Death of a Nightingale (34 page)

Søren just nodded. They ducked under the tape, which in any case was being quietly buried in a snowbank. Søren turned on the flashlight he did have and then turned it off again. He had no idea what to expect if they came upon Savchuk. It would depend on the situation, and he would like to have the option of observing before he was observed.

The wind moaned around the corner of the house, but otherwise he couldn’t hear anything except his own footsteps. It didn’t look as if a car had come through here. Behind the bungalow he met Babko, who had just as little to report.

“Let’s go see the lady with the good oven,” suggested the Ukrainian.

When they were still about a hundred meters from the yellow farmhouse, Søren stopped the Hyundai in the middle of the road.

“Same procedure?” asked Babko.

“Yep.”

There was a light on in the yard, but the only car parked there was Anna Olesen’s red Mazda. Babko headed down along one stable wing; Søren turned his attention to the farmhouse. There was no dog
barking, but there was a light on in the hallway. He went along the gable and into the garden to get a discreet look through the kitchen windows.

Just then his cell phone vibrated in his pocket, a single buzz. A signal from Babko.

The car is here
, the text message said.

“L
IEUTENANT
B
ABKO
, I
see you’ve been busy.”

Søren stopped mid-step, on his way around the stable corner. He carefully set his foot down into the snow again. In front of him, a few steps away and with his back to Søren, stood a large, broad-shouldered man in a long, classic overcoat. Babko was facing Søren but carefully avoided looking in his direction.

“Colonel. You’ve been missed.”

“Really. By whom, Mr. Lieutenant? Who has such a burning interest in what I do?”

Søren had absolutely no intention of interrupting this fascinating conversation. He took a slow, silent step backward in the direction of the half wall around the old midden.

“The Danish police do,” said Babko. “It’s an unfortunate situation. If you have news of Natasha Doroshenko, you should report it to the Danes.”

“And why would you think I have such news?”

“Among other reasons … because you are here. So close to where her Danish fiancé was murdered.”

“The Danes won’t know I’m here—unless you tell them.”

Søren slid behind the half wall and began to crouch down to be less visible. In the middle of the move, his bum knee, the one that he’d had surgery on, cracked loudly.

Savchuk spun around. His hand disappeared into his coat, but at the moment the gun came out, Babko hammered the edge of one of
his large, bony hands against the Colonel’s neck.

The blow didn’t hit with true precision, partly because of the thick, woolly overcoat, but mostly because Savchuk was moving. The gun was free of its holster, but by this point, Søren had left his half-covered position to come to Babko’s aid. He threw his flashlight as hard as he could in Savchuk’s direction just as the first shot rang out.

Savchuk fell over in the snow with Babko partly under him. There was yet another shot, a second before Søren kicked Savchuk under his jaw with all the strength he could muster. He grabbed the bigger man by the arm and rolled him on his stomach. Søren didn’t have handcuffs, but right now there wasn’t any resistance in the arm he was holding. Savchuk was unconscious.

“Are you okay?” Søren asked. His sense was that both shots had been fired in his direction without hitting him.

It took awhile for Babko to answer. “Not quite,” he said.

Søren whirled around. Babko sat in the snow with both hands pressed against one thigh. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

Søren let go of Savchuk. He pressed the
ASSISTANCE NEEDED
button on the radio with one hand. Where the hell was the gun? It must be lying somewhere in the snow.

“Where are you hit?”

“On the outside of the thigh.”

Better than the inside, where a huge artery supplied blood to the entire leg.

“We have an alarm from you,” came the dispassionate voice over the radio. “What is the emergency?”

Something hit Søren in the side with a whistling kick, and suddenly he didn’t have the air to answer. The radio slipped from his hand. He stretched his hands out in front of him without quite knowing why, maybe to support himself so he wouldn’t fall. He still ended
up in the snow, with a growing worry about where his next breath was going to come from. The kick had completely knocked the air out of him.

By the stable wall stood the tiniest, most ancient woman he had ever seen. Her mouth shone red in a powdered beige face, and in front of her she held a pistol that looked grotesquely huge in her wrinkled hands. She took aim again.

It was only then that Søren realized that he hadn’t been kicked.

Fuck, he thought. I’ve been shot by a little old lady. And in another second, she’ll do it again.

It took forever to get the plastic ties off.

Natasha found the light switch after some fumbling and pressed it with her elbow. Anna had a first-aid kit in her linen closet, she knew—Natasha had needed it several times when she lived with Michael. And in that kit were scissors.

She managed to open the closet and, with her chin and shoulder, maneuvered piles of towels, cleaning rags and toilet paper onto the tile floor until she found the red plastic pouch with the white cross. It landed on the floor too. With difficulty she got down on her knees and slid sideways onto her bottom like a clumsy mermaid. The flap on the case was closed with a button that took several more minutes of fumbling to open. She shook the contents onto the floor, found the scissors with her stiff hands and guided the two short, slender blades to the black plastic bands.

Snip.

Her arms fell forward and suddenly felt twice as heavy and sore, which made no sense. But there was still a locked door between the Witch and her. She pressed her shoulder against it, testing. Her weight didn’t seem to make any impression on either the jamb or the door.

She pushed the small angled overhead window open instead. A whirlwind of snow hit her, pricking her skin like the metal spikes on a hairbrush. She could hear voices somewhere in the howling of the storm—voices speaking Ukrainian. She thought one was Jurij’s but
couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly she saw dancing lights along the road. Someone on foot was coming around the bend where the fat electrician and his wife lived, and when they passed under the lamppost in his driveway, even at that distance she recognized the dog, Anna’s red snow suit and …

And Nina Borg. With a child in her arms, a child wrapped in a blanket, but it could only be … It made no sense, but it had to be Katerina.

A lie. The Danish nurse had failed her own gospel of truth and had lied to her. Katerina was not with the police, and she was not,
not
at all “safe.” Hatred and panic rose in Natasha with equal force. The Witch was here, downstairs in Anna’s house, and the nurse was on her way to the Witch with Katerina. For a moment she thought the Witch had paid Nina Borg to lie and now was sitting in her chicken-legged house, waiting for Nina to bring her the child she was going to devour.

But the Witch didn’t know everything. She could not have known that Natasha would lead them to Anna’s house. There must be another explanation.

Then the next wave of emotion arrived, and this time it was pure, unarticulated panic.

Katerina. The Witch. Katerina.

Natasha planted her foot on one of the closet shelves and was now halfway through the narrow window without having thought about how she would get down from the roof. But it turned out to be easy. The snow lay in drifts around the rosebushes beneath her, and she just jumped, hung in the empty space, then hit a snow pillow and thick, bristling rose stems and finally the cold ground. Seconds. She only had seconds to get to them and stop them before they were within reach of the Witch.

She had turned one knee in the fall but still ran, slipping and
limping, through the deep snow. Behind her came the sudden sound of two dry bangs in short succession. Shots. But who had shot whom?

The dog barked briefly and started to run as if it were expecting a couple of ducks to come drifting down from the sky for it to collect. The flashlight figures hesitated. Then Nina put her burden down in the snow and ran after the dog, toward the farmhouse and the yard, in the direction from which the shots had come.

How stupid was that?

Natasha ran in the opposite direction, toward Anna and Katerina.

Anna, squatting in the snow next to the child, looked up in surprise when Natasha came running. She said something or other, but Natasha wasn’t listening. She pulled the blanket aside, and Katerina’s face appeared, closed and pale like the faces of the dead saints Mother had hanging above the kitchen table.

But Katerina wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be. Natasha desperately attempted to quiet her own hectic breathing so she could hear Katerina’s, pulling her onto her lap and hugging her tightly.

“What’s wrong with her?” she asked. “What happened?”

Yet another shot, followed by a piercing howl from the dog.

Anna jumped. Instead of turning around, she walked past Natasha on stiff legs and toward the yard, stupid as a pig that wanders into the slaughter stall without noticing the blood on the floor, just because someone jangles the feed bucket. She had lived too long in Bacon Land.

When she got to the corner of the main house, she stopped. She only stood there for a moment before she took three quick steps backward and turned around, but the light from the lamps in the yard had hit her, and yet another flat slap sounded.

The pig is dead, thought Natasha, and in a moment it will fall over on the bloody floor. But Anna was still standing. Natasha felt Katerina move, a slight scraping of one knee against her thigh, and she
got up quickly with her daughter in her arms and stumbled away from the road, into the deep winter darkness. She sank down into the drifts behind the rose hedge, better hidden by the darkness than by the leafless stalks, but she knew it wasn’t enough. If the Witch had a light, if she looked this way …

The car. Could she make it to the car? No, it was no good; the keys were in big Jurij’s pocket. Natasha wished that she had listened more closely back when acne-covered Vasyl had tried to impress her by hot-wiring his father’s ancient Lada. But she remembered something about hot-wiring not working on new cars anyway, so perhaps it made no difference.

She saw Anna back away from the corner of the house and down the road, her hands held out in front of her.

“Stop,” the Witch commanded. “One more step, and I’ll shoot.”

The dog howled as if possessed. Long, piercing screams, as only an animal in pain can scream. Nina ran in the direction of the sound. It was where the two first shots had come from too. She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone and only a second later remembered yet again that she had given it to Søren that morning.

She found the dog first. It had been shot in the back and was attempting to crawl through the snow to the house, leaving a wide and scarlet track behind it. She forced herself not to meet its gaze.

Behind the stable a big black car was parked, half hidden by the old midden wall. There was an unreasonable amount of blood in the snow, and it wasn’t all the dog’s. A man lay on the ground with his face downward, unconscious but alive to judge by his labored breathing, and a few meters from him another man sat on the ground, half bent over a third man, who was Søren. Had they shot each other? She couldn’t see a gun.

She had recognized Søren immediately even though she couldn’t see his face, just his back and neck. She fell to her knees next to him.

“Help,” said the man who was still sitting. It was not a plea for himself but more of a calm instruction. “Shot. Chest. Get help. Him.”

The telegram style was clearly caused by linguistic difficulties, not panic, though she could see that he himself was bleeding pretty heavily from a wound in the thigh.

I can’t see anything, she thought. How can I help him when I can’t
see anything?

Søren was breathing, but not well. There was a bubbling sound.

“Let me,” she said. In Danish. Of course it didn’t help. “I’m a nurse,” she attempted in English. “Let me take a look.”

She was able to turn him over partially so she could see his face. His eyes reacted when he saw her, but he was gasping too hard for air to be able to speak. Blue lips. Hypoxia. She suddenly realized that what looked like red and white snowflakes on his chest was down—from where the shot had torn a hole in his jacket. Entry wound and no exit wound. His back had not been bloody. Pneumothorax. The lung had been punctured and was in the process of collapsing. With every breath he took, he was dragging air through the hole, air that was caught between the lung membrane, compressing the lung further.

A syringe, she thought, where the hell am I going to find a syringe? The only place there was even the tiniest chance of finding something she could use was in the house.

“I’ll be right back,” she said to Søren’s conscious gaze. She ran, trying to calculate how many minutes he had left.

The gun was so large that the Witch had to use both her ancient hands to hold it. Natasha shrank down with Katerina in her arms, much too close, and with only the snow, the darkness and the rose hedge for cover. She was terrified that the Witch would hear Katerina’s breathing, but it seemed as if the old woman only had eyes for Anna. The light from the gable illuminated Anna’s hair and face and made the red ski suit glow like a torch in the middle of the whirling whiteness of the blizzard. Natasha couldn’t see the Witch’s face. Only the fur and the boots with the too-high heels that sank into the packed snow with every step the old woman took, making deep, precise holes, like punctures.