For some reason, something collapses inside her. She can’t hold back her tears any longer and starts to cry without making a sound.
He stands there. What does he want? He said something about reading a magazine. There is a small pile of Eurowoman on the coffee table. She picks up a copy and opens it up, holding it in front of her face. Finally he moves away.
He’s over by Malene’s bookshelf now. She hears him take out a few books, leaf through them and toss them to the floor. Iben peers at him from behind the magazine. He raises his arm and his command is like a blow: ‘Read!’
Iben turns her eyes to the pages in front of her, but the text is blurring. Is there some truth in what he has told her? Why else would he risk coming to Denmark?
It’s Malene’s fault if I die now, Iben thinks. It’s Malene who’s been in touch with Zigic, not Camilla. And, despite what the others think, I’m not the one who’s been paranoid. In fact, I’m the only one who has faced up to reality.
There’s something else: this means that it wasn’t me sending those emails after all. I did remember writing them, at least I thought I did because it all seemed so real, so vivid and convincing, but that was just a fantasy. Now it’s all gone. But then was it Malene who sent them? Ever since I came back from Kenya she’s been full of resentment towards me. Why shouldn’t it have been her?
Zigic has finished going through the contents of the shelf. He found a box of home-made CDs, which he puts down next to Pilot Jacket. If Iben heard correctly, Zigic calls Pilot Jacket ‘Nenad’. She has the impression that Nenad is uneasy, presumably because he cannot find the file.
Zigic disappears into the bedroom and starts rummaging. She’s alone with Nenad, whose back is turned. Why aren’t they taking any precautions to stop her from trying to escape? They haven’t even searched her; they don’t know that she has a knife hidden away. Maybe they don’t give a damn because they are convinced of their own power?
Her common sense is fading. She desperately wants to believe that her executioners are going to let her live — that, after all, a deal will really be possible. But if her work at the DCGI has taught her anything, it is that genocide perpetrators always give their victims a glimmer of hope that they’ll survive if they cooperate and don’t provoke anger. This illusion allows the perpetrators to peacefully take the victims’ weapons and slowly oppress them until they are incapable of resistance. In the end their execution is as easy and inevitable as swatting a fly.
Iben urges herself to accept the truth of her situation. There is no hope. After all, the inmates in the Warsaw ghetto and the Sobibor camp revolted only when they faced up to the fact they had nothing to lose.
Nenad still sits facing in the other direction.
She gets up, slowly and soundlessly. Then she takes a step past the coffee table.
Nenad’s voice is loud. ‘No!’
Zigic suddenly appears at the door. Iben practically falls down onto the sofa and quickly raises the magazine to her face. Blindly, she waits for what will happen next, but when she peeps out from behind the pages, Zigic has returned to the bedroom. She stares at an article about handbags. How did they know? Did Nenad see her image reflected in something shiny on Malene’s desk? Was Zigic merely passing by?
A reel is playing in her head showing the landscape of Bosnia, the camps and buildings, the corpses excavated from mass graves — piles of corpses with cracked skulls and cut-off fingers; close-ups of the better-preserved bodies; the black marks of the ties that held straining torture victims to their chairs.
She has spent two years trying to understand men like the ones now in Malene’s flat. Is the smell of evil around them different from the smell of ordinary people? All she can get a whiff of is a mixture of aftershave and deodorant — expensive aftershave and deodorant. Zigic has enough money.
Zigic returns to the sitting room and walks around testing Malene’s chairs, lifting them and shaking them. He slams several of the chairs against the floor, selects one, places it in the middle of the floor and then turns to Iben. ‘Do you have any string?’
‘There might be some in the fourth drawer down next to the kitchen sink.’ Iben has no intention of telling him that there’s some in Malene’s desk.
When he goes to fetch it, she’ll be alone with Nenad for a few seconds, her last chance before they tie her down and start torturing her. She has to run for the front door. Losing them in the hallway and the stairwell is going to be nearly impossible, but she forces herself to remember Warsaw. And Sobibor.
Her whole body tenses. She hides her face behind the magazine. They mustn’t notice. Now she leans forward. Her heels against the floor.
Only Zigic does not go to the kitchen. Nenad goes instead. ‘I’ll fix some coffee as well.’
Zigic and Iben listen to Nenad opening and closing drawers in the kitchen.
‘There’s nothing here!’
Zigic suddenly remembers seeing a ball of string. He shuffles through the desk contents scattered on the floor and finds it under the radiator. He walks to the chair and turns to Iben.
‘Malene, come over here. We’ve got to leave you alone for a moment. We won’t be long. But I’m afraid I will have to tie you to a chair.’
It doesn’t matter whether he’s lying or not, and he knows it. What can she do except hope that her common sense, all her instincts, are mistaken?
While Zigic ties her arms behind her back, Nenad pops his head around the kitchen door. The scene doesn’t bother him at all — it must be routine. ‘Hey, where’s your coffee?’
Iben finds it hard to speak, her vocal cords seem coated with thick glue. ‘In the jar … by the window sill.’
Nenad seems to have another idea. He looks pleased with himself and cocks an eyebrow. ‘You have any cakes or biscuits?’
‘No.’
Zigic tightens the string. It cuts into her wrists and hurts badly — nothing compared to the pain to come. Soon he’ll discover her knife.
‘You know, there are some biscuits. Only three left. He’s probably eating them all right now.’
Zigic seems to find that funny. He yanks hard at the string to make sure she can’t move and wanders off to the kitchen.
Iben kicks her right leg up under the chair as far as it can go, reaches for the knife and grabs it. It’s something she has practised many times. She nicks herself as she jabs the tip of the knife under the string but suddenly her arms are free and she can stand up.
At lightning speed she slips soundlessly into the hallway. She’s able to reach the door without being discovered.
Denim Suit, however, is guarding the door downstairs. The moment she turns the dead bolt to the flat they’ll hear it in the kitchen. A couple of deep breaths. Someone in the kitchen throws something; she hears them run.
She turns the lock and almost flies down Malene’s stairwell, her feet barely touching the steps. They’re only a few metres behind her. As she throws herself around a turn in the staircase, she hits the handrail and almost tumbles into an endless fall. She grabs the handrail with her bloodied hands to stop her body from crashing down the steps and the knife clatters to the ground. This near-fall speeds her descent, but she has to stoop to pick up her knife.
The men behind her call out in Serbian to their guard below.
He shouts back: ‘OK!’
She’s already on the first-floor landing when he comes into view, walking slowly up towards her. He’s a big man.
She remembers exactly what the yard looked like.
If, like Rasmus, you’re on your way down the stairs and shoot out through the window, your body will take off to the right and become skewered on the fence posts, but if you’re on your way up, the angle of the fall should be different. It should be possible to miss the wide steel railings and land on the tarmac, clear of the fence.