The Boy in the Suitcase

JUČAS KNEW HIS rage was both a weakness and a strength.

When he was training he could sometimes use it to wring the last reserves from his body, and achieve those explosions of force that made his blood throb in a way that was almost better than sex. Following a set like that, he could see it: the veins lay on top of his muscles like plastic tubing, and the pump was visible, bang bang bang, just as he felt it in every fiber. God, he loved that feeling. In such moments he felt strong, and he had to supress a desire to leap onto the bench and yell out his invulnerability to the world, like some action hero from the American films he liked to watch: You don’t f*ck 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 sure. She was the one. She had taken the suitcase. But why had she come back? Did she think she could come here to gloat, and he wouldn’t know? He would show her differently. Even through the rage, he saw her clearly. Thin as a boy, with very short dark hair; for a moment he imagined sticking his cock into something like that, but who would want to, unless they were queer? Bloody boy-bitch. He would stick her, all right, but with something else.

HE CALLED THE Dane right away. Was fed a truckload of excuses about delays and honest intentions. Could he believe the man? He didn’t know. Anger was still guttering in his stomach as he walked up the steps to the street, past three Russians engaged in a blatant dope deal. Morons. Couldn’t they be just a little discrete? The biggest one, obviously meant to be the muscle, cast a nervous eye over Jučas. It improved his mood a fraction. Look your fill, he thought. I’m bigger than you are, pal.

Outside in the street, heat surged from the pavement and the sun-warmed bricks. The leather jacket had been a bad choice, but he’d thought Denmark would be colder, and now he didn’t really feel he could take it off. He sweated a lot, people did when they were in good shape, and he didn’t like Barbara to see him with huge underarm stains on his shirt.

“Andrius?” Barbara called to him through the open car window. “Is it okay?”

He forced himself to take long deep breaths. Couldn’t quite produce a smile, but he did manage to ease his grip on the car keys.

“Yes.” Deep breaths. Easy now. “He says it’s a mistake. He is on his way home, and when he gets here, we will get our money.”

“That’s good.” Barbara was watching him with her head cocked slightly to one side. For some reason, it made her neck look even longer. More elegant. She was the only one who ever called him by his given name. Everyone else just called him Jučas. He didn’t event think of himself as Andrius, and hadn’t since his Granny died and he was sent to Vilnius to live with his father because no one had any idea what else might be done with him. His father rarely called him by name at all, it had been either “boy” or “brat,” according to his mood. Later, in the orphanage, everyone had gone by their last name.

He let himself drop into the front seat next to her, wincing at the contact with the sun-scorched fabric. The Mitsubishi had a certain lived-in appearance after two days on the road. Paper mugs and sandwich bags from German Raststellen littered the floor, and the food-smeared car seat the boy had been strapped into gave off a sour odor of pee. He really ought to dismantle it and sling it in the back of the van, but right now the fug was too much for him and he didn’t want to spend another minute in the car.

“Are you hungry?” he said. “We might as well do something while we wait for him to call.”

Suddenly, Barbara’s face came alive.

“Tivoli!” she said. “Could we go there? I was looking through the fence earlier, and it all looks so beautiful.”

He had not the slightest wish to endure the wait surrounded by screaming toddlers, cotton candy, and balloon vendors, but the surge of expectation in her eyes melted his resolve. They paid a day’s wage to get in, and ate a pizza that only set him back about seven or eight times as much as it would have cost him in Vilnius. But Barbara was loving every minute. She smiled more than she had done at any time during the long tense drive here, and his nerves began to settle. Perhaps everything would still be all right in the end. It might be just a misunderstanding. After all, if the Dane was stuck in a plane and couldn’t do much, it wasn’t surprising somebody screwed up. He would pay. He had said so. And if he didn’t, Jučas knew where he lived.

“There’s a bit of oregano on your chin,” said Barbara. “No, let me… .” She blotted the corner of his mouth gently with the red-and-white-checkered napkin, smiling into his eyes so that the rage curled up inside him and went to sleep.

Later they walked around a ridiculous little lake in which someone had placed a disproportionate schooner, so large it would hardly be able to turn if anyone had the misguided idea to try to actually sail it. Barbara put two fat Danish coins into an automat and was rewarded with a small bag of fish fodder. As soon as they heard the click from the automat, the fish in the lake surged forward so that the water literally boiled with their huge writhing bodies. The sight turned his gut, he wasn’t quite sure why. At that moment, the phone finally rang.

“I just got home,” said the man at the other end. “There is no sign of the goods or the money. Nor of the person I sent to do the trade.”

Bitch. Swine.

“I delivered,” he said, with as much calm as he could muster. “Now you must pay.”

The man was silent for a while. Then he said:

“When you give me what I paid for, you will get the rest of the money.”

Jučas was struggling both with his temper and his English vocabulary. Only Barbara’s hand on his arm made it possible to win at least one of those battles.

“You sent the woman. If she don’t do what you say, is not my problem.”

Again, the silence. Even longer, this time.

“She took a company car,” the Dane finally said. “We have GPS tracking on all of them. If I tell you where she is, will you go and get her? She must have either the money or the goods, or both. Or she must know where they are. Bring her back to me.”

“Is not what we agreed,” said Jučas through clenched teeth. He wanted his money, and he wanted to get out of this stinking, stupidly expensive country where even the fish were fat.

“Ten thousand dollars extra,” said the man promptly. “To get the money and the goods, and bring her back.”

The screaming from the roller coaster was getting on his nerves. But ten thousand dollars was ten thousand dollars.

“Okay,” he said. “You tell me where she is.”





NINA WRAPPED THE blanket more tightly about the boy, picked him up, and left Allan’s office with the skinny body in her arms. He felt feather light compared to Anton, but of course Anton was no longer a toddler. He went to school. He was a big boy now.

She was careful to make sure that the lock on the main door of the practice clicked behind her. The parking lot, thank God, was still empty. She levered the body carefully into the back seat and closed the door with a soft push. It was 6:44.

“What do I do now?” she muttered, then caught herself with some irritation. Talking to herself now. Not cool. She hadn’t done that much since she started secondary school and had had to leave that and other childish habits behind if she wanted to survive socially. But sometimes, under pressure, it came back. It seemed to help her concentrate.

She started the car and let it roll down the graveled drive. Her hands were shaking again. She noted it with the same detached interest she would have awarded a rare bird at her bird feeder. She had to lock her fingers around the rim of the steering wheel to stop the annoying quiver that spread through her arms, then her palms to the tips of her fingers.

Karin had not returned any of her calls. Nor had Morten. Nor had there been any sign of police or other authorities. The last would of course have been unlikely, but the sense of being hunted would not leave her. It just didn’t seem right that she could be driving around for hours with a three-year-old boy who wasn’t hers. Somebody had to be missing him—someone other than the furious man at the railway station.

Nina turned up the volume of the car radio to be ready to catch the news. It was 6:46 according to the display on her mobile. She slowed slightly and regained enough control of her fingers to tap out Karin’s number once more.

After seven long rings, there was, finally, an answer.

“Hello?”

Karin’s voice sounded both hopeful and reserved.

Nina took a deep breath. It would be so easy for Karin to cut the connection if Nina came on too strongly. She had to be careful. Had to coax Karin into giving the answers she needed.

“Karin.”

Nina softened her tone persuasively. Like she did when Anton was in the grip of one of his nightmares—gently, gently.

“Karin, it’s Nina. I have the boy with me here in the car. He is okay.”

Silence. Then a long hiccoughing breath and a heavy sigh. Karin was battling to control her voice.

“Oh, thank God. Nina, thank you so much for getting him out of there.”

Another long silence. That seemed to be it. Nina cursed inwardly. Thank you for getting him out of there? How about an explanation? How about a bit of help? Something, anything, that would tell her what to do with her three-year-old burden.

“I have to know something about him,” she said. “I have no idea what to do with him. Do you want me to take him to the police? Do you know where he comes from?”

Nina heard the rising shrillness in her own voice, and for a moment she was afraid Karin had gotten spooked and hung up. Then she heard a faint, wet snuffling, as if from a cornered and wounded animal.

“I really don’t know, Nina. I thought you had contacts … that your network would be able to help him.”

Nina sighed.

“I have no one,” she said, and felt the truth of it for the first time, at the very pit of her stomach. “Look, we need to talk properly. Where can I find you?”

Karin hesitated, and Nina could practically hear the doubts and fears ripping away at her.

“I’m in a summer cottage.”

“Where?”

Nina waited tensely, while Karin fumbled with her phone.

“I don’t want to be involved in this. I can’t. It wasn’t supposed to be a child.”

The last word was nearly a wail, a high-pitched hysterical whimper, and Karin could no longer control the violent sobbing that Nina guessed had been coming even before she answered the phone.

“Where is the cottage?” she repeated, striving for a note of calm authority. “Tell me where you are, Karin, and I will come to you. It will be all right.”

Karin’s breath came in harsh bursts, and her silence this time was so long that Nina might have ended the call, had she not been so desperate herself.

“Tisvildeleje.”

Karin’s voice was so faint that Nina could barely make it out.

“I’ve borrowed the cottage from my cousin, and it’s… .” There was a crackling sound as Karin fumbled for something, possibly a piece of paper. “Twelve Skovbakken. It’s at the very end, the last house before the woods.”

There was a click, and this time, she really was gone.

Nina turned to the sleeping child with the first real smile she had been able to manage during the six hours that had passed since she opened a suitcase and found a boy.

“I’ve got it covered,” she said, feeling her hands unclench on their own. “Now we will go find out what has happened, and then I will see to it that you get back home where you belong.”





SIGITA WAS DESPERATE enough to ask him to come.

Darius’s mobile phone voice became ill at ease.

“Sigita… . You know I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My job.”

He worked for a construction company in Germany. Not as an engineer, as he sometimes told people, but as a plumber.

“This is Mikas, Darius.”

“Yes. But….”

She ought to have known. When had she ever been able to count on him? But Mikas … she hadn’t imagined that Mikas meant so little. Darius liked the boy and often played with him for anything up to an hour at a time. And Mikas worshiped his father, who would always appear at the oddest times, carrying armfuls of cellophanewrapped toys.

“Are other people’s toilets really more important to you than your son?” she choked.

“Sigita… .”

She hung up. She knew it wasn’t his job that was stopping him. If it had been something he really wanted to do, like a football match or something, then he called in sick without worrying about it. He was not a career chaser. His job didn’t mean all that much to him.

It wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was because he wouldn’t. He wanted to stay in his new life, probably with a new girlfriend, too, and had no wish to be drawn back to Vilnius and Tauragė , to Sigita and her tiresome demands.

Pling-pliiing. The mobile gave off its tinny “Message received” signal. The text message was from Darius.

Call me when Mikas comes home, it said.

As though Mikas were a runaway dog who would appear on her doorstep when it became sufficiently hungry.

“Are you all right, madam?”

She looked up. An elderly gentleman in a gray suit stood watching her from a few yards away, supported by a black cane.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s … it was just … it’s over now.”

He helped her to her feet and began to collect her scattered belongings.

“It’s important to drink enough when it is this hot,” he said kindly. “Or so my doctor is always telling me. I often forget.”

“Yes. Yes, you are quite right.”

He tipped his pale gray Fedora to her as he left.

“Good afternoon, madam.”

SHE WENT BACK to the police station in Birželio 23-iosios gatvė. Sergeant Gužas’s face took on a look of resignation when he saw her in his doorway.

“Mrs. Ramoškienė. I thought you were going home.”

“It’s not him. Darius didn’t take him” she said. “Don’t you understand that my son has been kidnapped?”

Resignation gave way to tiredness.

“Mrs. Ramoškienė, a few hours ago you claimed that your husband had taken the boy. Am I to understand that this isn’t so?”

“Yes! That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But your neighbor saw—”

“She must have made a mistake. She’s old, her eyesight is not very good. And I think she has only met Darius once.”

Click, click, click. The point of his ballpen appeared and disappeared, appeared and disappeared. A habit of his, it seemed, when he was trying to think. Sigita could barely stand it. She wanted to tear the pen away from him, and only the need to appear rational and sober held her back. He simply has to believe me, she thought. He has to.

Finally, he reached for a notepad.

“Sit down, Mrs. Ramoškienė. Give me your description of the chain of events once more.”

She complied, doing the best she could to reconstruct what had happened. Described to him the tall, fair-haired woman in the cotton coat. Told him about the chocolate. But then she reached the gap. The black hole in her mind into which nearly twenty-four hours had disappeared.

“What’s the name of the kindergarden?”

“Voveraitė. He is in the Chipmunk Group.”

“Is there a phone number?”

She gave it to him. Soon he was talking to the director herself, Mrs. Šaraškienė. The compact ladylike form of the director popped into Sigita’s mind’s eye. Always immaculately dressed in jacket and matching skirt, nylons and low-heeled black pumps, as if she were on her way to a board meeting in a company of some size. She was about fifty, with short chestnut hair and a natural air of authority that instantly silenced even the wildest games whenever she entered one of the homerooms. Sigita was just a little bit afraid of her.

Gužas explained his errand; a child, Mikas Ramoška, had been reported missing. A woman involved in the matter might have made contact with the boy in the kindergarten playgrounds. Was it possible that one or more of the staff had observed this woman, or any other stranger, talking to the children or watching them, perhaps?

“The chocolate,” said Sigita. “Don’t forget the chocolate.”

He nodded absently while listening to Mrs. Šaraškienė’s reply.

Then he asked directly, apparently completely unaffected by Sigita’s presence: “What is your impression of Mikas Ramoška’s mother?”

Sigita felt heat rush into her face. The nerve! What would Mrs. Šaraškienė think!

“Thank you. I would like to talk to the group leader in question. Would you ask her to call this number as soon as possible? Thank you very much for your time.”

He hung up.

“It seems one of the staff has in fact noticed your fair-haired woman and has told her not to give the children sweets. But Mikas wasn’t the only child she contacted.”

“Maybe not. But Mikas is the only one who is gone!”

“Yes.”

She wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t want to ask. But she blurted it out anyway:

“What did she say about me?”

The tiniest of smiles curled his upper lip, the first sign of humanity she had observed in him.

“That you were a good mother and a responsible person. One of those who pay. She appreciates your commitment.”

There was no fee as such to be paid for Mikas’s basic care, but the kindergarten had an optional program funded by parents who paid a certain sum into the program’s account every month. The money was used for maintenance and improvements, and for cultural activities with the children—things for which the city did not provide a budget. It had been a sacrifice, especially the first year after she had bought the flat, but to Sigita it was important to be “one of those who pay.”

“Do you believe me now?”

He considered her for a while. Click, click went the damned pen.

“Your statement has been corroborated on certain points,” he said, seeming almost reluctant.

“Then will you please do something!” She could no longer contain her despair. “You have to find him!”

Click, click, click.

“I’ve taken your statement now, and we will of course send out a missing persons bulletin on Mikas,” he said. “We’ll look for him.”

At first Sigita felt a vast relief at being believed. She opened her purse and pushed the picture of Mikas out of its plastic pocket. The picture had been taken at the kindergarten’s midsummer celebration, and Mikas was in his Sunday best, with a garland of oak leaves clutched in his hands and an uncertain smile on his face. He had objected to wearing the garland in his hair because he didn’t want to look like a girl, she recalled.

“Thank you,” she said. “Will this do? It’s a good likeness.”

She put it on the desk in front of Gužas. He took it, but there was something in the way he did it, a certain hesitation, as if he wasn’t sure how much use it was going to be. It was then she realized that it was much too soon to feel any kind of relief.

“Mrs. Ramoškienė … is there any chance that the couple who took the boy are someone you know, or perhaps someone you are related to?”

“No, I … don’t think so. I certainly didn’t know the woman. But I didn’t really ask Mrs. Mažekienė about the man because I thought it was Darius.”

“We will try to get a description from your neighbor. Have the kidnappers tried to contact you in any way? Any demands, or threats? And can you think of anyone who might want to pressure you for any reason?”

She shook her head silently. The only thing she could think of was that it might be something to do with Janus Construction, with Dobrovolskij and other clients like him, and the figures she kept only in her head. But how? It didn’t make sense. And in any case, no one had said a thing. No threats. No demands.

She realized that he was watching her intently, and that the clicking of the pen had finally ceased.

“What do they want with him?” she said softly, hardly daring to say it out loud, because it made it that much more real. “Why do people steal someone else’s child?”

“When a child is taken, it is often personal—aimed at a specific child, for specific reasons that might be to do with custody rights, or with something the kidnappers want from the parents. But there is a second category. One where the motives are less personal, and in those cases… .” He hesitated, and she had to prod him on.

“What then?”

“In those cases, the perpetrators just take a child. Any child.”

He didn’t come right out and say it, but she knew immediately what he meant. She knew that children were sold in the same way some people sold women. A crushed and wordless whimper forced itself out of her. Esu kaltas, esu kaltas, esu labai kaltas. It’s all my fault. Desperately, she tried to stop the images that flickered through her head. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t think of Mikas in the hands of people like that. It would destroy her.

“Please. Please, will you find him for me?” she begged, through a hot flood of tears that blurred the room and made intelligible speech almost impossible.

“We will try,” he said. “But let us hope that Mikas belongs to the first category. They are often found, sooner or later.”

Again he didn’t say it, but she could hear the unspoken words all the same: we never find the others.