The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [26]
Twelve o’clock came and went with no suitcase-dragging woman in sight. He kept phoning Barbara, just to be sure, but he could hear that he was only making her nervous. He decided to give it an hour; after all, the Dane had had to make contingency plans, so some delay was understandable. But in the end, he had to send Barbara down to check on the locker.
A few minutes later, she came up the stairs by the street exit, and he could see it a mile off: something was wrong. She was walking with tense little reluctant steps, her shoulders hunched.
“It wasn’t there,” she said.
So he had to go see for himself, of course. And she was right. Somehow, the woman must have gotten past either him or Barbara. The suitcase was gone, and no money had been left in its place. When he saw that, he lost it for a moment so that the uniformed piglets got all scared, and he had to smile and pay to calm their frightened little hearts.
And in the middle of all that, he had felt it. Her eyes on him. She might have been any old tourist except for the intensity of her gaze, but he picked her out of the crowd immediately. The woman. She had been scared, too. And more than that. He had seen her note what locker it was he had been smashing. When she turnd and ran, he was sure. She was the one. She had taken the suitcase. But why had she come back? Did she think she could come here to gloat, and he wouldn’t know? He would show her differently. Even through the rage, he saw her clearly. Thin as a boy, with very short dark hair; for a moment he imagined sticking his cock into something like that, but who would want to, unless they were queer? Bloody boy-bitch. He would stick her, all right, but with something else.
HE CALLED THE Dane right away. Was fed a truckload of excuses about delays and honest intentions. Could he believe the man? He didn’t know. Anger was still guttering in his stomach as he walked up the steps to the street, past three Russians engaged in a blatant dope deal. Morons. Couldn’t they be just a little discrete? The biggest one, obviously meant to be the muscle, cast a nervous eye over Jučas. It improved his mood a fraction. Look your fill, he thought. I’m bigger than you are, pal.
Outside in the street, heat surged from the pavement and the sun-warmed bricks. The leather jacket had been a bad choice, but he’d thought Denmark would be colder, and now he didn’t really feel he could take it off. He sweated a lot, people did when they were in good shape, and he didn’t like Barbara to see him with huge underarm stains on his shirt.
“Andrius?” Barbara called to him through the open car window. “Is it okay?”
He forced himself to take long deep breaths. Couldn’t quite produce a smile, but he did manage to ease his grip on the car keys.
“Yes.” Deep breaths. Easy now. “He says it’s a mistake. He is on his way home, and when he gets here, we will get our money.”
“That’s good.” Barbara was watching him with her head cocked slightly to one side. For some reason, it made her neck look even longer. More elegant. She was the only one who ever called him by his given name. Everyone else just called him Jučas. He didn’t event think of himself as Andrius, and hadn’t since his Granny died and he was sent to Vilnius to live with his father because no one had any idea what else might be done with him. His father rarely called him by name at all, it had been either “boy” or “brat,” according to his mood. Later, in the orphanage, everyone had gone by their last name.
He let himself drop into the front seat next to her, wincing at the contact with the sun-scorched fabric. The Mitsubishi had a certain lived-in appearance after two days on the road. Paper mugs and sandwich bags from German Raststellen littered the floor, and the food-smeared car seat the boy had been strapped into gave off a sour odor of pee. He really ought to dismantle it and sling it in the back of the van, but right now the fug was too much for him and he didn’t want to spend another minute in the car.
“Are you hungry?” he said. “We might