Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (6 page)

Even though he didn’t say it very loudly, she heard him. In spite of the noise and the angry voices, in spite of the engine noise from the vans, whose motors hadn’t been turned off even though they were parked.

“Sándorka,” she said. “My treasure. Come here.”

He ducked under the arm of a man in a gray EMT uniform and made it all the way over to the ambulance and the scratched aluminum gurney. He thought his mother looked the way she usually did. Yes, she had been sick, but why was it suddenly so bad that she had to go to the hospital?

When his other grandmother, Grandma Vanda, whom his oldest sister had been named after … when she had gone to the hospital, she hadn’t come back. She died.

Sándor couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t even make himself ask. He just walked over to her so she could grab hold of his hand.

“Watch out,” the ambulance attendant said. “We’re lifting the gurney now. Don’t get your fingers pinched.”

His mother had to let go of him again.

“It won’t be for very long,” she said. “Then I’ll be home again. You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás until I get back, right? Along with Grandma Éva.”

Then the doors closed, and the ambulance started driving away. The other cars stayed. And it quickly became apparent that the
gadje
hadn’t come only for his mother.

I
T WAS SO
wrong to see Tamás standing here, outside Sándor’s room, in the middle of a life that had nothing to do with him. Grown up, or almost—he still had a gangly teenager’s body, and there was a softness to his features that didn’t seem as tough-guy as the rest of him. Couldn’t he at least get his hair cut? Did he have to look so … so Gypsy? If anyone saw him, they would assume he was here to steal something.

“Come in,” Sándor said reluctantly. It was preferable to him hanging around in the hallway.

Tamás turned a slow circle in the middle of the room, checking it out. The proportions were a little odd because a dividing wall had been put up in what had originally been one large, well-lit room. Now Sándor and his neighbor each had half a window and a greater familiarity with each other’s bodily noises than they would have liked, since the dividing wall was pretty much just painted plywood. But apart from that.…

“This is nice,” Tamás said. “You’ve got a lot of books, though.”

“That’s because I’m a student.”

“Right. And which class did you get these for?” Tamás grinned broadly, pointing to a shelf full of well-worn paperbacks. He pulled one of them down, and Sándor instinctively reached out a hand to stop him.

“Morgan Kane,” Tamás read. “
The Devil’s Marshal
.”

“Don’t damage it,” Sándor said. “They’re really hard to come by these days.”

He couldn’t explain his fascination with the lonely, hard-hitting US Marshal. He was well aware that Westerns were not exactly what Lujza would call “literature,” and he pretended he only ever read them to improve his English. But the books consumed him, and he had followed the entire course of Kane’s life, from vulnerable, orphaned sixteen-year-old to aging, disillusioned killer. Or almost the entire course—there were eighty-three books in the series, and he only had eighty-one of them. He was missing
The Gallows Express
and
Harder than Steel
.

“Where’s your computer? You have one, don’t you?” Tamás asked, tossing
The Devil’s Marshal
onto the bed. Sándor picked it up and returned it to its place on the shelf.

“Why do you ask?”

“Come on now,
phrala
. Are you my brother, or what?”

Phrala
. He had heard people call each other that on the street in the Eighth District, their voices gently mocking, evoking a sense of community that he wasn’t a part of. Hey, brother. Hey, Gypsy. No one called out to him, though. They could tell he didn’t belong.

Take care of the girls and Tamás
. But he had only been eight years old. What did she expect?

“What do you want?”

“There’s just something I want to find out. Online, I mean. You have Internet access, right?”

“Yeah,” Sándor admitted, reluctantly.

S
ÁNDOR HAD TO
log him onto the university network with his own username and password, but otherwise Tamás needed no help. He clearly didn’t want Sándor looking over his shoulder.

“What are you searching for?”

Tamás glanced at him briefly. “None of your business.”

“Um, hello? That’s my computer you’re using, right?”

“Okay, okay. It’s a girl. Happy?”

There was a fidgety energy in Tamás’s compact body, excitement or anticipation of some kind. It worried Sándor and made him a little envious. He had never been young the way Tamás was young right now—there had always been so many rules for him to follow, so many unforeseeable consequences if he stepped out of line.

“You can’t sit here and surf porn, just so you know.”

“I’m not! It’s not like that. I’m just going to chat with her a little.”

“Is she Roma?” Sándor blurted out. Knee-jerk reaction, as if that were the most important thing. It would certainly be the first question his mother or grandmother would ask, he thought.

“No, she’s a
gadji
.”

“What does Mom have to say about that?”

Tamás straightened up and turned around. “Well, it’s really more what Grandma would say. If they knew, but they don’t.”

Tamás’s hands flew over the keyboard. But Sándor noticed that one of them was flying more slowly than the other.

“What happened to your hand?”

Tamás turned it over and studied it for a second, almost as if he hadn’t realized anything was wrong with it until now. The skin was peeling off in big flakes, like a freshly boiled new potato, and the surface underneath the old, dead layer of skin was strangely reddish brown.

“I burned myself,” Tamás said.

“On what?”

Tamás flipped his hand back over. “A motor,” he said. “Now get lost. I can handle this myself. Don’t you have to study or something?”

Sándor did, but it was impossible to concentrate with Tamás in the room. He was a foreign body, and a fidgety one at that. He rolled around on Sándor’s old office chair and drummed his fingers on the worn desktop, humming or whistling softly but constantly. Twice he pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and spoke into it in a low voice, but it didn’t sound like he was talking to his new conquest.

“You have a mobile phone,” Sándor said, half as a question. Maybe that meant money wasn’t quite as tight as the last time he had been home.

Tamás simply said, “Yes.”

“Does Mama have one, too?”

“No.”

It was quiet for a bit. Then Tamás said, vaguely apologetically, “Here. I’ll write the number down for you. Give me yours, then she can call you, too.”

Sándor gave Tamás his number, even though the idea that his mother could now call him at any time made him feel strangely uneasy. Going back to Galbeno for a few days a year when he thought he could cope with it was one thing. Being … 
available
like this, whenever his Roma family felt like it … that was entirely different.

Added to that, there was the other increasingly urgent problem.

He needed to pee.

His computer was hands-down the most expensive thing Sándor owned. Scrimping to buy the Toshiba had been a struggle, even though it was secondhand and far from state-of-the-art. There was no bathroom on Sándor’s floor. He had to go down two flights of stairs and partway down the hallway. But he didn’t trust Tamás enough to leave him here, even
though right now he seemed completely focused on typing and had just hissed a soft, triumphant “Yes!” which might mean his chat romance was paying off.

In the end Sándor didn’t really have a choice. He set down his Roman law compendium and got up off the bed.

“Don’t touch my stuff,” he said. “And if you wreck my computer, I’ll rip your nuts off.”

That was the kind of thing he could never say to other people. To all his Hungarian friends and acquaintances who had no idea that he was half Roma. But Tamás just grinned.

“That would take bigger hands than yours,
phrala
.”

S
ÁNDOR HURRIED. BUT
of course the lavatory was occupied, and it wasn’t until he had knocked on the door twice that one of his downstairs neighbors came out.

“Yeah, yeah! Give a guy a chance to pull up his trousers.”

“Sorry.”

He locked the door, pulled down his fly and relieved his sorely tested bladder. Someone had tried to improve the smell in the room with a pale-green air freshener hanging off one side of the toilet bowl, but as far as Sándor could tell, it just added an odd chemical sweetness to the considerable stench of sewage and urine.

He was too anxious to take the time to wash his hands properly, just quickly stuck them under the tap and dried them on his trousers instead of the damp, red towel hanging next to the sink.

When he got back, Tamás was gone. Luckily the computer was still there, unharmed, still on and logged in. He pulled the window open and looked down at the street. His brother’s slender yet compact form was heading toward Prater Street.

“Hey!” Sándor yelled.

Tamás turned and danced a couple of steps backward.

“Thanks for letting me use your computer!” he yelled back at Sándor. “See you,
czigány
.”

Then he turned the corner, and Sándor couldn’t see him anymore.

S
ÁNDOR TURNED OFF
the computer. Now that Tamás was gone, he suddenly wished he had asked more questions about how things were
going and what kind of girl Tamás was so terribly in love with that he would travel for five hours on three different buses just for a chance to chat online with her. Surely there was a computer somewhere closer? Didn’t they have Internet cafés in Miskolc?

Maybe the girl lived in Budapest. Maybe that’s why Tamás was suddenly in such a hurry to leave.

Or maybe there was another reason. Sándor suddenly noticed that one of his desk drawers was ajar. It hit him like a punch to the stomach, because even though he had been afraid that Tamás would make a mess or knock something over or pour soda on his computer, at no point had he been afraid that his little brother would take something that was his. You didn’t steal from your own people.

And his wallet was still there. It was his passport that was gone.

NSIDE THE SURVEILLANCE
van, the smell of nervous sweat and coffee-induced flatulence had grown intense over the past couple of hours. Søren leaned forward, and then back, in an attempt to focus on the screen. Recently his optician had begun to mutter something about “bifocals.”

“Any chance of a better picture?” he asked.

“Not while he’s moving,” the technician said. “It’s not exactly broad daylight out there.”

The image was jumping and shaking as the man outside made his way across the abandoned railway yard. Søren’s eyes wandered over to one of the other screens, the one that gave him a bird’s eye view of the area. They had two men stationed on the roof of the closest residential building on Rovsingsgade. The beat-up blue Scania refrigeration truck that was the object of the whole operation was parked more or less in the middle of the derelict triangle of no-man’s land between Rovsingsgade and the old railway junction tracks. A little farther away, on the other side of the strip of straggling allotment gardens, a train rattled past in a flicker of lit windows. Darkness had given way to half-light. Luckily, a mass of leaden clouds delayed true dawn a little, but it was still light enough for the inhabitants of the refrigeration truck to spot Berndt if he wasn’t careful.

But he was. Currently the little camera mounted on his headset was showing nothing except close-ups of stiff, yellow grass and nettle stalks from last year.

“Come on, come on.…” mumbled a voice on the far side of the technician—Mikael Nielsen, an intense young man with a very high IQ, one of the new people Søren had personally helped recruit to counterterrorism from the surveillance force. With his crew-cut and ruddy complexion,
he could be mistaken for the head of one of the more violent soccer fan clubs, and he gave off a vibe that made people reluctant to share a taxi with him. He had been part of Søren’s group for a year and a half now, but Søren wasn’t sure he would last. Yes, he had a sharp mind and a head filled with astonishing facts, but there was a restlessness in him that he struggled to control during moments like this, when all they could do was wait. And wait. And wait some more. Caution took time.

Suddenly the camera advanced with a bump. They could hear Berndt’s breathing; it was very loud in the stuffy, oxygen-depleted atmosphere inside the van. The image got significantly darker.

“He’s under the truck now,” Gitte Nymand said, practically into Søren’s ear. She was standing behind him and had leaned forward so she could follow the action more closely. He couldn’t help noticing the feminine scent of freshly washed hair and deodorant. Hopefully the contrast with his own sixteen-hours-on-the-body shirt wasn’t too jarring.