Death of a Nightingale

The doorbell’s synthetic ding-ding hammered at Søren’s eardrum. He had a confused sense that it wasn’t the first ring but perhaps even the fifth or sixth. He had been going through Babko’s case files, both the official ones and the unofficial USB-key, until almost one o’clock, when he had had to admit that he couldn’t think straight any longer.

He tumbled out of bed, still with a heavy sensation of sleep and unreality weighing down his body, and lifted the shade a bit so he could see who it was ringing his bell at whatever hour it was in the night.

An adult and a child. They were both bundled up in down jackets and scarves, and it was probably more a sense of inevitability than actual recognition that made him conclude that it had to be Nina Borg and the girl. What was her name? Katerina?

He looked down at himself. Bare, middle-aged legs and boxer shorts. Where was that robe Susse had given him for Christmas? He grabbed a pair of sweatpants instead and pulled them on over his hairy legs.

He turned on the light in the hall and the entranceway. Through the flecked glass of his front door the figures were just vague silhouettes, but he had been right. It was Nina holding the hand of a skinny blonde girl. The girl was clutching a pink backpack.

“You were in the phone book,” said Nina. “Your address and everything. I didn’t think that was allowed when you were in the PET.”

“It doesn’t say than I am in the PET,” he said, feeling stupid with sleep and thoroughly unprepared. But despite the untimely invasion, he was glad to see her. “Come in.”

“They don’t know I’m here,” she said.

“Who?”

“The police.” She looked at him and corrected herself. “That is, the other police.”

“What happened?”

“He tried to kidnap Rina.”

“He?”

She gestured impatiently with her hand. “Someone. Not Natasha. Someone who uses gas grenades and infrared goggles.”

He took a deep breath. “What happened to the guards?” he asked.

“They … one was taken away in an ambulance. Because of the gas. A very young man. They say it’s critical, that he might die. He stopped breathing. He is under observation for brain damage. I took Rina and locked us into the walk-in refrigerator. Otherwise they would have taken her. Or rather, he would have. I didn’t see more than one person.”

Her eyes were huge. She was speaking calmly even though her sentences weren’t quite coherent. She looked peculiarly happy, like someone who has said all along that it would end badly and finally has been proven right.

“They still think it’s just Natasha,” she said; this time she apparently meant the police. “They don’t understand that Rina is in danger. But … you do. Am I right?”

“Maybe,” he said. He wouldn’t give her too much.

“You have to help me protect her,” she said. “Will you?”

The words came out all edgy and awkward. He sensed that she didn’t often ask for help.

“At least come in and have some breakfast,” he said. “I have to call my boss. You understand that, right?”

A cop killing. If the young policeman died, it would be a cop killing. No one would condone Nina’s disappearing act then. But when he looked at the little Ukrainian girl, about to collapse and breathing like a leaky balloon, he couldn’t quite blame her.

“Is he … not an idiot either?” she asked.

He wasn’t quite sure if Torben, with his adherence to rules and career focus, would be able to live up to her definition of non-idiocy. “He usually knows what’s what,” he said. “And he’s super smart.”

“Okay,” she said, as if he needed her permission.

To BE WOKEN up in the middle of the night—or in this case, at a quarter to five on Sunday morning—was of course a part of the job for a man like Torben, but that didn’t necessarily mean he liked it.

“What is it now?” he said shortly.

“Everything has gone pear-shaped,” said Søren quickly. “Someone tried to kidnap the daughter from the Coal-House Camp, and one of the men from the guard detail is in intensive care. They say his life is in danger.”

There was silence for a few seconds.

“Could it be the girl’s mother?” asked Torben.

“It was a man. Of course you can’t exclude the possibility that it was at the mother’s request. But I’m calling because the girl is sitting in my kitchen right now with Nina Borg. And no one else knows.”

“For fuck’s sake, Søren. Why?”

“Because Nina is convinced that the girl would be in imminent danger if she stayed in the camp.”

“That woman is hostile to authority and borderline paranoid,” said Torben. “How on earth did she manage to walk off with the kid without anyone noticing?”

“I haven’t asked yet. But I would like you to contact our colleagues and explain to them that we are planning to provide Katerina Doroshenko with the necessary personal protection.”

“Søren, I can’t do that. Especially not if they have a dead colleague on their hands!”

“Maybe precisely for that reason. The girl’s safety is not their priority. They just want to get hold of the perpetrator and Natasha Doroshenko—and that’s not necessarily the same thing.”

“Do you know something? Or are you just guessing?”

“The original Ukrainian case against Natasha Doroshenko, that is, the killing of her husband, is based primarily on two circumstantials: the fact that she fled the country, and a confession from a violent criminal who claims that she paid him to attack Doroshenko.”

“That latter is perhaps more than circumstantial.”

“Torben. It’s Ukraine. You can extract confessions like that in so many ways.”

“Okay. I hear what you are saying. But who is ‘you’ in this case, and why would ‘you’ do so?”

Søren tried to structure his argument before answering. “The Ukrainian policemen who originally came up here to interrogate Natasha are from two different services—as you know, Lieutenant Babko is from GUBOZ. His colleague, a Colonel Savchuk, is from SBU.”

“Hold on,” said Torben. There was a creaking, followed by footsteps and the sound of a door being closed carefully. Torben had left the bedroom, Søren guessed, in order not to wake Annelise and to be able to speak freely.

“GUBOZ and SBU,” said his boss thoughtfully. “You have to ask yourself why they are interested in Natasha Doroshenko.”

“Precisely. Especially when one of them disappears without a word to anyone, apparently blindsiding his GUBOZ colleague completely. A colleague who was sent up here specifically to keep an eye on him.”

“What do you mean?”

As briefly as possible, Søren told Torben about Babko’s admissions and about the connection between Savchuk and Nikolaij Filipenko, Babko’s “clean man.” “Unfortunately, I think Nina Borg’s concern for the girl’s safety is well justified.”

“Because of Savchuk?”

“I have no grounds for claiming that. Not at the moment. One might equally well argue that Savchuk is missing because during his search for Natasha Doroshenko, he got in the way of the person or persons who attacked the Coal-House Camp.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

“Right now I don’t believe anything. The closest I can come to a theory is that everything is connected to the killing of Pavel Doroshenko.”

“Mmm.” Torben had the habit of humming inarticulately when he was thinking something he wasn’t saying. “Go on.”

“It’s speculation.”

“Go on anyway.”

“Doroshenko was a journalist.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve looked through his articles. He published a good deal of controversial material with sensitive personal content.”

“Okay.”

“Presumably you remember the Gongadze case?”

“The journalist. The headless corpse, which they at first tried to avoid identifying. When they couldn’t get away with that any longer, it came out that the murder was committed on the orders of the interior minister, what was his name …”

“Kravchenko.”

“Yes. Him. He got the journalist eliminated because he wrote critically about the administration’s abuse of freedom of speech and civil rights, wasn’t that the way it was?”

“More or less. Four officers from the SBU were sentenced for the murder, and the investigation of who gave the order stopped with the death of Kravchenko. He was found with two bullet holes in the head a few hours before he was to due to be interrogated by the public prosecutor, and Oleksandr Turchinov, Savchuk’s boss in the SBU, closed the case with a declaration that Kravchenko had committed suicide.”

“Very convenient.”

“Yes. Of course, it is theoretically possible the first wound wasn’t fatal and the suicide candidate was very determined, but …”

“It’s pretty rare for people to shoot themselves in the head twice,” said Torben dryly.

“Precisely. I’m not saying that Pavel Doroshenko is another Gongadze; I don’t have any proof of that. But what if … what if he was killed by someone in the system either because they were hired to do so or because they were protecting one of their own? Then you can’t really find fault with Natasha’s decision to leave the country in a hurry.”

“And where in this speculative scenario do you place Colonel Savchuk and his brother the politician?”

“Half brother. I don’t know. I have no idea whether Savchuk is a hero or a villain in this.” Among Doroshenko’s articles there had been nothing about Nikolaij Filipenko, his half brother or their mother. Nothing that tied Savchuk to the case. “It’s hard to get a sense of the relationship between the two brothers. There’s such a great distance between them age-wise and … historically. Savchuk was born in the postwar years with a supposedly ‘unknown’ father, an army brat who himself made a career of the military. From what little I’ve been able to dig up on him, it seems he was with the Russians in nineteen seventy-nine when they moved into Afghanistan. Later he joined the KGB and just continued on to the SBU after the Independence. A bit of a Cold War dinosaur, it looks like, but there are a surprising number of those in that part of the world, and a wise man doesn’t turn his back on them. Filipenko, on the other hand, was born in nineteen seventy-two. A completely different life—glasnost, perestrojka, independence. And it looks like a completely different personal life as well—the mother had at that point married a man who was somewhat younger than her, an engineer who later became a diplomat under Gorbachev. There are a number of foreign postings, two years of boarding school in England, engineering studies because he apparently wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, then soccer hero status, which he begins to turn into a political career in the late nineties. Apparently Filipenko is a humane, well-intentioned, decent man who wishes to get to the bottom of corruption in his country. What Savchuk is … That’s more of an open question. And until now there was no other connection to Pavel Doroshenko than his energetic efforts to get the widow extradited to Ukraine.”

“What does your friend Babko say?”

“He doesn’t know either. He has given me a lot of material that I am trying to understand. Among other things I have a sense there is a pattern to the articles Doroshenko published, but I can’t quite make the pieces fit together. I would like to speak with Babko again. But first I want to solve the problem I have sitting in my kitchen.”

A pause. He could hear the refrigerator door open and the sound of something being poured into a glass. Tomato juice, if he knew Torben. Once in a while the juice was accompanied by Tabasco, ice and vodka, but not now, not when there was work to be done.

“Are you really convinced that the girl is in danger, and it’s not just her mother who has tried to get hold of her?” his boss asked.

“If that was your daughter, would you have used gas? A grown man almost died from it. Would you risk it with your daughter—when that daughter suffers from severe asthma attacks?”

There was a swallowing sound as Torben took a sip of his juice. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. I would go as far as to say that it certainly doesn’t sound like the mother has had complete control over the person or persons responsible for the attack.”

“Then you agree that the girl is in danger.”

A sigh. “Yes. That would follow. But listen. You know exactly how Heide and her people will react if we just waltz in there and take things over.”

Søren was well aware of the tensions between the PET and the other divisions of the police. It was not the PET’s primary job to make sure that those who committed criminal acts were taken to court and sentenced, and there were times when a prosecution would directly interfere with the security concerns of the PET. Once, in 1988, that schism had even cost the life of a young policeman, and the wounds still ached.

He could understand Heide’s resistance and her fear that the PET’s involvement might make it more difficult to construct a case.

“I’ll call Heide,” said Torben. “But only to make your collaboration easier. You’re going to have to work it out between you. We have to make her feel safe. Make her understand that we want to help, not obstruct.”

“And can personal protection of Katerina Doroshenko be a part of that help?”

“What level were you thinking of?”

“First, that the girl doesn’t have to go back to the Coal-House Camp or any other place where she is easy to find.”

“Okay. I think I can sell that—on the condition that they have access to both Borg and the girl when they are needed for questioning. But are you imagining an actual safe house?”

“If that’s possible. Wouldn’t that also make Heide feel safer, knowing Natasha Doroshenko would have a very hard time getting hold of the girl? She’s unlikely to try to leave the country as long as the girl is here.”

Torben snorted. “I can try. Okay. You stay where you are for the time being. I’ll call when I have something for you. And keep a close eye on that paranoid nurse of yours, okay? We don’t want her to give us the slip.”

THE PARANOID NURSE sat at the little table in the kitchen with her head against the wall. Her eyes were closed, and Søren guessed she was close to nodding off if she wasn’t asleep already, despite the hardness of the chair. She was still wearing her coat, and a little pool of water was spreading around her boots as the snow stuck in the treads melted.

The girl, on the other hand, was wide awake. She didn’t look at him directly, but there was a guarded glitter from behind her lowered eyelashes.

He squatted down in front of her. “Are you hungry?” he asked her in Russian.

He saw Nina jolt and open her eyes. The child just shook her head. “Sleepy?”

A single nod.

“Proshoo,” she whispered then. “De tut tualet?”

“It’s right out here in the hall,” he said, still in Russian. “Do you want me to show you?”

She got up, still holding the backpack tightly. He didn’t try to get her to put it down. Nina sat completely still and observed them with a carefully neutral expression. She didn’t interfere with his attempts to make contact.

He showed the slight girl to the bathroom and turned on the light for her. Built-in halogen spots threw shiny reflections back from shiny black granite tiles and lacquered white cabinets. There were no calming bath toys and happy frogs on the shower curtain or anything else that might make a child feel at home, but at least it had just been cleaned, so hopefully it smelled more of Vim than of urine.

“Thank you,” Rina said politely. She was clearly waiting for him to leave.

He closed the door but remained outside for a moment, listening. She didn’t lock it, he was happy to note. He had no desire to deal with a child who had barricaded herself in his bathroom, either on purpose or accidentally—his six-year-old nephew had once gone into a panic when he couldn’t unlock the door.

She stayed in there for a while. He let her be and went back to the kitchen to offer Nina a cup of coffee.

“That’s unusual,” she said.

“That I offer coffee?”

“No, that Rina speaks to someone she doesn’t know.”

“Maybe it was because I spoke Russian.”

“Yes. Maybe. What did your boss say?”

“He’s going to call me back. But we’re trying to get you a safe house. Do you know what that entails?”

“Kind of … well, not really.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you.”

“It can be more or less institutional, with more or less in the way of surveillance and guards, depending on how we evaluate the level of threat. The most important thing for Rina’s safety right now, in my opinion, is that we make her hard to find. That’s the best protection we can give her.”

Nina put both her hands around the mug of instant coffee that he handed her. She sniffed the scent as if it were perfume. “So she’s not going back to the camp?”

“No. Not if we can help it.”

“I knew you weren’t an idiot,” she said and flashed him something that was more of a relieved grimace than a real smile.

“A few ground rules,” he said. “If you haven’t done so already, you need to turn off your cell phone. You can’t use it. In fact, I’d prefer if you gave it to me.” Søren didn’t know what resources his adversary could draw on—if the adversary was Colonel Savchuk, with his rank and standing in the GPU, it was probably a considerable amount. Tracking a cell phone was not, these days, a PET monopoly, more was the pity.

“Okay.” She must have figured out why, because she didn’t ask any questions. She just fished her phone out of her pocket and handed it to him, meek as a lamb. Would wonders never cease?

“Does Rina have a telephone?”

“No.”

“Good. Where is your car?”

“I parked it a few streets away. It’s pretty recognizable.”

“Good thinking. Do you have any sense of whether you were seen when you left the camp?”

“It’s hard to say. Everything was still pretty chaotic. But if the deputy chief and her troops had seen me, I guess they would have stopped me.”

She cleared perceived the police as the enemy. Again, Søren experienced that odd, don’t-let-her-fly-away sensation mixed with a dose of wonder that she was sitting here. That she trusted him at least that far.

“Until we have the opportunity to move you to a more secure location, this is your safe house,” he said. “That means that neither you nor Rina may leave the house—not even to go outside to smoke or anything like that.”

“I don’t smoke.”

He considered the situation. The house was neither more nor less secure against break-ins than any other suburban house—or secure against escape, for that matter. It was easy for Torben to tell him not to let Nina wander off, but in reality there wasn’t a whole lot he could do if she really wanted to leave. Not without restraining her physically—and wouldn’t that be a fine thing for the fragile trust he hoped they were establishing?

“Would Rina understand if we tell her she has to stay here? That it’s dangerous to go out?”

Nina hesitated. “Rina has lived in the Coal-House Camp for a long time now,” she said. “She understands about rules. But …”

“But?”

“She really just wants to be with her mother. So if Natasha finds us, Rina is gone. You can bet on that.”

“Do you think that Natasha would recognize your car?”

“It’s not the same one that I had when she was in the camp. No, I don’t think so.”

At least Nina had been smart enough not to park it in the driveway, but his own professional paranoia would have preferred it to be even farther away.

He got up and went into the hall. Listened at the bathroom door.

The girl was talking to someone.

He stopped breathing for a moment to listen better.

“Are you coming soon, Tatko?” Søren could just barely make out the soft, quiet child’s voice through the door. “We miss you. And Mom is … Mom is in the kitchen making poppy seed cakes. Guests are coming. Anna is coming. And Great-Grandmother. Oh, it would be so nice if you could come too. You are coming? Oh, that’s good. Three o’clock. Kiss, kiss. I love you!”

Tatko. He was fairly sure it meant “father,” even though it wasn’t something a Russian child would say.

He quietly opened the door. Rina was sitting on the toilet, but on the lid, holding a cell phone up to her ear.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked.

She stiffened. “No one,” she whispered almost inaudibly.

“May I see your phone?”

She held it tightly against her chest for a few seconds. “It’s mine.”

“Yes. I just need to have a look at it.”

Rina handed it over reluctantly. Her breathing abruptly became even worse, wheeze in, wheeze out, a labored and uneven rhythm.

The cell phone was turned off. Dead. It was an old model, at least five or six years old. The display had a thin black crack across the upper left-hand corner; the back cover was cracked too, and absolutely nothing happened when he tried to turn it on. Presumably it hadn’t worked for a long time.

He handed it to the girl. “Thank you for letting me see it.”

She quickly put it away in her backpack.

Dear God, he thought.

“Who gave it to you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Just stared at him, blankly and fearfully, gnawing at her lower lip as if she were trying to eat it.

“Your Tatko?”

She nodded. An almost invisible nod.

“I can see why you treasure it,” he said.