Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (21 page)

The driver tried without success to get everyone to stay inside. Within five minutes Sándor was the only still obediently sitting in his seat. The rest were spread out like a motley human blanket across the grassy slope, peeing, talking, stretching, and arguing. Some of them started walking toward the highway rest stop cafeteria they could see a few hundred meters away. The arguments centered on the driver, who was by turns yelling futilely at the passengers, staring probingly at the engine, and trying to reach someone on his mobile phone.

Finally Sándor got up, too. His knee hurt after having been wedged in the same position for more than twenty-four hours. He felt greasy and unkempt, and every cell in his body was screaming for coffee. His phone also really needed a charge. The cafeteria was tempting, but he didn’t have any Euros or his credit card. Or … did he? The driver’s jacket was hanging on a hook behind the driver’s seat.

He felt oddly delinquent, sticking his hand in another man’s pocket, even though the only thing he was planning to steal was something that belonged to him. He glanced out the windscreen, but no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to him. His card was in the middle of a bunch of others in a plastic pouch—he obviously wasn’t the only one whose finances the driver was “looking after.”

Sándor stuffed the pouch with the other cards back in the pocket of the unattended jacket, pulled the charger out of his bag, and exited the minibus. Outside, the morning traffic was edging its way around the
broken-down bus by driving partly on the shoulder, and the mist over the road was so heavy it almost felt like rain. The cafeteria sign, a big yellow coffee cup with wisps of white steam in artistically swooping neon, shone like a lighthouse through the fog.

Sándor got in line at the checkout and splurged on a cellophane-wrapped croissant along with his coveted cup of coffee, placing both on his plastic tray. He realized a little late that he didn’t have any ID if the girl at the register didn’t automatically accept his Hungarian Visa card, but luckily she did. Given that they were right off the E55, they probably saw a little of everything here, and even at German autobahn prices, the price of his breakfast was small change to them.

He spotted a free table with—hallelujah—an available socket, and gratefully slid onto the red vinyl seat. The coffee smelled amazing. The croissant tasted like cotton.

As he sat there imagining he could feel the caffeine rushing to his deprived cells and filling them up, a text message appeared on his resurrected phone with a beep. At first he couldn’t tell who it was from, because the number was a different one from what Tamás had given him that evening on Szigony Street, and there was no sender name.
WHY AREN’T YOU COMING
, it said in desperate all caps. “Didn’t you see my e-mail? Help me. I’m dying!”

The last part was in Romany—“
Te merav!
”—and that was what made him realize the message was from Tamás. He stared at the phone’s miniature bluish-white screen. He had heard the phrase so often, in Galbeno and also in the Gypsy neighborhood in the Eighth District.
Te merav, te merav. It’s so hot, I’m dying. I’m so tired, I’m dying. Give me a cup of coffee, I’m dying.…
A hyperbolic expression his Hungarian stepmother would have found inappropriate, if she could’ve understood it, that is. But was this hyperbole, or did Tamás really mean it? There was a desperate quality to the rest of his message that made Sándor think this was more than merely an expression.

He tried calling the number, and it rang, but no one answered.

He hadn’t checked his e-mail in almost a week now, since he no longer had a computer. The NBH had it. He was going to have to find an Internet café somewhere if he wanted to read the e-mail Tamás had apparently sent him.

Te merav
. He hoped Tamás was just being melodramatic.

KOU-LARSEN WAS STANDING
in his garden, looking at those damned minarets. He couldn’t believe they had been allowed to build them that tall, right next to a residential neighborhood. Someone in his old office had completely dropped the ball, he decided. The zoning laws called for low residential structures and scattered recreational areas. Not a word about prayer towers.

Maybe he could call and complain? After all, he still knew a few people at the planning office.

“Jørgen?” Helle called.

“Yes?” he replied.

“Coffee.”

He obediently slunk back in through the sliding glass doors—the trim around them needed painting again, he noted—and took his place by the coffee table. There was marble cake, but it didn’t look homemade. And Helle seemed a little absent-minded, pouring their coffee into their everyday mugs from the Arabia set.

“I talked to the lawyer,” he said. “That young Ahlegaard. He says he knows a decent law firm in Marbella if we want to sue.”

“Why would we?” she asked.

“To get the money back,” he said patiently.

“But I’m happy about the apartment.”

Skou-Larsen gave up. He couldn’t make her understand that there was no apartment and there wasn’t going to be one, at least not at the address specified in that fancy brochure she had. He poured cream into his coffee and took a sip. It tasted strange.

“What’s in the coffee?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“It doesn’t taste the way it usually does.”

“That’s because it’s decaf. And that’s fat-free milk, not cream.”

He felt oddly deceived.

“Decaf?”

“Yes, it doesn’t cause as much stomach acid.”

Lately he had been having a little bit of a burning sensation just behind his breastbone, and the doctor had said it was something called reflux. He thought that sounded like some kind of cleaning product. Reflux: cleans like a white tornado! But it turned out it was the acid in his stomach rising up and irritating his esophagus, and he had been instructed to cut back on coffee, tea, alcohol, chocolate, and orange juice. And what was that other thing? Peppermint. He never ate peppermint. Who the heck ate so much peppermint that it could be a problem? And in the bedroom they had put wooden blocks under the legs of the bed at the headboard to elevate it, so now he felt like he was constantly sliding down toward the foot of the bed.

“It doesn’t taste like real coffee,” he said, setting down his cup.

She stood up abruptly.

“Well then don’t drink it,” she snapped, disappearing into the kitchen.

He sat there for a bit, looking at the coffee table. At the meticulously arranged slices of marble cake and the bowl of currant cookies, the cream jug, which had now become a skim milk jug instead, the napkins, the cake plates. It had been wrong of him to complain about the coffee. She had only done it because she cared about his health.

So go out and apologize, he told himself. But he just couldn’t make himself do it. It wasn’t just Helle and the decaf. It was the damn minarets in the garden, the scam artist brochures on the nightstand, those darned wooden blocks that made him wake up with a sore back, and then of course the biggest injustice of them all, death.

Just when exactly had he stopped calling the shots in his own life?

Maybe he never had. Maybe free will had been an illusion the whole time, the biggest scam of them all.

He got up and went into the hallway.

“I’m going for a walk around the lake,” he called, in the direction of the kitchen door. He waited for a while to see if there would be a response. There wasn’t.

H
E DIDN’T GO
down to the lake after all. He wasn’t in the mood for all those joggers. Instead he walked defiantly over to the construction site. They were pulling the tarpaulins off the domed roof now. The gate was ajar, and there was no one in the little trailer that served as a kind of guard hut by the entrance. It didn’t make much of a difference, anyway. Skou-Larsen had noticed that holes had been cut in the wire fence in two different locations on the side facing Lundedalsvej. There was a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but he didn’t feel like he was trespassing. This building was very much his business. It was marring his view and upsetting his wife.

“Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Mr. Skou-Larsen, right?”

He turned around, feeling a little guilty in spite of the justifications he had just been reviewing in his mind. An alien in a cylindrical helmet and hazmat suit that covered his entire body stood before him.

“Ah, yes, excuse me,” the alien said, flipping off his helmet. “It’s not easy to recognize someone in this getup. We’re just removing asbestos panels from the old ceilings.”

Skou-Larsen contemplated the ruddy face and the thinning flaxen hair that came into view. Everything about the face was a little plump and round, like those cartoons of hysterically happy pigs that used to decorate the sides of butchers’ vans in the old days. As if nothing could be funnier than being strung up by your hindquarters and having your throat slit.

“Ah, yes. Hello,” he said tentatively. “It’s been a long time.”

“It certainly has. Are you still working in the planning office?”

“No. I’ve been retired for several years.”

“How time flies! I switched over to the private sector myself. Have my own company now. We specialize in asbestos removal.” The man gestured toward one of the cars haphazardly parked in the area in front of the future cultural center. Jansen Enterprises, it said, which finally jogged Skou-Larsen’s memory. Preben Jansen, he worked in maintenance and engineering. Or at least he had back when Skou-Larsen used to occasionally run into him in the course of duty.

“Congratulations,” Skou-Larsen said.

“Thanks. To what do we owe the honor?”

That was, of course, a polite way of saying, “What are you doing here?,” but then Skou-Larsen valued politeness.

“Uh, I live nearby,” he said, pointing toward Elmehøjvej. “So I’m curious
to see what all this is turning into. I mean, when you’ve worked with construction and building permits your whole life.…” A thought suddenly hit him. What if they didn’t have a permit to build this high, after all? It had happened before. People sometimes thought absolution was easier than permission. Or maybe they had broken other rules—fire safety or some such, anything at all that could be used to file a complaint.… Maybe he could still find some grounds for objection that would stop the project, or at least delay it. “Do you think I could come in to see how it’s coming along? People say it’s going to be really stunning. A little multicultural gem.” Was he laying it on too thick? No, Jansen just nodded.

“The architect is brilliant. He’s done several mosques in Europe.” His round, hurray-I’m-about-to-be-slaughtered pig face was still furrowed with hesitation, but then he appeared to make a decision. “Oh, sure, why not. It’s about time for us to call it a day anyway. Just follow me, Mr. Skou-Larsen, and I’ll see if we can’t give you a little tour.”

T
HE OLD FACTORY
building formed the flat-roofed reception area, now significantly renovated with arched windows, gleaming pine woodwork, and ornamental tiles. The cloakroom and lavatories were being installed at one end of the reception hall; at the other end was quite a plain-looking meeting room with a small kitchenette. Skou-Larsen inspected and made mental notes. They weren’t done with the ceilings yet, and there were still drop cloths and plastic covering the tile floor.

“We’re a little behind on the ceilings,” Jansen said. “They didn’t realize there was asbestos in the old panels until quite late—they hadn’t been properly registered, I guess. And that’s when we were called in.”

“Did they do an expanded workplace health hazard evaluation?” Skou-Larsen asked automatically. As soon as asbestos was involved a special workplace evaluation was mandatory.

“Hey, I thought you were retired?” Jansen said with a smile, which Skou-Larsen hurriedly returned.

“Old habits,” he said. “Sorry. Of course it’s none of my business.” But now the asbestos rules were swirling around in his head; there were so many potential oversights and minor legal violations. If a seventeen-year-old apprentice so much as walked through the site, for example.…