“Shit.”
Taghi felt the tires on the junker Opel Flexivan sliding and losing traction in the icy mud. If he drove any closer to the entrance they might get completely stuck on their way out. The marble sinks were heavy as hell, and right now a wet, heavy snow was barreling out of the black evening sky, forming small streams in the newly dug earth in front of the building. The walkway around the building lacked flagstones. Nothing at all, in fact, had been finished. The whole place had been abandoned, left as a gigantic mud puddle, slushy and sloppy, and they were forced to park out on the street.
Taghi backed up, swearing in both Danish and Farsi. It would be backbreaking work lugging all the stuff that far, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He wasn’t going to risk getting bogged down with all that shit out here in the middle of nowhere. No goddamn way.
They hopped out on the street and stood for a moment, hugging themselves in the icy wind. The building looked like every other place out here. Glass and steel. He’d never understood who would want to live in such a place. True, there was a view of some sort of water if you were up high enough, but otherwise… Taghi sneezed and looked around. The other brandnew glass palaces were lit up as if an energy crisis had never existed, but there was no life behind the windows. Maybe nobody wanted to live this way after all, when it came right down to it, and it would for sure be a long time before anyone moved into this particular building. The workers had been sent home several weeks ago. Something to do with a bankruptcy. Taghi didn’t know much about it, but he had been by a few times in the past week to check it out. They could pick up some good stuff here.
At the corner of the enormous glass façade, pipes and cables stuck up out of the ground like strange, lifeless disfigurements. A stack of sheetrock lay to the side, the top sheets presumably ruined by now; the middle ones might be okay but they were a waste of time. They were after the marble sinks in the ten apartments. Three men, three hours work, and a short drive out to Beni’s construction site in Valby. It was exactly what he needed, Beni had said.
The front door stood open a crack.
When they had been by earlier that day it was locked, and Taghi sensed Farshad and Djo Djo exchanging glances when he carefully shouldered the door open and stepped into the bitter cold hallway.
“Let’s go, ladies.”
Taghi’s voice rattled off the unfinished cement walls, and he regretted wearing hard-heeled boots. Every single step rang upward through the stairway, fading into weak echoes that vibrated under the large, clear skylights, the steel beams, and the tiles dusty from all the construction. He fished his flashlight out of his pocket and let it play over the steps.
Had he heard something?
Djo Djo stumbled over a few half-empty paint cans, and Farshad laughed at him, a loud, ringing sound. Djo Djo grumbled and hopped around on one leg, the paint cans clattering around on the dark tiles. Those two babies. Annoyed, Taghi bit his lip and decided the ground-floor apartment to the right was a good place to start. For some reason he had gone totally paranoid. Wanted out of here, quick. He felt a prickling under his skin.
“Shut up, you two. It’s not that goddamn funny anyway.”
Farshad held back another giggle, but at least they didn’t speak until they reached the half-open apartment door, and now there was that sound again. A muffled, drawn-out moaning that rose and fell in the empty pitch-dark surrounding them.
Taghi stiffened. “What the hell is that?”
Djo Djo’s whisper broke, his voice on the edge of failing him. “It’s some kind of totally weird ghost or something.”
The muffled moaning was weaker again. They stood listening until it died out, and now the only sound was Djo Djo’s nervous feet on the dusty tiles.
“We’re out of here, right, Taghi?” Farshad had already stepped back, he was gripping Djo Djo’s arm. “We can always come back tomorrow.”
Taghi didn’t answer, he was gazing at the darkness in the doorway while he considered the situation. The truth was that he felt exactly the same way as Farshad. He wanted to get out. He felt sticky underneath the down jacket Laleh had found for him in Føtex-løsning, the discount grocery. He heard a faint scraping sound and possibly a sigh from inside the apartment. He felt unsure, but he was the oldest, after all, and he had to decide what they should do.
“It’s not a ghost,” he said, in a voice as strong and steady as he could make it.
The others hesitated behind him when he pushed the door open and entered the apartment, the beam from the flashlight bouncing in front of him like a disco ball out of whack. There was an open living room and kitchen, bathed in a pale orange light from the plate-glass window facing the canal. Taghi knew instinctively that this wasn’t where to look. It was too open, no place to hide. An empty space at the opposite end of the living room led into what must be the guest bathroom. If there had been any doors in the apartment they were gone now. Maybe someone else had gotten here before them, Taghi thought. Something dark was moving in there. Rocking back and forth on the floor still covered by clear plastic from the painters. He heard Farshad gasping behind him. He had followed, while Djo Djo hung back at the newly plastered island in the kitchen.
Taghi pointed the beam of light directly at the black shadow, and before the figure even turned its head toward him, he knew he’d been right.
It was a woman.
She sat stooped over the toilet seat. Her skirt hung sloppily around her hips and thin legs. Her arms arched like taut bows over the toilet bowl. Like someone throwing up, Taghi thought. But he knew what the woman was doing. First it was as if she didn’t know they were there, not really, anyway. But when he stepped closer she turned her head, and her eyes, completely naked and black, met his.
They had been so close. So close that she could see the bridge, see the long rows of lights leading to Sweden. After the nightmarish days on the open deck of the ship, after months of overcrowded rooms that smelled of fear, with nervous men who always wanted more money than agreed upon, with uncertainty and despair about her belly that kept growing and growing… after all that, only one thing was left: get over the bridge. When she got there she was supposed to call Jacob, and he would come and take care of everything, the rest of her life, he had promised, with her and the baby… She felt an overwhelming yearning in her gut, almost as fierce as the contractions, and her lips formed the words he had taught her to say, the magic words that would open the gate so she could be with Jacob forever: Jag söker asyl-I seek asylum. But don’t say it before she got to Sweden, he had said. And for God’s sake, she must not be discovered before she was inside Sweden, otherwise the gate to her life with Jacob would close. If she wasn’t sent back-a terrible, horrifying thought-she would end up in some sort of refugee camp, someplace he couldn’t get to her, couldn’t be with her. It would be like prison, he said, and it could be for several years.
That was why Chaltu hadn’t said anything about the jolts of pain shooting through her body. She had tried, tried, but eventually she couldn’t hold it back. The sounds were coming out no matter what, just like the baby. And then it happened, the one terrible thing she couldn’t let happen. Her water broke, came rushing from between her legs and out over the seat beneath her.
The driver stopped the car. This is no good, he said. He cursed about the seat that was wet now, but even worse was how she couldn’t sit upright and keep quiet when the contractions came. They would be stopped, and he wasn’t going to prison because of her, he said.
She screamed and wailed and begged, and they had to drag her out of the car by force. She even tried to run after them, but of course that was hopeless. The driver floored it and a shower of slushy gray snow sprayed up in her face, and then the car was gone.
I will die, Chaltu thought. The baby will kill me and neither of us will ever see Jacob. She slugged her stomach with both hands, punches of helpless rage, and she had to bite her cheek not to say out loud the curse that was on her lips. I must not curse my own child, she thought. God will punish me for that. Holy Virgin, what have I done? But she knew well enough. Her sin was love. Love for Jacob, a love that had no future in Adis Ababa, but maybe in Blekinge, where he had lived since he was seven and was now studying, in Blekinge College and Yrkeshögskolan, to become an agronomist.
She kept walking without knowing where she was going. First she thought she might be able to find the bridge again and cross it on foot, but she quickly lost all sense of direction. What kind of a city was this? There were no people, none at all. It was almost as if the buildings owned the city and the streets, as if they had decided that they didn’t want any dirty living creatures crawling around.
A strange singing tone stopped her. For a moment she wondered if she were hearing angel voices, because she was so close to death. But then a light popped out, an entire snake of light, and she saw that it was a train, even though it zipped through the air above her, on a track supported by concrete pillars. There was water underneath the track, long shiny-black sheets of water reflecting the train light. Why couldn’t it run on the ground? Chaltu wondered. It was as if someone had erected a bridge just to remind her of the one she couldn’t get across.
There were people up there, she noticed. They were being carried through the dead city and they looked warm and cozy and cheerful in the belly of the snake train.
The wet snow was denser now, and the wind drove it against her head so she could no longer feel her face. When she noticed the building still under construction, with the fence knocked down and the empty, dark windows, she realized it might be a place she could stay without being discovered. No one could be living there.
And it was dark and quiet in there too, but there were so many windows. She thought the whole world must be able to see her. And it was almost as bitter cold as outside. There were no blankets, no furniture, nothing soft whatsoever. Some of the inside doors were missing. The wind whistled through the main hallway, and the wet snow slid quietly down the enormous panes of glass.
A violent contraction came-it felt as if God Himself had grabbed her with His giant hand and squeezed until she was close to breaking apart.
“Stop,” she whispered desperately. “Stop.” If only it would hold off again. If the contractions would stop; if the baby would just stay in there and leave her alone-then maybe she could cross the right bridge to the right country instead of dying in the wrong one.
She crouched down on the tile floor beside a toilet bowl because she felt least visible there. But the sounds from inside kept coming, and what good did it do to hide?
Here there is no one, she told herself. The building is empty, it is unfinished. No one can hear you now. But suddenly there was someone. She hadn’t even heard him come in. She just opened her eyes and there he was. Her heart took a long, hovering leap and ended up stuck in her throat.
He was just a silhouette in the dark, a darker outline, and the glare from the flashlight blinded her even more. A moment earlier she had thought she would die either from the cold or from her baby. Now another possibility had shown up.
“Leave me alone,” she said, but of course he didn’t understand her.
The man said something, and she realized he wasn’t the only one there.
“Don’t kill me,” she said.
And he didn’t. To her amazement he took off his coat and put it around her shoulders.
His name was Taghi. She understood that much from his words and gestures, even though they shared almost no common language. And he was trying to help her. This was so strange that she could barely comprehend it. His hands were friendly, his tone of voice reassuring. And he said one word she understood.
“Doctor,” he said in English. “We will get you to a doctor.”
“No,” she answered, the word scaring her. “No doctor.”
“It is okay,” he said, slowly and clearly. “It is a secret doctor. Okay? You understand? Secret doctor okay.”
She couldn’t answer. The next contraction hit her, and she was only vaguely aware that he brought out a cell phone and called the okay secret doctor.
Nina was staring at the vending machine when the telephone rang. For a measly five kroner you could choose between coffee with cream, coffee with sugar, coffee with cream and sugar, bouillon, pungently sweet lemon tea, and cocoa. Unsweetened and uncreamed coffee had once been options, but they had been eliminated sometime in the mid ’90s, if those who had been here even longer than her were to be believed.
It’s Morten, she thought, without taking the phone from her white coat. And he’ll be pissed with me again.
She was tired. She had been on duty since seven that morning, and the Danish Red Cross Center at Furesø, commonly known as the Coalhouse Camp, was every bit as ravaged by December flu as the rest of Copenhagen, with various traumas and symptoms of depression thrown in, plus an epidemic of false croup among the youngest children in Block A.
Despite all that, she could have been home by now. If she had left at four, after the evening nurse delayed by the snowstorm had finally shown up, she could have been sitting right now in their apartment in Østerbro with a cup of real coffee and a few of the slightly deformed Christmas cookies Anton had baked in the SFO, his youth center. Why hadn’t she? Instead of hanging out on a tattered, tobacco-stained sofa in the Block A lounge, listening through the walls to Liljana’s thin cough, her professional ear focused. How obstructed was the child’s respiratory tract? How much strength was there behind each cough? Should she be suctioned again, and when was the last time her temperature had been taken?
The sick-staff excuse was about as worn out as the sofa-Morten wasn’t buying it any longer.
“Damnit, Nina. She’s your mother!” he had hissed the last time she had called home to say she’d be late. He was supposed to be going to some sort of show with the others from his work, and if she wasn’t there it would be the second night in a row that Nina’s mother would be alone with the kids.
The phone began to repeat its cheery little electronic theme. Reluctantly, Nina grabbed it out of her coat’s pocket.
It wasn’t Morten. It was an extremely frantic voice she didn’t recognize until he said his name.
“It’s Taghi. You have to help. There’s a woman, and she’s… she’s about to have a baby.”
Even then it took her some time, for Taghi had been out of the Coalhouse Camp for three years, and there had been so many others since then.
“Take her to the hospital,” she said, even though she knew that wasn’t an option. Not when he was calling her.
“No,” he replied. “She’s from Africa. She won’t go to the hospital. You have to help.”
I’m not a doctor or a midwife. The words were in her mind, but she didn’t speak them. Her exhaustion was already gone. Adrenaline shot into her blood, she was clear-headed and energetic. Morten will have a fit, she thought. But this would be so much easier than trying to explain to him why she couldn’t handle spending another night alone with her own mother after the kids went to sleep.
She set the plastic cup of lukewarm coffee with cream down on the scratched table. “What’s the address?” she asked.
Taghi glanced at his watch. Wasn’t it about time she got here? He was out of his league here, he wanted so badly to hand over this woman and baby and the contractions and birth to someone trained for it. He was a man, damnit. He shouldn’t even be here.
He heard a sharp metallic click, and suddenly the whole apartment was bathed in a piercing white light from the spots set into the ceiling.
The woman crouching on the floor grabbed desperately for his arm. Taghi heard Djo Djo and Farshad swearing softly out in the kitchen area. A second later they stood beside Taghi in the small bathroom, where they both squeezed their way in behind the wall, the only thing shielding them from being in full view from the street outside.
Someone had walked into the hallway, and Taghi immediately assumed it was the police, and thought that the residency permit he’d worked so hard for was about to go up in smoke right now, right here, in front of the entire fucking district of Ørestad. Someone had turned on the building’s electricity and the harshly lit apartment made him feel like a fish in a very small aquarium. The bathroom was the only place to hide. He caught Djo Djo’s eye and held his index finger to his lips, warning him.
The footsteps outside rapped sharply against the tiles. Whoever they were, they weren’t afraid of being heard. They walked past the door and stopped farther down the hallway. There were at least two of them, maybe more.
The dark-skinned foreigner on the floor fidgeted and held both hands over her eyes, as if to protect herself from the whole world. Another contraction was on its way. Her backbone formed a round, taut bow underneath her summer jacket, Taghi noticed; soon she would be moaning again. Soon they would be discovered.
If they nailed him for theft they would send him back to Iran, or at the very least back to the refugee center. To the knotted-up feeling of not knowing where he would be the next day or the rest of his life. The letters from his lawyer, from the state. The stiff white sheets of paper folded perfectly with knifesharp edges. How would he take care of Laleh and Noushin then?
Taghi caught the woman’s eye when the next contraction overtook her and she moved to get back on her knees. As if she was trying to flee from the source of the pain. He stopped her halfway and pulled her head against his chest while shushing her, the way you would shush a young child.
Now the men outside were arguing. It was impossible for him to hear what it was all about, but one of them yelled that the other was an asshole. Then their voices were muffled by the creak of an elevator door, which slid shut and swallowed the rest of the argument.
Quiet.
“Shit.”
Djo Djo was the first to stand up; he slapped the light off in the kitchen area. The snow outside swirled in the cloudy yellow spotlights illuminating the building’s façade. Taghi rose and moved to the window facing the street. Farshad came to stand beside him.
“Why don’t we just get out of here?”
Farshad looked warily over his shoulder at the bathroom door. He was more afraid of the woman than the men, Taghi thought.
Farshad was nineteen and Djo Djo eighteen. Childbirth was obviously not their strong suit.
Taghi’s pulse was pounding in his temples.
“Okay, you called that woman,” said Farshad. “Time to split. Me and him, we’re out of here for sure.” He gave a jerk of his head in the direction of Djo Djo.
“And leave her here alone? Na baba. You’ve got to be kidding.” Taghi nodded fiercely and pointed out to the van.
A metro train whistled past on the tracks above the black canal. No conductor-it was some kind of new technology they had installed when the metro was built. It was all automated. The light from the windows of the empty cars reflected in the water.
He supposed the shadow came first, hurtling past the window, but it was the sound that Taghi reacted to. A hollow, wet thud, like the sound of a very large steak being slapped down on a cutting board.
The man had landed on the stack of wet sheetrock less than a yard from the window and was definitely dead. Taghi didn’t need to go outside to check. He was lying on his belly, with his neck twisted back and to one side, so that they could see his forehead and his eyes. Or rather, eye. The part of his face that was resting against the sheetrock had been crushed so completely that it was just a pulped mess. His one identifiable eye was staring at Taghi, Farshad, and Djo Djo with a strangely irritated expression.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck. What the fuck do they think they’re doing?” Farshad’s voice stumbled, shrill and pitched too high in the dark behind them, and Taghi knew right then that Farshad was a bigger problem than the woman in the bathroom.
Her eyes were wide, but she had stopped talking. He couldn’t even hear her breathe. He felt the shock himself, like a strap tightening around his chest. Despite this he managed to reach out and clap his hand over Farshad’s mouth.
“Khar. Shut up, you big idiot,” he hissed.
Farshad thrashed around like a drowning man under Taghi’s right arm. Now they heard quick steps on the stairs. The front door opened and slid shut with a quiet click. A moment later a pair of headlights swept over the glass façade. The car took off and the sound died behind the thick thermal windows.
Taghi slowly removed his hand from Farshad’s mouth. He wasn’t sure that Farshad was completely calm yet, but at least he wasn’t shrieking like some old woman. In the bathroom the woman had begun to groan again. It sounded like she was calling out for someone. She no longer had the strength to crouch, she was rolling on the floor, trying to curl up as the contractions grew stronger. Her lips formed a fluid and nearly silent stream of words, and her long, slim hands clutched at thin air and then grabbed a corner of his sweat-soaked T-shirt.
“Jacob?”
Taghi rubbed a hand across his eyes. He needed to think.
Djo Djo had stepped right up to the window to get a better look at the corpse.
“What the hell we do now, Taghi? He’s dead. The police will come. They’ll be looking for us and they…” Djo Djo spoke slowly, searching for his words, as if the reality of the situation first struck him as he talked about it. “Maybe they’ll think we did it. Then we’re fucked. They’ll throw us out, they’ll kill us.”
Taghi had been thinking the same thing.
Their fingerprints were all over. Farshad’s gloves dangled from his pants pockets. One in each pocket. Djo Djo hadn’t even brought any. All they had planned on doing was liberating a couple of fucking sinks. That’s not something they nail you for-not seriously, anyway.
The woman had another contraction. They came every few minutes now. She was pulling him down, as if all she really wanted was someone she could drown with. She was crying.
“You have to find something to cover him up with.”
Djo Djo glared silently at Taghi. Then he grabbed Farshad’s shoulder and dragged him toward the door. Farshad stumbled, found his feet again, and trudged off behind Djo Djo, who was as agile as a cat in the dark.
A second later, Taghi saw the two brothers standing outside the window, struggling with the green tarp from the van. The wind grabbed the tarp, making it look like a dark, flapping sail against the multitude of brightly lit windows on the other side of the canal.
The woman on the floor loosened her grip on Taghi a bit, and as he straightened up he noticed a thin figure walking their way, leaning into the wind, hands over her face to shield herself from the big wet flakes.
She had arrived.
Nina zipped her down jacket all the way to her nose before getting out of the car.
Brave new world. The streetlights’ reflections shimmered in the black water of the canals, and the elevated railway looked like something from a sci-fi film. Trees and bushes didn’t belong in this vision of the future, the general impression was that organic life forms were unwelcome here. How in the world did an African woman about to give birth end up here?
Brahge Living, a big sign said, illuminated by a powerful floodlight. 24 exclusive condominiums-for sale NOW! The colorful, optimistic drawing of the finished development formed a sharp contrast to the muddied mess of construction and the toppled wire fence.
Brahge, she thought to herself, hitching up her shoulder bag. He was the man who went broke. One of the most publicized bankruptcies in recent times, because Torsten Brahge had been regarded as one of the best and brightest, having just been awarded some business prize a few weeks earlier. Investor megabucks were in danger of evaporating. She had seen the man’s slightly chubby, Armani-clad figure on the front page and in several self-pitying television interviews, though she couldn’t remember what he had said. Usually she quickly grew tired of hearing wealthy people moan about the financial crisis and the real estate collapse.
A battered-looking van was parked beside the fence, and she caught sight of two young men grappling with a green tarp just outside the building. Life in the desert, she thought, and lifted her arm in a stiff, frozen wave
“Is Taghi here?” she yelled.
Both of them stared at her as if she were some monster that had crawled out of the canal. But one of them nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Are you the doctor lady?”
“Nurse,” she corrected.
He shrugged his shoulder, whatever. “He’s inside. Ground floor to the right. You’d better hurry.”
She found them in the apartment’s tiny guest bathroom, the woman on her knees in front of Taghi, clinging to him with both hands. The quiet hope Nina had been nourishing that it might be false labor and a touch of hysterics immediately disappeared. The woman’s coat and skirt were soaked with amniotic fluid. If there were any complications, Nina decided, she’s off to a hospital whether she likes it or not.
At that moment the woman’s eyes flew open, and she looked straight at Nina.
“Hi,” Nina said in English, in her most reassuringly professional voice. “My name is Nina, and I’m here to help you. I’m a nurse.”
“Doctor,” the woman gasped. “Secret okay doctor.”
“Just say yes,” Taghi said. “I don’t think she understands much English. Her name is Chaltu.” Taghi didn’t look so hot himself, Nina observed. Anxious, nervous, but that wasn’t so surprising, either. She had a good idea what he was doing here. Or anyway, what he would have been doing had a woman giving birth not gotten in the way.
He tried to stand up, but Chaltu kept clinging to him.
“No go,” she said. “Jacob no go.”
“Sometimes she calls me Jacob,” Taghi said. “Don’t ask me why.”
Nina touched Chaltu’s arm. Her fingers were bloodless and gray, her skin icy cold. She let go of Taghi with one hand and swatted at Nina, who was trying to see how far she had dilated.
“Chaltu,” Nina ventured. “I must look. Look to see if baby is coming.”
“No baby,” Chaltu groaned. “No baby here. In Sweden. Jag söker asyl.” And she pressed her legs together so hard that her thigh muscles quivered.
Jesus, Nina said to herself, and took measure of the woman’s desperation. If it was possible to delay a childbirth by will alone, this would turn into a very long night!
“We have to get her someplace where we can keep warm,” Nina said. “Is that your van?”
Taghi looked toward the window facing the parking lot, and Nina followed his eyes. She saw the two young men outside, pulling a blue nylon rope through the green tarp’s grommets. A violent gust of wind rammed them. One of them slipped in the mud and lost his grip on the tarp. It flew up, flapping like a bird trying to fly away. Underneath lay a dead man.
It took her only a few seconds to recognize him. The Armani suit had had a terrible day, and the man inside a worse one. There was no doubt, however, that it was the head of Brahge Living lying there, very much dead.
The two young men got the tarp under control and tied it down, and the well-dressed corpse disappeared from sight. But it was too late. Nina had seen him. And Taghi knew it.
They stared at each other over Chaltu’s head.
“We didn’t do it,” Taghi said. “The guy just went flying past us and-wham!”
Nina nodded. She also stuck her hand in her pocket and began pressing numbers on her cell phone blindly, not bringing it out. But he noticed. He tore away from Chaltu, who screamed in a burst of fright, and suddenly he had a knife in his hand. The blade was barely two inches long. A pocketknife, Nina thought, no murder weapon, and he didn’t hold it as she imagined a murderer would. It looked more as if he were about to sharpen a stick to roast something over a fire.
All the same. He had a knife.
“Give me your phone,” he said. “Now!”
She thought about what was at stake for him if the police came. Everything he stood to lose. She gave him the phone.
Chaltu looked back and forth between them with eyes that could hold no further terror. Taghi plopped Nina’s Nokia into the toilet. Then he brought out his own cell phone and punched a few numbers. Through the window she watched one of the young men let go of the tarp and put his hand to his ear.
Taghi began to speak, fast and in Farsi. Nina didn’t understand a word. Yet for the first time she felt a jolt of fear.
Fucking morons.
Taghi could barely control his anger. He felt it, warm and throbbing just under his skin. No one had better touch him. No one. Especially not those two idiots standing there fidgeting by the door. Just covering up a body with a green tarp-you would have thought it was a pretty simple job. It wasn’t like he was asking them to perform brain surgery.
They stood there staring at Taghi and the doctor lady and the woman on the floor. Farshad squirmed around like a three-year-old in need of a pee. His eyes moved back and forth uneasily between the doctor lady and him, as if he was trying to figure out what Taghi was thinking. Taghi knew he ought to say something, but he didn’t know what. Plus, he didn’t want to talk to that idiot. Not right now. They had a problem. The African wouldn’t go to the police, of course. The doctor lady, on the other hand…
Would a Danish woman be able to drive away from here and forget everything about the squashed corpse on the sheetrock outside? Could he let her go?
His thoughts were broken by Farshad, who again spoke way too fast and way too loudly. “Shouldn’t we…” He hesitated and flashed another look at the women in the tiny bathroom. “Shouldn’t we kill her, Taghi? Isn’t that what we should do?”
Taghi caught Farshad with a whipping blow across the back of the neck. He didn’t want to talk to him, mostly he wanted to hit him again, harder. Farshad’s astonished expression stopped him, and instead he spoke slowly and clearly.
“No, we are not going to kill her. Ajab olaqi hasti to. You are as stupid as a fucking donkey.” Taghi’s low, tense voice quivered. “Keep your mouth shut while I think.”
Farshad, clearly hurt, stared at him, then he bowed his head.
“Taghi.” The doctor lady’s voice sounded like a gunshot in the tense silence. “You’re all going to have to help me hold her. She won’t do anything.”
Taghi gaped at her. She couldn’t be serious. Did she think they looked like a bunch of nurses? He was about to say something, but he stopped. One glance at the sinewy little figure beside the African woman convinced him that there was no room for discussion at the moment.
The doctor lady had made a pallet for the woman consisting of Taghi’s down coat and Djo Djo’s fleece. On top of that she had laid clean white towels from the shoulder bag she’d brought along.
“Sit so you can support her head, and then shut up. Apparently you’re Jacob at the moment, and it works a lot better if you’re not yelling at your cousin.”
Taghi trudged back into the bathroom, and slid to the floor without another word. He raised the woman’s head and shoulders so she could rest against his thigh. He dared a quick glance at Djo Djo, who was still standing in the kitchen area, his expression an absurd mixture of terror and amusement. A brief, nervous laugh escaped him.
The eyes of the doctor lady gleamed fierily in the dark. “You two can make yourselves useful and see if there’s any hot water in the pipes.”
Djo Djo and Farshad got going too. Taghi heard them swearing beneath their breath at the kitchen sink. There was water, but it was cold. The African woman hunched over and pushed so hard he could see the small veins in her temples standing out in the weak light from the streetlamp. He put a hand on her forehead and sent a quick prayer off to heaven. For her, for the baby, and for the three of them-Djo Djo, Farshad, and himself.
He turned again and looked at the doctor woman. Nina. Her face blazed with a pale, persistent concentration.
“It’s coming,” she said, glancing up at him with something resembling a weak smile.
“I know.”
The African woman opened her eyes and looked directly at him as the next contraction hit. And he thought about what it must be like-to give birth here, among strangers, among men.
Down between the woman’s legs, the doctor lady reached out with both hands and made a quick turning motion, and Taghi heard the wet sound from the baby slipping out onto the white towels.
It was a boy, and he was already screaming.
“Blessed Virgin, Mary full of grace, free me from this pain, Gaeta, Gaeta, Lord have mercy upon me, may all your saints protect me, and I will honor you… honor you…” Chaltu had to pause for a moment because God’s fist squeezed the air out of her, but she continued the litany in her head and time disappeared for her; it was the priests’ mass she heard, she thought she could smell the incense and feel the pressure, not from labor but from the crowd, all trying to catch a glimpse of the procession, the long parade of holy men clad in white costumes trimmed in red and gold. “Hoye, hoye,” the children sang, swaying and clapping their hands, and farther forward she could see the Demera, the holy bonfire waiting to be lit. The Meskel festival had arrived in Addis Ababa, and she was a part of it, swaying in rhythm to it, and she felt uplifted, she felt like she could float above the crowds and see over them instead of standing there among backs and thighs and shoulders and legs.
“Chaltu, push. Go on now, push!”
Hoye, hoye… be joyful, for today the true cross is found, praise God Almighty for today all sins are forgiven… and Jacob’s eyes gleamed at her, his hands supported her so she didn’t stumble despite all the people around her pushing and shoving. In that moment it made no difference that she hardly knew him, that he was only home for a visit, that he wasn’t the one she was supposed to marry. She loved him, loved the open look in his eye, his rounded upper lip, the way his earlobe attached to his neck. Loved him, and wanted to make love to him. It was as if the holy Eleni herself smiled upon them and promised them that their love would be clean and unsinful. Hoye, hoye. Today life will conquer death.
But why did it hurt so badly? She no longer understood this pain, no longer remembered the baby, instead she called for Jacob, again and again, but he faded away from her, as did the priests, the singing and clapping children, and the bonfire, the flames of which were supposed to show her the way to salvation.
God’s hand crushed her, she could neither think nor scream. She could just barely sense that she was surrounded by strangers, and that the arm she was clinging to wasn’t Jacob’s.
“Look, Chaltu. It’s a boy. You have a son.”
They laid a tiny, wet creature, a baby bird, on her stomach. Could it really be hers? She knew she should hold it, but her arms felt cold and heavy as stone.
It took several minutes before she realized that the baby had been born, and that she was still alive. A miracle, it was, and she only slowly began to believe it. For the first time in many days she felt something other than pain and fear. She raised her heavy arm and curled it around the baby-bird child. Breathed in its odor. Began to understand. Hoye, hoye, little one. We are here, both of us. We are alive.
Nina regarded Taghi’s tensed-up face. She sensed that the truce was over. The umbilical cord had been cut and tied off. The placenta lay intact and secure in the plastic basin she’d brought along from the clinic. The little boy whimpered in Chaltu’s arms, pale against her dark skin. And Nina’s reign had ended with the birth. Now they were back to the corpse and everything death brought with it.
Farshad said something or other, his voice catching nervously. Taghi answered him, negatively Nina thought, but she wasn’t sure. How terrifying it was that they could discuss what to do with her without her understanding a word. Taghi had said that they didn’t kill Brahge, and she couldn’t really believe he was a cold-blooded murderer. They aren’t evil, she told herself, and tried not to think how absolutely normal, unevil people could do horrible things if they were pushed far enough.
“Why don’t you just leave?” she said. “You can take Chaltu and the baby with you, and I’ll wait until you’re long gone before I call the police.”
“Yeah, right,” Djo Djo said, and scratched himself quickly and a bit too roughly on the cheek.
Taghi said something sharply, obviously an order. Djo Djo protested, and Farshad started to titter nervously, maybe at what Djo Djo had said. But finally the brothers left the apartment. Nina saw them through the window, lifting the tarpwrapped body and carrying it over to the van.
All of a sudden they were rushing frantically. They pitched the body in the van, threw themselves into the front seats, and roared off. Seconds later Nina could see why. On the other side of the canal, on Ørestads Boulevard, a police car was approaching slowly, its blue lights flashing.
Eggers stopped the patrol car.
“There’s a building with balconies,” he said. “And that van didn’t waste any time driving off.”
Janus shrugged his shoulders. “We’d better check it out,” he said. He had his regular black shoes on, not his winter boots. The radio hadn’t mentioned anything about snow when he left Allerød that morning at a quarter past seven.
Eggers called in the address. “We’re going in,” he told the shift supervisor. “But it looks peaceful enough.”
Janus sighed, opened the car door, and lowered his nice, black, totally inadequate shoes into the muddy slush. “Does anyone even live here?” he asked. The place was all mud, with construction-site trash everywhere, for sale signs in most of the windows.
“At least there’s light,” Eggers growled. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”
The street door was open, a bit unusual nowadays. Eggers knocked on the door of one of the ground-floor apartments. After quite a while, a thin dark-haired woman opened the door. She stared at them with an intensity that made Janus uneasy.
“Yes?”
Eggers told her who they were and showed his ID. “We had a report from a passenger on the metro who saw someone fall from a balcony in this area. Have you noticed anything unusual?”
A whimpering came from within the apartment. It sounded like a baby.
“Just a moment,” she said, and closed the door in their faces. Eggers and Janus glanced at each other.
“She looks a little tense,“ Eggers muttered.
Then the door opened again, and this time she held a very small baby in her arms. “Sorry,” she said. “We just got home from the hospital and it’s all a bit new to him.”
The baby made a low murmuring sound, and Janus instinctively smiled. Lord. Such a tiny little human. No wonder his mother wasn’t too pleased about the disturbance. She was looking at the baby, not at them, and even Eggers was thawing out a bit, Janus noticed. There was something to this mother-and-child thing.
“Like I said, we just want to know, have you noticed anything?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It couldn’t have been here.”
“There was a van over here a little bit ago,” Eggers said.
“Yes,” she replied. “It was the plumber. There’s something wrong with the heat, and now we have the baby… we have to get it fixed.”
“Sure, of course. Well. Have a nice evening.”
The woman nodded and closed the door.
“I bet that plumber was after a little undeclared income,” Eggers said.
“Yeah. But it’s not our business right now.”
They walked back to the car. The snow felt even wetter and heavier now. Janus wished he’d at least brought along an extra pair of socks.
Taghi was elated when the police left. It was as if he’d forgotten all about threatening her with a knife a minute ago.
“It was the plumber…” he said, in a strange falsetto mimicing her voice. “Fuck, you were good! They totally swallowed it.”
It took a moment for Nina to answer. “Get out, Taghi,” she said. “Don’t think for one second that I did it for you.”
He came down like a punctured balloon. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got a little crazy, I think.”
“Just leave. And don’t call me again.” She remembered her cell phone and got him to fish it out of the toilet bowl.
“It doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
“No. But I’m not leaving it for anyone to find.”
All the way across the bridge Chaltu sat with her eyes closed, praying, as if she didn’t dare hope she could make it without divine intervention. Nina let her off at the University Medical Center in Malmø and tried to make it clear to her that she should wait until Nina had left before saying the only three Swedish words she knew. Chaltu nodded.
“Okay, secret doctor,” she said.
Nina looked at her watch. 11:03. With a little luck her mother would already be in bed when she got home.
The snow turned slowly into rain. The gray slush around the building in Ørestaden was melting into the mud. The blood of Torsten Brahge mixed with the rain seeping into the sheetrock, which eventually grew so pulpy that not even Beni in Valby would be able to find a use for it.