The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,54

for Julija. No result. Then she tried Baronas, in case the telephone was registered to the husband only. Eight of those. Two didn’t answer, one had an answering machine that made no mention of any Julija, two said they didn’t know anyone of that name. The sixth call was answered by a woman’s voice with a cautious “Yes?”

Sigita listened intently, but she wasn’t sure whether she recognized the voice.

“Is this Julija?” she asked.

“Yes. To whom am I speaking?”

“Sigita Ramoškienė. I would just like to—”

She got no further. The connection was severed with an abrupt click.

JUČAS DROVE THE car all the way down onto the beach.

It was dark now, and there were no people. Behind him, the thicket of pines formed a black wall. He took off all his clothes except his underpants. The sand was still warm beneath the soles of his feet, and the water tepid and so shallow that he had to wade several hundred feet before it became deep enough for him to swim.

There was no significant surf, no suction. Just this flat, lukewarm water that could not give him the stinging shock he craved. It had to there, he thought, further out—the cold, the undertow, the powers. He considered quite soberly the possiblity of simply continuing until he met something stronger than he was.

Barbara was waiting at the hotel. He hadn’t told her much, just that he had to help the Dane with something before they could get their money.

There would be no Krakow now, he thought, digging into the water with furious strokes that did, after all, make his muscles burn a little. In his mind he could still see the smiling family, the mother, the father, the two children, but large brown rats had begun to gnaw at the house so that it was disappearing bite by bite, and now one of the rats had started on the leg of the smallest child, without causing the child or the parents to smile any less.

He stopped his progress abruptly, treading water. He knew where those rats came from. Could still remember them scuttling away as he had come into the stable with the lantern and had found Gran on the floor next to the feed bin. No one had ever thought it necessary to tell him what she had died from. But dead she was, even a seven-year-old boy could tell as much. And the rats had known it, too.

He had succeeded in finding waters too deep for him to touch bottom. But he began to swim for the coast, this time with smooth, methodical strokes. He would not let the rats win. And there was still a trail of sorts that he might follow.

He thought about his clothes. What to do with them. In the end he dipped the sleeve of his shirt into the petrol tank of the car and made a small bonfire on the beach. He had only vague notions of DNA and microscopic fibers, but surely fire would deal with most of that.

The first thing to go wrong had been the woman herself. It hadn’t been the one he had seen in the railway station—the bony, crew-cut boy-bitch. This one was fair-haired like Barbara and had even bigger breasts. It would have been so much easier if it had only been the other one.

But she tried to run the minute she saw him, and surely she wouldn’t have done that if she had been innocent? His reflexes took over, and he hit her a few times on the arms and legs when he caught her, just to stop her from trying to run again. She was terrified. She gabbled at him in a language that was probably Danish, then seemed to realize that he didn’t understand. She began speaking English instead. Asked him who he was, and what he was doing there? But he could tell from her eyes that she knew precisely why he had come. And she was so scared that a trickle of yellow pee ran down one leg and made a damp spot in the middle of her white dress.

Why wouldn’t the stupid woman just tell him, he thought? What was she thinking? That if she said “no” enough times, he would apologize for the inconvenience and go away?

There always came a point when they knew. Some tried to escape, or scream and beg. Others simply gave up. But the time always came when they knew. Once he had torn away all the things they used