The Considerate Killer (12 page)

“We'll have to ask Søren first.” What was she supposed to say if he asked why?
Because Søren has to determine if it's safe.
“And it won't be today, Anton. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

Luckily, he reacted to the limit she could more easily defend.

“Because . . . because I'm not completely well,” she said.

The smile disappeared as if someone had erased it with a wet cloth. He tugged at his blue Man of Steel hoodie (
“I'm not saying I'm Superman. I'm just saying nobody has ever seen me and Superman in the same room.”
) and looked both more grown-up and more afraid.

“Tomorrow is fine,” he said quickly. “Filip and me can play at Filip's if you want.”

You have two children who are afraid of losing you.
Oh, Christ.

“Ask Filip if he wants to come here instead,” she said and tried to look perky in spite of the stubborn headache. “Then we can make apple fritters and watch
The
Lord of the Rings
.”

“All three of them?” he asked.

“If Filip is allowed.” She quickly calculated what that promise entailed. Damn it. Nine solid hours of orcs and elves and epic battle scenes. So much for that day.

They were only halfway through the Mines of Moria, however, when the doorbell rang. Caroline Westmann, of the Mid-West Jutland Police.

“I hope I'm not interrupting,” she said. “But there's something I'd like to show you. Is there someplace we can talk?”

Nina quickly evaluated the possibilities. The living room was occupied by fantasy fans and echoed with clashing swords and monstrous roars; in the conservatory her mother was teaching Ida to knit (Ida? Knit? It was so unlike her that it almost defied belief). The three bedrooms, Nina felt, were all just too small and intimate for police interviews.

The kitchen. It would have to be the kitchen.

“Coffee? Would you like an apple fritter?” she asked.

Caroline Westmann declined politely but allowed herself to accept a cup of tea.

“I have to be a little careful about how much coffee I drink,” she said apologetically, then immediately became professional and business-like again.

“I'd like to show you some photos,” she said. “Please tell me if anyone seems familiar.”

She looked around—it wasn't easy to find a ready surface that wasn't covered in grease and fritter batter. Nina quickly cleared the small dining table by dumping two bowls into the kitchen sink and wiping the vinyl tablecloth with a damp cloth, not entirely clean.

“Sorry. Half-term break.”

“That's okay. My sister has children; I know what it's like.”

Westmann placed the photographs on the table as if dealing a game of solitaire. There were a dozen or so, all men, all between about twenty and thirty-five, all more or less “European” looking—whatever that meant these days. Nina studied them, one at a time.

“No,” she said. “They don't ring any bells. Who are they?”

“Try again,” said Westmann. “Take as long as you need.”

Søren emerged casually from the fantasy marathon and exchanged polite greetings. He loaded the coffee machine with water and freshly ground beans, but Nina didn't think it was a desperate craving for caffeine that had brought him here, and she suspected that Caroline Westmann was equally unconvinced.

He kept silent while Nina took another tour through the photo archive. Not until she repeated her negative—“I'm sorry, but I don't remember ever seeing any of them”—did he get involved.

“Did you find them? Your eastern Europeans?”

Caroline Westmann hesitated. Then she nodded.

“They were caught red-handed,” she said. “Breaking and entering a holiday home on the coast. Two of the victims have already identified them, and so we were hoping . . .”

Nina shook her head again.

“No,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“What about the DNA?” asked Søren. “From the jacket. Does it match?”

“We've only just sent the samples to be analyzed. That is, the new samples from our three bandits.”

“And they were all eastern European?”

“Yes. From Bulgaria.”

“Do you have anything that leads in a more Southeast Asian direction?”

“Where are you thinking of?”

“The Philippines?”

“No. That's not something we see every day here. Why?”

Søren held out his hand.

“Nina, may we see your phone?”

She became irrationally angry. Felt yet again that he was flattening the picket fences around her private life and stepping in the flower beds with very big feet. Still, she handed him her cell phone.

“I suspect that Nina has a kind of stalker,” said Søren. “Look at this.”

He showed Caroline the messages from Victor. Or she assumed that's what he was doing. She couldn't see the display.

“My life is in danger, and so is yours,” the detective sergeant read. “It's a bit vague, but I'll make a note.”

“And follow up?” asked Søren. “I could help you obtain a bit of info on this Victor Galang. If that's his real name.”

“Through the PET?”

“Yes. We have excellent international connections.”

“I was under the impression that you were on sick leave,” said Caroline Westmann pointedly.

Søren looked as if she had just thrown the contents of her teacup into his face. It was only a second—a glimpse so brief that Nina afterward began to doubt it—then he smiled disarmingly and smoothed things over.

“That's correct,” he said. “But that doesn't mean I can't ask a friend for a favor.”

Caroline Westmann looked as if she regretted the jab.

“Well then, thank you. But as I said—we've not previously had problems with people from that part of the world.”

She got up, put on her blue duffel coat and left, in a flurry of wind and autumn leaves.

Nina turned to Søren.

“Sick leave?”

There it was again—and this time she was more certain.

Shame. But why?

“Torben's idea,” he said. “Completely unnecessary, but right now it means I can be here.”

She bit her lip.

“And why is that so important?” she asked. She tried not to sound too cold, too dismissive.

“Don't you want me here?” he asked and suddenly looked like Anton when he was most uncertain.

“It was nice that you were there,” she admitted. “At the hospital. It was nice for someone to be there. And that it was you. And . . . it was also nice that you were there last night.”

That elicited a smile at least. But she had to go on.

“I was just a little surprised that you had moved into my mother's house.”

“She invited me.”

“She is perfectly entitled to.”

“That didn't sound very heartfelt,” he said and straightened to his full height. He was very nearly Morten's height, she realized. Her shoulder fit under his in almost the same way. Without warning, a jolt of desire shot from her belly button downward and made her legs rather wobbly.

He noticed. She could
see him noticing, and that did not improve matters.

He pulled her close and kissed her thoroughly.

“Is it okay?” he asked. “That I'm here? Is it okay with you?”

“Yes,” she answered hoarsely.

He let go of her. The house was full of kids. It was the half-term break. And they weren't teenagers who could go sit in the car and let their hormones take over.

“Good,” he said, fairly hoarse himself. “That makes bodyguarding you much easier.”

He said it lightly, with the suggestion of a smile. But she was pretty sure he meant it seriously.

THE PHILIPPINES, SIX MONTHS EARLIER

M
y houses.”

Vadim pointed across the steering wheel at something that at this distance was merely a group of shimmering dark smears in the heat haze across the rice paddies. “Four blocks, six stories each, altogether eight hundred apartments and homes for almost four thousand people. My work is done.”

“You do realize, don't you, that the people who are going to live in those fancy buildings of yours are being forced to move out here because the city council in Manila would like the city to look at bit more appealing to tourists?” Diana considered Vadim across the edge of her Gucci sunglasses, and it was as if her gaze punctured his smugness.

“And do you realize that every teenage girl you treat for pneumonia in the slums will have ten undernourished kids who'll also get pneumonia and live a shitty life? Stuck in the mud— quite literally. Filthy, sewage-contaminated mud. Here at least there's some sort of future. Indoor plumbing. Flushing toilets. No more crapping in the river,” he said.

Vincent took a sip of his cola and glanced in the rearview mirror. The mood in the car had been oppressive since they left Manila in the early morning. At first Diana had not wanted to go at all, and it was Victor, not Vadim, who had at last convinced her.

Now she sat looking out at the landscape with a dark and sombre gaze. White T-shirt, dark blue shorts and a pair of worn flip-flops. She had become a resident just a month ago and was now working for starvation wages in a minor hospital only ten kilometers from “Vadim's phallic constructions,” as she called them. In pediatrics. She wanted to become a pediatrician.

“Have all the apartments been let?” asked Victor. His enormous body occupied so much of the backseat that his hair grazed the roof, and Diana was perched against the door on her side to give him a little more room.

“Yes, most people moved out here a month ago. All the units went pretty quickly. People like it.”

Diana snorted.

“It wasn't as if they had much choice. The police bulldozed a half-kilometer strip along Pasig River and burned the rest.”

Vadim ran his hand through his hair with an irritated gesture. It had been like this since he and Diana broke up about six months ago. A constant battle. It would, of course, have been easier if they had stopped spending time with each other, but that had apparently not occurred to either as a possibility. They met as usual at the Cabana Bar when Diana was in town, and presumably also at home in their respective laps of luxury. Vadim and Diana's families saw each other socially, lived in the same gated community and attended the same cocktail parties. Vincent also knew that Vadim and Diana still occasionally slept together. It seemed to be a kind of withdrawal symptom sex, and when it happened Vadim would be whistling, cheerful and full of hope, and Diana dark and shuttered. Like now.

“Sometimes people don't know what's best for them,” said Vadim. “In fact, I'd think that most people, myself included, would do better to have others make the decisions about their lives.”

“I'm not surprised that you think so,” said Diana. “After all you've always had your father to do precisely that.”

Vadim slapped a flat hand against the steering wheel but didn't answer.

They were slowly approaching Vadim's apartment complex. The road was newly paved and bordered by long, brown grass, skinny palm trees, and flat, vividly green rice paddies. Here and there were small clusters of old-fashioned huts with woven bamboo walls and tin roofs, but the teeming multitude of roadside booths and advertising signs that had edged Paradise Road closer to the Manila suburb of Lungsod had dwindled to nothing, and the four buildings towered like lonely human silos in the flat landscape. A few discarded trucks and cement mixers from the construction were still parked in the yellow dust in front of the first building. The remains of cement sacks and plastic tarps flapped in the faint breeze, and a group of kids who had been playing among the building materials ran away screeching when Vadim stopped the car.

Vincent opened his door and was instantly hit by the oppressively hot air. He knew the buildings already. Had been here several times with Vadim during their construction to keep an eye on the work force and the suppliers. Vadim had gradually become a kind of job to him. They were together almost twenty-four hours a day. Lived in the penthouse apartment Vadim's father had bought—cool and spacious, with white tiles on the floors and a room for each of them, including Victor, a huge living room, and a state-of-the-art kitchen. Not to mention the roof deck that had its own swimming pool. Everything was neatly cleaned by a housekeeper who came every afternoon and removed the empty, greasy glasses, the ashtrays, and the pizza cartons. That was the kind of service you got used to when you were with Vadim.

Vincent had dragged himself through the third and fourth semesters, but by the fifth it was over. He had failed spectacularly. Both subjects. Finished and done for.

It hadn't come as a surprise. It felt inevitable, as if the numbers posted outside the director's office were predetermined.

Father Abuel used to speak of the inexorable will of God. Death was unavoidable, and man's fate lay in the hands of God. You could try to fight against it, but it would be like attempting to stop an earthquake with your bare hands. Impossible. God's will was, after all, stronger than that of Vincent's parents and infinitely stronger than his own.

It must have been the episode at the hospital that had been the final straw. Officially they weren't graded on it; it was just a study visit to give them a chance to observe some orthopedic surgical procedures. A knee operation came first. Vincent had had a nervous sensation in his body, a kind of tremor in his chest—it felt as if some alien creature in there was throwing itself against his ribs to get out. He could barely think of anything else, but had managed to put on the green operation gown with slow, stiff movements and to pull the mask over his mouth. The chemical smell of the plastic made his abdomen contract, and he tried to think about something good. About Bea and the boy. Carlito. This tiny, perfectly formed person who had clung to his hand with chubby fingers when he visited them two weeks earlier. But all that kept coming back to him was the two hundred thousand pesos he had gradually received from Vadim, and all the money his parents had paid for his dorm room the first year, for the food he had eaten and the beer he had drunk. Money that had been set aside with great effort over twenty years, paycheck by paycheck, bill by bill. His mother drawing the heavy, black
niquabs
out of the steaming laundry tub. His father smoothing boiling asphalt in some distant land. Vincent pictured the money torn fluttering from their hands, as if they were caught in a hurricane.

The patient was already lying on the operating table with strips of sticky tape on his closed eyelids. An elderly man, somewhat obese. No doubt rich. Cruciate ligament ruptured on the tennis court, the surgeon said. The room stank of rubbing alcohol and metal, and the instruments for the operation were being laid out. Victor was already bending eagerly forward to take it all in. Something that looked like a compass saw, a hammer, and a chisel. Tools to break bones and sinews. A panicked sweat broke out under Vincent's T-shirt, and he suddenly felt certain that he was going to die. Right now and right here on the tiled hospital floor. It was only with the utmost effort that he managed to obey the lecturer's order to come closer.

At the first cut the skin parted willingly, like it did when his father cut up a pig in the kitchen at home. The fat, the sinews, and the patella itself gleamed whitely through the brilliant red flow of the blood. Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn't eaten, but he had. Rice cooked with garlic and
daing
, dried fish.

When the nausea finally overpowered him, the lumpy breakfast shot out of both nose and mouth with great power and hit the tiles with a splash. He was escorted out by nurses with tight smiles, and the surgeon's gaze above the edge of his mask said it all.

He would never become a doctor. All his parents' plans, all the carefully stacked bills . . . in vain.

Now he did the things Vadim asked him to do, and in return Vadim handed him the occasional handful of cash. Or paid for his drinks. Once in a while Vincent sent Bea a picture of himself standing outside the director's office at the university, making a victory sign in front of the grade board.

He still hadn't figured out what would happen next year when he was supposed to be a resident earning a little money. He tried not to think too much about it, just as he tried to avoid thinking about little Mimi, who had finished high school and gotten a temporary job as a clerk at the pharmacy back home. The plan was for him to start saving money toward a software-
programming course for Mimi as soon as he was being paid, because unfortunately she had not distinguished herself with good grades or especially moral behavior. At least, Father Abuel had not recommended her for the church's scholarship. She was a good girl, said their mother, but the boys liked her and it seemed to be mutual. Father Abuel did not look kindly on that kind of behavior.

Vincent kicked one of the empty concrete sacks so the cement dust rose around him in a white cloud. They were covered with Chinese characters, and Vincent was taken aback. The engineer who had originally been responsible for the construction had insisted they stay away from the Chinese supplier. He and Vadim had had a long and heated discussion about it back when the enormous pits for the foundations were being dug.

“Eden Towers,” Vadim announced with a “Ta-da!” voice worthy of a circus ringmaster. “Well, what do you think?”

He jumped familiarly over a couple of abandoned plastic basins and strode to the front of the massive grey building.

“The rent is cheap, and there's running water, electricity and gas. A public school in that direction . . .” He pointed out across the fields toward something in the distance that looked town-like. Tin and tile roofs that glittered in the sun.

Even Diana couldn't help smiling at his enthusiasm.

“Very nice,” she said in the same exaggerated tone that she might use to praise a child and its sand castle. “Did you build it yourself?”

“Yes, damn it, I did.” Vadim leaned his head back and looked up toward the top floors. Skinny, half-naked children played on the covered walkways, and a couple of teenagers perched on the railing with no apparent qualms about the drop.

“But you know, of course, that there's nowhere for them to earn money for the rent,” said Diana. “The men are probably already back in Manila, in the process of building a shack along the railroad tracks or in one of the cemeteries. And as soon as they've knocked together a few pieces of tin, the whole family will be back where they started.”

Vadim took out a cigarette, lit it, and followed the smoke with narrow eyes.

“That's all politics, Diana. Can't you just be pleased that things are going well for me, and I've built some pretty decent buildings? Those kids have never tried sitting on a proper toilet before.”

Diana nodded and flashed a rare, sweet smile.

“Okay,” she said. “The buildings are nice, but the politics are rotten. Can we agree on that?”

Vadim turned his palms upward as a sign of his total capitulation, climbed into one of the old trucks, and hammered the horn in as deep as it would go.

“She smiled!” he shouted. “Vincent and Victor, break out the champagne.”

They drank chilled
champagne and ate longan fruit in the sizzling heat of the truck's battered cab. Flocks of kids had already scavenged just about everything that could be scavenged, but there was still a bit of cushion foam left to sit on.

Afterward Victor and Diana took their bags and started on the first stairwell, looking for infected wounds, undernourished children, and pregnant women. Their favorite Sunday pastime.

Vadim's narrowed gaze followed them.

“How are Bea and the boy doing?”

“Fine.” Vincent didn't feel like talking about it. “Did you get the cement from the Chinese after all?”

Vadim took a few longans, peeled them and threw the juicy, grape-like fruits into his mouth.

“It was too expensive with the other supplier. I wouldn't have been able to stay on budget. I think that engineer had been bought by the others, so I fired him. I'm actually a good businessman, Vincent. It's in my genes. And . . . speaking of business . . .”

Vincent's muscles clenched automatically. There was something about Vadim's look that made him think of free diving. Of being under nine meters of water with no air in his lungs.

“You owe me a favor, my man.”

“Yes,” whispered Vincent. “I do.” He hadn't intended to whisper; it kind of happened on its own.

“That engineer. The one I fired.”

“Yes.”

“He is blackmailing me. Or trying to.”

“How?”

“It's the thing about the cement. It's completely legal and up to standard, but he's pissed off about the firing. Said he would report me for swindling the World Bank. It's a lie, but he knows that a report could harm both me and my father. He's just an envious little asshole. And this is where you come in, Vincent my man.”

“How?”

“You have to make him stop. Teach him to behave.”

“Me?”

“Yes. Why not? Those biceps you've so carefully developed should be used for something.”

“I don't want to beat anyone up!”

Vadim furrowed his brow.

“And you won't. You just need to . . . look threatening. I know his type of asshole; they fall apart as soon as they come up against opposition. So? Can I count on you?”

It wasn't a real question. Vincent could see the chill in Vadim's eyes, the costs of saying no.

“Fucking hell, Vadim. You want me to be your gorilla?”