The Considerate Killer (11 page)

“Yes.” She laughed. “But it's not very easy to say what you are thinking with a mother or an aunt constantly hanging over your shoulder. They are
so
curious. One day it'll kill them.”

She became serious.

“I envy you, Vincent, because you moved away. Because you're in Manila doing new things. And I'm afraid of losing you; I'm afraid you'll find another girl—some bright and pretty medical student with as much money as Vadim and expensive black underwear and sky-high stilettos.”

She pointed down at her flip-flops, and they both couldn't help laughing. Bea's slender brown legs and narrow ankles were covered by a thin layer of dust from the road. It was the dry season.

“You don't need to be afraid of that, Bea. Really,” said Vincent, putting his arm around her hips and pinching her teasingly in the side. “The girls studying medicine are small and fat and boring. All of them. There's no one like you in all the world, my flower. No one.”

They had reached the bridge. It was a narrow affair with wooden slats and worn netting along the sides, and reassuringly thick ropes for those who were afraid of heights to cling to. The river slid by lazily far beneath them, murky and dark green in its seasonal low.

Bea pulled herself free of his arm and danced out onto the bridge, playful and light on her feet. He suddenly had the urge to tell her about his final exams and the money he didn't have for the next semester. He had no one to talk to about it, even though he had a feeling Victor might know how bad things were. Thanks to his uncle, Victor didn't need a scholarship, but he was poor enough to know what things cost. Ironically, Victor had achieved top grades in every damn subject that had been put up on the bulletin board this year.

And he must have noticed Vincent's miserable results. He must have.

Bea skipped over a few holes in the bridge where boards were missing. That was always the way of it, ever since they were children. The bridge was under constant repair and in just as constant decay. As soon as the rotten parts had been replaced at one end, the boards in the middle began to sway and sink under your feet. They turned grey and black and fell from the row, like the teeth of an old woman, and the peasants who crossed the bridge every day to reach their rice paddies on the other side of the bridge were used to hopping it, tools balanced in their hands.

Bea jumped again, and he set off after her and caught her in the middle. She stood with her hands tightly clutching the thick rope, staring upriver. The warm wind tugged at her smooth, black hair and the red checked dress.

“Vincent,” she said. “I'm pregnant.”

“How much do
you need?”

Vadim calmly lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes. It was afternoon, and the bar was only half-full. Vincent sipped his whiskey carefully. He felt like getting drunk, but he had to take care of this before he could sink into a longed-for dizzying and necessary darkness.

“Fifty thousand now and fifty thousand more in six months. At least.”

“No more? It's expensive to have a baby. Diapers and private school and college. It all adds up.”

Vadim's face was unmoving, and Vincent couldn't quite tell if his friend was making fun of him, mocking him. The child was barely a child yet, and the thought of diapers had in fact crossed Vincent's mind, but beyond that, the fact that he was going to be a father was mostly an abstract, swirling hole somewhere on the horizon. Private school and college . . . He didn't want to think about it. Had to look at what was right in front of him, which was next semester and a hole in his budget of a hundred thousand pesos.

“It's just to pay for the next two semesters,” he said. “Bea and I were going to get married in six months anyway, and she and the baby will live with her parents in the beginning so she can continue her studies. I'll pay you back when I can. I promise.”

He would have liked to say something more. Give Vadim some form of assurance, something that definitively proved that the loan was temporary and therefore had nothing to do with their friendship. But first of all, he had nothing to give Vadim but his word, and second of all, it was already too late.

Something had changed between them.

He had seen it in Vadim's eyes when he told him about Bea and the lost scholarship. Vadim had looked like someone who had just been given an unexpected slap. The gaze was naked and vulnerable. But only for a moment. Then the hurt look had slipped from his face and he had become cool and to the point.

“So I'm your rich uncle now.” He smiled faintly. His cigarette hung in his mouth, in the style of an American gangster. If Vadim had been an actor, he would have been Leonardo DiCaprio. No, he would have been better—and more beautiful.

Vincent shrugged. Tried to make it all look like nothing.

“You're not my father. Or my uncle. And I don't like to owe you anything. We're friends, right? The V-Team and all that?”

“But,” said Vadim thoughtfully, “my father's pockets are, as we all know, deeper than the Philippine Trench, and I can bury my hands in them as long as I behave. That much money is hard to ignore when the shit hits the fan, right? Oh, I understand. That's how I feel about my father, and you feel that way about me. It's natural. And what else are friends for?”

The last was said with a lash of sarcasm, which made Vincent even more uncertain.

The music coming from the diminutive stage at the end of the room was turned up higher. A three-man live band was playing eighties pop and old ABBA songs.

“I've been expelled from St. Francis,” said Vadim calmly. “I won't be allowed to start next semester, no matter how much money I throw at them. I haven't told Diana yet.”

He considered Vincent over the rim of his whiskey glass with a gotcha sort of look.

“Why?”

Vincent didn't understand. Vadim had done all right at his exams. Not brilliantly so, but definitely acceptable, and as he said himself, money wasn't exactly a problem.

“Because I cheated, Vincent. What else? I'm no good at the book stuff. My father is right about that much. He was against me studying medicine.”

Something fell into place inside Vincent.

Vadim hadn't shown up at a single morning lecture the entire spring, and he usually spent his evenings down at Joye's or Cabana Bar—with or without Vincent, but usually with. And Vincent
had
wondered when Vadim actually had time to study. The answer had of course been obvious. Vadim was one of the rich students who paid others to write their papers and sit their exams.

“How did they catch you?”

Vadim pulled his hand through his smooth hair.

“It was stupid,” he said. “I got Bryan to write my name on his paper for the final. He needs the money because his father is sick. Cancer. It costs an arm and a leg. And he can retake his own exam in the fall. Or so I hope. So far, I'm the only one they've thrown out. Bryan is a genuine scholarship boy from the slums, and the director has chosen to show understanding for his difficult family situation. Being lazy and drunk is apparently not enough of an excuse. They have professional standards and the school's reputation to consider, or so the director assured me. I don't think I've ever met a more unbribable man. Pretty unsettling.”

“So what will you do?”

Vadim shrugged.

“I've told my father that I don't want to be a doctor after all. He wants to put me in charge of a part of his construction business. You know, concrete and steel and the bribing of officials and politicians. He's busy with his election campaign, you know? It's perfect for me.” He smiled palely.

Vincent shook his head. How could he have been stupid enough to believe that Vadim was doing the work himself? Him and all his carpe diem shit. All those lost hours. The cigarettes, the booze, the wild nighttime rides through Manila's streets on that damn motorcycle . . .

He suddenly felt terribly alone. Bea was still pregnant, and he hadn't done any of the things his mother and father had expected of him. Their money was lost if he couldn't stay in Manila. What would there be for him to return to in San Marcelino? A newspaper stand by the main road? Showing the tourists the sights for a few pesos a day? Bea, who would get up every morning and go to a badly paid job at the public hospital and smile bravely when the neighbors bought a new car and built a new house? The families would grow to hate him—both Bea's and his own

“The money, Vadim . . .” He tried to smile. “Can I borrow the money?”

He couldn't think of anything else right now.

Vadim turned back to Vincent with a look that had taken on a new hardness.

“The money. Right.” Vadim whistled quietly. “It's a lot of cash, Vincent, my man. Haven't you heard of condoms?”

“Please don't jerk me around. It's just a loan,” said Vincent. “I can work it off, can't I? Just say yes or no. Do you have a job for me? In your father's business maybe? Something . . .” He fumbled for the words. Didn't really know exactly what he imagined. “Some kind of office work or . . . anything at all, damn it. I can study during the day and work at night. It's just these two semesters. Just until I get another scholarship.”

Vadim laughed.

“Fuck it, Vincent, you don't earn fifty thousand pesos working in an office. Come on! What world do you live in? We're on the third rock from the sun, just so you know.”

Vincent slumped over his whiskey, and it struck him that Vadim was like a miserably sad little boy dangling a hunk of meat just out of reach of a chained dog. He, of course, was the dog. Snap, snap. Teeth closing on empty air.

“Does it feel good?”

Vincent could hear the anger in his own voice.

“What?”

“To have so much money that you can act like an asshole twenty-four hours a day? I said I would pay the money back. It's a loan. I'll find a way to get it.”

Vadim lifted his hand with a tired gesture.

“Yes, Vincent. It feels great. Really. You should try it.” He dropped the irony. “It doesn't matter about the money, Vincent. You can have it. Believe me, it means nothing. I don't even want it back. Five hundred pesos at a time or whatever you can manage? Forget it. I've got better things to do with my time.”

“Thank you.” The relief was so enormous that Vincent's anger evaporated in a split second, and he felt a ridiculous impulse to lift Vadim's hand to his forehead, as if Vadim was an uncle or grandfather he felt compelled to respect. He barely managed to stop himself. Instead he emptied his whiskey glass and stood up on weak legs.

“If you don't want the money back,” said Vincent, looking at Vadim, “then what do you want me to do?”

Vadim searched the pockets of his jeans and pulled out five crumpled ten-thousand-peso bills, which he threw on the table in front of Vincent. A sad smile flickered in his dark eyes.

“You work for me now,” he said calmly. “Simon says. You'll do whatever I ask you to do.”

W
ho did you
say he was?” asked Søren sleepily.

“Victor Galang. I met him some months ago in Manila. A medical student . . . There was this terrible accident, several thousand people were hurt, and they needed people with my kind of training . . .”

Nina could hear how defensive she sounded, as if Søren had become Morten and she needed to justify herself. Søren merely looked at her with his calm Paul Newman–blue gaze and waited for her to finish explaining.

The spare room had once belonged to one of her younger brothers, and its dimensions were rather modest. When the double bed was pulled out as it was now there was just a minimal passage along one wall. The only lights apart from the pendant in the ceiling were two small, ball-shaped bedside lamps at either end of the window ledge. The sheets were white with blue pinstripes, and Nina's mother had painted the pine wall panels a shiny white to brighten the narrow space, but with two people in it, it remained a bit of a den. They had left the window slightly ajar, and the blinds slapped against the windowframe with every gust of wind. Yet Nina still felt as if the air was too thick for her lungs.

“What were you doing in Manila in the first place?” asked Søren. She glanced at him, but his expression was, like his tone, neutral and calmly receptive. No blame, no accusations. But why would there be? He wasn't the father of her children. It wasn't
his
vacation that . . .

“Morten was making a presentation at a conference . . . He asked if . . . if we might not at least try a vacation together. For the sake of the children.” She glanced at him because in a way it also concerned him. Nina and Søren had already gone out together before the Philippine trip, but only a few times. That was in fact partly why she had agreed to Morten's invitation. Because
if
. . . if there really was a way back, she had no intention of messing it up by starting a relationship with Søren.

The airplane tickets had cost a fortune, but accommodation, at least, had been cheap: a surprisingly inexpensive week at a resort to begin with—pristine white sands and turquoise waters right on their doorstep, too—and later those days as the guests of Morten's colleague. At first it had gone pretty well. Civilized conversations, mini golf and splashing in the pool with the kids, even a certain bodily chemistry what with all the swim suits, tans and so on. She still found Morten . . . attractive. When he wasn't biting her head off, that is, or making her feel guilty enough to provide material for an entire conference of psychologists. The first evening in Manila they had gone out together for the first time in about six hundred years. As she remembered it, they both tried like mad to look as if they were having fun for each other's sake, until they almost simultaneously had broken down and confessed that they would rather be home. In the taxi, an out-on-the-town mood had somehow still surfaced. Morten had suggested a midnight swim in the pool, and they had made love, otter-like and slightly absurd, in the warm, chlorine-filled water. Afterward, lying next to him in bed, she had cried noiselessly for almost an hour. Over wasted efforts. Over good intentions. And the fact that it just wasn't enough.

When the accident happened a few days later, she had known exactly how he would react if she went out there. And if she had to be brutally honest with herself, it hadn't been necessity alone that made her volunteer her services.

Their marriage was over and could not be resuscitated. The sense of defeat had filled her with a panicky anxiety that did not go away until she found herself once more in the midst of real disaster, cool and competent, completely capable of saving
other
people's lives.

“It didn't work?” Søren asked carefully.

“No. The accident . . . that's exactly what he can't stand about me. That I help other people but not . . . not us. Not him.”
Not our own children
, she confessed silently to herself, but couldn't quite say it out loud.

“And this Victor was . . . what? A kind of colleague? A friend?”

“Victor? No. A fellow volunteer. But . . . something happens when you work together under conditions like that. Even if it's just for a few days. You never quite forget.”

Her heart pounded so hard and so quickly that her thin undershirt vibrated with every beat. The familiar dry, metallic taste of the adrenaline rush appeared in her mouth, as if Victor's name alone and the memory of Manila were enough to evoke it. She didn't understand it. That wasn't the way it was when she thought of the camps at Dadaab, for instance, and she had been there for much longer and under much riskier circumstances.

“What was he like?”

“He was good. He knew what he was doing, but it was more than that. He exuded calm, and people trusted him. He was extraordinarily tall and broad for a Filipino, and I think that helped.”

“Was he very religious?”

“You're thinking of the Bible quotations?” She had told him about the flowers and the cards they came with. “Not like that . . . not very. But almost everyone there is to some degree. They were everywhere, those Bible quotations—on T-shirts and caps, on buses, even as neon signs outside churches. Some of the nurses subscribed to a text service that sent them one a day, and they usually showed them to each other and compared. I think for them, it's about as normal as sending Christmas cards or something similar.”

She didn't tell him how effectively the last one had gotten to her. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” She wasn't sure she expected
joy
from the light of dawn—a certain relief would do. But as for the weeping bit . . . at least she wasn't alone in the dark now. She scrupulously admitted to herself that it was not only objective, clue-gathering motives that had made her wake up Søren to show him Victor's message.

He sat with his shoulders against the pine-clad wall, one leg stretched, one bent. His scarred chest was covered by a white T-shirt, his legs by the comforter and a pair of loose, striped boxer shorts. A lock of greying dark hair hung down over his forehead in a slightly post-rebellious way. She thought he resembled someone—some aging rock singer maybe—one of those men like Leonard Cohen and David Bowie who managed to make age, experience and reading glasses seem sexy.

“And you think he was the one who sent you those lilies?”

She shook her head.

“I don't know what to think. The Bible quotations . . . there can't actually be two people in the world sending me that kind of thing at the same time?”

“No. That would be stretching coincidence to the breaking point.”

“But the flowers were from a florist in Viborg.”

“Did you save the card?”

“No.” After the scare with the man who may or may not have been following her mother, she'd searched for it in the bin in her hospital room, but this had, of course, long since been emptied. Hospitals had to have efficient cleaning services. “But I'm sure. They were bought locally and delivered by a messenger.”

“Then we'll have to assume that the person who sent you these messages may be somewhere in the vicinity of Viborg.”

“But he wrote that he was on his way to Denmark—not that he was here already.”

“Nina. Don't be naïve. Anyone can write anything on Facebook—doesn't make it true. Can I borrow that?” He stretched his hand in the direction of her phone.

She handed it to him. He typed for a while with fierce concentration and swore when his broad fingertips slipped on the undersized keypad, or the spell check inserted especially useless suggestions.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Seeing if I can lure him further out of hiding.”

“Søren! That's my phone. And my profile!”

He looked up at her with something resembling real wonder.

“Surely you don't actually believe what he wrote?” he asked.

“Does it matter? You can't just . . . pretend to be me!”

He drew his glasses down on his nose and observed her over the top of them.

“Right now he knows quite bit about you,” he said dryly. “Your real name, your whereabouts—can't you at least turn off that function?—what your family looks like, how you're feeling, and what you think about everything under the sun. If we assume the flowers were from him, then he figured out what hospital you had been admitted to. We don't know if he is alone or part of a team.
If
he was the one who photographed your mother, it might have been to give his colleagues the ability to recognize her. He's got you and your life at his fingertips. Whereas you only know that he
migh
t live in Manila,
might
have been educated at the St. Francis College of Medicine, and that he likes the International Red Cross, a couple of Filipino pop groups and something called Young Christian Diamond. But have you seen his list of friends? He has one—and that's you.”

She wrestled the phone away from him. First to read the message he had written in her name—“Where are you? What is so important?”—and then to conclude that he was right. In the Facebook universe, she was apparently Victor's only friend.

“That profile was created solely to contact you,” said Søren with an irritatingly professional expression. “Victor may not even have been the one who did it. But the person looking for information can sometimes end up giving away more than he gets. He wants something from you. That's a weakness we can exploit.”

She glared at him.

“We aren't all terrorists,” she pointed out. “Some of us are who we say we are—with or without a thousand friends on Facebook.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let's wait and see how he answers.”

“You don't understand,” she said angrily. “The people you meet under conditions like that . . . you go through hell together. You hardly sleep, you don't get enough to eat and drink, all of that is pushed aside because . . . because it's life or death, literally. People are dying right here, right then. Every mistake, every break can cost some poor wretch their life. Under those circumstances, the masks drop. You see who people are—and what they are not. You see what they are capable of, what they can take, and what they find unbearable. And the Victor I got to know in that way—he was a good man. A good person. He wouldn't hurt a fly.”

He nodded very faintly—she barely caught the movement. There was something disarming about it, even though she wasn't sure exactly what he was agreeing with.

“You've just been attacked by an unknown assailant,” he then said, calmly and neutrally.

“That Westmann woman says it's some kind of eastern European gang.”

“No. That Westmann woman would like to know
if
it's them—or not.”

“I
have
thought about it,” she said. “And I just can't see how it can have anything at all to do with Victor and Manila.”

“I'm not saying it does. Not yet—we don't know enough. That's why I'm fishing for more information.”

“By abusing my profile!”

“Yes.”

He didn't even say he was sorry. And he didn't look the least apologetic. What were you supposed to do with the man?

She kept glaring at him for quite a long time, but he was one of the few people you simply
couldn't
stare down. A faint smile had appeared on one side of his mouth, and he returned her look in a way that was entirely devoid of confrontation.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking at you.”

She couldn't remember the last time someone had made her blush, but the warmth in her cheeks—and a few other places—could not be ignored. She could hardly be a sight for sore eyes right now, but his gaze followed everything, took it all in: the fading bruises, the hematoma, the hollows below her cheekbones and the swelling under her eyes.

“You're crazy,” she whispered and meant it. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“This?”

“Us. Me.” Her voice broke a bit. “A lot of people would think you're out of your mind.”

His smile grew noticably broader.

“A few people have said something of the kind,” he agreed.

She deliberately placed her hand on his chest precisely where the scar was hidden under his T-shirt. He let her do it without breaking eye contact. Then she felt his hands on the small of her back and let herself fall into him. The cell phone slid out of her hand and disappeared somewhere under the covers. She didn't care about the headache that buzzed constantly in the background or the faint smell of hospital that still clung to her skin. His lips tasted like sleep and a little of toothpaste, and she suddenly began to shake all over—long, shuddering jolts that she couldn't control.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes. No.” She pulled herself out of his embrace. “I don't know . . .”

It felt ridiculously dangerous to relax her wariness and allow someone else to be on guard. Like stepping out in front of a bus and hoping the driver would have time to put on the brakes. Dangerous, but at the same time unbelievably tempting.

“Come here.”

He held her for a while, calm and silent. Then she felt the cell phone vibrate against her right thigh. Victor had answered.

“I'll be in Denmark tomorrow. I must speak to you. My life is in danger—and so is yours.”

“Mommy
. .
. can we
go to the Swim Center? Please? Pretty please?”

Anton was old enough now to have complete control over his powers of persuasion. He knew it irritated her when he whined and begged in that pathetic way, so he opened his eyes extra wide, batted his eyelashes, and offered her a smile that made Shirley Temple look like an amateur. All of it with just enough ironic exaggeration that she couldn't help laughing.