The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [31]
“What then?”
“In those cases, the perpetrators just take a child. Any child.”
He didn’t come right out and say it, but she knew immediately what he meant. She knew that children were sold in the same way some people sold women. A crushed and wordless whimper forced itself out of her. Esu kaltas, esu kaltas, esu labai kaltas. It’s all my fault. Desperately, she tried to stop the images that flickered through her head. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t think of Mikas in the hands of people like that. It would destroy her.
“Please. Please, will you find him for me?” she begged, through a hot flood of tears that blurred the room and made intelligible speech almost impossible.
“We will try,” he said. “But let us hope that Mikas belongs to the first category. They are often found, sooner or later.”
Again he didn’t say it, but she could hear the unspoken words all the same: we never find the others.
SHE DIDN’T REALLY have the time.
Nina’s sense of urgency made it feel all wrong to contemplate a mundane shopping expedition, but the devil did, after all, reside in the details, and at a minimum she needed one set of T-shirt, shorts, and sandals sized for a three-year-old if she and the boy were to remain relatively secure and invisible for a while.
She scanned the storefronts on Stationsvej and cursed softly to herself at the lack of choice. There weren’t all that many shops to begin with, and most of them now had closed doors and dead, unlit windows. But as she approached the end of the street, more appeared, and two of them, amazingly enough, sold children’s clothes. Both clearly saw themselves as up-market; one even had a French name—La Maison Des Petites. Outside, the racks sported brightly colored rompers in a trendy retro ’70s style, and when she peered through the window, she spotted a mannequin that looked to be about the right size. And the shop was still open. A big retail chain like Kvickly would have been better, not to mention cheaper, but so far all she had seen along the way had been a co-op with nothing much but food products. She was running out of time. The boy was lying on the back seat like a small, ticking bomb; traveling discretely with a screaming three-year-old in tow was difficult enough in itself—if the child was naked, it would be plain impossible. First rule of survival: don’t draw attention to yourself.
She turned into Olgasvej and squeezed the antiquated little Fiat into a space between two larger cars parked along the curb. She twisted in her seat to draw the blanket more thoroughly over the boy, who already seemed too close to the surface. One small arm came up to tug reflexively at the woolly material, pulling it off his face again.
Nina got out of the car, quickly scanning her surroundings. On a day as hot as this, presumably most of the inhabitants of Vedbæk would have retired to the beach, or to shady gardens and barbecued patio meals. But there were still people in the streets. On the opposite sidewalk, a suburban family sauntered past, the father thin-legged in shorts that were too short, the mother in a white summery top exposing her sunburnt, peeling shoulders. Their two young daughters both held giant ice cream cones, and the parents were engaged in heated conversation. A little further up the street on Nina’s side, a senior citizen was walking a heavy-set basset hound, and a tight little group of long-haired teenagers had just turned the corner from Stationsvej and were headed Nina’s way.
“All right,” said Nina, deliberately leaning across the back seat through the open door. “I’ll get you an ice cream, but that’s it, okay? No more pestering.” She paused artistically, covertly eying the dog walker, who was now within easy hearing, but moving at a draggingly slow pace. “Mama will be back in a jiffy.”
She locked the doors quickly, then trotted resolutely back towards Stationsvej. The teenagers seemed not to have noticed her, or the little show she had provided. They moved only enough