Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

He looked up. There was Tamás, Mulo-Tamás with the red, bleeding eyes.

“Shut up,” Sándor mumbled. “Out of my way! You know this whole thing is your fault, right?”

Mulo -Tamás didn’t move. “Not just my fault,” he said.

Sándor didn’t have the strength to argue with an evil spirit that might not even be there. He tried to crawl farther, but his body wouldn’t obey.

“I did it because I had to,” Mulo -Tamás said. “So the family would survive. So we could get by. Who knows? If you hadn’t turned your back on us, maybe I wouldn’t have fucking needed to.”

“Move,” Sándor repeated feebly.

“You turned your back on us.” Mulo-Tamás’s bloody eyes burned. “You turned your back on your own people, your brother and your sisters, your own mother. Just so you could get by in the gadjo world. And where did it get you? Nowhere. Soon you’ll be as dead as me. And what will happen to the family then? Your death is hardly any purer than mine.”

Sándor’s head sank.

“The money,” Sándor mumbled. “Feliszia’s school. The new roof. An apartment for Vanda. Tamás, I’m not turning my back on them.”

“You just don’t want anyone to know we exist.”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Lujza is going to meet you all. If … well, if she wants to.” I don’t think I have the strength to love someone who isn’t brave enough to be himself , she’d said. But … what if he was brave enough now? What if he could stop being just half a person? Somewhere deep down, he knew perfectly well that that was why he backed down so easily, why he never stood up to confrontation, why he was afraid of the authorities and walked away from most fights—even the most important ones. A half person has a harder time keeping his balance than a whole one. Maybe it was about time he quit being a half-brother, too.

“ Phrala ,” Sándor said. “Enough now, okay? Te merav . You’re killing me.”

But Mulo -Tamás wasn’t there anymore. There was nothing there.

Sándor clung to the doorframe and managed to pull himself up onto his knees. The front hall was empty. Nina wasn’t lying in the middle of the floor anymore, and he really hoped that was because she had managed to get away, and not because Frederik had dragged her off somewhere.

He wasn’t going to be able to get away. He heard car doors closing and footsteps outside. He had minutes or maybe only seconds left until they were here.

His heart hammered in an attempt to force the blood around his body faster. He clung to the doorframe with both hands and managed to struggle to his feet. The hole in the ceiling was still there, but there was no chance he would be able to reach it and not much chance that he would avoid detection even if he could. But the money. Maybe he could get the money up there.

One try. He didn’t think he had it in him to do any more.

Come on now , phrala. Do it !

He wasn’t sure if the voice came from someone else or if it was from inside him. Wasn’t sure if it was Tamás’s or his own. Maybe it didn’t matter, either. Maybe it was one and the same thing now.

He threw. Flung the envelope up, toward that dark opening up there. It was pretty much going to take a miracle, he thought. And that was exactly what he got—a perfect arc, with more strength than he actually had, and a precision that even on a good day would have been remarkable. The envelope disappeared through the opening into the jumbled chaos of wires and insulation material and darkness.

Sándor staggered a few more steps before his legs gave out. The fall almost killed him, but he managed to crawl another few meters. Then he could go no farther.

He lowered his head on to his one aching arm and lay down to wait for help or judgment. For whatever was going to come next.

Okay, phrala . You did what you could.

DA’S ALIVE. IDA’Salive.

Nina hadn’t noticed she was shaking until the officer had put his jacket across her shoulders. And then he had told her that someone had found Ida. And that she wasn’t dead. She didn’t hear much else of what he said, but it was as if she became aware of herself again in a different way. The pain in her ribs became real. The nausea and the throbbing in her head and her shaking hands, clutching the water bottle the policeman had handed her. They all felt like her, like parts of her. It hurt, but that meant she was alive again. And Ida was alive.

Nina sank back in the seat, watching the scene outside as pain throbbed rhythmically in her right side. There were three police cars parked along the curb now, but none of the officers were in sight. The door they had entered through gaped blackly at the parking lot, and the door to the office trailer was also open now and swinging in the wind. She hoped Sándor was alive. She hoped those shots that had been fired hadn’t been meant for him, but she was consumed by relief over the news about Ida. It was as if there wasn’t room for anything else right now.

A man was walking down the sidewalk. She wouldn’t even have noticed him if he hadn’t sped up as he went past the police cars. It was just a man in a pale raincoat, a man who was out taking a walk in the suburban neighborhood where he surely belonged. It was the low, white silhouettes of the police cruisers that were out of place. But instead of stopping out of curiosity to look at them, he hurried on. And that was why she recognized him.

It was Frederik. And it wasn’t until she looked more closely that she saw there were quite a few things wrong with the picture Mr. Suburbia presented. The raincoat was too big to be his. And the one pocket, the one he was hiding his right hand in, sported a growing bloodstain.

The open door of the office trailer, swinging in the wind … the light she thought she had seen in the window of the hut. Had that been something more than a reflection from the spotlights bobbing on the swaying posts? Had Frederik been hiding there while he got his camouflage worked out?

Nina flung herself across the steering wheel in the front seat and hit the horn. The prolonged honk made the man cower like a gun-shy dog, but then he sped up to a run. And nothing else happened. The officers in the hall either hadn’t heard her, or they were busy, preoccupied with something they thought was more important. Nina pushed the horn down again and held it. This time with the result that the curtains moved very slightly in the anxious old man’s house. Well, that’s not much help, Nina thought dryly.

I parked the Touareg a few blocks away . She suddenly remembered what Frederik had said as he came jogging back, skipping between the puddles in the parking lot, before they went into the mosque. If he made it to the car, he might actually escape. Frederik slowed back down to a just-out-for-an-evening stroll again as he rounded the corner. He was getting away.

Mr. Suburbia. Who had sat there drinking instant soup out of his ugly red ceramic mug while Ida was strapped to that radiator.

Nina had ridden in the ambulance a few times while she was in training, and she had quickly picked up some of the more experienced EMTs’ tricks. One of them was to leave a set of extra keys under one of the sun visors so any driver would be able to start the ambulance when the call came in. She leaned over the driver’s seat in the police car and tilted the visor down. A key landed on the seat with a soft thump, and Nina gingerly shimmied her way into the driver’s seat, pushed the clutch pedal down, and stuck the key in the ignition. She steered the car out onto Lundedalsvej and accelerated toward the corner, without being completely sure what her plan was. She just couldn’t let him get away like that. Not after what he’d done to Ida. And Sándor. And his brother.