“You’re welcome,” Finn said to her, then turned back to Harry. “Ask her what happened.”
The story spilled out of her without much need for encouragement, her voice wavering occasionally, a pause to wipe a tear from her cheek—but the whole thing was retold with a remarkable stoicism.
She was an orphan from some provincial Russian city, southeast of Moscow. She’d been offered the chance to become a model, a plausible offer given her looks, but she’d been drugged and brought to Estonia. It wasn’t such an unusual story for Finn or Harry, given that their job was dealing with organized crime.
But after one brief exchange, Harry looked momentarily lost and said to Finn, “I asked her if she’d been attacked by the people who took her.”
“And?”
Harry shook his head.
“But the guy you killed, he told her Karasek wanted her for himself—that’s the only reason she hasn’t been raped. Karasek wanted her.”
“How old is she?”
There was another brief exchange, but this time Harry was so shocked that he asked the question again and she laughed as she repeated her answer.
“She’s thirteen. Can you believe that?”
“I thought thirteen or fourteen, but you’re right, she could pass for older.”
“When you first brought her in I thought eighteen or nineteen.”
“She’s a child. If you’d seen her afraid, you wouldn’t have doubted it. Thank God I was there, thank God . . .” He paused, trying to think what it was that he was grateful for. “You know, two weeks ago I wouldn’t have intervened.”
“Yes, you would. It’s who you are.” Harry smiled. “It would have been wrong, probably, but you still would have done it. Anyway, at least now you know you were right to kill the guy.”
Finn hadn’t given it any thought. He’d killed a man half an hour earlier, had sliced through the side of his neck and watched him bleed to death. But for the time being at least, it carried no weight whatsoever within his thoughts. He was too busy wondering what to do now.
Harry was clearly thinking along the same lines because he said, “Whatever Karasek had in mind, he’ll be peeved as hell about losing her, and peeved that someone killed one of his guys, too. Of course, he could think the girl had done it herself.”
Finn thought back to the dead guy. The knife wound could have been inflicted by a determined girl of her age, but Finn had given him a beating beforehand.
“No, he’ll know it was someone else.”
“And you’re sure no one saw you in the church?”
“Absolutely.” Now that he said it, he realized he should have checked the church before leaving, not that there was much he could have done, short of killing any witnesses. He supposed he would find out soon enough if he had been spotted. “Anyway, that’s less of a concern than what I do with her now.”
The girl asked Harry something. He answered and she poured herself more coffee, and held the mug between her hands as if still trying to get warm.
“There’s the authorities of course, but Lord only knows where she’d end up.” Harry looked preoccupied for a moment, as if mentally going through his address book before saying, “None of my old Russian contacts would be much use. I did know one or two who might have been able to help, but . . .”
The solution leapt out at Finn—a hundred attendant questions coming with it, but a solution all the same. And it hardly mattered that he didn’t know how it would work, because he knew immediately that it was the girl’s only real hope.
“I know one. A Russian.”
Harry laughed. “We all know Russians, Finn, but that’s—”
“I mean a Russian who could help.” He looked at Katerina, gave her an encouraging smile. “Could she stay here a while? I can’t take her home with me. Even if we could understand each other, how would I explain it to Sofi?”
“How long for? I mean, yeah, of course she can stay. But how long? What’s your thinking?”
Finn nodded, realizing that one way or another he was about to test his friendship with Harry to the limit. They’d known each other eighteen months, had bonded from the start, had been through a lot in that time, but this was the point at which Harry might begin to doubt he knew Finn at all.
“The Russian I know, he’ll be in Stockholm, I think a week from now. We could go on the overnight ferry, no need to get her a passport. He’d be able to deal with everything from there.”
Harry made a show of accepting that much, or of at least deferring acceptance for the time being, but said, “Can you trust him? You know, the girl just escaped who knows what, we don’t wanna hand her over to someone who’ll sell her to the highest bidder.”
There was no question in Finn’s mind. “I trust him completely, Harry. I trust him as much as I trust you. Maybe even more.”
Harry laughed at the slight. “Do you trust him more than Jerry de Borg?”