The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [57]
There would be no Krakow now, he thought, digging into the water with furious strokes that did, after all, make his muscles burn a little. In his mind he could still see the smiling family, the mother, the father, the two children, but large brown rats had begun to gnaw at the house so that it was disappearing bite by bite, and now one of the rats had started on the leg of the smallest child, without causing the child or the parents to smile any less.
He stopped his progress abruptly, treading water. He knew where those rats came from. Could still remember them scuttling away as he had come into the stable with the lantern and had found Gran on the floor next to the feed bin. No one had ever thought it necessary to tell him what she had died from. But dead she was, even a seven-year-old boy could tell as much. And the rats had known it, too.
He had succeeded in finding waters too deep for him to touch bottom. But he began to swim for the coast, this time with smooth, methodical strokes. He would not let the rats win. And there was still a trail of sorts that he might follow.
He thought about his clothes. What to do with them. In the end he dipped the sleeve of his shirt into the petrol tank of the car and made a small bonfire on the beach. He had only vague notions of DNA and microscopic fibers, but surely fire would deal with most of that.
The first thing to go wrong had been the woman herself. It hadn’t been the one he had seen in the railway station—the bony, crew-cut boy-bitch. This one was fair-haired like Barbara and had even bigger breasts. It would have been so much easier if it had only been the other one.
But she tried to run the minute she saw him, and surely she wouldn’t have done that if she had been innocent? His reflexes took over, and he hit her a few times on the arms and legs when he caught her, just to stop her from trying to run again. She was terrified. She gabbled at him in a language that was probably Danish, then seemed to realize that he didn’t understand. She began speaking English instead. Asked him who he was, and what he was doing there? But he could tell from her eyes that she knew precisely why he had come. And she was so scared that a trickle of yellow pee ran down one leg and made a damp spot in the middle of her white dress.
Why wouldn’t the stupid woman just tell him, he thought? What was she thinking? That if she said “no” enough times, he would apologize for the inconvenience and go away?
There always came a point when they knew. Some tried to escape, or scream and beg. Others simply gave up. But the time always came when they knew. Once he had torn away all the things they used for protection—nice clothes, perhaps, or an immaculate home, courtesy and starched curtains, a name, a position, an illusion of power and security: this can’t be happening to us … once he had made them understand that yes, it was happening, it could happen to anybody, and right now it’s happening to you. Once the disbelief had vanished. Then there was only one raw reality left: that he would not stop until they gave him what he had come for.
Despite her terror, it took a long while for the fair-haired Danish woman to get to that point. Much longer than he was used to in Lithuania. Perhaps the layer of security was thicker here, like the layer of fat on the fish in the Tivoli lake. Peeling it off took time. But in the end she was just trying to figure out what he wanted her to say.
He asked about the money. I put it back, she said. Jan has it. She kept saying that, so it might be true.
Then he asked about the boy. Who was the bitch who had collected him? Where was he now? Who had him?
That was when he came upon a core of resistance in the middle of all that soft blondness. She wouldn’t tell him. Lied to him, saying she didn’t know. And that was when he became angry.
He had had to leave her for a while, afraid of losing it, afraid that he had already lost it. He’d stood outside on the porch for some minutes, just breathing, listening