Invisible Murder

HWACK!

Nina aimed a quick, precise blow at the vicious little gnat that had been hounding her for the past thirty seconds. First it had gone for the back of her neck, then it had changed tactics and tried her lips, eyes, and ears. Now it was smeared across her bare shoulder, a small disgusting streak of blood. She brushed the worst of it away and looked around at the crowd of happy people with the growing sense that she had landed on some alien planet. Class 2A’s first big overnight field trip. When Nina was a kid, that kind of thing was between the kids and the school. These days the parents were supposed to come along to “get to know each other.” And that was just one horror on a long list of social activities requiring creative costumes, fake smiles, and liters of mediocre coffee. Thank god the school year was drawing to an end; she was completely and utterly fed-up. But here they were, in one final binge of get-togetherness, in an old Boy Scout cabin near Solrød Beach, and everything was exactly the way she had pictured it. It was dark and dank and smelled of damp wood and sweaty feet. The kitchen was a grease pit, and a quick glance at the sleeping facilities revealed that, just as she had feared, everyone was supposed to sleep in one common bunkroom, which meant getting a whole lot better acquainted with the other parents than she was prepared to. The fact that she had had a pounding headache ever since she returned from Valby the previous evening did nothing to improve her mood. She had taken a cocktail of aspirin with codeine and Paracetamol that usually worked for most kinds of pain, but without much success so far. The low evening sun pierced her eyes, and invisible knives stabbed into her temples every time she turned her head toward the light.

But Anton was loving it.

He was standing over by the campfire with Benjamin poking the embers with a long stick. They had finished their twist bread long since, and Benjamin’s mother had chased them away from the flames several times. Nina had given up without even trying. Boys had been playing with campfires since before recorded history, and it was presumably part of their DNA. They poked at the coals, pushing twigs into the flickering, orangey yellow flames, sending little clouds of sparks and ash up into the blue sky at regular intervals.

Nina knew she ought to be doing something. Clearing the table, making coffee, or at least chatting with the other parents. But right now she didn’t have the strength for anything other than nursing her headache and holding it together. She missed Morten. He would have been so much in his element. Right now, he would have been laughing and talking with the other dads, and no doubt he would also have had the energy to bake a proper cake for the group instead of the hastily purchased store-bought version she had brought along. He would have loaded the car full of balls and bats and got a pickup game going on the lawn in front of the cabin. Morten was good at this kind of thing, and when he was along, he provided a peaceful refuge from all the socializing whenever she got tired of smiling.

Behind the cabin there were newly grown, knee-high stinging nettles under the beech trees. She walked a few steps farther away from the cabin, carefully bending the nettles to the side with her feet, and sat down on a large boulder with her phone in her hand.

An international number had called. Twice. Nina guessed it was the little boy’s mother out in Valby even though there was nothing on her voicemail aside from white noise and a faint murmur.

She sat with her phone in her hand and listened to the raucous drone of the kids and grownups on the other side of the building. A woman laughed shrilly, and Nina again noticed her headache, which came rolling in like a heavy wave from somewhere in the very back of her skull, moving forward toward her eyes.

She had promised to return to the garage if they needed her. The forest floor swayed very slightly as she stood up and started walking back toward Anton. Hopefully he would insist on staying.

The boys were still standing by the fire with their sticks, and Nina decided to exploit her casual acquaintance with Benjamin’s mother, a short, sympathetic looking woman who looked to be no older than thirty.

“Excuse me.” Nina attempted to smile weakly, but bravely. “I think unfortunately we’re going to have to head back home. I’m coming down with the worst headache.”

Benjamin’s mother stepped out of the little cluster of parents she had been standing in and looked at Nina with compassion.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “The boys are having such a good time. Don’t you think Anton would like to stay? I’d be happy to watch him.”

Nina smiled gratefully and glanced quickly over at Anton.

“Oh, would you? That’s so sweet of you,” she said. “I’ll just go ask him.”

“Yes, by all means.” The woman gave Nina a serious look. “But are you sure you can drive? You don’t look well.”

When Nina climbed in behind the wheel of her Fiat seven minutes later and glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw what Benjamin’s mother had meant. She was pale and her skin gleamed damply in the light refracting through the windshield, painting rainbow-colored stripes on the dashboard. She waved to Anton as she backed down the narrow drive, her skull feeling as if it was about to explode. He waved back with a cheerful grin and then took off, galloping after Benjamin into the trees. She couldn’t see him anymore as she pulled out onto the paved road. Just before getting on the highway, she stopped the car, walked all the way over to the drainage ditch and threw up the sausages, twist bread, and mediocre coffee onto the fresh green dandelions.

WHEN NINA PARKED the Fiat in front of the garage, a man was standing by the chain-link fence by the road. The sun had sunk farther in the sky and hung behind his head like a glowing halo that made it impossible for her to make out his facial features. All the same, she had the sneaking sense that he was watching her as she walked across the cracked asphalt.

A muffled bass line with a techno beat hammered at her as she opened the door into the shop. There were only a handful of men in there. The nice weather apparently meant longer workdays in the city. The few that had returned home were sitting on a set of rickety lawn chairs just inside the door and were so preoccupied with their card game that the only scrutiny she received was a scowl as she scooted around them. At the back of the room, there was a slightly overweight teenage girl in pale blue jeans that were far too tight, a bright-yellow top and ponytail leading an impromptu chorus line of younger girls. Nina saw two little girls who hadn’t been at the garage the previous evening. They must be seven or eight, she guessed, as she saw them carefully copying the teenager’s not-entirely-unrefined dance steps with dark-eyed concentration. A couple of the boys, slightly younger, were fiddling with the source of the noise, a greasy ghetto blaster that had been plugged into a socket next to the door to the kitchenette. One of them was trying to sabotage the girls’ dance with a big, impudent grin, swaying hips and holding a chocolate cookie in his right hand, but the rest of the group gathered around the ghetto blaster looked wan and limp.

The little boy was nowhere to be seen.

Nina proceeded down the length of the garage, her steps wobbly. Objects kept floating off to one side whenever she tried to focus on them. The cold, blue light from the fluorescent tube blinked irregularly as she made her way back down the rows of mattresses, rolled-up bedding, and sleeping bags. Then she spotted the boy’s mother. She was huddled up against the wall, tiny. The boy was lying next to her, and when Nina got close enough, she saw that he was awake. His eyes were big and dark in his pale face, but it reassured Nina to see that he was conscious. His mother looked like someone who hadn’t slept in days, which she probably hadn’t. She was pale and colorless in a pair of worn jeans and a pink fleece jacket that looked too warm for May. She pointed to a little phone she wore hanging around her neck and flashed her cavity-ridden teeth in something that was meant to resemble a smile.

“Ápolónö, telefonál!” she said.

Nina nodded and slid down beside the woman. The nausea, which had been lying in wait the whole way to Valby, came back when the stench of the boy’s sickbed hit her nostrils. What is this damn thing, she wondered, aware of how the question drifted around inside her aching head in an oddly aimless way. The boy’s pulse was a little too high, but that wasn’t a big deal. He could definitely use a new unit of saline, but his mother had apparently succeeded in getting him to drink some fluids. There were a couple of empty half-liter water bottles rolling around next to the mattress. Not critical, Nina thought, but the boy wasn’t healthy either. Far from it. The boy’s mother looked like she had read Nina’s thoughts.

“Kórház,” she said. “Hospital?”

Before Nina had a chance to respond, the woman stood up in a wobbly, exhausted motion and gestured to Nina to follow her outside. They walked past the men playing cards and out into the parking lot, where darkness had now settled over the industrial neighborhood. The woman continued around the corner of the garage and down the uneven concrete pavers of an overgrown walkway that led to the garage’s boarded-up office shack. A tall, untrimmed beech hedge was leaning across the path from the neighboring property, and Nina was on the verge of losing her balance as she ducked to pass underneath the branches. The pavers were wobbling. The whole world was wobbling now. The woman stopped about halfway down the path, squatted down, and separated the leaves in the hedge. Then she pulled out an old, plastic bucket that she held with just two fingers on the handle, cautiously placing it on the cobblestones between them.

The stench from the sloshing plastic bucket revealed its contents even before Nina looked into it. Vomit. The woman pointed into the bucket and looked at Nina with bare, black fear in her eyes.

“Vér,” she said. “Much sick.”

Nina held her breath and cautiously leaned over the bucket. The contents were grainy and dark, like coffee grounds.

Hematemesis. The person whose vomit this was had a seriously bleeding ulcer. It couldn’t be the boy, Nina told herself. It couldn’t. Not when he was sitting in the garage eating cookies, looking sick, but not deathly ill. It must be someone else, maybe the young man who had disappeared. Either he had consumed something that had eaten away the mucous membrane in his stomach or his stomach was totally ravaged by the effects of the disease. Hematemesis didn’t just stop on its own. It was a potentially lethal condition.

“Where did it come from? Where is he?”

The woman hesitated.

“Mulo, much sick. Gone. Now, my son same sick.” Fear pulled at the woman’s mouth.

Nina moved, as quickly as her wobbly state permitted. If the vomit had come from Peter’s “sick young man,” he was in serious trouble. But she had no idea who he was or where in the world he was, and the children had to be her first priority now.

She yanked open the door of the garage and went across to the boy on the mattress. She was still far from certain that this was the same thing the young man had been suffering from. But she couldn’t let herself run that risk any longer. The boy had to go to the hospital.

“Hospital. Now.”

Nina gave a friendly smile and went to great lengths to act calm. There was no reason to scare the wits out of the boy’s mother. On the other hand, it was important that she understood what had to be done. Nina could leave no room for doubt.

The woman glanced anxiously over at the men on the rickety lawn chairs. Then she took out a crumpled white plastic bag and started gathering up a few of the boy’s clothes. It said “Ticket to Heaven” on the bag in big, attractive, swoopy letters. Below that was a drawing of happy stick-figure boys and girls in colored shorts and dresses. The woman’s hands had started shaking.

One of the men got up. Nina could hear his footsteps approaching on the bare concrete floor but didn’t turn around. She kneeled down next to the boy and smiled at him.

“Do you want to go for a little trip?” Nina asked, picking him up. Then she nodded quickly at the woman. “Let’s go.”

She started walking toward the door, and the boy’s mother followed. He was heavier than she remembered him being, or maybe she was weaker. It felt like she was walking on pillows.

“Abbahagy. Stop.”

The man hadn’t even raised his voice, but Nina sensed the woman behind her stiffen. Now all of the men stood up and came over to block their way, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. The boy’s father took a step forward and grabbed his wife’s arm.

“Örült éu vagy?”

A shower of Hungarian words hailed down on them. The man gestured in Nina’s direction, and the woman responded quietly and fervently. Then she pulled herself free, walked over to Nina, and tried to clear a path for them through the little group of men.

“Né!”

The man jumped forward and grabbed her again, this time so hard that it was obvious it hurt. Then he looked over at Nina. “My son stay here.”

The woman protested, clearly trying to explain something to him, but still without luck. The men had begun to close in around Nina, who stood motionless with the boy locked in her arms.

“The boy is very sick. We must take him to the hospital,” she said calmly. “Please let me through.”

She expressed her desire to proceed with her face, and a very young man with a ponytail and youthful peach fuzz on his chin moved just enough to allow her to proceed toward the door. If she made it out with the boy, presumably his mother would be allowed to follow. Otherwise Nina might have to come back for her later.

With a quick yank someone spun her around, and she was now face to face with the boy’s father, who looked like a man ready to fight to the death. He was furious, and behind the fury lurked something that resembled panic. As if he were afraid of her.

The man made a grab for the boy and tried to lift him out of Nina’s arms with harsh, vigorous yanks, which caused the boy to emit an ear-splitting shriek. Nina let go of him. They couldn’t stand there each tugging on either end of the child like two dogs with a piece of meat. But it was too late. The boy’s shriek made the man yell something, first at Nina and then at the boy’s mother, who had begun to cry. Nina looked at the men’s faces, backed over to the door, grabbed the handle, and left. They let her do that.

She stood in the parking lot and took a deep breath, mouthful after mouthful of cool evening air. Her headache, which had receded slightly during the scuffle, returned as if her head were being bludgeoned.

She wasn’t physically up to taking the boy away herself and would now have to notify the authorities. There was no way around it. Nina decided to start with Magnus, who had a detailed list of contact numbers for the police and the various welfare agencies. No matter who came out here now, they were going to need police assistance if they were to have any chance of taking the boy.

Magnus’s number was in her fingers, but she didn’t manage to finish dialing it. A hard blow struck her hand. The pain in the back of her hand made her lose her grip on her phone. The phone hit the asphalt with an ominous crack, and when she spun around, she saw the young man with the ponytail standing there holding a broomstick. That was what he had hit her with. He put his heel on her phone, and there was a crunching sound as he crushed it. He raised the broomstick yet again and yelled something or other, either at her or to the men who had stayed behind in the garage.

Nina turned around and sprinted the few remaining meters to her Fiat, flung herself into the driver’s seat, and jabbed her key into the ignition. Someone tried to open the door on the passenger’s side. She couldn’t see who it was and didn’t care, either. She leaned across the passenger’s seat as best she could with the steering wheel in her way and tried to force the door closed again. Without success. Whoever was holding the handle was stronger than she was, and in the rearview mirror, she could see a bunch of angry men closing in. A rock hit her rear windshield with a dull crash. The door handle slid out of her desperate grasp, and a man slipped into the front seat next to her.

“Drive,” he said. “Please.…”

It wasn’t until then that she realized that he wasn’t one of the pursuers but appeared to be pursued like herself. His face was red and swollen. He had a busted eyebrow, dark with clotted blood. As if he had just come out of a bar fight. Yet another shower of rocks hailed down over the car.

Nina turned the key in the ignition, and the Fiat started miraculously and immediately. She backed up so fast that the men behind them had to jump to the side, then sped ahead and threw the car onto the deserted industrial road, still with one door wide open and the stowaway clinging to the seat and the handle of the glove compartment. He managed to get the door closed again before they merged into the steady evening rush hour traffic on Gammel Køge Landevej.

THE CAR’S FRONT wheels hit the curb by the sidewalk in Fejøgade with a soft bump, and Nina heard the scraping sound of the undercarriage against the concrete. She was starting to feel dizzy again, and small black spots were dancing in front of her eyes as she turned her head to look at her uninvited passenger. He was pressing a handkerchief against the gash in his eyebrow. It was already soaked with blood, and a couple of big, dark drops had seeped through the fabric, dripping onto his arm. He noticed and folded the handkerchief carefully, trying to avoid further mess on himself or the car seat. It was almost touching, Nina thought, with a glance at the Fiat’s shop-soiled upholstery. She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a roll of paper towels, and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said politely.

They hadn’t said anything to each other the whole drive. She hadn’t had enough breath for anything besides maneuvering them in one piece through the city traffic despite her headache, and he had just sat there, motionless and silent, as if he felt that any movement on his part would be interpreted as a threat.

He fumbled the paper towel into place over his gash and continued to sit there with the bloody handkerchief in his other hand as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. It wasn’t until now that Nina had a chance to size him up. He was a long way from home, she thought, and young, probably somewhere in his early twenties. At first she had assumed he was Roma, but now she wasn’t sure. There was something about the way he was dressed, his mannerisms, his reserved politeness—something that somehow set him apart from the other men out there at the garage. And then of course there was also the fact that they had beaten him.… His breathing was unsteady, and he was holding his elbow awkwardly against his ribcage on one side. The split eyebrow clearly wasn’t the whole story.

“What happened?” she asked, grateful that he spoke at least a little English. “Where does it hurt?”

“My side,” he said. “I got kicked.…”

At least it wasn’t a knife or a baseball bat. Her eyes wandered up to his mouth, but there were no blood bubbles, and the blood that was there all seemed to have come from his eyebrow. A kick could easily break a rib, and a broken rib could perforate a lung. The eyebrow would have to wait; it wasn’t life threatening. Chest pain could be.

“Take your jacket off. No, wait. I’ll help you.” She didn’t want him to move his torso too much until she had an idea of what was going on with his ribs. The need to call on her professional skills once again pushed her own nausea into the background, and she was grateful for that. She turned on the overhead light to see what she was doing and pulled the now blood-splattered white shirt to the side to expose his torso. There was a round red mark along the third rib on his left side, and he inhaled sharply when she touched it. But the bone felt intact; at most it was cracked, which was still enormously uncomfortable and would make breathing an unpleasant chore for a few days, but nothing worse.

“Are you a doctor?” he asked.

“Nurse.”

A flash of eagerness and hope lit up the eye that wasn’t stuck shut with blood.

“My brother,” he said. “Have you seen him? He’s sick.…”

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Sixteen.”

“No. Then I haven’t seen him.” Was he the sick, young Roma man who had disappeared from the garage? Should she ask? But she didn’t know anything other than that he was gone and that he might not be just sick but critically ill.

The man’s shoulders sank. She cautiously moved the hand protecting his eye so she could see the gash. It was what she had been expecting, a classic boxing injury. It bled a lot, but the gash wasn’t all that long, and Nina could have fixed it up with a drop of skin glue from her first aid kit if she had had a chance to grab it when she left Valby. Now she would have to make do with the car’s first aid kit, which wasn’t ideal, but better than nothing.

“Do you know the people out there?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

He sat perfectly still while she worked, almost as if he wasn’t completely present. As if he had disappeared into himself, to some place where the pain couldn’t reach him. It gave her a jolt of discomfort because that was a reaction she was more used to seeing in exhausted or abused refugee children, but at least it made him an easy patient. She cleaned the wound with a splash of iodine and closed the gaping gash with small pieces of surgical tape. Finally she turned the rearview mirror so he could view the results. The look in his eyes became more alert, and he thanked her again, just as politely as the first time.

“You’re welcome.”

Nina forced herself to smile as she felt the nausea come roiling back up from somewhere low in her abdomen. It was that refugee child’s reaction in him that made her continue:

“Are you in trouble? Is there anything I.…”

She only made it halfway through the question. It felt as if the car were sailing across the black asphalt, like a ship in rough waters. She opened the door, but only made it halfway out before she threw up, hanging out of her seat. Warm vomit spattered her sandal, her foot, and her bare leg. When the heaving stopped, she sat there for several seconds with her eyes closed and her forehead resting against the steering wheel, gasping the cool evening air.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up. He had gotten out of the car and come around to her side to help her out. He looked scared, she thought. Worried and scared, in a way that looked wrong for someone that young. People his age usually lived secure in their faith in their own immortality.

He supported her gently under the elbow as she awkwardly straddled the little pool of vomit next to the car. There were small bright red splotches in the grayish yellow. Blood. That put paid to any lingering doubts. She was suffering from the same thing as the children at the garage.

Nina instinctively pulled her arm back and took a step away from the young man. If this was contagious, and she was a carrier, then she had already spent too long with him in the car, not to mention with Anton and all the kids on the field trip. She wasn’t too worried about herself or Anton. A well-equipped hospital would have no trouble curing this thing, whatever it was. It was a different matter for the Roma at the garage and for her injured passenger. She had no idea where he was going and if he would have access to a hospital if he got sick.

“This is just first aid,” she told him. “Get back in. I’ll drive you to the emergency room just as soon … just give me a moment.”

“No.” He shook his head vehemently.

She stared at him and felt an intense exasperation spread like heat through her chest. What was it with these people? Why couldn’t they just do what she said?

“You need more treatment. And the children out there. They need to go to the hospital. Why won’t any of you see that?” Her voice had become hard and flat with suppressed rage. But not sufficiently suppressed, it seemed.

“I’m going now,” he said, taking a step back, as if he was backing away from a vicious dog. “Thanks for your help.”

She wanted him to wait. To at least stay long enough to get her phone number so he could call if there were problems. If he got sick. Or if he found his sick brother. But he was already walking down the sidewalk. The muscles in Nina’s legs trembled as she tried to take a couple of swaying steps after him. She didn’t even have the strength to call out. She was afraid she would throw up again if she so much as flexed a single muscle in the region of her neck. But when he got to the corner, he turned around spontaneously. He hesitated for so long she thought maybe he had changed his mind after all.

“The children,” he said then. “In Hungary, Roma children are often removed from their homes. For example if someone in the family is seriously ill or … or something. That’s why they’re afraid. That’s why they don’t dare go to the doctor here. Because the children don’t always come home again.”

He looked as if he wanted to say more, but then he turned his back on her again, lengthened his strides, and disappeared down Jagtvej. She stood perfectly still for a while, waiting for her nausea to subside.