Death of a Nightingale

Natasha felt cool and clear-headed. It was as if she was better able to think and act now that half her brain was no longer occupied with keeping track of where Katerina was. She dumped the damaged Audi in a snowdrift by a small forest and hoped that the snow would soon cover it so it would be just as hard to recognize as the other snow-covered roadside wrecks. There were plenty of those on a day like today.

She had to walk for a few kilometers along the road before the solution to her acute transportation problem revealed itself in the form of a long, sprawling inn with wide-open doors and men in shirtsleeves who stood in the doorway smoking. From inside the inn she could hear the loud, homemade songs that were a part of most Danish family celebrations, with the addition of jovial bass line, electric piano and a slightly tinny drum machine.

She edged her way past the smokers into the outer hall and proceeded down into the cloakroom in the basement without anyone taking any particular notice of her. In one of the many heavy overcoats hanging from the rack, she found a key ring with a Suzuki logo. The parking lot was behind the inn, next to the main entrance, and when she pressed the key’s remote control, a helpful blinking light guided her to the right car. It was a small, ugly blue one, but it started without protest, and she drove unchallenged down the road and farther into the anonymous drifting snow.

She had no idea how to go about killing someone like the Witch, but it couldn’t be that hard. Not when you were bigger and stronger than the person who was to die. And Natasha certainly was, because the Witch was tiny and more fragile than an egg. She pictured the old woman as she seen her in the backseat of the car in the winter forest, and in spite of her determination, Natasha felt a jolt of fear that she immediately tried to suppress. Stop thinking like a mouse, she said to herself. Now you’re the hunter, and she is the one who has reason to fear. The days of shivering in the dark are over.

IN COMPARISON WITH the fourth break-in, the three first had been amateurish and almost peaceable. Natasha was wrenched from sleep straight into terror. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. An unidentified pain raced up through her stomach, and it was only in the seconds that followed that she realized someone had hit her, and that the reason she couldn’t scream was because something moist and acidic had been pushed into her mouth. An apple. They had stuffed an apple into her mouth as if she were a cartoon pig about to be roasted. The juice ran into her throat, and she tried to cough it out but couldn’t. A hand in her face forced her head back against the bed’s headboard.

“Not a sound. Get it, bitch?”

She did not get it. She didn’t understand anything. There were two men in their apartment, and Pavel was nowhere to be seen.

“If you scream, we’ll kill the kid. Do you understand that?”

She nodded, her fear choking her.

“Where is he?”

She assumed they meant Pavel, but she just shook her head. She tried again to spit out the apple, and this time they let her.

“Don’t know,” she gasped. “He isn’t … don’t know … where …”

“Listen, you whore. If you don’t do exactly as I say, we’ll fuck you till you can’t walk. And afterward we’ll do the same to the kid.”

The words hit her harder than the heavy, brutal hands. She felt them inside her head, blows you couldn’t block or duck.

“I don’t know,” she moaned. “He isn’t here. I don’t know.”

“You can tell him that if he writes another word, we’ll be back.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell him. I will.”

Not until they had left did she remember that Pavel was in Denmark. With Anna. He wouldn’t be home for several days. She crept along the wall of the bedroom, down the hall and into Katerina’s little room. The light was on, but Katerina was asleep. She lay with warm red cheeks and the blanket half kicked off, but she was all right; nothing had happened to her. Natasha let herself sink to the floor and sat with her knees folded up against her chest for almost an hour before she felt strong enough to get up again, find the telephone and call Pavel.

It was as if he didn’t understand what had happened. Even though she told him, told him what they had said, told him that they had been there, in the apartment, he still didn’t understand.

“But didn’t the alarm work?” he asked, as if that meant anything.

“They said they would … Pavel, you have to come home. Now. Do you hear me?”

“I’ll come as quickly as I can,” he said. “Can’t you go stay with your mother and father? My love, I understand that you are frightened, but that’s what they want. That’s why they do it.”

“You’re not going to write anymore, are you?” she said. “You’ll do as they ask, won’t you?”

There was a pause on the other end.

“Did they say what it was I couldn’t write?” he asked.

“No. Just that you should stop.”

“But it’s my work,” he said. “What we live on. I can’t just stop.”

She cried so hard, the snot was about to choke her. “You can just write good things,” she said. “Things everyone will like.”

“You can’t live on that,” he said.

She couldn’t go home to Kurakhovo until the morning, when the trains would be running again. Instead, she got a knife from the kitchen and began breaking open his desk drawers, the ones he kept locked and didn’t want her to look in. There wasn’t much there. She knew there used to be more—old photographs, newspaper clippings. He had bought a scanner after the first break-in and used it frequently, so maybe it wasn’t necessary to keep so many paper pictures around. There were some bank payment statements, some empty envelopes, a Dictaphone. The new digital camera he had just bought. A pack of condoms, which under normal circumstances would have made her insanely jealous. Now she barely cared.

It took her a few minutes to figure out how to make the camera show pictures on the little display, and it was hard to see them properly. There were pictures of various people and places, nothing she recognized. She turned on the Dictaphone, but there were no recordings on it. It was no longer the one he used when he talked with people, she remembered. His cell phone recorded the conversations for him now and stored them on a little flat memory stick.

Finally she looked at the payments. They were from U-card, the credit card that Pavel used most frequently. She was surprised to see how much he owed. And why was it that nothing was ever paid in? She looked down the long row of numbers. Nothing but outgoing payments, no deposits. Even though she let Pavel manage their budget, she knew this wasn’t normal. You couldn’t have a credit card like that, with everything going out, thousands and thousands of it, and nothing ever being paid back in.

Maybe it was like the rent—Pavel didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

All at once she realized there was a link to some of the pictures in the little camera. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but there was a connection. Two pictures showed a little old lady. In one a large man in an overcoat was helping her out of an even larger car. In the other she stood smiling broadly up at another man, a man Natasha knew mostly because he had once been on the national soccer team. Nikolaij Filipenko. And the woman holding his face between her hands was his mother, Tetjana Filipenko. Who owned U-card.

“WHO DO YOU call when you need a bit of cash? U-card, U-card, U-card! You call: zero, eight hundred, four hundred and two hundred twentyyyy.”

She sang the little jingle aloud to herself, as Pavel had done when he flashed his gold card in expensive clothing boutiques and good restaurants. Happy, greedy Pavel who had treated that U-card like a goose who shat golden eggs, golden eggs he never had to pay for.

Natasha turned off the country road she was on and pulled over to the side. She drew the numbers with a finger on the fogged-over car window so she wouldn’t stumble: 0-800-400-220. Then she found Robbie’s cell phone in her pocket and called.

“U-card customer service. How may we help you?” The voice was young and mild and could almost have belonged to one of the scantily clad girls from the commercial. In the background Natasha heard the faint clatter of hundreds of fingers on computer keyboards.

“I would like to speak with Tetjana Filipenko.”

“I’m sorry?”

Natasha waited a moment. “Tell her that Natasha Doroshenko wants to speak with her. Tell her to call me at this number.”

“I think you have the wrong number.” The voice at the other end had developed a sharp edge. “You have called U-card’s customer service. We can block your card if it has been stolen. We can make a transfer for you. We can assist you with your …”

“Do you want to die?”

Natasha’s question stopped the girl’s memorized service patter, and the phone became silent. She could still hear the faint clicking from all the other keyboards and the soft buzz of other young women’s voices in the background. Natasha pictured the young woman, far away in Ukraine, looking around for help. Considering her options. But she was surrounded by young women like herself, and they were all busy blocking U-cards and sending money through cyberspace.

“Tell Tetjana Filipenko that I called, and she should call me at this number. Natasha Doroshenko. Tell her.”

She hung up and remained sitting with the phone in her hand. Closed her eyes and waited. The Witch would call.