The Boy in the Suitcase

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Anne Marquart might look as if a rough wind could snap her in half, but there was an unexpected strength beneath the pastelcolored fragility. That she had a dead body in a pool of blood on her upper landing seemed not to shake her, and she stuck to her decision to claim responsibility for his death with no apparent effort. She and Nina had covered the body with a bedspread, mostly out of consideration for Anne’s son Aleksander, and Anne had politely offered Nina the loan of a cream-colored shirt to replace the one that had served as emergency bandaging for her husband’s gunshot wound. The label said Armani, Nina noticed with a pang of guilt as she stuck her haphazardly washed arms into its expensive sleeves.

  Anne took her out of the house, around the corner, to a separate entrance at the back.

  “This is it,” said Anne, tapping a code into the digital lock. “Up the stairs. Just go in. I’ll keep an eye on Jan until the ambulance gets here.”

  Nina merely nodded. The door to Karin’s flat had been sealed with yellow police tape, but Nina opened it anyway, ducking beneath the seal. The light in the small hallway came on automatically as she entered—there had to be a photo sensor somewhere. She located the switch and turned on the light in the living room as well.

  This was Karin’s home. Her coats and shoes in the hallway, her perfume still in the air. Her specific blend of chaos and tidyness. Piles of papers and books were allowed to grow abundantly, because Karin did not consider such things mess. But Nina knew that if she checked the laundry basket in the bedroom, she would find even the dirty clothes neatly folded.

  She recognized Karin’s old rocker, an heirloom that had followed her since their dormitory days. But apart from that, it was clear that styles had changed as her bank balance swelled. Conran and Eames rather than Ikea. A genuine Italian espresso maker in the open kitchenette. Original modern art on the walls.

  On Karin’s desk was a compact little printer, but no laptop. Presumably, the police had taken it away, along with some of the piled papers—you could tell, somehow, that there were gaps in the arrangement, and one drawer had been left slightly ajar.

  Nina dropped into the rocking chair. She hadn’t come to pry. She was here to say goodbye, as best she could.

  Karin’s fear. That was what kept coming back to her. It had been obvious that Karin had been terrified during the last hours of her life, even before the Lithuanian found her. Had it been Jan Marquart who scared her? He hadn’t seemed particularly terrifying to Nina, but then, that might be because she hadn’t met him before a nine-millimeter projectile had made a mess of his shoulder and left him shocked and bleeding on his own living room floor.

  Karin knew him better. Well enough for her to be shit scared of going against his orders. And it had even been she who had taken the dollar bundles still lying on the stone floor next to Jan Marquart. What had Karin imagined Jan would do? Why had she fled this lovely flat so precipitously, to hide out in an isolated summer cottage?

  She was afraid of people who put little children into suitcases, thought Nina suddenly, and of the people who pay them to do it. She thought I might be able to save Mikas. And I suppose I did. But there was no one around to save Karin.

  She heard distant sirens now. Time was running out. She got up to turn off the lights and leave, but as she reached for the switch, she noticed the various postcards, Post-its, and photographs that Karin had stuck to her refrigerator door.

  There was an entire Nina-section, she realized. Top left was a picture of her and Karin, an ancient one taken at a concert at the Student Union Hall way back in a former century when they had been at nursing school together. Karin’s hair looked huge, teased into a festive post-eighties pile on top of her head; her eye-liner would have done Cleopatra proud, and her earrings almost reached her shoulders. Her eyes were laughing at the camera, with familiar sparkling warmth. Nina, of course, wore black, but for once she had been able to muster a smile for the photographer, albeit somewhat less exuberant.

  She has kept this for seventeen years, thought Nina. I wonder how many fridge doors it has been stuck to?

  Below it was Nina’s wedding picture, somewhat hastily taken in front of the sow-and-piglets sculpture by the Registry Office. Nina had forgotten who had had that particular flash of artistic inspiration, but both she and Morten looked ridiculously young, eyeing each other with an earnest intensity that almost looked like somber premonition. Nina’s dress could not quite disguise the four-months bulge that was Ida.

  Still further down came the baby pictures of Ida and Anton. She and Morten had sent them out like picture postcards of holiday attractions, post-partum snapshots of rather purplish-looking wrinkled little creatures, supplemented by tiny black fingerprints.

  My life is hanging here, thought Nina, and has been stuck to this door year after year, alongside pictures of nephews and nieces, dental appointments and holiday postcards. Here, where she might look at it every day if she wanted to.

  A hodgepodge of feelings assaulted her, a sticky dark mixture of loss, grief, self-hatred, and guilt. It would take time to sort it out, more time than she had at the moment. She switched off the lights. Closed the door and heard the electronic lock click. As the sirens came closer, she plopped herself down on the front steps to wait. She really ought to go check on Jan Marquart, but right now she couldn’t contemplate looking at him. It wasn’t his hands that had beaten Karin to death, but he had paid the man who had done it. Karin’s fears had been well-founded.

  Her head hurt like hell, and she knew she probably should be hospitalized, but she just wanted to go home. At long last, and if at all possible. She had washed her arms and hands as best she could, short of soaking them in a tub for hours, but despite her scrubbing, she could still feel the Lithuanian’s blood as a stickiness between her fingers and under her nails.

  She hadn’t been scared. Or not of him, at any rate.

  He had been lying in a pool of blood that grew bigger and bigger around his head. He hadn’t moved of his own volition, but faint spasms went through the big body, as though he were cold, and seeing him like that made it hard to feel anything except pity. That was how he looked—pitiful.

  When she rolled him away from the woman, she had seen at once how the blood spurted in rhythmic jets. In that second, she knew he was dying. Yet she still instinctively knelt next to him, sticking two fingers into the messy neck wound. She had been able to feel the rubbery toughness of the torn artery, but although she tried to clamp it, blood still bubbled and spurted around her fingers, in a hot and uncontrollable flow.

  The man had looked at her with a gaze already distant and milky. As if somene had drawn a curtain. She knew that look. She had seen it before. Of course she had. Nurses saw people die.

  Yet this was different.

  The smell of hot blood and the sticky, scarlet flow of it down her arms dizzied her.

  (Don’t let go of time, Nina. Stay awake. Don’t forget time again.)

  She’d shaken her head irritably and tried to catch the man’s gaze once more. There was something she needed to know.

  “Did you kill her?”

  The man blinked, and his breath sounded wet and soggy. Perhaps the trachea had also been damaged? He wasn’t looking at her, but she couldn’t tell whether he had heard her or not.

  “Karin. The woman in the summerhouse. Did you kill her?”

  His lips parted, but it could be anything from a snarl of pain to an attempt at speech. His eyes were glazed, like dark dry rocks on a beach. He hadn’t answered her. And yet she felt completely certain.

  I could let him die now, she thought, looking down at her own hands. I could just let go and stop trying. He killed Karin, and he does not deserve any better.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, she slid her fingers further into the wound. Perhaps, if she got a better grip, if she squeezed harder … she was using both hands now, but blood still gushed up her forearms. And when it finally did ease off, it was not because she had succeeded in stemming it. I
t was because there was nothing left to pump.

  The sternum heaved towards her, then fell in a sudden collapse of breath. She stayed as she was for a while, fingers still uselessly clutching, and an ache of ancient grief in her chest.

  She would not have been able to save him no matter what she had done, she thought, and as the knowledge hit her, it eased a deeper and older pain inside her.

  (He would have died no matter what she had done.)

  NINA ASKED THE policewoman who had driven her home to leave her by the front door. She was sore and tired and hurt, and being polite to a stranger in her home was entirely beyond her. Pretty much everything was beyond her right now.

  She knew Morten was waiting. The policewoman had told her as much. He had been notified right away and was reportedly “very happy and thrilled to have her back safe and sound.”

  Nina grimaced at the phrase as she took the first step up the stairs. No doubt Morten was relieved, but “thrilled to have her back” might be overstating it, and “happy” was not really a word that applied to their relationship right now. In fact, he looked anything but happy, confirming her worst fears.

  He must have seen her arrive through the window, because he was waiting in the open doorway, arms crossed. Nina slowed her progress involuntarily.

  “So there you are.”

  His voice was toneless and barely more than a whisper.

  Not angry, not miserable. Something else she couldn’t identify, and the look he gave her made her duck as if he had thrown something at her. She girded her tired loins and continued up the last few steps to the landing.

  She was so close that they were nearly touching, and she had to fight back an impulse to put her face against his neck in the little hollow place by his collarbone.

  “May I come in?”

  She tried to make her voice sound casual and self-assured, but her throat was closing into the tight and tender knot that usually led to tears. She fought them. She didn’t want to cry now; she needed to be the one to comfort him. She raised her head to catch his eyes, and in his gaze she saw something huge and dark come unstuck. His chest heaved in a single sob, then he grabbed the back of her head with both hands and drew her close.

  Helplessness.

  That was what she heard in his voice, and seen in his eyes. The total and abject feeling of powerlessness that she knew seized him when something took her away from him.

  “Don’t,” he said, holding her so tightly that it hurt, “don’t ever do this again.”

  SEPTEMBER

  THERE WAS FLOUR all over the kitchen. Flour on the kitchen table, flour on the floor, greasy doughy flour on one tap, and even a few floury footprints in the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” asked Morten, putting down his laptop bag.

  “Making pasta!” said Anton enthusiastically, holding aloft a yellow-white floury strip of dough.

  God help us, he thought. Nina must be having one of her irregular attacks of domesticity. And it was typical of her that she couldn’t just buy a package of cake mix and have done with it. He still shuddered to recall the side of organic beef that had appeared in the kitchen one day. The flat had looked like a slaughterhouse for the better part of twenty-four hours while Nina carved, filleted, chopped, packaged, and froze unsightly bits of bullock—or attempted to, because in the end they had to persuade his sister to take most of it. She lived in Greve and had an extra freezer in the shed.

  Now here she was, hectic spots in her cheeks, running ravioli through a pasta machine he had no idea they possessed.

  “Good job,” he said absently to Anton.

  “Hey you,” said Nina. “What did they say?”

  “Esben does it this time. But I’ve promised to take his next shift. I have to leave on the twenty-third.”

  Normally, his job required him to do a two-week stint on the rigs in the North Sea every six weeks, but this time he hadn’t wanted to go. What he really wanted was for all of them to go on holiday. He had already managed to swap his way to a week’s leave from the mud-logging. But Nina refused.

  “What I need is a big dose of normal everyday life,” she had said.

  He had finally managed to drag her to the clinic so that Magnus could look at her. Magnus had stitched up the cut above her hairline, probed her battered skull with his fingers, and sent her on to the National for further check-ups.

  “At the very least, you are concussed,” he had said, shining his penlight into her eyes. “And you know as well as I do that we have to make sure it’s nothing worse. What the hell were you thinking?” He looked at Morten. “If something like this ever happens again, don’t let her fall asleep. People can slip right into a life-threatening coma without anyone noticing.”

  Dry-mouthed, Morten had nodded. Even though the doctors at the National later pronounced her skull uncracked, Magnus’s words stuck in him, and it was more than a week before he could sleep normally beside her. It felt like the times he had needed to look in on the children when they were tiny, just to make sure they were still breathing.

  Less than two weeks later, she was back on the job. And he had a strong feeling that Operation Ravioli had a lot to do with her need to prove that she was on top of it all. Could manage the job and her family, could be a Good Mother, could do it all and be here again.

  He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary. That it was okay if she was feeling irritable and tired, that it was okay to resort to easy fixes. If she had anything to prove, it certainly wasn’t as a pasta chef.

  He had been looking at her for too long. Caught, as he often was, by the sheer vitality and intensity of her eyes. He had once found a chunk of dolorite that reminded him so much of the stormgray color of her eyes that he had dragged it all the way back from Greenland in his pocket.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She held his face between her wrists so as not to get flour on his office shirt and gave him a kiss.

  “We’re making three kinds of ravioli,” she said. “One with spinach and ricotta, one with prosciutto and emmentaler, and one with scampi and truffle. Doesn’t it sound delicious?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  MORTEN HAD STAYED up long after she had fallen asleep, and Nina woke to find him kneeling on the bed next to her. She reached for him, and drew him down. He let himself fall. Kissed her deeply and with a certain ferocity, pressing his fingers into her mouth, then down the curve of her neck, over her breasts, her arms, and wrists. His fingers meshed with hers, and he let the full weight of his body push her into the mattress.

  His eyes were nearly invisible in the darkness. Nina saw only a vague glitter of reflected light, and she sensed something, some sort of melancholy grief, settle between them. Or perhaps it had been there the entire time, and she hadn’t noticed.

  She turned her head to look at the digital display of the clock radio.

  “No.” Morten’s voice was hoarsely insistent. “Not now.”

  He tilted the clock so that the numbers were no longer visible. Then he caught her face and turned it towards his in the darkness, drawing her leg slowly but firmly to one side.

  She let go. She let herself fall into him, into the feeling, into the warm zone where time meant nothing.

  SHE RAN ALL the way home. She couldn’t stop the panic even though she knew she was being hysterical, that he would no doubt be sitting at the kitchen table as usual, with an egg sandwich and a non-alcoholic beer in front of him and coffee brewing on the coffee machine. It was just the way it was—sometimes her father went home even though the school day wasn’t over. It didn’t happen often, three or four times a year at the most, and he was usually back at work the next day. Usually. But sometimes, when it was bad, two or even three weeks might pass by, and then it was “not too good.” That’s what her mother always said when people asked. “No, Finn isn’t feeling too good at the moment.” And then people didn’t ask any more questions, not if they knew him.

&nbs
p; EGGS AND CRESS, she thought. He’ll be sitting at the kitchen table, and he has just cut himself a good helping from the somewhat shapeless cress hedgehog that Martin has made in kindergarten. And he is drinking non-alcoholic beer because he has taken his medication.

  She looked at her watch. Twenty past eleven. If she could see him at the table, she wouldn’t even need to go in. She could just turn around and make it back to the school in time for her next class.

  BUT HE WASN’T at the table. And so she had to go in.

  His furry green loden coat was on its peg in the hallway. His shoes were left neatly side by side in the shoe rack, with his briefcase next to them. She eased open the door to the bedroom, thinking he might be taking a nap, but he wasn’t there. Then she noticed that the door to the basement stairs had been left ajar. And she heard the sound.

  SHE WAS LATE both for her Danish class and for Geography, and the teacher took her outside and made her explain. At first she didn’t know what to tell him.

  “I had to change my clothes,” she finally said.

  And it wasn’t till much later that anyone realized why, and then of course they began to ask different questions. Why had she just gone back to the school?

  The school psychologist in particular asked that question, and a whole bunch of other questions, mostly beginning with “What were you feeling when.…” or “What were you thinking when.…” Those, she couldn’t answer. She couldn’t remember feeling or thinking anything at all. Or doing anything. It wasn’t that she didn’t remember being in the basement, and she remembered everything else too: her father, and how he had been lying in the bath tub with his clothes on, and that the water had been scarlet. She remembered seeing his mouth move when he saw her, but it was like a film with the sound off, she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She was looking at the red stuff on his arms. And that was when time had disappeared, she thought, but she wasn’t sure how. She remembered going over to Mrs. Halvorsen next door and telling her to call an ambulance. What she couldn’t understand, what simply didn’t make sense, was that more than an hour had passed. That it was now suddenly half past twelve, and that she had changed her clothes. I went over there right away, she kept saying, to herself and to others. I went over there right away.