The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [96]
The boy-bitch was still lying where he had dropped her. But she was breathing, he noticed.
“She’s fine,” he told Barbara. “I’m taking her down to the car.”
Barbara didn’t answer. She just looked at him, and her eyes were almost as wide and frightened as the boy’s.
“I’m doing this for you,” he said.
She nodded obediantly.
He rolled up the bitch’s limp body in the disgusting blanket and eased open the door with his hip. The stairwell was still deserted. What would he say if he met someone—she’s had a fall, we’re taking her to the hospital? But no one came. He maneuvered her into the back of the Mitsubishi and covered her completely with the blanket, then parked the car in a more legal and less noticeable spot. So far, so good.
When he got back to the flat, he could hear Barbara murmuring to the boy. In Polish, not Lithuanian.
“Stop that,” he said. “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.”
Jučas didn’t either, and he didn’t like it when Barbara spoke in her native language. It gave him a feeling that there was a part of her he couldn’t access.
When they got to Krakow, she would be speaking Polish with everyone, he suddenly realized. Everyone except him. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? But he hadn’t. He had only been thinking about the house, about Barbara, and the life he imagined them having together.
The Dane would make it all possible. The Dane and his money. He could still recall the fizzy feeling of triumph when he had realized how easy it would be.
It had been Klimka who had told him to look after the Dane, and had emphasized that there would be no funny business. This man was a good client, with businesses not only in Vilnius but also a couple of places in Latvia, and he paid Klimka good money—very good money—to keep the other sharks at a distance. Now he was in Vilnius himself and wanted only a single bodyguard to follow him around. Discretion was essential.
And so Jučas had played the nanny from the moment the man got off the plane with his ridiculous little trolley that turned out to contain an unreasonable number of U.S. dollars. They had gone directly to some kind of private clinic, where the Dane tried to buy information about some Lithuanian girl or other who had apparently given birth to a baby. When Jučas had seen the sum he had offered the head of the clinic, he had begun to feel jumpy. It was as if the Dane had no idea what it was he was waving in the woman’s face. A tenth would have sufficed; would, actually, have been too much. People had been murdered for less.
He called Klimka to ask for backup. Klimka refused—the Dane had specified one bodyguard. Jučas would just have to handle it for now, but if things looked tricky, he could call, of course.
Yeah right, though Jučas. If the shit really hit the fan, he needed his backup with him, not a couple of phone calls away. He walked around with his senses tuned to max all day, paying precious little attention to whatever the Dane was saying and doing, because he was too busy scanning the surroundings. When the nurse more or less slammed the door in their faces and they had to return to the hotel, Jučas heaved a sigh of relief.
Premature, as it turned out. In a bout of depression, the man downed most of the contents of the minibar, then went for the hotel bar, already so inebriated that the bartender refused to serve him. After which performance the idiot staggered out the door, without the dollar trolley, thank God, but still with enough of a wad in his wallet to get into every kind of trouble. There was nothing Jučas could do except curse and follow.
That proved only the beginning of a very long night. But as the booze went in, the story came out, little by little, mixed with the drinks. And Jučas listened, at first indifferently, but then with growing interest. Fledgling plans formed in his mind. And the next morning, when he poured a sizeable but unbruised hangover onto the small private Danish plane, it was with almost tender feelings that he buckled the guy’s seatbelt for him and made sure a good