Invisible Murder

INA HAD BEEN feeling sick. She was pregnant with Ida, it was morning, and the morning sickness had overpowered her and made it hard for her to breathe. She was in bed next to Morten, trying to lie completely still in the sweat-dampened bedding as she listened to the traffic outside on the overpass. If she didn’t move, she could sometimes postpone the inevitable. The sudden rush of saliva, the sharp burning feeling of vomit in her throat, and the hurried scramble to their tiny bathroom with its cold, black-specked terrazzo floor. Sometimes thinking about lemons and ginger and cool, fresh, green grass helped, too, and she tried thinking about the baby as a good thing. Something happy.

She rarely succeeded. She could see that her body had changed, her breasts were bigger, and just beneath the skin, there was a fine network of light-blue veins. Her flat stomach had also taken on a small, discreet bulge, and although she knew that there was a living being in there under her skin, she didn’t really feel anything. It didn’t have a face. It didn’t exist, and as Nina lay on her knees on the cold terrazzo floor, the nausea finally overtaking her body, she sometimes wished the baby wasn’t there, and that she and Morten didn’t have to do this. Together. And with that thought came the anxiety of doing the whole thing wrong, because she didn’t love the little unborn life enough. Because you were supposed to love your own baby. Weren’t you? She didn’t dare ask Morten if he loved the child, because he probably did. His feelings were always proper, healthy, and normal. Nina, on the other hand, felt panic and anxiety creeping in, from all the black crevices of her childhood. Mostly she was afraid of herself. The nausea washed over her again, and she was so terribly thirsty. But if she moved now, if she stood up now, there would be no going back.

Bang.

A door was yanked open in the outskirts of Nina’s consciousness, and now there was someone yelling, too. She opened her eyes. The nausea was still there, but she wasn’t lying in bed next to Morten, nor on the bathroom floor of their first apartment. Her left shoulder was painfully stretched, her arm still bent awkwardly behind Ida’s neck and tied to the radiator. She must have dozed off, but not for very long, because there was still that same hazy, yellow half-light in the room.

“Fuck. We have to go. Now.”

Tommi had stumbled into the living room, swearing and trying to zip up his jeans.

Mr. Suburbia got halfway up from the sofa and shot a questioning look at the Finn, who was now struggling to put on his worn white sneakers.

“What’s going on? I thought we had to wait for the address.”

“We’re out of here now,” Tommi hissed. “The police are at Rhodesiavej. They got Mini.”

Something somewhere in the living room beeped, and the Finn looked around, searching, spotted his phone, and picked it up with a satisfied grunt. “I think we just got our address.”

He browsed down through the menu.

“41 Lundedalsvej. This is it, Frederik.”

Ida squirmed anxiously. She was wearing her favorite jeans, Nina noticed, a pair of skinny black jeans with ratty holes in the thighs and knees. She pulled her legs up against her chest so her bony white knees were visible. They were trembling faintly.

Mr. Suburbia stood there for a second staring mutely at Tommi.

“Rhodesiavej. How the hell did they find you?”

The Finn, who was now on his way over to Sándor in quick, decisive steps, sulkily shrugged. “No clue. It’s not my fault. But Mini has got her passport and all that shit in the house, and if they look up her name, they’ll find this place, too. So the new plan is.…” He pulled a flimsy pocketknife out of his back pocket and was now standing in front of Ida, Nina, and Sándor. “The new plan is we get the money, I take a little trip to Thailand and enjoy some Asian cunt, and you slink off back to your house in the ’burbs and keep a low profile until the police find something else to waste their time on.”

Mr. Suburbia looked like he had just woken up. He glanced around the living room, stuffed the laptop roughly into his computer bag and started randomly dumping DVDs, ring binders, loose change, and his red ceramic mug into a plastic bag. The Finn shot him an irritated look.

“Just leave all that shit, Freddie, and get over here and help me get this lot on their feet. I can’t be doing every fucking thing by myself.”

OUTSIDE, THE RAIN was coming down in a steady drizzle, and the moisture settled like a cool, wet film on Nina’s face and hair, making her thirst burn worse than before. Ida and Sándor walked ahead of her across the wet, shiny gravel of the U-shaped drive in front of the house. Ida looked small and stooped, her backpack dangling absurdly from one hand as if she were just on her way home from a normal day at school. Sándor was holding himself straight in an almost-defiant way but kept his injured hand tucked against his belly, as if to protect it from the rest of the world. Tommi was behind them, with the gun aimed at their backs. He seemed a little less tense now that they were all out of the house but was hurrying them along the whole time. When they rounded the corner of the house, Nina felt a sharp shove, which almost sent her nose-first into the knee-high stinging nettles growing up along the wall.

“Faster!” Tommi yelled, loud enough that Ida and Sándor also got the message and obediently sped up. Nina got up slowly but then stumbled again without provocation and dropped to her knees in the wet, stinging stalks. The ground rolled dizzyingly beneath her, and for a brief panic-stricken second, she thought she wasn’t going to be able to get back up again. What would he do then? Shoot her right there, in front of Ida? The thought flitted through her as she stared into the lush, dark-green jungle of nettles in front of her. She had broken the fall with her hands and felt her palms burn and sting as she struggled to regain her footing. Ida dropped back silently to pull her to her feet. Her daughter’s face was unreadable, her eyes narrow, black cracks in a sheet-white mask.

“Stop right there.”

Tommi barked the order in his heavy English, and Mr. Suburbia quickly skirted around Nina and Ida, his dog padding along at his heels. He stopped next to Sándor and cast an uncertain glance at Tommi. Mr. Suburbia looked like a man who was crumbling inside, Nina thought. If there had ever been any voice of authority inside that fancy polo shirt, it was gone now. This—whatever “this” was—was the Finn’s territory.

“Where is the damn thing?”

Mr. Suburbia had pulled a long, thin metal hook out of his back pocket and was kicking around in the stinging nettles, searching, until his foot hit what he was looking for. A rusty metal lid. Maybe to a septic tank or an old oil tank of the illegal, buried variety?

“Here,” he said.

In a way, Nina knew the instant she saw the lid. And yet she didn’t believe it. Not until Mr. Suburbia hauled the lid of the tank back and called Ida over.

Ida didn’t respond, just stood there, still with her backpack in one hand.

“Come on. Get over here.” Mr. Suburbia seemed annoyed and glanced hesitantly over at the Finn, as if he were waiting for some kind of instructions from him on how to get hostages to crawl down into black holes. But Ida kept close to Nina, her lips forming small, soundless prayers. Like when she was little and used to huddle in bed chanting whispered incantations against monsters.

“Get her down into the fucking tank,” Tommi hissed. “I can’t do it. I’m holding the gun. Come on already.”

Mr. Suburbia took a step forward, grabbed Ida’s arm and started pulling her toward the yawning hole. He stepped over it clumsily and was now trying to lift Ida’s feet off the ground so she would lose her footing, and he could stuff her into the hole. But his plan was doomed to fail. Ida finally let go of her schoolbag and stuck out her arms and legs in panic and started to make noises. Not screams, but sobbing pleas.

“Please don’t. No. Please don’t do this. Let me go.”

And then, finally, Nina’s feet left the ground, and she lunged at Mr. Suburbia, aiming for his eyes and nose and trying to dig her fingers into his face.

“Let. Her. Go.”

Her words slipped out one by one in between each desperate attack on the man’s mildly astonished face. Then he began to turn around, still with Ida struggling in his arms, so that Nina could only claw his shoulders and back.

A shot cracked with deafening loudness behind them, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw something brown and furry streak past her legs in a panic and continue through the stinging nettles into the field beyond. Mr. Suburbia swore loudly and called after the dog, and Nina gave it all she had and landed a proper blow for the first time, dead-on, somewhere just behind his ear. Then she was yanked back by the Finn’s skinny, iron grip on the back of her neck.

“Knock it off, or I’ll shoot you, your daughter, and your goat-fucking friend. Right now.”

Nina slowly turned her head. The Finn was still holding the back of her neck with one hand and, with the other, aiming the gun at Sándor, who was standing beside him, still and pale. Sándor’s injured left hand was clenched into a fist, but he had got no further than that.

Tommi loosened his grasp on her neck and instead pulled her all the way back, into an absurd embrace. She was standing with her back pressed against his chest while he pushed up her chin with the cold muzzle of the pistol. Nina tried to make eye contact with Ida, still dangling in Mr. Suburbia’s grasp over the manhole, but Ida saw only the Finn and the gun under her mother’s chin. Her eyes were crazed with fear.

“Psychology, Frederik,” the Finn said. He was winded from the struggle and paused for a second to catch his breath. “You have to use a little psychology in situations like these.”

Then he looked at Ida.

“There’s nothing dangerous down there, baby. And it won’t take that long. Your mom and the goat-fucker just have to help us with something. Then you can come up again. Nice and easy.”

Ida shook her head faintly, and Nina could see her trying to bring her thoughts into some kind of order. Filter away the man’s calm, almost friendly tone and hear what he was actually saying. She was confused.

“I could also put it another way,” Tommi said then, without changing his intonation. “If you don’t crawl down into that hole, right now, no fuss, I will blow your mom’s jaw off.”

This time the message hit home. Ida stared for a brief instant, looking from the Finn to Nina and back again. Her jaw muscles tensed, and Nina could see that she was trying to control her trembling. She didn’t want to cry, probably for Nina’s sake as much as her own. Nina herself wanted to scream, but didn’t. Ida might not be aware how dangerous it was to be locked in a sealed tank. How quickly the oxygen got used up. And Nina wasn’t going to explain that to her just now.

Without a word, Ida sat down on the edge of the hole, legs dangling. Then she slid down until only the very top of her shoulders stuck up amidst the stinging nettles. She slowly squatted, and Nina could hear a muffled scraping sound from Ida’s knees as she crawled into the underground metal coffin.

“Chuck that down after her,” the Finn said and pointed at her school bag with his pistol. “We can’t leave it lying around, or someone might notice. And make sure you lock the inner lid.”

Mr. Suburbia dropped the bag down into the tank and then hesitated a second. Glanced down at his polo shirt, up until now miraculously clean, and then knelt down with every sign of distaste. He stuck his head and upper body down into the darkness and, from the movement of his shoulders, seemed to be struggling with something big and heavy. There was the click of a well-lubricated padlock, and Mr. Suburbia popped back out of the hole, breathing hard.

Nina stood there as if she had been turned to stone.

“I have to go find Tyson,” Mr. Suburbia said, looking around. “We can’t leave without him.”

The Finn snorted in irritation.

“Enough already. You can deal with the stupid mutt afterward. You might even ask the nice cops if they’ll help you look.” He turned Nina around to face him and looked at her with the seriousness of a doctor giving instructions to the parents of a dying child. “It’s dangerous down there,” he said. “In the tank. You can die from it, and right now the four of us are the only ones who know where your daughter is. But if you do as we say, I’m sure she’ll make it out again just fine.”