“Yesterday.…” The man began, his eyes lighting up as he put on a theatrical smile. “Yesterday everybody fine, happy, eating. Today everybody sick again.”
He shrugged and pointed to the little boy on the mattress. “My son. Yes. Very sick again.”
The boy on the mattress moaned slightly but continued to follow Nina with his wide, wary eyes.
Nina stood up and peered further into the room. Two heavy, yellow tarpaulins were hanging from the ceiling so they served as a makeshift curtain in the middle of the room, maybe in an attempt to make some sort of division between women and men, but right now the two tarpaulins were pulled to the side so that what little light there was could reach both sections.
She spotted a couple of doors at the back of the room and guessed one of them must be a lavatory and maybe even a shower room. They might well have had something like that in an auto repair shop. She started walking back along the edge of the inspection pit.
The men went quiet, and she could feel their hostile eyes peering at her from all sides, following her as she moved through the room. The young man who had let her in when she arrived slid up next to her, so close that his shoulder touched hers with each swaggering step he took.
“I need to wash my hands.” Nina held her hands up to illustrate. Irritated, she maneuvered herself a little farther away from him and sped up. She didn’t understand why they needed to get all macho on her right now, but it wasn’t the first time she had been forced to put up with puffed up chests and threatening gestures before she was permitted to do her job. Sometimes there was a whole pantomime to get through, complete with jutting chins, bumping chests, heated discussions, and ultimately an ostentatious granting of permission to approach their child, sister, mother, or little brother. Nina had long since realized that it rarely had anything to do with her or what she did, it was more that to certain men she provided a welcome opportunity to demonstrate their glorious manliness and the accompanying ability to defend their family. However crude it might be.
All the same, she had started sweating a little.
No one, apart from that young mother, had seemed particularly pleased to see her, and she didn’t like the way the men were starting to fill the space behind her. As if they were moving in on her. She didn’t want to turn around to see if she was right.
She opened the door and stepped into a white-tiled lavatory. There was a toilet on the back wall that was missing its seat and lid. There was also a sink with a cracked mirror and a small shelf for the soap, and in the back corner there was a shower coated in lime scale, shower head barely attached to the wall. Otherwise the room was cold and bare. Nina cast a quick glance into the toilet bowl and noted that it was actually clean despite this being the only facility for the large number of people out there in the shop. Someone had employed soap and scrubbing brush with a will.
She washed her hands slowly, making a show of it for the young father, who had hung back in the doorway. Like a watchdog behind a fence, Nina thought, and felt it again. The anxiety. Something wasn’t right. They were the ones who contacted Peter for help, but now it almost seemed like they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. The child she had seen was very obviously sick, but so far everything still indicated it was a relatively benign stomach virus.
“Please,” the young man said, now adding a smile and an urgent hand motion. “More children sick. Please look.”
He remained there while Nina carefully edged past him through the doorway back into the garage. She hesitated. Where was Peter’s sick young man? After all, he was the one the whole thing had started with. She tried to ask, still in slow, clear English.
“What about the young man? The one who was sick. Where is he?”
The young father smiled, revealing a row of teeth marred by little black flecks.
“Fine,” he said. “He fine.” He looked away, and his eyes lingered a second too long on a door to the right of the bathroom.
“Where is he?” she asked again. “In there?”
“No, he fine. Gone now.”
He exposed his teeth again in a wide smile that finally convinced Nina that he was lying. They must have the room stuffed full of stolen flat-screen TVs, she thought, which would also explain the strange mix of aggressive macho attitudes and faint, shivery nervousness that filled the room. It was possible that the sick man was still in the garage somewhere, but they clearly weren’t interested in letting her talk to him, and that was all there was to it. She would be allowed to see the children, and that was also the most important thing. They were the only reason she had come.
She nodded quickly.
“Where are they? Where are the children?”
NINA DROVE HOME at 8:52 P.M.
There was almost no traffic on Jagtvej, but the rain ran down the windshield in thin, gray rivulets and made everything inside the car fog up. The de-mister no longer worked in Nina’s old Fiat, and she had to lean forward at regular intervals to wipe the inside of the windshield with her sleeve.
There was a certain sheepish feeling lurking in the back of her mind. Like an alcoholic on the wagon who had snuck a drink after work, she thought. It had almost been okay, what she had done. Visiting Peter wasn’t strictly speaking part of her work with the Network. The fact that she had gone out to Valby afterward was harder to justify. And now she felt strangely cheated. The children she had examined had stopped vomiting. The biggest ones, who were around Anton’s age, had been sleeping peacefully on the thin mattresses, and she hadn’t even needed to wake them up to determine that they were getting better. Their color was good, they were breathing calmly and steadily, and there were no immediate signs of dehydration. The smallest ones, the three-year-old boy and two twin girls who were slightly older, had moaned a little when she pressed on their stomachs. She had instructed the mothers thoroughly on how to add sugar and salt to bottled water and make sure the children got plenty to drink, and she had left a few packets of antiemetics that could help a little with the nausea. All in all there was nothing to worry about, and maybe there never had been. She had gone there out of her usual irrational anxiety, knowing full well that Morten wouldn’t be very understanding about her breaking her promise because of a couple of half-sick kids in Valby. Nina wasn’t sure if the severity of their condition made any difference to Morten, but it mattered to her.
Nina pulled into Fejøgade and glanced up at the windows on the second floor. The living room lights were on, so Ida must have crawled out of her cave while Nina was out and was probably happily enjoying the brand-new flat screen and having the whole sofa to herself. Nina had sent her a text message that she would be home late from work. She hadn’t given a reason, and Ida hadn’t asked. Just sent a laconic “OK”—without a smiley, of course. Ida considered emoticons tween, and if she ever did use them it would never be in a text message to Nina.
Nina left the first aid kit on the back seat and slammed the car door. She had no desire to go inside. Damn it. How had they ended up like this?
She left the question unanswered in some corner of her mind as she carefully pushed open the door to the apartment. The TV or stereo was on in the living room. “Let me rot in peace,” thundered the lead singer from Alive with Worms, an iconic Copenhagen Goth-rock group. Nina recognized both the singer and the Goth style from her own distant youth and felt annoyance starting to boil in her. Why did teenagers have to be such damned clichés? Did parents really only get to choose between pop chicks who wore lip gloss that reeked of strawberry, watched Paradise Hotel on TV, and had a stack of glossy magazines on their desk, or self-pitying mini-Goths who painted the insides of their heads black, romanticized anarchy and evicted squatters, and dug around in small, obscure shops for tattered clothes and narrow-minded music that would put them in an even worse mood? The latter was perhaps marginally better than the former, but hardly original, and it was ridiculously difficult to take it seriously while it lasted.