He stuck out his arm.
She stepped over to the tall, narrow window next to the door and knocked on the glass, alternating between her knuckles and her palm.
“Hello!”
Her voice made almost no sound. The shout was there, in her throat, but her tongue and dry lips refused to cooperate. Anyway, now she could see a face on the other side of the glass. An older man dismissively waving a hand lightly covered with liver spots. Nina looked down at herself. She looked terrible. The dark-blue tracksuit was covered with construction dust, and her right arm jutted out awkwardly to the side to keep her from touching her rib. She tried to smile, but the face inside the window had already started backing away. Farther and farther away. She knocked again, but this time without much conviction.
“Hello? I need help!”
There was no response.
Nina turned around and stared back at the mosque behind her. Its front door was still open, but she didn’t see any sign of Tommi or Frederik. The reflection of a light in the window of one of the portable office trailers at the construction site across the street made her jump, but it was just the streetlights swaying in the heavy wind.
Did she have the strength to try the neighbor’s? Nina looked over at the house next door. Yet another red-brick fort with a single lit window and an impervious front door. She had the utterly stupid desire to cry. Like when she was little, standing alone on the playground with a scraped knee and hundreds of happy, laughing children around her. But it hadn’t done any good then, and it wouldn’t do any good now. She rubbed a hand over her eyes and looked around. There was a birdbath on the little lawn in front of the house, attractively surrounded by fist-sized red, granite rocks.
Nina hobbled down the steps with a firm grasp on the wrought iron railing. One step, two steps … she tried to ignore the pain when she bent down, but as she straightened up with a rock in her hand, she emitted a wheezing groan anyway.
She went back up the stairs and peered in the window. The man had withdrawn so far that she could see only his feet, nervously padding away. She raised the rock and slammed it into the window with all her might. The old man’s double-glazing didn’t surrender until she hit it for the third time, making a hole big enough to pass a fist through. Her reluctant helper had by this time retreated so far back into his hallway that all she could see was his feet, but that didn’t matter.
“Call the police,” she bellowed. “Now!”
SHE SAW THE patrol car long before the pensioner could have even picked up the phone. It drove past her without flashing lights or a siren, pulled up outside the construction site, and turned off its headlights.
Nina grabbed the stair railing and took the three steps down to the front walkway so fast that she crashed to her knees on the flagstones. She got up again and staggered, shuffling and shouting, as fast and as loud as her rib would permit.
“Help.”
She didn’t know how long it had been since Ida had crawled into that oil tank. One hour? Two hours? At any rate it had gotten dark out, and it had been way too long.
“Help.” Nina picked up her pace. “Help. I need help.”
This time she screamed for real.
And the money. The money that Tamás had given his life for. It was all here in his hand, in a gray, blood-smeared envelope that was almost as thick as Blackstone’s International Law.
He didn’t have much time or many options. He clumsily got up onto all fours and couldn’t get any farther than that. Walking and standing were not in his current repertoire. A stab of pain shot through his hole-riddled palm when he put his left hand on the floor, but if he was going to take that envelope, he would have to ignore the pain. It turned out you could reach a point when the pain became irrelevant. What mattered were the mechanics. What you could and what you couldn’t do. He couldn’t stand up without falling down. And if he fell, he would stay down. He could probably crawl on all fours if he used his left hand, too, so that’s what he did.
He crawled past the person in the white suit. At the moment he didn’t care who was lying there inside the suit, nor did he care if the man were alive or dead. He didn’t have any spare energy to waste on anger or curiosity. Hand-knee, hand-knee, that was all that mattered. Past the Finn with only half a head. Out of the door. Out.
Halfway across the threshold he was hit by a wave of weakness. His arm buckled, he rolled halfway onto his side, but the doorframe stopped him and keep him from collapsing completely.
“You’re not going to make it, phrala.”
He looked up. There was Tamás, Mulo-Tamás with the red, bleeding eyes.
“Shut up,” Sándor mumbled. “Out of my way! You know this whole thing is your fault, right?”
Mulo-Tamás didn’t move. “Not just my fault,” he said.
Sándor didn’t have the strength to argue with an evil spirit that might not even be there. He tried to crawl farther, but his body wouldn’t obey.
“I did it because I had to,” Mulo-Tamás said. “So the family would survive. So we could get by. Who knows? If you hadn’t turned your back on us, maybe I wouldn’t have fucking needed to.”
“Move,” Sándor repeated feebly.
“You turned your back on us.” Mulo-Tamás’s bloody eyes burned. “You turned your back on your own people, your brother and your sisters, your own mother. Just so you could get by in the gadjo world. And where did it get you? Nowhere. Soon you’ll be as dead as me. And what will happen to the family then? Your death is hardly any purer than mine.”
Sándor’s head sank.
“The money,” Sándor mumbled. “Feliszia’s school. The new roof. An apartment for Vanda. Tamás, I’m not turning my back on them.”
“You just don’t want anyone to know we exist.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. Lujza is going to meet you all. If … well, if she wants to.” I don’t think I have the strength to love someone who isn’t brave enough to be himself, she’d said. But … what if he was brave enough now? What if he could stop being just half a person? Somewhere deep down, he knew perfectly well that that was why he backed down so easily, why he never stood up to confrontation, why he was afraid of the authorities and walked away from most fights—even the most important ones. A half person has a harder time keeping his balance than a whole one. Maybe it was about time he quit being a half-brother, too.
“Phrala,” Sándor said. “Enough now, okay? Te merav. You’re killing me.”
But Mulo-Tamás wasn’t there anymore. There was nothing there.