Invisible Murder

ÁNDOR DIDN’T UNDERSTAND a word of what the nervous looking television commentator said, but his two captors obviously did. “Fuck,” Frederik hissed, slamming his can of beer onto the glass top of the coffee table with a bang. “Shit, shit, shit.” In a flash he snatched the can back up again and hurled it at the window, where it hit the plastic covering the window with a soft, dissatisfying sound before clattering to the ground. The smell of top-fermented beer filled the room.

Tommi didn’t say anything. He just kicked the TV console so hard that the flat screen tipped over backward and hit the floor with an ominous crunch. Despite the fall, the TV kept displaying footage of the garage in Valby surrounded by yellow-and-black striped tape and people in yellow spacesuits.

Sándor remained motionless in his black leather recliner without saying anything, without drawing any attention to himself, without providing any provocation.

They weren’t in the city anymore, but some distance outside, Sándor didn’t have any real sense of where. The sound of planes taking off and landing could be heard at regular intervals not that far away, but when they arrived in midmorning after a long and frustrating night, he had seen grazing horses and flocks of wild geese. From the outside it looked to be just a fairly ordinary, red-brick farmhouse sitting alongside a derelict stable, and a dilapidated garage structure. Sándor didn’t know what they were doing here, and no one told him. Tamás wasn’t here.

“You don’t get to see him until we have the jacket,” Frederik had said.

The inside of the house was bizarre. The wallpaper in what must at one time have been the living room was painted a lurid egg plant purple, and on the walls was a series of equally lurid posters in clip frames. They weren’t there just for their entertainment value, they were a sales catalog. The girls, holding their breasts out provocatively at the viewer with both hands or suggestively rubbing their crotches, were accompanied by texts in German and English and a third language he assumed was Danish. “Russian Katarina, twenty-three, loves oral, anal, and gentle dominance; Anna from Riga, only fifteen years old—do you want to be her first?” But neither Anna nor Katarina nor any of their colleagues were in evidence, and some of the frames had already been taken down to make room for a half-hearted normalization of the room involving a lot of white paint, some wood paneling, and several plastic-wrapped bales of rock wool insulation.

In the middle of all that, there was an arrangement with a three-seater sofa, love seat, and armchair, as well as a glass-topped coffee table and TV console, a little island of bourgeois conventionality in the midst of the brothel ambience. Frederik had slept on the longer sofa for a few hours, Tommi on the shorter one, while Sándor had been left to curl up in the armchair.

In the twenty-four hours that had elapsed since the break-in on Fejøgade, Tommi and Frederik had become increasingly frustrated. They hadn’t been able to find the nurse or her car, in spite of all the information they had frightened, threatened, and shaken out of the teenage girl and her boyfriend. Sándor still felt a deep stab of guilt when he thought of those terrified teenagers; of the boy’s pretended cockiness as he nerved himself up to defend his girlfriend, of the sound it had made when Tommi nonchalantly whacked his head into the doorframe. Of the girl who had let go of the blanket and tried to kick Tommi with her bare feet, of how she yelled and screamed and lashed out at him even though all she had on was her panties. Of Tommi who had held her, just held her from behind, while Frederik grabbed the mobile phone and took pictures of her both with and without her panties on.

“Sweet little pussy,” Tommi had whispered in the girl’s ear, but loud enough that they could all hear it. “Just let us know when you get tired of the boy wonder over there, and we’ll get you a real man.”

Then she got scared, Sándor could tell. Until that point she had been shocked, anxious, upset, and furious, but only then did terror set in. She curled up in his grasp, trying to protect her body from the violation of the camera.

Don’t give up, Sándor had wanted to tell her. Don’t let go of your defiance and your rage. But to her he would have just been one of the attackers, the only one of her assailants whose face she could describe. My God, how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen? Maybe even younger. She was definitely still in school; Tommi had stolen her school bag.

And you did nothing, Sándor told himself caustically. You just stood there and did nothing. His passivity was a crime, and he couldn’t think of any way he could atone for it.

Frederik stood the flat screen back up. The picture flickered a little and disappeared, along with the sound, in a storm of multicolored pixels.

“Can they trace Valby to us?” Tommi asked. Still in English, in that strangely broad, rolling accent that sounded so wrong to Sándor’s ears.

“Not right away,” Frederik said. “It depends on how long Malee keeps her trap shut.”

“She won’t say anything,” Tommi said.

“They always do at some point or other.”

“Not Malee. She was one of the strong ones. She was in the tank three times before she gave up.”

“And you think that is going to make her love you?”

“No. But she remembers me. And after that lot, she won’t cave just because the police ask her a couple of polite questions.”

Frederik grumbled. “What are we going to do?” he said. “We can’t leave that thing out there for ever. And the car. You think it’s radioactive, too?”

Tommi shrugged dubiously.

Suddenly Frederik jumped up and went outside.

“Where are you going?” Tommi yelled.

“To get Tyson. He shouldn’t be out there.”

Tommi rolled his beer can back and forth between his palms.

“He spoils that mutt,” he told Sándor. “A wife and two point five kids in Søllerød, but sometimes I think he loves the dog more.”

Quit telling me stuff like that, Sándor pleaded silently. I don’t want to know that he’s married or where he lives. I don’t want to know anything about you two at all. I just want to get my brother and go home.

But Tamás.… How could he even find out if Tamás was still alive? He had asked to see him, be allowed to speak to him, even if just by phone. But aside from that repulsive video, they hadn’t given him any sign of life.

“You’re from Hungary, aren’t you?” Tommi asked suddenly, leaning forward.

Sándor stiffened. Sat even stiller, if that were possible. “Yes,” he said, without looking Tommi in the eye. No opposition, no provocation.

“How do you say ‘house’ in Hungarian?” Tommi asked, making an expansive gesture with his hand to illustrate what he meant by drawing Sándor’s attention to the derelict farmhouse they were sitting in.

“Haz.”

Tommi looked disappointed.

“Huh,” was all he said.

Frederik came back in again, now with an enthusiastically barking Labrador dancing around his feet.

“Okay, down! No jumping,” he commanded, with a certain lack of impact. “Go lie down, Tyson.” He pointed authoritatively to the shag rug under the coffee table. Tyson jumped up onto the sofa next to Tommi instead and settled there. Tommi shot him a dirty look.

“Okay,” Tommi said. “So, we have this damn thing out there in the shed. And apparently it’s leaking like crazy. What are we going to do about it?”

“Call the authorities, and get the hell out of here,” Frederik said. “Well, in the opposite order obviously.”

“Fucking brilliant,” Tommi said. “Then they have both Valby and this place. How long do you think it’ll take before they figure out we actually own them both? And what about the money?”

“Okay, so we dump it somewhere.”

Tommi held up his hand defensively, more or less in front of his crotch. “No way I’m going to have my onions toasted. I’m not touching that shit. Not again.” Then he suddenly looked pale. “You think we’ve already been affected? Fuck. That little shit. I would strangle him if he weren’t already dead.”

Frederik sliced his hand through the air as if he wanted to cut off the torrent of words. But it was too late. Sándor had heard and understood. If he weren’t already dead.

Something churned deep down inside him. Hot, fluid, and alien. He sat there in complete silence, noting the feeling, observing how it rose and rose, pouring like lava into every part of his body. He was looking at the two men who had let his brother die. Who had watched while he got weaker and sicker. As he lost the use of his limbs and his vision and finally his ability to breathe or make his heart beat.

Sándor split into two. One part of him was still sitting in the chair, watching, passive, neutral. He had never had an out-of-body experience before, but that was what was happening now. His rage was his body, and as he hurled himself across the coffee table and jabbed his elbow horizontally into the face of that little psychopathic wannabe cowboy, it was as if he could again taste the mixture of blood, saliva, and moisturizer from the gadjo woman who had once tried to take his siblings from him.

He only heard the screams from a distance. To begin with he didn’t even feel the pummeling blows he was receiving. He bit into something that felt cartilaginous and earlobe-like, hammered the base of his palm into a throat, thrust his elbow into a soft abdomen. Something struck him on the back of the head, making the sounds even more distant, but he didn’t stop hitting and kicking. Not even when he was picked up and hurled to the floor or when it got hard to breathe because someone was sitting on his battered ribcage.

The first thing that penetrated through the fog was a searing, white-hot pain in one of his hands. He instinctively tried to pull it toward himself, but that only made the pain worse. He was stuck. And suddenly he was back in the painful shell of his body, excruciatingly aware of every single blunt protest from his ribs, kidneys, and head, but especially the screeching, unbearable pulse pounding in his left hand.

“Fuckhead,” Tommi said testily. “Now look what you’ve done.”

Blood was pouring down the lower half of the pseudo-cowboy’s face, but Sándor didn’t care about that right now. He turned and stared at his left hand, which was stuck securely to the floor with two nails from a nail gun.

Frederik must have fired the gun, since he was still standing there holding it in his hand.

“Give me that,” Tommi said, yanking it out of Frederik’s grip. He put one knee on Sándor’s chest, forcing him onto his back again, and pressing the cold tip of the nail gun against his forehead just above the bridge of his nose. Sándor instinctively tried to focus, squinting at the green Bosch tool.

“No.…” he said, in Hungarian, Nem!, but it didn’t really matter if that psycho cowboy understood him or not. The inevitability was palpable in the weight of the tip of the nail, in the pressure of the knee on his chest.

“Cut it out,” Frederik said.

“Why? He broke my nose!” Tommi said.

“Yeah, but you said it yourself. You don’t want to fry your onions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone’s going to have to move that thing out there. Are you volunteering?”

The nail gun vanished from Sándor’s squinting field of vision. The weight was lifted off his rib cage.

“Fuck,” Tommi said. “Fucking hell. Goddamn it!”

“Find a hacksaw or a pair of pliers or something and get him up off the floor. I’ll go get the first aid kit from the car so he doesn’t bleed out on us.”

Sándor lay there on the floor like a half-crucified sinner, his sense of relief struggling against the nausea. But maybe there was no cause for relief. If only that guy had fired, it would all be over now. No more pain, no more guilt. Then he would just be dead.

Like Tamás.