Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

Katerina sensed her anxiety and whimpered and fretted. Natasha attempted to calm them both.

Pavel will take care of it. Pavel will fix it, she told herself.

Finally Pavel did come home, exuberant and happy as usual. He kissed her on the mouth, deeply and hungrily, and lifted her up off the floor. This was when Natasha usually put her arms and legs around him, as if she were a child who needed to be carried. But not today.

“I tried to call,” she said, and then the tears came rushing along with the rest of the story, even though she knew he hated crying. “A man came …”

“Stop. Dry your eyes, my love. You’re scaring Katerina.”

She sensed he was angry. She didn’t know if it was at her, and she definitely didn’t feel like making it worse, but she asked anyway.

“Pavel, is it true? Are we behind on the rent?”

“No,” he said. “We pay exactly what we are supposed to.”

“But why isn’t it the same as what the others pay?”

“You don’t need to worry about that, my love. I just need to make a call, then everything will be fine again.”

And it was. Less than an hour later, there was another man at the door. He didn’t smell of licorice but of expensive aftershave, and his cuff links were shiny and black, with a leaping golden jaguar.

Pavel did not invite him in even though it was terribly rude to leave him standing there in the doorway. “Natasha, this is Vasilij Ivanovitsj, who owns this beautiful house. Vasilij, this is my even more beautiful wife.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Doroshenko. And I regret that you were subjected to that unfortunate incident this morning. It was, of course, a mistake, and it will not happen again.”

Natasha nodded silently. The man bowed gracefully, turned and left.

“You see,” said Pavel and kissed her. “There’s nothing to be worried about. Worrywart.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t understand why we pay less than the others.”

“Because Vasilij is a good friend,” said Pavel. “That’s all.”

Natasha wanted so badly to believe it, and she almost succeeded. But if they were such good friends, then why hadn’t Pavel invited him in? And why had Vasilij Ivanovitsj turned when he was halfway down the stairs and stared up at Pavel with eyes that were narrow and dark with hate?

THE DOGS BARKED.Natasha got up as quickly as she could. If she stayed here, she would be found. Katerina was once again out of reach, but at least she was alive.

She felt as if she had been beaten up. Nina’s ears were buzzing, her entire body ached and there was a point at the back of her neck, at the meeting of spine and skull, where it felt as if a burning needle had been inserted.

She held Rina close despite her uneasy awareness that she was the one deriving comfort from the gesture, like a child holding a teddy bear. There was no reciprocity; Rina might as well be a stuffed animal. If it hadn’t been for the loud, gasping wheezes that constituted the girl’s breathing, Nina might have been tempted to check for signs of life.

Magnus and Pernille arrived with the oxygen. Magnus maneuvered Rina out of Nina’s embrace with his usual calm authority. “Okay, Rina. Now we’re going to make it easier for you to breathe.”

Nina had to fight a spasmodic tension in her arms, forcing herself to let go. “She also needs salbutamol,” she said before she could stop herself.

Magnus just nodded as if there were nothing odd in a nurse attempting to dictate a treatment he had undertaken hundreds of times.

It was 2:03. Forty-six minutes had passed since she had heard a key click unsuccessfully in the walk-in door.

“Nina, are you in there?”

It wasn’t a voice she had immediately recognized. She was paranoid enough to hesitate for a second.

“Nina Borg? Police.”

“Yes,” she shouted. “We are here.”

It had taken another fifteen minutes to get the door open. The lock had been damaged by the attacker’s attempt to break it open, and in the end, they had to cut the hinges instead.

Outside there were people everywhere—or at least that was how it felt. There were probably only seven or eight, but the only one she knew was the camp’s technical director, Henning Grønborg, who had apparently taken charge of the blowtorch himself. The rest was a whirl of yellow police vests, black SWAT uniforms and young policemen’s faces wearing oddly nerdy protective glasses. Like well-behaved children at a New Year’s party, thought Nina.

They tried to take Rina from her at that point, but she resisted. “Get Magnus,” she had repeated, over and over again. “It has to be someone she knows.”

Now she had finally let go. Her arms hurt just as much as the rest of her, in spite of the fact that she had only suffered a handful of bruises from furniture and doorways and whatever else she had bumped into on her confused, unsteady flight from Rina’s room.

Pull yourself together. You are not exactly dying, she told herself.

A shiver went through her that had nothing to do with cold, though it felt that way. Right now she was deeply grateful for Magnus’s insistence on heating the clinic to a temperature that would do credit to a steam bath.

2:11.

The children were sleeping now, she thought, Anton under his Spider-Man comforter and Ida presumably in sheets that were as pitch black as most of her wardrobe. For a while she had had Legolas from The Lord of the Rings on her pillow, but lately she had been talking about “the cynical abuse of Tolkien’s work in merchandising,” and Nina had had to quietly exchange a few Christmas presents before they reached the tree. The first post-divorce Christmas. Only Nina’s first childhood Christmas without her father had been worse.

2:13.

Stop. She turned her watch so the face was on the inside of her wrist. It made it a little more difficult to check the time and normally helped her control her own personal mini-version of OCD. The improvement was relative—the compulsive checking of the time was replaced by involuntary movements in her lower arm every time she caught herself turning her wrist.

After her divorce, an exciting new development had occurred in the neurosis, she observed dryly. Now the checking of the time was often accompanied by an automatic picturing of what Anton and Ida were doing; she wasn’t quite sure if that was better or worse.

“Nina Borg?”

She looked up. Yet another unfamiliar face, this time a younger man in civilian clothes.

“Detective Inspector Asger Veng, North Zealand Police,” he introduced himself.

“Yes,” she said tiredly. She couldn’t even manage a politely encouraging question mark in her tone.

“May we take a few moments of your time? We have a couple of questions.”

Yes, of course they did. If he had asked her to crawl naked through icy mud, her enthusiasm might have been at much the same level, but it was probably best to get it over with.

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

The shout sounded across the parade ground from a small group of freezing people who were huddled in the doorway of one of the family barracks. Nina recognized one of the camp’s long-term inhabitants, a man from Eritrea, but she had to cast about for his name. Rezene, that’s what he was called. He suffered from violent reflux attacks, so they saw him relatively often at the clinic.

Nina didn’t know what to answer. When it came to the spreading of rumors among the camps’ inhabitants, “wildfire” was an understatement, especially when the police were involved, and rumors were never harmless. They all lived with the threat of deportation as a constant stress factor. Even though Magnus did what he could to minimize it, there were a lot of sleeping pills and sedatives in circulation, and not so long ago, an Iraqi mother had shown up with three packs of nitrazepam that she had recovered from her sixteen-year-old son. When asked what he had been intending to use them for, he said that it was in case the police came to get them, because he would rather die in Denmark than in Iraq.