Invisible Murder

ÁNDOR AND NINA didn’t talk. They just sat there next to each other as the throb of the diesel engine resonated inside the cold metal box of the van, drowning out most of the street sounds. The first time they stopped, Sándor started kicking the back doors with both legs, but Nina grabbed his arm.

“Ida,” she said, and there was a feral imperative in her eyes that could not be ignored. “You risk getting my daughter killed.”

The car started moving again, presumably they had just stopped for a red light.

His injured hand throbbed and pulsed in time with the diesel engine. His head hurt so much that he was wondering if it wouldn’t be a relief to just let that Finnish psychopath shoot it off. His weary heart still had room for empathy for Nina and a shiver at the thought of that dark, subterranean oil tank and the girl down there, struggling not to gasp up the oxygen too fast and shorten the time she had left. But someone was going to have to try to think beyond that. He certainly understood that Nina couldn’t do it. It was her child. But someone had to think about everyone else, about unsuspecting people sitting on the metro or going to sleep in a hotel bed or jumping up and down in the stands at a concert somewhere, not knowing that their world was about to be blown into a thousand pieces, into a thousand radioactive particles, in a week or a day or an hour.

Someone had to think about them.

Tamás hadn’t. He had thought only about the money, about immediate injustices, about his family’s survival and dreams. The metro passengers, the hotel guests, and the Copenhagen music fans weren’t really people to him. The Roma in Valby had called him a mulo, an evil spirit. An impure death brought curses with it, and you couldn’t die much more impurely than Tamás had.

When Sándor closed his eyes, it was Tamás he saw. Not a living memory of him, but a dead Tamás, who stared at him with burning eyes like the ghosts in Grandma Éva’s stories, blazing eyes that cried blood. He wondered if he would ever be able to sleep again without seeing Mulo-Tamás in his dreams. He wondered if he would ever get the chance to go to sleep again at all or if it would all be over in an instant, with a bang he wouldn’t even hear before the projectile smashed its way into his brain and snuffed everything out.

The van stopped. For longer this time, too long for it just to be a traffic light. Then it slowly drove forward again, now over a somewhat more uneven, bumpy surface.

Nina’s eyes shone in the reflected lights from the driver’s cabin, and she moved uneasily. Then the doors were flung open, and the Finnish psychopath ordered them out.

They were at a construction site, Sándor noted. Muddy tire tracks, pallets of drywall wrapped in plastic flapping gently in the breeze. Spotlights on high posts and sharply delineated black shadows in the May night darkness. Tommi had parked the van between two portable office trailers so it wasn’t immediately visible from the street.

“He wants it inside,” Tommi said. His face mask made his heavy accent even heavier, or maybe it was just because he was excited. “Come on. We’re not going to get any money until he gets it where he wants it.”

Sándor measured the distance with his eyes, but Tommi was too far away. He was rocking back and forth on his feet like an athlete getting ready to make his approach to the high jump, with a phone in one hand and the gun blatantly on display in the other. Either he figured no one could see them or he just didn’t care. Frederik was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he was already inside the half-finished building a little further away, behind Tommi’s agitated, rocking form.

Nina started to push the top slab off.

“Help the lady, now,” Tommi said. “It isn’t fair to let her do all the work, now, is it?”

Sándor helped her. Yet again they managed to work the rake under the paint can’s wire handle. Yet again they balanced the can between them, and the need to maintain its equilibrium absorbed all his attention for a while. Right up until his heel struck something both soft and unyielding. He looked down, forgetting about the horizontal line of the rake handle, and then had to abruptly adjust his end before the can slid all the way down to him and spilled its sand on the ground.

It was a dog. A German Shepherd.

At first he thought Tommi had simply shot it, but there wasn’t enough blood, and now he saw its rib cage rise in a brief gasp and the tongue hanging out of the dog’s half-open mouth quivered, wet and pink. It wasn’t dead, or at least not yet. He couldn’t tell if someone had hit the dog and knocked it out or if it had been drugged in some way.

“Come on,” Tommi said, with an actual hop of happiness. “Aren’t you excited at all? The party is just beginning!”