Free The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl Page B

Thin as a boy, with very short dark hair; for a moment he imagined sticking his cock into something like that, but who would want to, unless they were queer? Bloody boy-bitch. He would stick her, all right, but with something else.
    HE CALLED THE Dane right away. Was fed a truckload of excuses about delays and honest intentions. Could he believe the man? He didn’t know. Anger was still guttering in his stomach as he walked up the steps to the street, past three Russians engaged in a blatant dope deal. Morons. Couldn’t they be just a little discrete? The biggest one, obviously meant to be the muscle, cast a nervous eye over Jučas. It improved his mood a fraction. Look your fill, he thought. I’m bigger than you are, pal.
    Outside in the street, heat surged from the pavement and the sun-warmed bricks. The leather jacket had been a bad choice, but he’d thought Denmark would be colder, and now he didn’t really feel he could take it off. He sweated a lot, people did when they were in good shape, and he didn’t like Barbara to see him with huge underarm stains on his shirt.
    “Andrius?” Barbara called to him through the open car window. “Is it okay?”
    He forced himself to take long deep breaths. Couldn’t quite produce a smile, but he did manage to ease his grip on the car keys.
    “Yes.” Deep breaths. Easy now. “He says it’s a mistake. He is on his way home, and when he gets here, we will get our money.”
    “That’s good.” Barbara was watching him with her head cocked slightly to one side. For some reason, it made her neck look even longer. More elegant. She was the only one who ever called him by his given name. Everyone else just called him Jučas. He didn’t event think of himself as Andrius, and hadn’t since his Granny died and he was sent to Vilnius to live with his father because no one had any idea what else might be done with him. His father rarely called him by name at all, it had been either “boy” or “brat,” according to his mood. Later, in the orphanage, everyone had gone by their last name.
    He let himself drop into the front seat next to her, wincing at the contact with the sun-scorched fabric. The Mitsubishi had a certain lived-in appearance after two days on the road. Paper mugs and sandwich bags from German Raststellen littered the floor, and the food-smeared car seat the boy had been strapped into gave off a sour odor of pee. He really ought to dismantle it and sling it in the back of the van, but right now the fug was too much for him and he didn’t want to spend another minute in the car.
    “Are you hungry?” he said. “We might as well do something while we wait for him to call.”
    Suddenly, Barbara’s face came alive.
    “Tivoli!” she said. “Could we go there? I was looking through the fence earlier, and it all looks so beautiful.”
    He had not the slightest wish to endure the wait surrounded by screaming toddlers, cotton candy, and balloon vendors, but the surge of expectation in her eyes melted his resolve. They paid a day’s wage to get in, and ate a pizza that only set him back about seven or eight times as much as it would have cost him in Vilnius. But Barbara was loving every minute. She smiled more than she had done at any time during the long tense drive here, and his nerves began to settle. Perhaps everything would still be all right in the end. It might be just a misunderstanding. After all, if the Dane was stuck in a plane and couldn’t do much, it wasn’t surprising somebody screwed up. He would pay. He had said so. And if he didn’t, Jučas knew where he lived.
    “There’s a bit of oregano on your chin,” said Barbara. “No, let me… .” She blotted the corner of his mouth gently with the red-and-white-checkered napkin, smiling into his eyes so that the rage curled up inside him and went to sleep.
    Later they walked around a ridiculous little lake in which someone had placed a disproportionate schooner, so large it would hardly be able