Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

“Are you okay?” Søren asked. His sense was that both shots had been fired in his direction without hitting him.

It took awhile for Babko to answer. “Not quite,” he said.

Søren whirled around. Babko sat in the snow with both hands pressed against one thigh. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

Søren let go of Savchuk. He pressed the ASSISTANCE NEEDED button on the radio with one hand. Where the hell was the gun? It must be lying somewhere in the snow.

“Where are you hit?”

“On the outside of the thigh.”

Better than the inside, where a huge artery supplied blood to the entire leg.

“We have an alarm from you,” came the dispassionate voice over the radio. “What is the emergency?”

Something hit Søren in the side with a whistling kick, and suddenly he didn’t have the air to answer. The radio slipped from his hand. He stretched his hands out in front of him without quite knowing why, maybe to support himself so he wouldn’t fall. He still ended up in the snow, with a growing worry about where his next breath was going to come from. The kick had completely knocked the air out of him.

By the stable wall stood the tiniest, most ancient woman he had ever seen. Her mouth shone red in a powdered beige face, and in front of her she held a pistol that looked grotesquely huge in her wrinkled hands. She took aim again.

It was only then that Søren realized that he hadn’t been kicked.

Fuck, he thought. I’ve been shot by a little old lady. And in another second, she’ll do it again.

It took forever to get the plastic ties off.

Natasha found the light switch after some fumbling and pressed it with her elbow. Anna had a first-aid kit in her linen closet, she knew—Natasha had needed it several times when she lived with Michael. And in that kit were scissors.

She managed to open the closet and, with her chin and shoulder, maneuvered piles of towels, cleaning rags and toilet paper onto the tile floor until she found the red plastic pouch with the white cross. It landed on the floor too. With difficulty she got down on her knees and slid sideways onto her bottom like a clumsy mermaid. The flap on the case was closed with a button that took several more minutes of fumbling to open. She shook the contents onto the floor, found the scissors with her stiff hands and guided the two short, slender blades to the black plastic bands.

Snip.

Her arms fell forward and suddenly felt twice as heavy and sore, which made no sense. But there was still a locked door between the Witch and her. She pressed her shoulder against it, testing. Her weight didn’t seem to make any impression on either the jamb or the door.

She pushed the small angled overhead window open instead. A whirlwind of snow hit her, pricking her skin like the metal spikes on a hairbrush. She could hear voices somewhere in the howling of the storm—voices speaking Ukrainian. She thought one was Jurij’s but couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly she saw dancing lights along the road. Someone on foot was coming around the bend where the fat electrician and his wife lived, and when they passed under the lamppost in his driveway, even at that distance she recognized the dog, Anna’s red snow suit and …

And Nina Borg. With a child in her arms, a child wrapped in a blanket, but it could only be … It made no sense, but it had to be Katerina.

A lie. The Danish nurse had failed her own gospel of truth and had lied to her. Katerina was not with the police, and she was not, not at all “safe.” Hatred and panic rose in Natasha with equal force. The Witch was here, downstairs in Anna’s house, and the nurse was on her way to the Witch with Katerina. For a moment she thought the Witch had paid Nina Borg to lie and now was sitting in her chicken-legged house, waiting for Nina to bring her the child she was going to devour.

But the Witch didn’t know everything. She could not have known that Natasha would lead them to Anna’s house. There must be another explanation.

Then the next wave of emotion arrived, and this time it was pure, unarticulated panic.

Katerina. The Witch. Katerina.

Natasha planted her foot on one of the closet shelves and was now halfway through the narrow window without having thought about how she would get down from the roof. But it turned out to be easy. The snow lay in drifts around the rosebushes beneath her, and she just jumped, hung in the empty space, then hit a snow pillow and thick, bristling rose stems and finally the cold ground. Seconds. She only had seconds to get to them and stop them before they were within reach of the Witch.

She had turned one knee in the fall but still ran, slipping and limping, through the deep snow. Behind her came the sudden sound of two dry bangs in short succession. Shots. But who had shot whom?

The dog barked briefly and started to run as if it were expecting a couple of ducks to come drifting down from the sky for it to collect. The flashlight figures hesitated. Then Nina put her burden down in the snow and ran after the dog, toward the farmhouse and the yard, in the direction from which the shots had come.

How stupid was that?

Natasha ran in the opposite direction, toward Anna and Katerina.

Anna, squatting in the snow next to the child, looked up in surprise when Natasha came running. She said something or other, but Natasha wasn’t listening. She pulled the blanket aside, and Katerina’s face appeared, closed and pale like the faces of the dead saints Mother had hanging above the kitchen table.

But Katerina wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Natasha desperately attempted to quiet her own hectic breathing so she could hear Katerina’s, pulling her onto her lap and hugging her tightly.

“What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “What happened?”

Yet another shot, followed by a piercing howl from the dog.

Anna jumped. Instead of turning around, she walked past Natasha on stiff legs and toward the yard, stupid as a pig that wanders into the slaughter stall without noticing the blood on the floor, just because someone jangles the feed bucket. She had lived too long in Bacon Land.

When she got to the corner of the main house, she stopped. She only stood there for a moment before she took three quick steps backward and turned around, but the light from the lamps in the yard had hit her, and yet another flat slap sounded.

The pig is dead, thought Natasha, and in a moment it will fall over on the bloody floor. But Anna was still standing. Natasha felt Katerina move, a slight scraping of one knee against her thigh, and she got up quickly with her daughter in her arms and stumbled away from the road, into the deep winter darkness. She sank down into the drifts behind the rose hedge, better hidden by the darkness than by the leafless stalks, but she knew it wasn’t enough. If the Witch had a light, if she looked this way …

The car. Could she make it to the car? No, it was no good; the keys were in big Jurij’s pocket. Natasha wished that she had listened more closely back when acne-covered Vasyl had tried to impress her by hot-wiring his father’s ancient Lada. But she remembered something about hot-wiring not working on new cars anyway, so perhaps it made no difference.

She saw Anna back away from the corner of the house and down the road, her hands held out in front of her.

“Stop,” the Witch commanded. “One more step, and I’ll shoot.”

The dog howled as if possessed. Long, piercing screams, as only an animal in pain can scream. Nina ran in the direction of the sound. It was where the two first shots had come from too. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone and only a second later remembered yet again that she had given it to Søren that morning.

She found the dog first. It had been shot in the back and was attempting to crawl through the snow to the house, leaving a wide and scarlet track behind it. She forced herself not to meet its gaze.