The Boy in the Suitcase Read online

  “Mr. Marquart. There was no money.”

  Jan tried to imagine what could have happened.

  “There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. “As soon as I get back, I’ll clear it up.”

  “That would be a very good idea,” said the man, and cut the connection. The very restraint of his phrase sent a chill through Jan even in the midst of the overheated cabin. It signaled that this was a man who did not have to resort to threats. A man best not angered.

  Jan jabbed out Karin’s number with some ferocity. She didn’t answer, and he left no message apart from a curt “Call me!”

  He stared sightlessly at the back of the seat in front of him. Sweated. Sipped the water, and the lukewarm gin and tonic he had accepted a few hours ago when he thought he had accomplished a feasible Plan B. It took him nearly half an hour to accept that he would have to call Anne.

  “Have you seen Karin?” he asked. And listened, while Anne’s soft voice told him that yes, Karin had returned, but had left again rather quickly. She had been in her flat above the garage for only a few minutes.

  “Was she carrying anything?” he asked. “When she arrived? And when she left?”

  “I really don’t know,” said Anne vaguely. “Were you thinking of anything in particular?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’ll have to wait till I get back.”

  As the plane finally started to taxi out onto the runway, he leaned back against the blue leather upholstery, wondering feverishly how he could have been so wrong about her.

  I should have done it myself, he thought bitterly. But that is just so typical. You make immaculate plans. You are in control. And then a fucking seagull wrecks it all.

  THE VILLA IN Vedbæk was perfectly situated, thought Nina.

  It had neither ocean view nor idyllic woods in the background, but for privacy it couldn’t be matched. Neatly clipped hedges screened the sprawling redbrick and the graveled parking lot from prying eyes, and the surrounding well-to-do family homes oozed respectability. Whether that had been at the front of Allan’s mind when he chose to buy his way into this particular general practice in the northern suburbs was dubious, as it had never really been part of his plan to moonlight as a medical resource for illegal immigrants; but it suited Nina’s purpose beautifully.

  She checked the rearview mirror. The boy hadn’t moved in all the time she had had him in the car, nor made a sound. The blanket was undisturbed, and only a few wisps of blond hair poked from its folds.

  Tock, tock.

  A measured rapping against the window glass made Nina jerk. It was Allan. His tall, gangly form cut off the sun as he bent to peer into the car. Then he rapped on the glass once more, but before she had time to react, he moved on, and was now trying to open the rear door, in vain. She must have locked it without thinking. She realized she was still gripping the steering wheel, fingers locked whitely around the rim, and it took her a second to make her hands unclench. She reached back and unlocked the rear door with stiff fingers, then got out of the car herself.

  Allan had already lifted the boy gently out of the car, the blanket still wrapped around him. He held the child against his shoulder.

  “What do you know?”

  He was headed for the house, and Nina had to lengthen her stride to keep up.

  “Nothing. Or almost nothing. Someone left him in a suitcase!”

  Nina closed the door behind them and followed Allan as he strode towards his office. Jolly children’s drawings decorated the walls, and behind his computer sat a small gnome-like clown doll, obviously intended for the cheering up of young patients.

  The clown would not serve them now. The suitcase boy hung limply in Allan’s arms, like one of Ida’s cast-off Raggedy Anns, thought Nina, with a familiar taste of metal in her mouth. It was her personal taste of fear. It always came to her when adrenalin rushed through her body, into every last cell of it, reminding her of the camps at Dadaab and Zwangheli and other hellholes in which she had lived and looked after the children of others. (And it reminded her of the day he died.)

  Nina pushed away the thought as soon as it entered her mind and instead locked her focus on Allan and the boy. Allan had rolled the small, soft body gently onto the couch, his middle and index finger resting against the side of his neck. His face was alight with concentration, and she saw a single bead of sweat trickle down his throat and into the open neck of his white shirt. This was not the time to talk to him.

  The sphygmomanometer sat on Alan’s desk, within handy reach, but the cuff was much too big for the boy’s thin arm. She found a smaller one and attached it. The child did not react to the highpitched whine, or to the pressure from the inflating cuff. 90/52. She turned the display so that the digital numbers were visible to Allan.

  Allan frowned and slid his hand across the boy’s chest, setting the stethoscope against the smooth, white skin of the chest, and then, in a quick precise move, to the abdominal cavity. He then rolled the boy onto his side with a gentleness that, for a moment, caused a strange tender warmth in Nina’s own chest. He listened again, and finally let the boy slip down to his original position, resting on his back with his arms spread wide.

  Still this disturbing lack of life, thought Nina. As if he were caught in some limbo, neither dead nor alive, simply a thing. Allan cautiously lifted one eyelid and shone his pen-sized flashlight at the boy’s pupil.

  “He has been drugged,” he said. “I don’t know with what, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly life-threatening.”

  “Should we give him naloxone?” asked Nina.

  Allan shook his head.

  “His respiration is okay. Blood pressure is a little on the low side, and he is somewhat dehydrated, but I think he will simply sleep off whatever it is and wake naturally. And in any case, we can’t give an antidote when we have no idea what the original substance was.”

  Nina nodded slowly, dodging Allan’s gaze. She knew what he had to say next.

  “You will of course take him to a hospital.”

  “But you said he would wake on his own… .”

  Allan gestured, indicating his collection of medical reference books.

  “There’s a million drugs out there that someone could have given him, and I have no idea what is really wrong with him, nor do I have the facilities to do the proper tests. You simply have to take him to Hvidovre.”

  Nina made no reply at first.

  She had had so little time to look at the child. At first she had thought him to be barely three years old, but now, examining his face, she thought he was merely small for his age. Closer to four, perhaps. She touched his cheek gently, tracing the soft lines of the mouth. His hair was short and so fair it was nearly white, the skin parchment thin and almost bluish in the light streaming through the blinds.

  “I don’t know where he’s from,” she said. “I don’t think he is Danish, and I know someone is looking for him. Someone who wants to … use him for something.”

  Again, Allan frowned.

  “Pedophilia?”

  Nina shrugged, trying to recall as much as she could about the man who had been kicking at the locker. Huge. That was the main impression. Perhaps thirty years old, with hair so short it hardly left an impression of color. Brown, perhaps? Like the weatherinappropriate leather jacket. She tried to imagine the police issuing an APB and knew immediately that this description would match any number of large men. And she pictured the boy, alone in a hospital room, while some social worker or child care specialist sat in the staff room filling out endless forms. Would they be able to protect the boy against the rage she had seen in the man’s eyes? Once he woke up, what would the Danish authorities do with him? Send him to some institution or refugee center like the Coal-House Camp? Nina suppressed a shudder. Natasha’s bastard of a fiancé had sauntered straight into the camp to pick up Rina without anyone even noticing she had gone. Far too many of the socalled unaccompanied minors simply disappeared from the camps after a few da
ys. They were collected by their owners.

  “I’m not letting them take him to the camps,” she snapped, glancing around the office. “Children vanish from them almost every day. He’s not going to any of those places.”

  Finally she saw what she was looking for. Behind the matte glass doors of the cabinets by the door she made out the contours of Allan’s special emergency kit, which she knew to contain a couple of bags of IV fluid.

  Last year, Allan had gone with her to attend an elderly man who had fled the Sandholm asylum center and was hiding with some relatives in the city. He had been due to be sent back to some refugee camp in Lebanon, but instead he was slumped on a mattress in a loft above an old tenement flat in Nørrebro. It was at least 115 degrees Fahrenheit up there under the rafters, and in other circumstances it might have been a rather trivial case of heat stroke. But because they didn’t have the range of equipment an ordinary ambulance would have had, they nearly lost him. Since then, the infusion sets had been a fixture in Allan’s emergency bag. As yet, he had not had to use them, as far as she knew. He wanted out. In fact, he had wanted out for a long time, but there was not exactly a waiting list for the unofficial post of MD to the illegal immigrants that the network struggled to aid, and Nina had hung on to his phone number. Just in case, she thought with a sardonic inner smile that didn’t quite reach her lips. Just in case she came across a three-year-old boy in a suitcase.

  She grabbed the infusion set and the IV bag off the shelf and felt a sense of calm descend as the familiar equipment came into her hands. She had done this a thousand times. Torn the clear wrapping in a single jerk, freed the needle, uncoiled the plastic tubing. She cast around for something to place the bag on, so that it would be higher than the boy, and finally cleared a space for it on the shelf above the couch, where various toys resided. Then she took hold of the boy’s inanimate arm, exposed the veins under the white skin, and let the needle slide in.

  Allan, standing next to her, shook his head and sighed.

  “I’ll lose my license if they find out about this. If anything happens to him… .”

  “They won’t. Why should they? And I’ll take good care of him,” said Nina. “He’ll be all right.”

  Allan looked at her with a strange uncertainty Nina wasn’t sure she cared for. Then he turned to the boy again, this time completely removing the blanket, which until now had shrouded the boy’s lower body.

  “Did you find him like this?” he asked.

  Nina nodded.

  “Would you be able to tell whether anything has been done to him?” she asked. “Whether he has been … abused?”

  Allan gave a partial shrug and rolled the boy onto his side again, so that his back was turned to them. Nina again felt the sour metallic taste in her mouth, and turned to look out the window. There was a slight breeze now, and she could hear the leaves of the large chestnut tree outside rustle in the hot wind. Except for that, there was barely a sound. No voices, no cars, no children. People in Vedbæk obviously weren’t as noisy as those in the inner city, she thought, suddenly aware of the sweaty stickiness that made her T-shirt cling to her back.

  Behind her, Allan spoke in carefully measured tones.

  “I see no evidence of abuse, but one can never tell with complete certainty. People can be horribly inventive about such things.”

  Allan pulled off the thin white plastic gloves with a snap, covered the boy to the waist once more, and gently stroked his forehead.

  “This is my professional advice to you, Nina,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time. His eyes were the color of corroded steel. For God’s sake, thought Nina, the man might have stepped right off the pages of a Harlequin romance, fit and tanned in an affluent kind of way that spoke of tennis courts and long sailing trips in the boat she knew he kept in Vedbæk harbor. A note of casual ease was introduced by the dark blue denim jeans, trendily scuffed at the knees to just the right degree. A handsome, humane suburban GP who did everything right and proper, even running great personal risks by doing his bit for the network. His place in the practice was on the line, she thought. This was so obviously a good man.

  And yet she felt a guttering animosity. In a minute, this nice, humane man would tell her that he couldn’t help her anymore. That there was nothing further he could do for the boy.

  Allan sighed again, a mere exhalation of breath.

  “My professional advice is that you take this boy to Hvidovre Hospital. And if anything goes wrong… .”

  Nina knew what he was about to say, but now it didn’t matter, because she also knew she had won the essential victory: he wouldn’t call the police.

  “If anything goes wrong, and questions are asked of me and this practice, then that is the advice I have given you. And I want to hear you accept it.”

  She nodded quickly.

  “I’ll take him to Hvidovre Hospital,” she obediently replied, with a quick glance at her watch.

  3:09.

  She had been there for more than thirty minutes.

  Allan looked at her again with the skeptical expression that reminded her so much of her long, exhausted fights with Morten. Morten, who seemed to think that she could no longer be trusted to handle anything alone. Least of all the children. He didn’t say it outright, but she could hear it in the way he spoke when he gave her detailed instructions on how to make Ida’s lunch box, or how to dress Anton for school. He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating each syllable, all the while trying to fix her eyes on him as though she were hard of hearing, or mentally defective, or both. More than anything, she could see it in his eyes when he packed his bags for his monthly shifts on the company’s North Sea oil rigs. Leaving her alone with the children had begun to scare him.

  He no longer believed her. He no longer believed in anything she said.

  Nor did Allan, it would seem. But at least he was not about to stop her. The suitcase boy was not his responsibility, and never would be. Only for that reason was he letting her go.

  “Keep the IV going until the unit is empty,” said Allan. “After that, I want you gone. Don’t let anyone see you leave. And Nina… .”

  He caught her eyes again, and she could see that his impatient irritation had returned.

  “I’m through with this,” he said. “Don’t come back.”

  AND IT is your claim that your husband has abducted Mikas?”

  “Evaldas Gužas from the Department of Missing Persons looked at Sigita with visible skepticism.

  “We are separated,” she said.

  “But he is the father of the child?”

  She could feel herself blushing. “Of course.”

  The office was stifling in the summer heat, and a house fly buzzed desperately in the window overlooking the street, caught between the net curtain and the glass. Gužas’s desk looked to be a scarred veteran of the Soviet era, several years older than Gužas himself was. Sigita would have preferred an older policeman, not this young, black-haired, sharp-featured man of thirty at the most. He had doffed his blue-gray jacket and loosened his burgundy tie, so that he looked for all the world like a café patron on holiday. It didn’t give a serious impression, she thought. She wanted experience, steadfastness, and efficiency, and she wasn’t sure she was getting it.

  “And this alleged abduction … you say it happened Saturday?”

  “Saturday afternoon. Yes.”

  “And you waited two days to come to us because … ?”

  He left his unfinished sentence hanging in the humid air.

  She nearly lowered her eyes, but resisted the impulse. He would only see it as uncertainty and become even more skeptical than he already was.

  “I was in hospital until this morning.”

  “I see. Can you relate to me the circumstances of the alleged abduction?” he asked.

  “My neighbor saw my husband and a strange young woman take Mikas to a car and drive off with him.”

  “Did the child resist?”

  “Not
… not as far as Mrs. Mažekienė was able to see. But you see, the woman has been spying on us for some time, at least two or three days, and she gave Mikas chocolate. That’s not normal!”

  He clicked his ballpoint pen a couple of times, watching her all the while.

  “And where were you when this happened?”

  Now she could not keep the uncertainty from coming out in her voice.

  “I … I don’t remember clearly,” she said. “I’ve suffered a concussion. Perhaps … perhaps they attacked me.”

  The words felt odd in her mouth because she didn’t herself believe that Darius was capable of something like that. But the woman. She didn’t know the woman, did she?

  “And at which hospital were you treated?”

  Her heart dropped like a stone. “Vilkpėdės,” she said, hoping that would be the end of it. But of course it wasn’t. He reached for the phone.

  “Which ward?”

  “M1.”

  She sat there on the uncomfortabe plastic chair, frustrated and powerless, as he was put through to the ward and had a brief conversation with someone at the other end. The fly kept buzzing and bumping into the glass. Gužas listened more than he talked, but she could guess what he was being told. Alcohol content in the blood, fall on the stairs.

  “Mrs. Ramoškienė,” he said, replacing the receiver. “Don’t you think you should simply go home and wait for your husband to call?”

  “I don’t drink!” She blurted out the words even though she knew they would only confirm his suspicion.

  “Please go home now, Mrs. Ramoškienė.”

  MECHANICALLY, SHE GOT on the number 17 trolley bus at T. Ševčenkos gatvė. Several stops too late, she realized that she had failed to get off at Aguonų gatvė to change lines. It was as if the city in which she had lived for more than eight years had suddenly become strange to her. The sunlight pierced her eyes like needles. Only once before in her life had she felt this helpless.

  Please go home now, Mrs. Ramoškienė. But to what? Without Mikas, the whole thing made no sense—the flat, the furniture, all the clean and new things she had fought so hard for.