The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,24

invulnerability to the world, like some action hero from the American films he liked to watch: You don’t fuck with me, man.

At other times, the rage helped him do things he didn’t really like doing. It was always there, just under the surface, a hidden power he could call on at need. Then the men became swine, and the women bitches, and he could do what had to be done. But it was dangerous to unleash it, because it also meant a loss of control. He couldn’t always stop once he had started, and he didn’t think as clearly as he normally did. Once he had hit the man who was the swine at that moment so hard that the guy never really recovered, and Klimka had told him that if that happened again, Jučas would be fired. In the most permanent way. It was just about then that he realized the rage could kill him one day if he wasn’t careful, and he had actually stopped taking both the andros and the durabolines immediately, because they made the rage that much harder to control. It was around that time he had met Barbara, too.

When he was with Barbara, the rage was sometimes so distant he could pretend it had gone away. It might even be gone one day, he thought, when he never had to work for Klimka again, when he and Barbara had their house just outside Krakow, and he could spend his days doing ordinary things like mowing the lawn, putting up shelves, eating dinners Barbara made him, and making love to the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

But there hadn’t been any money. Every time he thought of the empty locker, fury sent accurate little stabs through him like a nail gun. God, he could have smashed the bitch’s skull in.

He had deliberately chosen a locker in the dead-end passage; there were fewer people, and it was out of sight of the staff in the security booth. At first he had taken up position in the actual basement, so that he would be able to see when the suitcase was picked up, and by whom. But he had been there only about ten minutes when the security staff began to get nervous. He could tell they were watching him, taking turns at it, first one, then the other. They put their heads together and talked. Then one of them reached for the phone. Damn. He got out his own mobile and held it so that it shielded part of his face as he went past their window and up the stairs to the central hall.

In the end, he’d had to station Barbara there, while he himself tried to watch both the other two exits from the car. It was far from perfect. If only it had been the Dane himself, whom he knew by sight. But now it was to be some female Jučas had never laid eyes on. Oh, well. He would be able to recognize the suitcase, at least.

Twelve o’clock came and went with no suitcase-dragging woman in sight. He kept phoning Barbara, just to be sure, but he could hear that he was only making her nervous. He decided to give it an hour; after all, the Dane had had to make contingency plans, so some delay was understandable. But in the end, he had to send Barbara down to check on the locker.

A few minutes later, she came up the stairs by the street exit, and he could see it a mile off: something was wrong. She was walking with tense little reluctant steps, her shoulders hunched.

“It wasn’t there,” she said.

So he had to go see for himself, of course. And she was right. Somehow, the woman must have gotten past either him or Barbara. The suitcase was gone, and no money had been left in its place. When he saw that, he lost it for a moment so that the uniformed piglets got all scared, and he had to smile and pay to calm their frightened little hearts.

And in the middle of all that, he had felt it. Her eyes on him. She might have been any old tourist except for the intensity of her gaze, but he picked her out of the crowd immediately. The woman. She had been scared, too. And more than that. He had seen her note what locker it was he had been smashing. When she turnd and ran, he was