Invisible Murder

IS HEAD HURT like crazy. Sándor cautiously fingered his eyebrow, tracing the edges of the wound under the bandage, but that wasn’t where most of the pain was coming from. When the blow hit, his head had slammed back and something in his neck had dislocated, or at least that was how it felt. And the ribs on his left side ached with a steady, dull pain with every breath he took.

Traffic churned past on both sides of a narrow central strip of trees. It wasn’t very dark yet even though it was past ten, and though he felt like sitting down on the sidewalk and leaning against a wall, there were limits to how weird he could act out here in the open where everyone could see him.

It was no longer hot. There was a sharpness in the air, and a shiver ran through him when he breathed, partly because of the cold, partly because of the shock. Someone had hit him. Someone had kicked him while he was down. Someone had thrown rocks at him. There was a tumultuous, injured humiliation inside him. He felt picked on. The entire Hungarian part of his upbringing was in offended uproar—“You can’t just hit people, you know!”—while at the same time he could hear his stepfather Elvis’s sarcastic scorn when he had been stupid enough to complain that someone had pushed him at school. Crybaby. Push back!

He hadn’t found Tamás.

Even though the place was at the address Tamás had given him, Tamás wasn’t there. No one would admit having seen him. No one would say where he was. And when Sándor had kept asking, insisted … it had happened in a flash. There hadn’t been any introductory pushing or bumping chests, they had just … let him have it. Three or four quick blows and, when he fell down, a kick to the kidneys and one in the side. He wasn’t even sure which of them had hit him, after the first man, that little square guy with the mustache, the one who sounded like he came from Szeged. He was the one who had busted Sándor’s eyebrow.

As he lay doubled over on the filthy, gritty concrete floor of the repair shop, he heard the sound of breaking glass. Then they hauled him up onto his feet and pushed him up against the wall, and the Szeged man stuck something right up in his face, so close that Sándor had to squint to see that it was a broken bottle.

They’re going to slit my throat.

He had time to think that thought, disjointed and panicky and yet strangely matter-of-fact. A noise came out of his throat, a squeak that was both pain and fear. And that very instant there was a pling! from his mobile phone, an absurdly everyday sound in the midst of impending death. That didn’t stop the man with the broken bottle.

“Get lost,” he said coldly. “If we see you here again.…”

He didn’t need to say any more. The edge of the broken glass rested sharp and cold against Sándor’s cheek, and Sándor could feel his pulse throbbing in his carotid artery a few centimeters down.

“You and your mulo brother.…” one of the other men whispered. “Mamioro, scram.”

And Sándor had run away. His tail between his legs, his throat full of bile. But when he got outside, there was nowhere to go. After all, he had to find Tamás.

Mulo. He remembered that word because ghosts and evil spirits were staples of his grandmother’s bedtime stories. Mamioro? Wasn’t there a story about.…

But the memory slipped through his fingers like a fish squirming its way out of the fisherman’s grasp. And mulo was ominous enough on its own. Why were they calling his brother an evil spirit?

He shuddered and suddenly noticed that he was in his shirtsleeves, leaning up against a wall whose cool stone façade was sucking the heat out of his body with each second. His jacket. What happened to it?

Damn it. That’s right, the nurse had helped him to take it off.

He swore softly and starting walking back toward the street where she had dropped him off. It wasn’t far; it couldn’t be. A quiet side street off the noisy boulevard he was on now with three- or four-story residential buildings on both sides and some fragile, freshly planted trees in pots here and there.…

Was it here? FEJøGADE the sign said, a collection of letters that refused to make any kind of sense in his head whatsoever. And people said Hungarian was hard.…

The little, red Fiat was parked next to the curb, with a spider web shaped pattern in the rear window where the rock had hit it. He put his hands on the roof and peered in the side windows. Yes. There it was, tossed on the back seat with the first aid kit she had used when she patched him up. He grabbed the door handle, but of course the car was locked. The locking reflex was apparently so ingrained in city dwellers that it would take more than a stomach bug to defeat it.

He tried to figure out which building was hers. Surely she had parked as close as she could, but there weren’t very many free spots to choose from. He stared doubtfully at the big entry door closest to the Fiat. Was that it? He couldn’t be sure. And which floor? He stared at the row of lit buzzer buttons with neatly typed names behind Plexiglas. HANSEN, KRONBORG, H. SKOVGAARD, MALENE HVIDT & RASMUS BJERG POULSEN.… She hadn’t said what her name was. He tentatively pressed the button next to HANSEN, but there was no answer. KRONBORG turned out to be a man’s voice, speaking Danish, of course. Or so Sándor assumed anyway. He couldn’t make out a single word.

It’s just a jacket, he told himself. But he felt still further reduced. Going from a room full of possessions to a duffel bag of just the most essential things. Then the bag was gone—he hadn’t brought it from Valby. And now his Studio Coletti jacket, which with a little generosity could be mistaken for something more classic. What would it be next? For a brief nightmarish moment, he pictured himself roaming the streets of this foreign city stark naked. But he still had his wallet in his trouser pocket, his mobile phone, and the keys to the dorm room that was no longer his.

The phone. He had received a text message, hadn’t he? While he’d been pushed up against the wall with the sharp edge of the broken bottle at his throat.

The message was empty. But it had come from Tamás’s number.

He feverishly pressed “call.” How long had it been since the message had arrived? A half hour? More? Less? He had no idea. He just had to desperately hope his brother was still by the phone.

“Yes?”

“Tamás. Where are you?”

“Who is this?”

Only when the voice began speaking English did he realize it wasn’t Tamás.

“Could I please speak to Tamás?” he tried.

“Who may I say is calling?” said the man on the phone, very correctly, but in some accent that Sándor couldn’t identify. Maybe that was what it sounded like when Danes spoke English.

“I’m his brother.”

“Oh, good. He’s been asking for you. He can’t come to the phone right now, but he really wants to talk to you. Where are you?”

The alarm bells started going off in the back of Sándor’s mind. I don’t trust them. I only trust you.

“In Copenhagen,” he said vaguely. “Where’s Tamás now?”

“He’s here with us. He’s sleeping right now. He’s been very sick, and he’s not doing so well. But I know he’ll be really happy to see you when he wakes up. Where are you? We’ll just come pick you up. It’s no problem.”

I don’t trust you either, Sándor thought. But I don’t have any choice.

“It says FEJøGADE on the sign,” he said and spelled it out for them.