Nina carefully stepped around the small shards of glass, which were strewn across the kitchen floor, and proceeded into the living room.
The first thing she saw was Ida.
She was sitting against the far wall in a weird, floppy position with one arm crooked, raised awkwardly over her head. A rag doll tossed aside by a bored child. Her dark eyes looked even darker than they usually did. Her mascara had run in long black smears so her eye sockets had turned into deep, black pits. But she was there, and she was looking at Nina with watchful eyes that were somehow still intact and defiant and teenagery. She was still Ida. Nina felt the ground disappear from under her feet in a brief giddy second of relief. Then she sank down next to Ida, carefully running her finger over Ida’s black-striped cheek.
“Mom?” The wariness left Ida’s eyes, and she leaned her disheveled, black-haired head against Nina’s shoulder. “He came over during my free period. We just went to the bakery, and then suddenly he was there, and I didn’t have time to.…” Ida was talking so fast she was tripping over her own tongue. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry. So sorry.…”
The sobs came like an earthquake, causing Ida’s whole body to tremble, and Nina tried to pull her in closer and enfold Ida’s gangly teenage body in her arms. But something was in the way. Only now did Nina realize why Ida was sitting so awkwardly on the floor. Her left arm was attached to the pipe feeding the radiator behind her with black plastic ties, but she clung to Nina with her free arm and kept mumbling about Ulf and Morten and school. Nina had stopped paying attention. She let one finger slide along the edge of the strip of black plastic around Ida’s wrist. It was tight, but not dangerously so.
Only now, as she stroked Ida’s hair, did she take in the rest. A young man was sitting on the floor on the other side of the radiator, tied to a pipe the same as Ida. Nina was startled to recognize him—the young man from Valby. The gash over his eyebrow still gaped a little, and he looked like he had taken several more blows in the interim. His right cheek was almost the same dark purple color as the wall behind him, and he had a deep, oozing sore on the hand that wasn’t tied to the radiator.
She didn’t feel sorry for him. Not anymore. No matter why he was sitting here on the floor with her daughter now, he deserved whatever beatings he’d gotten. She was only sorry that she hadn’t actually been the one to give them to him.
The Finn seemed to have completely forgotten about her. He’d pushed a cowboy hat down over his forehead, adopting at the same time a more swaggering gait. He opened up a can of beer, drank, and made a slightly disgruntled face when the beer can accidentally bumped his swollen nose.
“You. Gypsy boy. Sándor—isn’t that your name?” The Finn pointed to the Valby man with his beer can. “How do you say ‘cunt’ in Hungarian?”
The young Hungarian raised his head very slowly, but didn’t respond. The Finn casually kicked one of the guy’s legs.
“Come on, pal. How do you say it?”
“Cuna,” the Hungarian said, his face completely devoid of any expression. The psychopath in the cowboy hat furrowed his brow.
“How do you spell that?” he asked, as if it were an important detail he needed for a thesis on the Hungarian language.
Beyond the Finn there was another man, sitting on a black leather sofa in the middle of the room. A slightly overweight chocolate Lab was lying on the sofa next to him, hesitantly wagging its tail as it followed the Finn around the room with its eyes. The man on the sofa slowly shut the laptop in front of him. His shoulders were pulled all the way up to his ears, and he was scowling in irritation at the Finn, who had already fished a new cigarette out of his pocket and was pacing around the leather sofa with his beer can in his hand.
“Damnit, Tommi. Can’t you shut up and stand still for even a second?”
The Finn grinned. “Goes against my philosophy of life,” he said. “Moss and rolling stones and all that.” Then he suddenly stopped after all, eyeing Nina through narrowed eyes.
“Okay. Mother and daughter, touching reunion, cool, cool. Now we get down to business.”
Nina had a strange feeling of having gone straight from small-talk recipient to being a daddy longlegs in the hands of a boy armed with a magnifying glass and the desire to take revenge for a bunch of lost fights. She had no idea what kind of “business” he might have with her, but she had a chilling sense that it was going to be horrendous.
And she still couldn’t do anything. There was no chance she would be able to free Ida and slip out of the house. Even if by some miracle they managed to get that far, they were surrounded by fields and miles of unpaved roads, and the muscles in her thighs were trembling just at the effort it took to kneel down next to Ida. She was thirsty now. Her jaw clenched too tight, and her mouth felt both dry and pasty at the same time.
“What do you want?” Nina asked. She deliberately ignored the restless Finn—Tommi, the other guy had called him. Instead she looked directly at the man on the sofa. He looked more normal than the Finn. Actually he looked like he would fit seamlessly into any suburban Danish neighborhood, armed with a dog and a stroller and a sports bag and whatever else your average dad carried around. But some dads evidently dreamed beyond little league soccer practice with their sons. She had no idea what connection these two men had to the source of the radioactivity in Valby. It was hard to imagine that either of them would personally go and set off a bomb; there was hardly a seething religious or political undercurrent to them or to this house. So what did they want? Maybe something to do with money and eighteen-year-old girls like Sabrina.
The man on the sofa didn’t answer her. He hardly seemed to see her. His pale blue eyes only rested on her for a brief instant before he looked back at Tommi.
“Okay, then. But you handle it.” The man spoke English with a heavy Danish accent. “I don’t want to have to deal with stuff like that right now.”
He opened his computer again and took a drink from a ceramic mug that was painted red and decorated with big, clumsy black letters. FOR DADDY, it said. Then she felt Tommi’s hard, thin fingers closing round her upper arm.
“THE JACKET?”
The room he dragged her into was painted baby blue with little, white stars scattered over the walls and ceiling. A double bed covered with a worn quilt with a big floral pattern took up almost the entire room, but a rickety, white plastic lawn chair and some empty paint cans jostled for space in one corner. A flat screen TV was mounted over the bed, casting a blank blue glow over the room. The room had a faint barn-like smell, mixed with mildew and those little air fresheners people hung from their rearview mirrors. Tommi had taken up a straddling stance in front of her, and his face wore the same slightly indulgent look he had had when he pulled out his phone in the hospital.
Nina didn’t understand what he meant. “What jacket?” she asked.
“Saturday evening you gave that little Gypsy shit in there a ride. He was wearing a jacket. Where is it?”
Nina began to see the light. The young Hungarian. She had taken off his jacket to check his rib when they were sitting in her car outside her apartment. And then what had happened to it? That evening wavered in her memory, half hidden in green clouds of nausea.