The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,14
off and call for a cab. But the pressure did ease as they left the center of the city and the rush-hour current ran the other way. When she finally got off by Žemynos gatvė, she had to sit on the bus-stop bench and just breathe for a little while before she was able to walk on.
She rang the bell by Mrs. Mažekienė’s front door before going into her own flat.
“Oh, it’s you, dearie. Good to see you on your feet again. What a to-do!”
“Yes. But, Mrs. Mažekienė, exactly when did Darius pick up Mikas?”
“Saturday. How peculiar that you don’t remember.”
“When on Saturday?”
“A little past noon, I think. Yes. I had just had my lunch when I saw them.”
“Them? Was someone with him?”
Mrs. Mažekienė bit her lip, looking as if she thought she might have said too much.
“Well, yes. There was this lady… .”
It stung, even though Sigita had been the one to kick Darius out, and not the other way around. But of course there was a “lady.” Had she really imagined there wouldn’t be?
“What did she look like?” she asked, in the unlikely case that it had been Darius’s mother or sister.
“Very nice. Quite young. Tall and fair-haired, with nice clothes. Not tarted up like some,” said Mrs. Mažekienė.
Which meant it wasn’t Darius’s sister, for sure.
Then another thought came to her. A nice-looking, tall, fair-haired young woman. Quite a few of those around, of course, but still… .
“Can you remember what she was wearing?”
“A light summer coat. One of those cotton coats, I think. And a scarf.”
The woman from the playground. The one who wanted a child so badly. Sigita felt a chill go through her. What if Darius had a girlfriend now who longed for children… . Sigita remembered the silver gleam of the chocolate wrapping, Mikas’s chocolate-smeared cheeks. The sly, ingratiating bitch. Watching them, watching Mikas, worming her way into his trust with the forbidden chocolate gift. Suppose it hadn’t been a Russian accent after all, but a German one. Some Irmgard he had picked up where he worked now.
“Dearie, are you all right?”
“Yes,” said Sigita through her teeth, though nausea sloshed in her throat like water in a bucket. “But I think I had better go lie down all the same.”
THE FLAT LOOKED the way it always did. Clean and white and modern, light-years away from the shirt-ridden hell of Tauragė. Even Mikas’s toys were lined up in tidy rows on the shelves. Only one alien object disturbed the symmetry: an empty vodka bottle glared at her from the kitchen worktop, next to the sink.
She tossed it into the bin with unnecessary force. Did they get her drunk first? She didn’t believe, couldn’t believe, that she had just let Darius and his German slut waltz off with Mikas in tow.
Her mobile rang.
“Sigita, where the hell are you? Dobrovolskij will be here in half an hour, and we need those figures!”
It was Algirdas. Algirdas Janusevičius, one half of Janus Constructions, and her immediate boss.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just got out of hospital.”
“Hospital?” Irritation was clear in his voice at first, but he managed a more suitably worried tone when he spoke again. “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“No,” she said. “I fell down some stairs. But I won’t be in for a few days.”
His silence was palpable at the other end of the line.
“Sorry,” she said again.
“Yes. Well. It can’t be helped. But … the figures?”
“There’s a green folder in the cabinet behind my desk, under Dobrovolskij. The accounts are almost the first thing you’ll come across.”
“Sigita, for God’s sake. Not those figures.”
She knew what he meant, of course. When one worked for Dobrovolskij, there were unwritten accounts as well, numbers and sums that never made it into the official records. The reason Sigita had become indispensable to Algirdas so quickly was that she was able to hold it all in her head. Even old man Dobrovolskij himself, who was not easy to please, had come to trust in Sigita’s accuracy. She knew what had been agreed, down to the last litas.
Except that right now she would have some trouble remembering her own phone number. The only thing her head held at the moment was a gray fog of nausea and confusion.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I’m a little concussed.”
This time, the silence was even heavier. She could almost hear the panic in Algirdas’s breathing.
“How long … ?” he asked cautiously.
“They say most people get their full memory back inside a few weeks.”