The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (47 page)

Then the crowd parted and someone pointed to where the ringing was coming from. The Christiania trike with its cargo crate.

The guy seated in the saddle shook his head and gave a shrug, as if he had no idea what was going on. But Carl sensed a lie.

The man was wearing gloves, and the hood of his anorak was drawn tight, so only his eyes were visible. It was a rather strange choice of apparel, considering the mild springtime weather.

Carl looked at the cargo box on the trike. It was big. Maybe just big enough.

“Hey, you,” he called out, approaching the man. “Would you mind showing me what’s in the—”

Before he could reach out and stop him, the guy was off, pedaling away like mad.

“Rose, you look after Tilde,” Carl shouted, setting off in pursuit. “Help us, for Chrissake!” he yelled up the street, as the dealers stepped aside with a collective frown of bemusement.

Carl knew damn well that one never ran on Pusher Street, but what about cyclists?

“Stop him!” he yelled again, his chest tightening as Assad sprinted past, together with the guy who’d lent them his belt.

“Hey, almond man!” he heard Assad scream, so loud that the words echoed off the wall of the Spiseloppen restaurant.

The vendor standing with his cart by the entrance turned around.

“Shove your cart into the path and block his way!” Assad shouted. “You’ll get a thousand kroner!”

The almond man burst into action, trundling his handcart in front of the gate, loath to pass up a potential source of income. After all, a thousand kroner was more than enough to repair any damage to his beloved almond cart.

The man fleeing on the trike veered off toward the large shed that housed Christiania’s refuse collection depot, recycling center, and a lot more besides. He braked hard, leaped from the saddle and tried to dodge behind a pile of rusty machinery, only to find his path blocked by a group of men who had just finished work and were standing around with
beer cans in hand, enjoying the weather. They weren’t the sort of blokes you just shoved aside.

The only option left was to run inside the wooden building with its red-painted window frames.

By the time Carl arrived out of breath ten seconds later, Assad and the almond vendor were already inside, looking about.

“Where the fuck did he get to?” the Christianite exclaimed.

Carl quickly took stock. The large, high-ceilinged space was a festival of color. On the wall above the entrance hung a five-meter-tall mask, a caricature of a former Danish prime minister who was particularly despised in these parts. The floor and shelves were a clutter of machine parts and assorted junk, and further back was what looked like a jumble sale of everything from miniature racing cars to palm trees carved in wood with sombreros on them.

All in all, not the easiest place to apprehend a young black man with gymnastic talent.

“Try up there, one of you,” Carl instructed, pointing to the ceiling where an office of gypsum boards and wood had been constructed on top of the crossbeams. Then he turned around and went back outside to the cargo trike.

The silence that came from it made him uneasy.

If they had injected Marco with the same sedative as they had used on Tilde, only a much larger dosage, then more than likely they had already carried out their mission. It was a dreadful thought.

He pushed the bolt aside and lifted the lid of the box.

And sure enough, there was Marco. Curled up and inert.

Carl lifted him up and carried him into the shed and found a blanket on which to lay him, while Assad and the other guy clattered around among all the scrap metal.

Pulling up Marco’s sleeve, Carl ascertained that if there was a pulse at all, it was terribly weak.

Carl felt despair welling inside him. After all, it was his fault this had happened.

He got down on his knees beside the seemingly lifeless figure and began to attempt resuscitation. It was years since he’d done it last, and
on that occasion the girl in question, the victim of a traffic accident, had died. Now the whole experience came back to him. The girl’s smooth skin, the mother’s anguish as she looked on. The paramedics who had gently pulled him away and taken over. It had taken Carl weeks to get over it, but if Marco died on him it would stay with him forever. He knew that now, as he knelt there, pumping the boy’s fragile rib cage.

He turned his head as a movement caught his eye, and saw the giant mask vibrate slightly in the draught from the entrance so it looked like the ex–prime minister’s mouth was moving. How strange to notice something so irrational and inconsequential in a situation like this, he mused.

“Come on now, Marco,” he whispered, as Assad hurled rusty junk out of his way and his Christianite helper rummaged about in the office above his head.

“He’s not up here,” the guy called down through a window.

“And there are no other exits down here, so he must still be here somewhere,” Assad shouted back from the far end of the shed.

Carl continued his efforts, now performing mouth-to-mouth. If only someone would come and help him.

Then he resumed the heart massage.

“Call an ambulance, Assad,” he yelled. “I’m afraid we’re losing Marco. He’s very heavily sedated. He may even be dead already.”

And then came the faintest of whispers from beneath him: “Owww, that hurts . . . !”

Carl looked down into Marco’s open, anguished face.

“You’re breaking something inside me,” the boy gasped, half suffocated.

At that moment the mouth of the great mask on the wall above them opened, and the African tumbled out, falling two or three meters to the floor below.

He seemed stunned as he lay there, but only for a couple of seconds.

“He’s here, hurry!” Carl barked, climbing to his feet.

“Stay lying there, Marco,” he said, and turned to face the African, prepared for combat.

When the man got up, Carl saw he had a gun in his hand, and that his finger was curled much too tightly around the trigger.

I’m going to die now, he thought, and was at once filled with a singular feeling of calm. He raised his arms in the air and watched as the African came toward him, then lowered his weapon and aimed it at Marco.

A shot rang out, giving Carl a start, the sound implanting itself deep inside him. And then he saw the blood on the African’s hand. The gun was gone.

He lifted his head and looked up at the office under the roof and saw the Christianite standing in the window with a pistol still smoking in his hand.

Only then did Carl recognize him. He was an undercover narc from Station City.

“I’m coming down,” he shouted, disappearing from view.

“Look out!” cried Marco from the floor, as Carl spun around in time to see the African lunge at him with a knife in his unwounded hand.

The shadow that came flying from out of nowhere was just as unexpected.

It was Assad. Enraged and utterly without fear, he aimed a high, flying heel-kick at the African’s chin, but his adversary was skilled in the same art and managed to spin around so the bones of their feet clashed together in kicks and parries. Assad tumbled backward, but the African remained on his feet and raised his hand to hurl the knife at Marco.

He’s insane, Carl managed to think, before the guy suddenly went limp and dropped the knife on the floor. There hadn’t been a sound.

Carl didn’t know what was happening. The African staggered sideways, clutching at whatever was at hand to stay upright. Finally, he slid to the floor in what seemed like slow motion, down-for-the-count unconscious.

Carl turned to Assad and the undercover drug-squad officer. Assad smiled and extended his palm. In it was a heavy metal nut.

“If he gets up he can have another one. There’s plenty more where it came from,” Assad said, thrusting his hand into a box of rusty nuts, bolts, and assorted odds and ends.

By now Marco had raised himself onto his elbows, white as a sheet, but alive and kicking.

“Tilde?” was all he could say.

“She’s OK. Rose is with her.”

The smile that appeared on the boy’s face was almost unnatural. “I want to go to her,” he said.

If a person ever needed someone to look up to, this boy was Carl’s number one candidate at the moment.

He looked out through the doors where a group of tourists were standing, seemingly enraptured. Maybe they thought they’d come just in time to catch the day’s Wild West show. Whatever it was, a couple of them burst into enthusiastic applause.

Only the enormous black woman from the cruise party who stood in their midst seemed rather less exhilarated. Gripping her bag tightly, she stormed off.

“Mikkel Øst, drug squad,” said the undercover officer, shaking hands with Assad and Rose with a look in his eyes that said he was less than satisfied with how the situation had developed.

He would have to turn in his weapon until the internal investigation of the shooting was concluded. Most likely he was relieved and annoyed at the same time. A four-month undercover stint in Christiania’s drug underworld wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially when you were interrupted just before results began to show.

Carl thanked him. “If we run into each other again, let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, yeah?” And then both Mikkel Øst and the ambulance containing the African were gone.

By now Tilde had appeared with Rose and was standing with Marco, their arms wrapped around one another. What each of them had just been through was apparently best dealt with jointly.

“There’s something we have to do,” said Tilde, when eventually she seemed more or less recovered. “Will you phone my mum, Carl, and tell her we all need to meet at the house in Brønshøj? Marco and I have something to show you.”

—

Half an hour later Tilde and her mother were hugging each other in the driveway of Stark’s house.

“What did they do to you, Tilde?” her mother asked, deeply shaken.

“They stuck a needle in me, and then I was gone until they woke me
up. I sat on a bench by a shawarma stall for ten minutes out there before I could walk. It felt just like when they give me an anesthetic at the hospital. You feel a bit nauseous afterward, but I’m OK again now.”

“And what about you?” Malene asked Marco.

He nodded. “I’m OK, too, even though my legs still feel like they’re asleep.”

Be thankful it’s not a lot worse, thought Carl.

“What is it you want to show us?” asked Rose.

Tilde took a deep breath before letting go of her mother and leading them up the drive to the back garden.

“You do it,” she said to Marco.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “No more secrets. We’ve kept this one long enough.”

So Marco lifted the flagstones one by one, placing the buried treasures in a row as he explained to them how they’d been discovered.

Five white plastic containers. Five testimonies from a dead man.

Carl shook his head and looked at Rose and Assad. How extraordinary to think it had all started with a missing persons notice, and now it was ending with a code written inside a safe and some plastic boxes buried in a garden. Sometimes police work was like a lottery. You checked your ticket stubs, hoping you have drawn at least one winning number.

I don’t think we need to show them everything, Marco’s eyes seemed to be saying to Tilde, but she took the containers one by one and explained what was in them.

Malene Kristoffersen needed a chair. There she sat with the jewelry and the little notebook in her lap, along with the certainty of how systematically the man she had loved had committed fraud. Even when Tilde began to speak in his defense, her hands remained clenched, her face a picture of shame and disappointment. Clearly, she felt betrayed.

“I think you should make sure all this gets into the right hands,” she said finally, handing Carl the bundle of documents bearing the foreign ministry’s logo.

Carl studied the uppermost sheet for a moment, then nodded. It was just as they’d thought.

If William Stark had embezzled from his ministry and the Danish
state, he was but an amateur compared to his superior. Eriksen’s signature was everywhere.

Carl handed the bundle to Rose. “We’ll go through this later, OK?” he said, then pointed at the last box.

“What’s in this one?”

“Nothing of much use to us, as far as I can see,” said Tilde. “It’s William’s will.”

“His will?” Malene whispered.

Tilde nodded. “He was leaving everything to us, Mum. All his money, the house. Everything.”

That’s when they saw the cracks appearing in Malene’s facade. All the noble qualities she had attributed to her partner through the years came flooding back now. She was confused, embarrassed, and full of grief and anger all at once.

“You’re right. His will’s of no use to us now, Tilde,” she said tearfully. “William’s estate will be confiscated to cover the costs of his fraud.”

She lowered her head and allowed her tears to fall unhindered.

Then Marco stepped forward and whispered something in Carl’s ear.

The lad was definitely imaginative, he’d give him that. Carl nodded.

“OK, Malene and Tilde,” he said. “I think I’d better ask you to hand over the notebook and the documents. Would you please give them to Assad?”

The girl nodded and gently picked up the notebook from her mother’s lap, hugging her briefly. Then she gathered together the papers that documented Stark’s deceit and handed it all to Assad.

Carl looked around, then pointed over to a pile of bricks stacked up behind the bike shed.

“Over there, Assad.”

Assad stared blankly for a moment at his boss, but as Carl produced a pack of cigarettes and his lighter, the penny dropped.

“Oops,” said Carl, as he set fire to the stack of papers with the notebook on top. “I’m afraid there’s been a little accident. Would you happen to have some water handy, Rose?”

He gave her a penetrating look until the frown on her brow smoothed.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said, cottoning on. “There’s the lake
down there, of course. But I’m afraid it’s too far because this bucket’s got a hole in it.”