Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

Once the sun had disappeared from the courtyard and there was just a faint orange reflection in the uppermost windows, the Big Man came back. Sándor ran over to the door as soon as it opened and tried to push his way past the grown-up body. He was stopped by a strong arm, and when he tried to twist himself free, he was pushed back into the Yard again in a restrained, but firm, way. Another escape attempt was blocked in the same manner.

“I can see that you haven’t calmed down yet,” the man said. “Now I will slowly count to ten. While I do that, I ask that you take time to reflect. If we can’t speak properly to each other when I’m done, you’ll have to stay out here all night.”

The man started counting, slowly and deliberately. “One. Two. Three. Four.”

“I want to go home,” Sándor yelled.

“Five. Six.”

Sándor raised a fist in frustration, but he didn’t strike. He didn’t dare. “Seven. Eight. Nine.”

“We want to go home to our mother.” Sándor’s voice cracked, hoarse, and resigned.

“Unfortunately that is out of the question. Ten. Now. Are you ready to say you’re sorry?”

Sándor shook his head mutely.

“I’m their brother,” he repeated, somewhat less vehemently.

“Good night, Sándor.”

And then the man closed the door again.

It got cooler, but not freezing cold. After all, it was spring, the rowan tree was sporting delicate new leaves. Sándor discovered that there was a water spigot you could drink from even though the water had a very definite muddy and metallic taste. But he was alone. Sándor couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. There was always someone there . If his mother didn’t happen to be around, then his Grandma Éva was. Or one of the other grandmothers. Or Aunt Milla who lived four houses away. Or Tibor, or Feliszia, or Vanda, or … there was always someone .

Now there wasn’t. Just the darkness and the walls and the sky, those rough, cold pavers and the seeping steam issuing from the bathrooms’ ventilation ducts, although he didn’t know that then. That first night, he just huddled up next to the door and stared at the gray column of condensing vapors and hoped it wasn’t a mulo . At some point he started crying again. At some point he stopped. And when they came back the next morning, he told Miss Erszébet he was very sorry and began to learn the rules of the gadjo world. There was still trouble now and then, and he came to know the Yard well. But he never spent a whole night there again. It was like he once heard the Big Man tell one of the municipal inspectors: “Roma children are no more troublesome than other children. You just have to nip them in the bud.”

A CAR PULLEDup outside. Frederik stiffened and reached into his computer bag. The gesture so much ressembled a movie cliché that Sándor wondered whether he had a weapon hidden there. Then a car door slammed, and Frederik let go of the bag and visibly relaxed. “He got her,”

he said. “He really got her.”

But it wasn’t the nurse Tommi shoved in the door a few seconds later. It was the girl from the apartment. She looked like a disfigured Pierrot, with her chalky white face and black eyes smeared from a mixture of tears and cheap mascara. The sight struck Sándor like a bludgeon.

“What the hell,” said Frederik, who obviously wasn’t pleased either. “Why did you take her ?”

“Piece of cake,” Tommi said with a triumphant grin. “Just had to check the girl’s school timetable, right?”

Oh, that’s why, Sándor thought. That’s why he had snatched her school bag. Because he wanted to be able to find her again.

Frederik shook his head in disbelief. “You were supposed to get the goddamn mother, not the kid.”

“This,” said Tommi, “is even better. And more fun.…”

T HAD BEENstrangely quiet inside Nina’s head since the PET man had left. Her head still ached a little and there was a very faint, whooshing throb, like in the water pipes she used to listen to before she fell asleep in the room she had had as a teenager back home in Viborg. Nina pushed the tray of uneaten rissoles and overdone cold carrots aside, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She couldn’t sleep, but she didn’t have anywhere good to send her thoughts, so instead she allowed herself to slide into the gray throbbing, whooshing semidarkness inside her eyelids instead.

She heard the sounds a second before it happened.

The door that slid open almost imperceptibly, soft rubber soles padding across the gray linoleum, first by the door, then a little closer. The little click as the door closed automatically behind the intruder. Then, abruptly, something big and warm was pressed against her mouth, and Nina’s eyes flew open. Her head was being pushed so deeply into the pillow that it almost closed around her face, and the sense of being suffocated caused panic to explode through her for a second. Trying to move her head was hopeless, the man crouched over her was now putting his weight behind the outstretched arm and hand while Nina frantically batted at the air around her. She grabbed for the face, the hair, the neck, and arms of her attacker, but he moved quickly and avoided her blows. The man’s little finger had been pushed up under her nose, and she had to fight for every single scrap of air for her lungs. As if she were breathing through wet gauze. And in the middle of her frenzied panic, she could see a gaunt face with a wide grin swaying back and forth over her. The eyes gleamed, distant and exhilarated. He’s on drugs, Nina managed to conclude. An addict looking for morphine or maybe someone who was mentally ill, lost in the wrong part of the hospital. His breath was heavy and sharp and smelled of cigarettes and peppermint. The man was making an effort to catch her eyes, and for some reason or other, that made her slow down. She tried to aim her blows better. Make them harder. But the hand that was pressed so solidly over her mouth didn’t budge a millimeter, and eventually she lay perfectly still as she tried to breathe through the one, almost free nostril.

It seemed like that was what he had been waiting for.

The man eased up on the pressure on her mouth a little bit and reached for something with his free hand. Nina tried to follow his movements with her eyes, but her head was still being pushed so far down in the pillow that it obscured her view like a white mountain range. She couldn’t see much besides the ceiling, the man’s arm, and little bits of his head and upper body. All that smothering softness drowned out even the sounds. Some notion of escape occurred to her. The man still had a hand over her mouth, but he was only holding her with one arm. Maybe she could slide free and pull the alarm cord that was hanging right over her bed.

Then a black object appeared right over her face. It took a couple of seconds before she was able to focus on it, and yet another moment before she realized what it was. A mobile phone. It was on, and the screen showed a picture with a dark, almost-black background. In the foreground there was a person who had been photographed from above. The girl’s pale face glowed white in the darkness. The eyes were slightly narrowed and the facial expression frozen in that defiant face she always made, when she was trying not to cry.

Ida.

Nina didn’t scream.

She could tell he was expecting her to, because he clamped his hand down tighter over her mouth before he pushed the button. But Nina couldn’t scream. Nothing inside her was working. There was only silence and cold and the picture dancing on the black phone in front of her. Something started moving on the tiny screen. The sound of footsteps on a floor that echoed in a strangely hollow way. The man doing the filming said something or other, but Nina couldn’t hear what it was, and now she could see Ida take a step back. As if she were trying to disappear into the darkness. Where? Nina desperately tried to gauge the location of the recording. It wasn’t home in their apartment—the wall behind Ida was a hideous dark purple color—but otherwise there wasn’t anything that revealed where she was.