’t?

  Two parameters were relevant: His connection to Nina and his connection to the police. The first increased his value and might keep him alive—perhaps it would be a good idea to exaggerate it a bit; the latter, on the other hand, would probably be seen as a threat and should either go unmentioned or at least be minimized . . .

  His attempt at analysis seemed to have eased the nausea, or maybe the tracks were smoother. They were going downhill now, and this to some extent relieved the cramps in his arms and abdomen. Instead, an ominous thumping had begun at the back of his head, and the vehicle was now lurching back and forth in a way that revealed that they were completely off-road.

  Finally the lurching stopped. The engine was turned off, and the front door opened. Shortly afterward the back door opened, too. Fresh, moist forest air streamed in and the nausea dissipated entirely.

  “I’ll cut you loose now,” said the parka-man in his slightly singing English. “But stay lying down until I say you can move. I’ve shot you once, and I’ll do it again if necessary.”

  “Okay,” said Søren, somewhat more hoarsely than he had planned.

  The parka-man crawled halfway across him to get the Taser, which he apparently had just thrown into the car on top of Søren. Then he disappeared out the back door again.

  “No moving until I say so,” he reminded Søren. Then a little snip sounded and Søren’s left wrist was free. The right one followed.

  Søren remained where he was, as he had been told to, but bent his arms so the pressure on his abdomen was relieved. Air, oh, air. He had once read that what killed a crucified human being was neither the nails nor hunger and thirst, but but the simple fact that one could not continue to draw sufficient breath in that position. Lying flat on a floor did not put anything like the same amount of pressure on the respiratory musculature, but still he had had to fight more and more to catch his breath. Shocking how little it took—it had probably not been the parka-man’s intention to do anything more than keep him immobilized.

  “Sit up.”

  That was easier said than done. Even though he hadn’t been tied for very long—an hour, maybe?—his hands were numb, and his first attempt to grab hold of the edge of the containers that surrounded him failed miserably. Just eight months ago it would have been easy to raise himself using only his stomach muscles—sit-ups were an unmissable part of his training routine. He had been in good shape his entire life and had taken it for granted, as he progressed smoothly from the gymnastics team in the small Jutland town he came from to the military service of his youth, then on to the rigors of his training as a language officer in military intelligence, and after that the police academy. He was not quite like Torben, to whom every bench press was a competition that gave some kind of testosterone charge to the training, but he liked the solitude of the long runs, liked the way his body functioned, smoothly and
naturally, letting his thoughts flow free.

  He hadn’t been on a run since February. Visits to the gym under PET’s headquarters in Søborg had been sporadic and unsatisfying. And now he couldn’t even sit up without using his arms.

  He managed to plant an elbow on the seat to the right and made it to a sitting position. The parka-man stood watching him through the open back door, armed with that damned Taser. He tipped it in an awkward come-hither gesture.

  “Get out of the car. Nice and slow, please.”

  Nice and slow was pretty much the only possibility right now. The connection between brain and muscles still felt oddly woolly, and even the modest movement toward the door made him uncomfortably dizzy. He touched the back of his head and felt, not surprisingly, the sticky sensation of partially dried blood. A lot of blood, it seemed. Four fingers and most of his palm were stained with it after the brief touch. He looked at them glumly. Yet another step toward total physical decrepitude. Lovely.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the parka-man had taken a step back.

  “Wipe it off,” he said hoarsely.

  “What?” asked Søren. “This?” He deliberately extended his hand, and the man retreated yet another step.

  “Yes,” he said. “Wipe it off. I don’t want you to leave blood stains everywhere. Here!” He searched his pocket and threw an unopened pack of paper napkins to Søren. “Get rid of it.”

  Aha, thought Søren. A kidnapper who doesn’t like the sight of blood. Interesting. He managed to open the package and rub off most of the blood. Then he threw the bloody napkin into a bush.

  “Pick it up.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it!” The Taser tipped again, this time threateningly.

  “Okay.”

  “Put it in your pocket.”

  “Okay.”

  Søren wasn’t quite sure what to conclude from this small experiment. He hoped it meant that the man was not planning to make this particular clearing the site of a murder—if he was planning to leave a body, then a single bloody paper napkin didn’t mean much. If, on the other hand, they were moving on . . .