The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [80]
But a sickening little thought kept worming its way into her mind. What if there was nothing he wanted her to do? What if he already had what he wanted, and didn’t give a damn about her?
He collects my children, she thought, with a chill of horror. Now he has two.
The other child had come into her dreams during the few hours when sleep had finally claimed her. It had come out of the darkness, large as an adult, but with the face of a fetus, blind and hairless, and a naked, sexless body. It held out its arms to her and opened a toothless, unfinished mouth.
“Mama… ,” it whispered. “Mammaaaaaaah… .” And she drew back from it in horror. But suddenly she saw that it was holding something in its arms. Mikas. The long bluish limbs glistened wetly with embryonic fluid, and Mikas struggled in its grasp like a fish in the tentacles of a sea anemone.
“Mikas!” she screamed, but the fetus child was already distant. It retreated further and further into the dark, taking Mikas with it.
She woke up with her nightgown twisted about her, sticking damply like an extra layer of skin.
Sigita called the airport. There was a flight leaving for Copenhagen at 1:20, and a single ticket would cost her 840 litu. Sigita tried to recall the state of her bank balance. There would be enough for the ticket, just, but what about the rest? It would be difficult to manage in a foreign country with little or no money. And everything cost more abroad, or so she had heard.
Might Algirdas give her an advance on her salary?
Perhaps. But not without asking questions. Sigita bit her lip. I have to go, she thought. With or without money. Unless I call Gužas now and leave it all to him. And if I do that, they may harm Zita. She thought about the small, shattered family, of Zita’s clawlike hands on the piano keys, and Julija’s terror and despair. She couldn’t do anything to make it worse. She mustn’t. And it might not be just Zita, either. It could be Mikas too. She couldn’t stop thinking about the torn-off nail Julija had received in an envelope. And that was nothing. Nothing compared to what people like that were really capable of.
1:20. It would be hours before she could leave for the airport.
She decided to visit her Aunt Jolita for the first time in eight years.
BANG, BANG, BANG, bang. The big yellow pile driver was pounding the foundations of the new building into the earth with resounding thumps, and a little further off, a huge crane was raising yet another prefabricated concrete element into its place. It appeared that someone had decided that there was room for a new apartment building on the green square of grass framed by the old gray and white Soviet-era blocks. Dust and diesel fumes permeated the air, and the pavement was being ground into the mud under the weight of caterpillar vehicles. Sigita felt a pang of pity for the original inhabitants. Pašilaičiai, where she lived, had barely existed ten years ago, and she often felt it was not so much a neighborhood as a constant building site. Only recently had such luxuries as streetlights and sidewalks been reestablished after the latest round of construction mayhem.
Once she was through the door, the appalling noise receded a little. She walked slowly up the stairs to the third floor and rang the bell.
A thin, gray-haired woman answered. It actually took a few moments before Sigita recognized her aunt. Jolita stared at her for several seconds, too.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“Ask away.”
“Can’t we do this inside?”
Jolita considered it for a moment. Then she stepped aside, letting Sigita into the narrow hallway.
“But be quiet,” she said. “I have a tenant who is a bartender. He works until four or five in the morning, and he gets furious if you wake him up before noon.”
The bartender lived in what used to be the sitting room, it turned out. Jolita preceded her into the small, elongated kitchen instead. At the tiny table, an elderly woman was seated, having coffee. A further two unused