Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (26 page)

“Drive,” he said. “Please.…”

It wasn’t until then that she realized that he wasn’t one of the pursuers but appeared to be pursued like herself. His face was red and swollen. He had a busted eyebrow, dark with clotted blood. As if he had just come out of a bar fight. Yet another shower of rocks hailed down over the car.

Nina turned the key in the ignition, and the Fiat started miraculously and immediately. She backed up so fast that the men behind them had to jump to the side, then sped ahead and threw the car onto the deserted industrial road, still with one door wide open and the stowaway clinging to the seat and the handle of the glove compartment. He managed to get the door closed again before they merged into the steady evening rush hour traffic on Gammel Køge Landevej.

T
HE CAR’S FRONT
wheels hit the curb by the sidewalk in Fejøgade with a soft bump, and Nina heard the scraping sound of the undercarriage against the concrete. She was starting to feel dizzy again, and small black spots were dancing in front of her eyes as she turned her head to look at her uninvited passenger. He was pressing a handkerchief against the gash in his eyebrow. It was already soaked with blood, and a couple of big, dark drops had seeped through the fabric, dripping onto his arm. He noticed and folded the handkerchief carefully, trying to avoid further mess on himself or the car seat. It was almost touching, Nina thought, with a glance at the Fiat’s shop-soiled upholstery. She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a roll of paper towels, and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said politely.

They hadn’t said anything to each other the whole drive. She hadn’t had enough breath for anything besides maneuvering them in one piece through the city traffic despite her headache, and he had just sat there, motionless and silent, as if he felt that any movement on his part would be interpreted as a threat.

He fumbled the paper towel into place over his gash and continued to sit there with the bloody handkerchief in his other hand as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. It wasn’t until now that Nina had a chance to size him up. He was a long way from home, she thought, and young, probably somewhere in his early twenties. At first she had assumed he was Roma, but now she wasn’t sure. There was something about the way he was dressed, his mannerisms, his reserved politeness—something that somehow set him apart from the other men out there at the garage. And then of course there was also the fact that they had beaten him.… His breathing was unsteady, and he was holding his elbow awkwardly against his ribcage on one side. The split eyebrow clearly wasn’t the whole story.

“What happened?” she asked, grateful that he spoke at least a little English. “Where does it hurt?”

“My side,” he said. “I got kicked.…”

At least it wasn’t a knife or a baseball bat. Her eyes wandered up to his mouth, but there were no blood bubbles, and the blood that was there all seemed to have come from his eyebrow. A kick could easily break a rib, and a broken rib could perforate a lung. The eyebrow would have to wait; it wasn’t life threatening. Chest pain could be.

“Take your jacket off. No, wait. I’ll help you.” She didn’t want him to move his torso too much until she had an idea of what was going on with his ribs. The need to call on her professional skills once again pushed her own nausea into the background, and she was grateful for that. She turned on the overhead light to see what she was doing and pulled the now blood-splattered white shirt to the side to expose his torso. There was a round red mark along the third rib on his left side, and he inhaled sharply when she touched it. But the bone felt intact; at most it was cracked, which was still enormously uncomfortable and would make breathing an unpleasant chore for a few days, but nothing worse.

“Are you a doctor?” he asked.

“Nurse.”

A flash of eagerness and hope lit up the eye that wasn’t stuck shut with blood.

“My brother,” he said. “Have you seen him? He’s sick.…”

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Sixteen.”

“No. Then I haven’t seen him.” Was he the sick, young Roma man who had disappeared from the garage? Should she ask? But she didn’t know anything other than that he was gone and that he might not be just sick but critically ill.

The man’s shoulders sank. She cautiously moved the hand protecting his eye so she could see the gash. It was what she had been expecting, a classic boxing injury. It bled a lot, but the gash wasn’t all that long, and Nina could have fixed it up with a drop of skin glue from her first aid kit if she had had a chance to grab it when she left Valby. Now she would have to make do with the car’s first aid kit, which wasn’t ideal, but better than nothing.

“Do you know the people out there?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

He sat perfectly still while she worked, almost as if he wasn’t completely present. As if he had disappeared into himself, to some place where the pain couldn’t reach him. It gave her a jolt of discomfort because that was a reaction she was more used to seeing in exhausted or abused refugee children, but at least it made him an easy patient. She cleaned the wound with a splash of iodine and closed the gaping gash with small pieces of surgical tape. Finally she turned the rearview mirror so he could view the results. The look in his eyes became more alert, and he thanked her again, just as politely as the first time.

“You’re welcome.”

Nina forced herself to smile as she felt the nausea come roiling back up from somewhere low in her abdomen. It was that refugee child’s reaction in him that made her continue:

“Are you in trouble? Is there anything I.…”

She only made it halfway through the question. It felt as if the car were sailing across the black asphalt, like a ship in rough waters. She opened the door, but only made it halfway out before she threw up, hanging out of her seat. Warm vomit spattered her sandal, her foot, and her bare leg. When the heaving stopped, she sat there for several seconds with her eyes
closed and her forehead resting against the steering wheel, gasping the cool evening air.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up. He had gotten out of the car and come around to her side to help her out. He looked scared, she thought. Worried and scared, in a way that looked wrong for someone that young. People his age usually lived secure in their faith in their own immortality.

He supported her gently under the elbow as she awkwardly straddled the little pool of vomit next to the car. There were small bright red splotches in the grayish yellow. Blood. That put paid to any lingering doubts. She was suffering from the same thing as the children at the garage.

Nina instinctively pulled her arm back and took a step away from the young man. If this was contagious, and she was a carrier, then she had already spent too long with him in the car, not to mention with Anton and all the kids on the field trip. She wasn’t too worried about herself or Anton. A well-equipped hospital would have no trouble curing this thing, whatever it was. It was a different matter for the Roma at the garage and for her injured passenger. She had no idea where he was going and if he would have access to a hospital if he got sick.

“This is just first aid,” she told him. “Get back in. I’ll drive you to the emergency room just as soon … just give me a moment.”

“No.” He shook his head vehemently.

She stared at him and felt an intense exasperation spread like heat through her chest. What was it with these people? Why couldn’t they just do what she said?

“You need more treatment. And the children out there. They need to go to the hospital. Why won’t any of you see that?” Her voice had become hard and flat with suppressed rage. But not sufficiently suppressed, it seemed.

“I’m going now,” he said, taking a step back, as if he was backing away from a vicious dog. “Thanks for your help.”

She wanted him to wait. To at least stay long enough to get her phone number so he could call if there were problems. If he got sick. Or if he found his sick brother. But he was already walking down the sidewalk. The muscles in Nina’s legs trembled as she tried to take a couple of swaying steps after him. She didn’t even have the strength to call out. She was
afraid she would throw up again if she so much as flexed a single muscle in the region of her neck. But when he got to the corner, he turned around spontaneously. He hesitated for so long she thought maybe he had changed his mind after all.

“The children,” he said then. “In Hungary, Roma children are often removed from their homes. For example if someone in the family is seriously ill or … or something. That’s why they’re afraid. That’s why they don’t dare go to the doctor here. Because the children don’t always come home again.”

He looked as if he wanted to say more, but then he turned his back on her again, lengthened his strides, and disappeared down Jagtvej. She stood perfectly still for a while, waiting for her nausea to subside.

IS HEAD HURT
like crazy. Sándor cautiously fingered his eyebrow, tracing the edges of the wound under the bandage, but that wasn’t where most of the pain was coming from. When the blow hit, his head had slammed back and something in his neck had dislocated, or at least that was how it felt. And the ribs on his left side ached with a steady, dull pain with every breath he took.

Traffic churned past on both sides of a narrow central strip of trees. It wasn’t very dark yet even though it was past ten, and though he felt like sitting down on the sidewalk and leaning against a wall, there were limits to how weird he could act out here in the open where everyone could see him.

It was no longer hot. There was a sharpness in the air, and a shiver ran through him when he breathed, partly because of the cold, partly because of the shock. Someone had hit him. Someone had kicked him while he was down. Someone had thrown rocks at him. There was a tumultuous, injured humiliation inside him. He felt
picked on
. The entire Hungarian part of his upbringing was in offended uproar—“You can’t just hit people, you know!”—while at the same time he could hear his stepfather Elvis’s sarcastic scorn when he had been stupid enough to complain that someone had pushed him at school.
Crybaby. Push back
!

He hadn’t found Tamás.

Even though the place was at the address Tamás had given him, Tamás wasn’t there. No one would admit having seen him. No one would say where he was. And when Sándor had kept asking, insisted … it had happened in a flash. There hadn’t been any introductory pushing or bumping chests, they had just … let him have it. Three or four quick blows and, when he fell down, a kick to the kidneys and one in the side. He wasn’t even sure which of them had hit him, after the first man, that little square
guy with the mustache, the one who sounded like he came from Szeged. He was the one who had busted Sándor’s eyebrow.

As he lay doubled over on the filthy, gritty concrete floor of the repair shop, he heard the sound of breaking glass. Then they hauled him up onto his feet and pushed him up against the wall, and the Szeged man stuck something right up in his face, so close that Sándor had to squint to see that it was a broken bottle.

They’re going to slit my throat.

He had time to think that thought, disjointed and panicky and yet strangely matter-of-fact. A noise came out of his throat, a squeak that was both pain and fear. And that very instant there was a
pling
! from his mobile phone, an absurdly everyday sound in the midst of impending death. That didn’t stop the man with the broken bottle.

“Get lost,” he said coldly. “If we see you here again.…”

He didn’t need to say any more. The edge of the broken glass rested sharp and cold against Sándor’s cheek, and Sándor could feel his pulse throbbing in his carotid artery a few centimeters down.

“You and your
mulo
brother.…” one of the other men whispered. “
Mamioro
, scram.”

And Sándor had run away. His tail between his legs, his throat full of bile. But when he got outside, there was nowhere to go. After all, he
had
to find Tamás.

Mulo
. He remembered that word because ghosts and evil spirits were staples of his grandmother’s bedtime stories.
Mamioro
? Wasn’t there a story about.…

But the memory slipped through his fingers like a fish squirming its way out of the fisherman’s grasp. And
mulo
was ominous enough on its own. Why were they calling his brother an evil spirit?

He shuddered and suddenly noticed that he was in his shirtsleeves, leaning up against a wall whose cool stone façade was sucking the heat out of his body with each second. His jacket. What happened to it?

Damn it. That’s right, the nurse had helped him to take it off.

He swore softly and starting walking back toward the street where she had dropped him off. It wasn’t far; it couldn’t be. A quiet side street off the noisy boulevard he was on now with three- or four-story residential buildings on both sides and some fragile, freshly planted trees in pots here and there.…