Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

“Stop right there.”

Tommi barked the order in his heavy English, and Mr. Suburbia quickly skirted around Nina and Ida, his dog padding along at his heels. He stopped next to Sándor and cast an uncertain glance at Tommi. Mr. Suburbia looked like a man who was crumbling inside, Nina thought. If there had ever been any voice of authority inside that fancy polo shirt, it was gone now. This—whatever “this” was—was the Finn’s territory.

“Where is the damn thing?”

Mr. Suburbia had pulled a long, thin metal hook out of his back pocket and was kicking around in the stinging nettles, searching, until his foot hit what he was looking for. A rusty metal lid. Maybe to a septic tank or an old oil tank of the illegal, buried variety?

“Here,” he said.

In a way, Nina knew the instant she saw the lid. And yet she didn’t believe it. Not until Mr. Suburbia hauled the lid of the tank back and called Ida over.

Ida didn’t respond, just stood there, still with her backpack in one hand.

“Come on. Get over here.” Mr. Suburbia seemed annoyed and glanced hesitantly over at the Finn, as if he were waiting for some kind of instructions from him on how to get hostages to crawl down into black holes. But Ida kept close to Nina, her lips forming small, soundless prayers. Like when she was little and used to huddle in bed chanting whispered incantations against monsters.

“Get her down into the fucking tank,” Tommi hissed. “I can’t do it. I’m holding the gun. Come on already.”

Mr. Suburbia took a step forward, grabbed Ida’s arm and started pulling her toward the yawning hole. He stepped over it clumsily and was now trying to lift Ida’s feet off the ground so she would lose her footing, and he could stuff her into the hole. But his plan was doomed to fail. Ida finally let go of her schoolbag and stuck out her arms and legs in panic and started to make noises. Not screams, but sobbing pleas.

“Please don’t. No. Please don’t do this. Let me go.”

And then, finally, Nina’s feet left the ground, and she lunged at Mr. Suburbia, aiming for his eyes and nose and trying to dig her fingers into his face.

“Let. Her. Go.”

Her words slipped out one by one in between each desperate attack on the man’s mildly astonished face. Then he began to turn around, still with Ida struggling in his arms, so that Nina could only claw his shoulders and back.

A shot cracked with deafening loudness behind them, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw something brown and furry streak past her legs in a panic and continue through the stinging nettles into the field beyond. Mr. Suburbia swore loudly and called after the dog, and Nina gave it all she had and landed a proper blow for the first time, dead-on, somewhere just behind his ear. Then she was yanked back by the Finn’s skinny, iron grip on the back of her neck.

“Knock it off, or I’ll shoot you, your daughter, and your goat-fucking friend. Right now.”

Nina slowly turned her head. The Finn was still holding the back of her neck with one hand and, with the other, aiming the gun at Sándor, who was standing beside him, still and pale. Sándor’s injured left hand was clenched into a fist, but he had got no further than that.

Tommi loosened his grasp on her neck and instead pulled her all the way back, into an absurd embrace. She was standing with her back pressed against his chest while he pushed up her chin with the cold muzzle of the pistol. Nina tried to make eye contact with Ida, still dangling in Mr. Suburbia’s grasp over the manhole, but Ida saw only the Finn and the gun under her mother’s chin. Her eyes were crazed with fear.

“Psychology, Frederik,” the Finn said. He was winded from the struggle and paused for a second to catch his breath. “You have to use a little psychology in situations like these.”

Then he looked at Ida.

“There’s nothing dangerous down there, baby. And it won’t take that long. Your mom and the goat-fucker just have to help us with something. Then you can come up again. Nice and easy.”

Ida shook her head faintly, and Nina could see her trying to bring her thoughts into some kind of order. Filter away the man’s calm, almost friendly tone and hear what he was actually saying. She was confused.

“I could also put it another way,” Tommi said then, without changing his intonation. “If you don’t crawl down into that hole, right now, no fuss, I will blow your mom’s jaw off.”

This time the message hit home. Ida stared for a brief instant, looking from the Finn to Nina and back again. Her jaw muscles tensed, and Nina could see that she was trying to control her trembling. She didn’t want to cry, probably for Nina’s sake as much as her own. Nina herself wanted to scream, but didn’t. Ida might not be aware how dangerous it was to be locked in a sealed tank. How quickly the oxygen got used up. And Nina wasn’t going to explain that to her just now.

Without a word, Ida sat down on the edge of the hole, legs dangling. Then she slid down until only the very top of her shoulders stuck up amidst the stinging nettles. She slowly squatted, and Nina could hear a muffled scraping sound from Ida’s knees as she crawled into the underground metal coffin.

“Chuck that down after her,” the Finn said and pointed at her school bag with his pistol. “We can’t leave it lying around, or someone might notice. And make sure you lock the inner lid.”

Mr. Suburbia dropped the bag down into the tank and then hesitated a second. Glanced down at his polo shirt, up until now miraculously clean, and then knelt down with every sign of distaste. He stuck his head and upper body down into the darkness and, from the movement of his shoulders, seemed to be struggling with something big and heavy. There was the click of a well-lubricated padlock, and Mr. Suburbia popped back out of the hole, breathing hard.

Nina stood there as if she had been turned to stone.

“I have to go find Tyson,” Mr. Suburbia said, looking around. “We can’t leave without him.”

The Finn snorted in irritation.

“Enough already. You can deal with the stupid mutt afterward. You might even ask the nice cops if they’ll help you look.” He turned Nina around to face him and looked at her with the seriousness of a doctor giving instructions to the parents of a dying child. “It’s dangerous down there,” he said. “In the tank. You can die from it, and right now the four of us are the only ones who know where your daughter is. But if you do as we say, I’m sure she’ll make it out again just fine.”

HE GIRL WASsitting on the black bed, now dressed in a T-shirt, tight Levis, and a pair of red sneakers. Christian was on the floor whistling quietly and unconsciously as he connected his own custom-built box of computer tricks to the porn central with the webcam.

“Beatrice Pollini,” Søren said, looking dubiously at the ID the girl had given him—a worn, dog-eared Italian passport. “Do we buy it?”

“No way she’s nineteen,” Jankowski said. “Seventeen at the very most.”

“And I don’t think she’s Italian, either,” Søren said. “ Come ti chiami ?” he asked. The girl smiled uncertainly.

“Good,” she said. “Okay.”

“That’s not what you asked, is it?” Jankowski said.

“No. I asked her what her name is.”

“Italian passports are some of the top scorers on the border police’s list of forgeries,” Jankowski said. “It’s a whole industry.”

Søren nodded. “It may well take some time. And that’s exactly what we don’t have. Christian, how’s it going with that IP address?” He saw us, Søren thought, feeling the stress sizzling along his neural pathways. He has hostages, and he saw us. They could be looking at every kind of disaster right now.