The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [110]
Then the straining shoulders slumped, and the woman straightened.
“He is dead,” she said.
Sigita stared at the big, heavy body.
“I shot him,” she whispered. She wasn’t quite sure how that made her feel. She suddenly remembered what she had promised herself if they harmed Mikas. If you hurt my boy, I will kill you. Does an act have to be conceived in the mind before it can happen? And once one had thought of it, did that bring it closer to reality? She had thought it. And now, she had done it. The calm she had felt then seemed very distant now.
“I think you are wrong,” said Anne Marquart quietly, bending to pick up the gun. “I think I was the one who shot him.”
Sigita stared at her in confusion. What did she mean by that?
Anne looked utterly calm. She raised the gun carefully.
“Watch out,” she said. And fired a deliberate shot into the doorframe.
“It might be better that way,” said the dark-haired woman thoughtfully. “The police will have no trouble believing her statement.”
Finally Sigita understood. She was a stranger here, a foreigner without credibility, money, or connections. She remembered how hard it had been to make Gužas believe her at first, and they at least spoke the same language.
“I had to do it,” said Anne, nodding at the big motionless body. “It was self defense.”
Sigita swallowed. Then she nodded.
“Of course,” she said. “You had to defend your child.”
Something happened when they looked at each other. A silent agreement. Not a trade-off, more a sort of covenant.
“Not Mikas,” said Sigita. “But me. He can have mine. If it’s a good enough match.”
“You had better leave now,” said Anne. “But I hope you’ll come back. Soon.”
“I will,” said Sigita.
Suddenly, the dark-haired woman smiled, a brief intense smile that made her dark eyes come alive and banished all the jagged seriousness.
“He is downstairs in the garage,” she said. “In the gray van.”
MIKAS WAS STANDING in the doorway with the darkened garage behind him. He was holding on to the doorframe with one hand, as if he had only just learned to walk. When he caught sight of her, an expression slid across his face that was neither happiness nor fear, but a mixture of both. She couldn’t lift him, the stupid cast was in the way. But she squatted down beside him and pulled him into her embrace with her good arm. His little body was warm, and smelled of fear and pee, but he clung to her like a baby monkey and hid his face against her neck.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured. “Mama’s little baby.”
She knew there might be bad dreams and difficult times. But as she crouched here, feeling the warmth of Mikas’s breath against her skin, she felt that something—life, fate, maybe even God—had at last forgiven her for what she had done.
THERE WASN’T MUCH time, thought Nina. In a little while, it would all begin—police, ambulances, paramedics, all the things that followed in the wake of death and disaster. They had exactly the time it would take for the first cars to reach them from Kalundborg.
Anne Marquart had made the emergency call, from her son’s mobile. She had lent her own dark-blue stationwagon to Mikas and Mikas’s mother. It would be better if they simply weren’t here when the authorities arrived, she had said. Jan Marquart was still lying on the living room floor, but now as comfortable as she could make him, with pillows, blankets and proper bandaging.
Anne Marquart might look as if a rough wind could snap her in half, but there was an unexpected strength beneath the pastelcolored fragility. That she had a dead body in a pool of blood on her upper landing seemed not to shake her, and she stuck to her decision to claim responsibility for his death with no apparent effort. She and Nina had covered the body with a bedspread, mostly out of consideration for Anne’s son Aleksander, and Anne had politely offered Nina the loan