4:21.
Not that that meant anything in itself. Still, she felt better anchored in time and place, better able to tell the difference between nightmare and normality.
As she sat staring at the black display with the large, pale, easy-to-read numbers, she realized that it hadn’t just been a nightmare.
Sorry. It won’t take long, I promise.
She had heard the words before, in real life. As she had been lying on the concrete deck of the Mathias Mall’s parking garage with a crack in her skull. And he had said the Lord’s Prayer. In Tagalog.
That’s why his face had looked like something Anton had painted with his watercolor set. She hadn’t seen it clearly, hadn’t been able to focus. And then he had placed his jacket over her face, as if she were already dead.
4:22. Caroline Westmann probably wasn’t at work—and if she was, it would be because she had more urgent things to do than to listen to vague flashbacks of something they still thought was a violent robbery that had been interrupted.
It wasn’t a robbery. She knew that now, with the certainty that comes with remembering. The odd apology, the prayer, the engine that she could hear being revved up . . . if he hadn’t hit the other car, would he have hit her? Victor’s warning had been completely justified. My life is in danger—and so is yours. Someone had tried to kill her.
She didn’t feel like trying to go to sleep again. She pulled on a shirt and stuck her feet into the worn canvas shoes she used for slippers here. Her mother had an entire box of them in various sizes so every guest could find a pair that fit.
Many of the neighbors had gone open plan long since, but her mother had kept the little kitchen and its breakfast nook. Even the cabinets were the originals, now painted a lavender blue with white frames. About the only bit of redecorating had been a new solid beech work top and the narrow dishwasher next to the sink. Nina turned on the electric kettle and made a cup of instant coffee.
Someone had tried to kill her.
After the fear, her most prominent emotion was a violated sense of justice. It wasn’t fair, protested a small voice some place in her mental universe. Not now, not when she had actually tried so hard, done therapy and everything, and fought her save-the-world complex, the time checking, and the old demons. Even if Morten didn’t believe her, she really was trying to get out of the war zone and live a normal, quiet life. She hadn’t done anything that would give anyone reason to murder her. She thought of Ida’s new fear of death, of the loss of illusion that had eliminated her teenage sense of invulnerability.
“If I die, she’ll never get over it.”
The thought hit her with such intensity that she said it out loud. The words sounded flat and out of place in the cosy fifties kitchen, designed for the cereal-eating, drip-coffee drinking middle class. On the bulletin board above the little foldout table—room for five with a bit of goodwill—still hung the school planner whose predictable fortnightly rhythm had been interrupted by the cancer diagnosis. Colorful, homemade Get Better! cards from four of Hanne Borg’s classes now hung side by side with “Nutrition Hints” from the Cancer Society, the recipe for the disgusting devil’s claw tea, and brochures and appointment slips for the Oncology Department.
Her mother was sixty-two. As far as Nina knew, she had had no plans for early retirement, but even though the chances of survival looked good, the illness, the treatment, and its aftermath might well put an undesired end to her working life.
“Nina?” Her mother stood in the doorway, in the old blue velvet robe she had had for at least fifteen years. Her bald head was covered by a soft cotton hat. “I thought I heard someone rummaging around.”
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“Well, you didn’t exactly wake me . . . I was mostly just lying there thinking.”
“About what?”
Her mother just smiled, a crooked and tired smile.
“What a scare with Anton today,” she said. “Lucky it wasn’t worse. Was that why you couldn’t sleep?”
“I don’t know. I did dream something about a pool though.” Just that small revelation made her heart rate increase. The blood, her father who wasn’t actually her father, the apologetic phrases from a man who was planning to kill her . . . She didn’t say any more. She couldn’t lay that worry on her mother.
“Were you afraid?” she suddenly asked, almost against her will. “When you got the diagnosis, I mean.”
“That’s a stupid question, Nina.”
It probably was.
“What about now? How do you feel now?”
Hanne Borg looked at her for a while, and the gaze was not particularly friendly.
“It must be a relief,” she said.
“What?”
“That I have a clinically diagnosable illness that you can approach professionally.”
“Mom! That’s not fair!”
“Isn’t it? I’m sorry then. Maybe I misunderstood something. It’s just that this is the first time in more than twenty years that you are voluntarily spending time in my proximity, but maybe that’s just a coincidence.”
“That’s not true. I’ve been here plenty of times . . .”
“For the sake of the children, yes. Or because Morten insisted.”
“Mom!”
Hanne Borg sighed. The animosity in her gaze flickered and was extinguished, and she seemed merely tired.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you get a little . . . impatient. When life punches you in the face with a new perspective.”
“Impatient?”
“With all the formalities. Everything we just pretend to do. Is it because you think it was my fault?”
“What?”
Yet another sigh.
“You know very well, Nina. That he killed himself. You’ve been so angry at me ever since.”
“Stop it. That’s not true.” Oh, fuck. She was about to cry. What the hell was wrong with her? You’re not falling apart, she told herself. It’s the fractured skull. Head trauma can lead to a certain instability.
“No one could have stopped him, Nina. He was ill. He didn’t do it to hurt us; he just couldn’t . . . take any more.”
“I. Know. That.” She managed to force the words out between tightly pressed lips.
“You do? It doesn’t seem like it.”
“Mom, I can’t. Do this. Right now.”
“Well, when?” asked her mother in a hard tone. “When I’m dead? It’ll be too late, then, sweetie.”
Nina poured the practically untouched coffee into the sink and fled back to the guest room.
When her phone began to ring, about an hour later, she answered it with gratitude, even before she saw the number and noted that it was Søren. She had been lying with the light on, catnapping in an attempt to get some rest without actually falling fully asleep. She still had the sense that the nightmare was just waiting to sink its claws into her and pull her down if she lost her grip.
“Where have you been?” she said sharply and with no preamble. “You could have left a message!”
No one answered.
“Søren?”
Still no reaction.
“Heavy breathing went out of fashion in the eighties,” she said. “Now all the freaks live in cyberspace.”
But it couldn’t be a random stalker. This was Søren’s number. She listened intently but couldn’t hear anything but a bit of wind. Rustling leaves? She wasn’t sure. Then even that bit of life disappeared, and the connection died. She pressed the “redial” with an angry index finger.
No one answered. She could hear it ringing and ringing. And suddenly she realized that she wasn’t just hearing it over the phone. There was Søren’s ring tone, riiing, riing, like an old-fashioned analog phone.
The sound came from the front yard—the small strip of grass and privet hedge
that shielded the house from the street. She tore the blinds to one side, too impatient to jiggle the tricky rolling mechanism.
She couldn’t see anything or anyone, but she could still hear the phone until voice mail took over. She hung up and redialed. Riing, riiiing.
She edged by the bed and in passing grabbed the fairly hideous jogging pants the Swim Center’s lost and found had loaned her to replace her own soaked, chlorine-stinking jeans—they were an unusually aggressive pink that made her think of Miss Piggy from The Muppet Show. In the laundry room, she stuck her feet into her mother’s old gardening shoes and clattered out onto the back steps. It was freezing; she really should have given herself time to find a jacket, but her brain kept throwing adrenaline-charged scenarios in her face. Søren unconscious. Søren paralyzed, Søren in spasms, having an attack, Søren dead . . . What might cause a man to call but not speak? Not say anything, not as much as a half-choked moan?
“Søren?” she called, with no great expectations. The wind rustled through the hedge, white petals from her mother’s favorite roses clung wetly to the grass, and Søren was nowhere to be seen. She dialed again.
This time she got a better sense of the call signal’s direction. It came from the carport, from the white-painted wooden shed at the end that housed the trash cans and her mother’s bicycle. She crossed the lawn. The grass was so high that her bare ankles got wet, but the sensation was distant and irrelevant. She opened the shed door and fumbled with the light switch. Nothing happened. But in the light from her own cell phone, she could see him. He was lying on the dirty cement floor, in a pile of dried leaves that had drifted in under the edge of the door. He lay in a bizarrely awkward position—on his side, with hands and feet gathered together—but it wasn’t until she was kneeling next to him and that she realized why.
Wide black strips of duct tape covered both eyes and mouth. Hands and feet were similarly stuck together. Her heart gave a shocked leap in her chest, and she reflexively began dialing 112.
She only made it as far as the first digit.
“Sorry,” a voice whispered behind her. Something hit her at the nape of the neck, just above the webbed collar of her T-shirt, and an overwhelming, painful paralysis put her body out of commission.
I t took almost eight hours to drive to Angeles and
an additional half-hour before Vincent, Vadim, and Diana reached the village Victor came from.
His mother and father grew rice on rented land, and their house lay in a field with flooded paddies on all sides and just a few packed paths connecting them to the rest of the world. Vincent and the others had to leave the car in the village and walk out to the house in the evening heat, with mosquitoes swarming in a dense cloud around them.
Diana hadn’t said a word on the entire trip; had merely stared straight ahead between the two front seats. As the tiny house came in sight, with its weathered grey plank walls, it was as if she woke up and began to see for the first time.
“I don’t get it,” she said, mostly addressing herself.
“What?”
Vadim had an almost defiant expression on his face, as if he had decided not to speak to her, but still couldn’t help it.
“That he came from this,” said Diana. “That a boy raised on rice and eggplant and a few strips of chicken could become a man like Victor. He grew out of nothing. How could they kill him? He was just like them.”
She began to cry, in the quiet introverted way of someone who does not want comforting. Vadim placed an arm around her shoulder all the same, and pulled her close. They walked like an old married couple tottering in mutual sorrow.
A couple of men were playing the guitar outside the dilapidated house, their song grating and melancholy. Mostly about unhappy love. Another group had settled down with dice and cards.
A woman whom Vincent instinctively knew was Victor’s mother was cooking rice in an enormous pot hanging on a tripod over an open fire. Bare feet on the ground. She was tiny. No more than five feet tall and skinny like a plucked bird. The dark face was furrowed and streaked by tears, but to Vincent’s great relief, it looked as if she had come past the first furious storm of feeling. He sensed that she had been a cheerful woman not long ago, because the wrinkles around her eyes looked as if they came from smiling.
Victor had been their only child, Vincent knew, which just made it all the more unbearable. For some reason, these two people had not succeeded in bringing forth more than one child, but that one offspring had been enormous. Victor would laugh when he talked about it.
“I ate everything,” he said. “And then I made sure to lock up behind me. Little Baby Victor didn’t want any competition.”
Now his tiny mother caught sight of them and came over to meet them. She allowed them one by one to guide the back of her skinny hand to their foreheads in the traditional greeting of respect.
“I knew that someone was going to die,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Ten days ago a black butterfly flew in and settled on our picture of the Virgin Mary. I prayed that it wasn’t him who was being called, but . . .”
She shook her head. That the higher powers had not listened was clearly unfathomable. Then she smiled faintly and revealed a row of beautiful, bright white teeth.
“It’s so nice that you’ve come. Victor’s friends are always welcome,” she said. “I have plenty of rice, and it’s important to eat so we can gather strength for the final nights. The coffin is beautiful. Did you send the money for the funeral, my dear?” She looked at Diana. “Victor has told us so much about you.”
Victor’s parents and relatives had already kept wake, kept lamay over the coffin for four nights. But according to tradition, there were still four sleepless nights ahead of them. Victor’s uncle from Switzerland was on his way home to say goodbye, and they were also waiting for some family from the distant southern islands.
Victor had been placed in a shiny white coffin with cream-colored lining and golden handles. Drifts of yellow roses framed it. The rough wooden walls were painted a bright cerulean blue, and behind the coffin a glistening green satin curtain had been artfully arranged. A gilded Virgin Mary posed in lonely majesty, holding vigil over the flickering candles and gently smoking incense sticks, and beneath the coffin someone had placed a cage with a small yellow chicken.
The tiny living room was already crowded. White plastic chairs had been set out for guests, and the people sitting there were eating and chatting. Most were as sinewy and weather-beaten as Victor’s parents, but there were young people as well, in white T-shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and sandals.
Diana walked over to touch the coffin with her fingertips. She had dressed entirely in black for the occasion, but other than that had made no effort. Her hair hung heavy and unbrushed around her face, and she had not put on any makeup to camouflage the dark shadows under her eyes. She looked like a dead woman walking, thought Vincent. Grief had transformed her. The bloom was gone, and Vincent almost felt sorry for Vadim because he was forced to see his beloved grieve for another man.
He bore it well. Was caring and supportive. Brought her water and a small bowl of rice, fresh fruit, and chicken in a strong red chili sauce.
“You have to eat,” he said and placed a solicitous hand on her bony hip. “Otherwise you’ll fade away completely.”
But Diana wasn’t listening and left her food untouched on the floor under her chair. She had caught sight of Victor’s mother, who had come in to sit with her son again.
“May I see him?”
Diana tentatively touched Victor’s mother sinewy arm, and the exhausted gazes of the two women met.
The coffin was closed and without the usual glass window through which the mourners could see the dead person’s face. Vincent knew all too well why, but until now both he and Vadim had spared Diana the gory details.
“The embalmers could not get him to look nice,” said his moth
er, and a bitter expression slid across her face. “Those squatters who did it. They are like animals . . . Not even the poorest here would do what they did. Why was he there? Why was he in the slums? He was going to be a doctor.”
Diana stepped back as if she had been hit in the face. Her lips were tight and narrow. Outside the men had begun to sing again. “I Will Always Love You.” A bit hesitant on the words, but recognizable despite the stumbles. The guitars kept admirable pace. The mosquitoes swarmed, singing around the small yellow light bulbs in the ceiling, and the smell of brackish water from the rice paddies filled the stuffy little room.
Diana leaned into Vadim and rested her head on his shoulder.
“I’m not feeling very well,” she said. “I’d like to go home when it gets light.”
Vadim stroked the back of her neck and her unbrushed hair, and Vincent felt a sudden jab of pain. As if Vadim’s gesture was an echo of what he and Bea had had together a long, long time ago.
He had forgotten. Now he remembered.
They had moved on to Elvis outside. “Heartbreak Hotel” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The guitar was not as tightly tuned as it had been, or else the player was coming a little unstuck, but he continued with fine abandon. Evening had faded into night, and the sky was pitch black over the fields. No one slept—you weren’t allowed to, in here with the dead man. The little downy chicken under the coffin received some cooked rice and water in its cage and stalked about on its disproportionately long orange legs. Vadim couldn’t take his eyes off of it.
“A chicken,” he whispered. “Why have they put a chicken under the coffin?”
“Because Victor was murdered.” Vincent sent Vadim a measuring look. Funerals must be entirely different where he came from. The rich man’s ghetto. Maybe no one was murdered there, or else they had become too urban and refined for the proper rituals.
The Considerate Killer Page 19
