Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [44]
God’s hand crushed her, she could neither think nor scream. She could just barely sense that she was surrounded by strangers, and that the arm she was clinging to wasn’t Jacob’s.
“Look, Chaltu. It’s a boy. You have a son.”
They laid a tiny, wet creature, a baby bird, on her stomach. Could it really be hers? She knew she should hold it, but her arms felt cold and heavy as stone.
It took several minutes before she realized that the baby had been born, and that she was still alive. A miracle, it was, and she only slowly began to believe it. For the first time in many days she felt something other than pain and fear. She raised her heavy arm and curled it around the baby-bird child. Breathed in its odor. Began to understand. Hoye, hoye, little one. We are here, both of us. We are alive.
Nina regarded Taghi’s tensed-up face. She sensed that the truce was over. The umbilical cord had been cut and tied off. The placenta lay intact and secure in the plastic basin she’d brought along from the clinic. The little boy whimpered in Chaltu’s arms, pale against her dark skin. And Nina’s reign had ended with the birth. Now they were back to the corpse and everything death brought with it.
Farshad said something or other, his voice catching nervously. Taghi answered him, negatively Nina thought, but she wasn’t sure. How terrifying it was that they could discuss what to do with her without her understanding a word. Taghi had said that they didn’t kill Brahge, and she couldn’t really believe he was a cold-blooded murderer. They aren’t evil, she told herself, and tried not to think how absolutely normal, unevil people could do horrible things if they were pushed far enough.
“Why don’t you just leave?” she said. “You can take Chaltu and the baby with you, and I’ll wait until you’re long gone before I call the police.”
“Yeah, right,” Djo Djo said, and scratched himself quickly and a bit too roughly on the cheek.
Taghi said something sharply, obviously an order. Djo Djo protested, and Farshad started to titter nervously, maybe at what Djo Djo had said. But finally the brothers left the apartment. Nina saw them through the window, lifting the tarpwrapped body and carrying it over to the van.
All of a sudden they were rushing frantically. They pitched the body in the van, threw themselves into the front seats, and roared off. Seconds later Nina could see why. On the other side of the canal, on Ørestads Boulevard, a police car was approaching slowly, its blue lights flashing.
Eggers stopped the patrol car.
“There’s a building with balconies,” he said. “And that van didn’t waste any time driving off.”
Janus shrugged his shoulders. “We’d better check it out,” he said. He had his regular black shoes on, not his winter boots. The radio hadn’t mentioned anything about snow when he left Allerød that morning at a quarter past seven.
Eggers called in the address. “We’re going in,” he told the shift supervisor. “But it looks peaceful enough.”
Janus sighed, opened the car door, and lowered his nice, black, totally inadequate shoes into the muddy slush. “Does anyone even live here?” he asked. The place was all mud, with construction-site trash everywhere, for sale signs in most of the windows.
“At least there’s light,” Eggers growled. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”
The street door was open, a bit unusual nowadays. Eggers knocked on the door of one of the ground-floor apartments. After quite a while, a thin dark-haired woman opened the door. She stared at them with an intensity that made Janus uneasy.
“Yes?”
Eggers told her who they were and showed his ID. “We had a report from a passenger on the metro who saw someone fall from a balcony in this area. Have you noticed anything unusual?”
A whimpering came from within the apartment. It sounded like a baby.
“Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door in their faces. Eggers and Janus glanced at each other.
“She looks a