Free The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl

dark and distant. Then there was just silence, real silence, as the connection was finally severed.
    Nina exhaled soundlessly and let the phone slip back into her bag on the floor. Then she eased herself away from the boy and stood up. Her heart beat a hard, cantering rhythm, and she needed to move, as if the disquiet she felt could be dispelled by mere motion. She stooped to snatch up the phone once more and pressed a new number while pacing up and down, imposing her own restlessness on the whole room.
    He was listed merely as “Peter” in her phone book, and actually that was almost as much as she knew about him, except that he lived somewhere in Vanløse. He was the only contact in the network whose number she had. Normally it was the other way around—they called her. The people the network looked after could not saunter into the office of their local GP, or take their children to the emergency room if they were ill. Could not, in fact, approach authority in any form. So when there was need, Nina was sent for, or Allan. Or so it had been. Might she perhaps ask Magnus to step in, if Allan was serious about quitting? Unfortunately, though, Magnus did not have access to a handily secluded private practice in Vedbæk.
    “Hi, this is Peter,” announced a happy-sounding voice, and Nina nearly said “Hi” herself when the voice went on without pausing: “I am on holiday from the fifteenth of August to the twenty-ninth, so you’ll just have to do without me!”
    Bloody hell. Nina rested her forehead against the wall, closing her eyes for a minute. She had never done this bit before. Not with an unaccompanied child. The network would sometimes find some basement room or empty summerhouse for a family to stay in, or help them across to Sweden—that wasn’t too complicated. Such people could, after all, look after themselves in most respects. But was there anyone out there who would take on an abandoned three-year-old? And if there was, how would she find them?
    Nina opened her eyes, examining the boy in a slightly different way. He could come from anywhere, she thought. Anywhere in Northern or Eastern Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany. She drew a hand through her own short, dark hair, which felt sticky and damp in the humid air. She would be wiser once the boy woke up, she supposed; meanwhile, she just had to get hold of Karin. She was the one who had started all this, and Nina had no doubts that Karin knew more than she had been willing to say when she’d sat there in Magasin’s cafeteria, nervously twisting her coffee cup.
    This time, she let the phone ring until it stopped, but Karin still didn’t answer, and Nina brushed at the faintly lit display with a restless finger, as if to clear away invisible dust.
    The boy stirred, and the blanket slipped to reveal a naked shoulder.
    Clothes, thought Nina, and felt relief at having a practical solution to focus on. She had to get some clothes for the boy so they wouldn’t draw any more attention than they had to. She peered at the IV bag. Nearly empty, which meant she would be able to get out of here soon.
    She tried Karin once more. Same depressing lack of results.
    Why the hell couldn’t the woman just answer her phone?

J UČAS KNEW HIS rage was both a weakness and a strength.
    When he was training he could sometimes use it to wring the last reserves from his body, and achieve those explosions of force that made his blood throb in a way that was almost better than sex. Following a set like that, he could see it: the veins lay on top of his muscles like plastic tubing, and the pump was visible, bang bang bang, just as he felt it in every fiber. God, he loved that feeling. In such moments he felt strong, and he had to supress a desire to leap onto the bench and yell out his invulnerability to the world, like some action hero from the American films he liked to watch: You don’t fuck with me, man .
    At other times, the rage helped him do things he didn’t really