The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [99]
SIGITA WAS SHAKING all over.
“You can’t!” she screamed, and for a few moments didn’t register that she was screaming in Lithuanian. She searched desperately for the English words this woman would understand.
“You can’t take a kidney from a three-year-old child! He is too small!”
Anne Marquart looked at her in astonishment.
“But Mrs. Ramoškienė. Of course not. We … we’re not going to.”
“Why did you take him, then? Why did people come to Vilnius and steal him from me, and take him to Denmark?” She didn’t know for certain, but it had to be that way. Didn’t it?
“I don’t know where your little boy is, or why he is gone. But I assure you, we could never ever harm… .” She broke off in the middle of the sentence and stared blankly out at the ocean for a while. Then she said, in a completely different tone of voice: “Would you excuse me? I have to call my husband.”
These people are rich enough to buy anything, thought Sigita. They bought my first child. And now they have paid someone to steal the second.
“He’s only three,” she said helplessly.
Di-di-da-da-di-di-diiih… . The unsuitably gay little tune from a different doorbell made them both freeze. There was the sound of child-light running feet from the hallway, and Aleksander’s voice called out something in Danish.
“He always wants to get the door,” said Anne Marquart absently. “With him in the house, there’s no need for a butler.”
Then, too quickly for natural speed, the door to the living room slammed back against the wall, and a man stood there, in the middle of the floor. He took up all the space, thought Sigita, and left no room for anybody else. It wasn’t just that he was big. It was his rage that made everything around him shrink. He held on to Aleksander with one hand. In the other was a gun.
“Get down on the floor,” he said. “Now!”
Sigita knew at once who he was, even though she had never seen him before. It was the man who had taken Mikas.
ALEKSANDER STRUGGLED AND tried to twist free of the man’s grip. The man grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked the boy’s head back, so the child emitted a thin sound of pain and fright and outrage.
“Don’t hurt him,” begged Anne Marquart. “Please.” She said something in rapid Danish to the boy, and he stopped struggling. Then she lay down on the floor, obediently.
Sigita didn’t. She couldn’t. She stood there, stiff as a pillar, with the noise of her own blood crackling in her ears like a bad phone connection.
“Where is he?” she asked.
The man didn’t like that she wouldn’t do as she was told. He took a step forward, then raised the barrel of the gun against Aleksander’s cheek.
“Who?” he said.
“You know damn well. My Mikas!”
“Don’t you care about this one?” he said. “Is the little one the only one that matters?”
No. No, it was no longer only about Mikas. It had never been only about Mikas, she knew that now.
“Lie down, bitch,” he said. “It will be better for all of us if I don’t lose my temper.”
He didn’t say it in any menacing tone of voice, he was just offering information. Like the little signs by the predator pits in Vilnius Zoo: Please don’t climb the fence.
Sigita lay down.
“What are you saying?” asked Anne Marquart in English. “Why are you doing this?”
The man didn’t answer. He merely forced Aleksander down onto the floor next to them, then slid his hands over Anne’s body, not in any sexual way, just professionally. He found a mobile phone in her pocket and bashed it against the stone floor till it broke. He then upended Sigita’s bag, fished her mobile from the wreckage, and treated it to a similar destructive bang.
“He took Mikas,” explained Sigita. “My son Mikas. I think your husband paid him to do it.”
The man looked up.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. But he will.”
IT WAS NEARLY half past eight in the evening before they let him go. Jan felt as if he had been run through a cement mixer.
“Go home and try not to think too much about it,” said his lawyer, as they shook hands in the parking lot.
Jan nodded silently. He knew it would be impossible not to think. Think about Anne,