Her eyes were wide, but she had stopped talking. He couldn’t even hear her breathe. He felt the shock himself, like a strap tightening around his chest. Despite this he managed to reach out and clap his hand over Farshad’s mouth.
“Khar. Shut up, you big idiot,” he hissed.
Farshad thrashed around like a drowning man under Taghi’s right arm. Now they heard quick steps on the stairs. The front door opened and slid shut with a quiet click. A moment later a pair of headlights swept over the glass façade. The car took off and the sound died behind the thick thermal windows.
Taghi slowly removed his hand from Farshad’s mouth. He wasn’t sure that Farshad was completely calm yet, but at least he wasn’t shrieking like some old woman. In the bathroom the woman had begun to groan again. It sounded like she was calling out for someone. She no longer had the strength to crouch, she was rolling on the floor, trying to curl up as the contractions grew stronger. Her lips formed a fluid and nearly silent stream of words, and her long, slim hands clutched at thin air and then grabbed a corner of his sweat-soaked T-shirt.
“Jacob?”
Taghi rubbed a hand across his eyes. He needed to think.
Djo Djo had stepped right up to the window to get a better look at the corpse.
“What the hell we do now, Taghi? He’s dead. The police will come. They’ll be looking for us and they…” Djo Djo spoke slowly, searching for his words, as if the reality of the situation first struck him as he talked about it. “Maybe they’ll think we did it. Then we’re fucked. They’ll throw us out, they’ll kill us.”
Taghi had been thinking the same thing.
Their fingerprints were all over. Farshad’s gloves dangled from his pants pockets. One in each pocket. Djo Djo hadn’t even brought any. All they had planned on doing was liberating a couple of fucking sinks. That’s not something they nail you for-not seriously, anyway.
The woman had another contraction. They came every few minutes now. She was pulling him down, as if all she really wanted was someone she could drown with. She was crying.
“You have to find something to cover him up with.”
Djo Djo glared silently at Taghi. Then he grabbed Farshad’s shoulder and dragged him toward the door. Farshad stumbled, found his feet again, and trudged off behind Djo Djo, who was as agile as a cat in the dark.
A second later, Taghi saw the two brothers standing outside the window, struggling with the green tarp from the van. The wind grabbed the tarp, making it look like a dark, flapping sail against the multitude of brightly lit windows on the other side of the canal.
The woman on the floor loosened her grip on Taghi a bit, and as he straightened up he noticed a thin figure walking their way, leaning into the wind, hands over her face to shield herself from the big wet flakes.
She had arrived.
Nina zipped her down jacket all the way to her nose before getting out of the car.
Brave new world. The streetlights’ reflections shimmered in the black water of the canals, and the elevated railway looked like something from a sci-fi film. Trees and bushes didn’t belong in this vision of the future, the general impression was that organic life forms were unwelcome here. How in the world did an African woman about to give birth end up here?
Brahge Living, a big sign said, illuminated by a powerful floodlight. 24 exclusive condominiums-for sale NOW! The colorful, optimistic drawing of the finished development formed a sharp contrast to the muddied mess of construction and the toppled wire fence.
Brahge, she thought to herself, hitching up her shoulder bag. He was the man who went broke. One of the most publicized bankruptcies in recent times, because Torsten Brahge had been regarded as one of the best and brightest, having just been awarded some business prize a few weeks earlier. Investor megabucks were in danger of evaporating. She had seen the man’s slightly chubby, Armani-clad figure on the front page and in several self-pitying television interviews, though she couldn’t remember what he had said. Usually she quickly grew tired of hearing wealthy people moan about the financial crisis and the real estate collapse.
A battered-looking van was parked beside the fence, and she caught sight of two young men grappling with a green tarp just outside the building. Life in the desert, she thought, and lifted her arm in a stiff, frozen wave
“Is Taghi here?” she yelled.
Both of them stared at her as if she were some monster that had crawled out of the canal. But one of them nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Are you the doctor lady?”
“Nurse,” she corrected.
He shrugged his shoulder, whatever. “He’s inside. Ground floor to the right. You’d better hurry.”
She found them in the apartment’s tiny guest bathroom, the woman on her knees in front of Taghi, clinging to him with both hands. The quiet hope Nina had been nourishing that it might be false labor and a touch of hysterics immediately disappeared. The woman’s coat and skirt were soaked with amniotic fluid. If there were any complications, Nina decided, she’s off to a hospital whether she likes it or not.
At that moment the woman’s eyes flew open, and she looked straight at Nina.
“Hi,” Nina said in English, in her most reassuringly professional voice. “My name is Nina, and I’m here to help you. I’m a nurse.”
“Doctor,” the woman gasped. “Secret okay doctor.”
“Just say yes,” Taghi said. “I don’t think she understands much English. Her name is Chaltu.” Taghi didn’t look so hot himself, Nina observed. Anxious, nervous, but that wasn’t so surprising, either. She had a good idea what he was doing here. Or anyway, what he would have been doing had a woman giving birth not gotten in the way.
He tried to stand up, but Chaltu kept clinging to him.
“No go,” she said. “Jacob no go.”
“Sometimes she calls me Jacob,” Taghi said. “Don’t ask me why.”
Nina touched Chaltu’s arm. Her fingers were bloodless and gray, her skin icy cold. She let go of Taghi with one hand and swatted at Nina, who was trying to see how far she had dilated.
“Chaltu,” Nina ventured. “I must look. Look to see if baby is coming.”
“No baby,” Chaltu groaned. “No baby here. In Sweden. Jag söker asyl.” And she pressed her legs together so hard that her thigh muscles quivered.
Jesus, Nina said to herself, and took measure of the woman’s desperation. If it was possible to delay a childbirth by will alone, this would turn into a very long night!
“We have to get her someplace where we can keep warm,” Nina said. “Is that your van?”
Taghi looked toward the window facing the parking lot, and Nina followed his eyes. She saw the two young men outside, pulling a blue nylon rope through the green tarp’s grommets. A violent gust of wind rammed them. One of them slipped in the mud and lost his grip on the tarp. It flew up, flapping like a bird trying to fly away. Underneath lay a dead man.
It took her only a few seconds to recognize him. The Armani suit had had a terrible day, and the man inside a worse one. There was no doubt, however, that it was the head of Brahge Living lying there, very much dead.
The two young men got the tarp under control and tied it down, and the well-dressed corpse disappeared from sight. But it was too late. Nina had seen him. And Taghi knew it.
They stared at each other over Chaltu’s head.
“We didn’t do it,” Taghi said. “The guy just went flying past us and-wham!”
Nina nodded. She also stuck her hand in her pocket and began pressing numbers on her cell phone blindly, not bringing it out. But he noticed. He tore away from Chaltu, who screamed in a burst of fright, and suddenly he had a knife in his hand. The blade was barely two inches long. A pocketknife, Nina thought, no murder weapon, and he didn’t hold it as she imagined a murderer would. It looked more as if he were about to sharpen a stick to roast something over a fire.