He knocked on the door a couple of times before Eivind came and opened it. He was a changed man, a pale, unshaven shadow of himself, though fortunately not hostile like last time. In fact, his face seemed to light up when he saw who it was.
“Marco, my goodness,” he exclaimed. “Where have you been, my boy? Kaj and I have been worried sick. Look at the state of you, you look dreadful. Come in, I’ll find you some clean clothes.”
Marco felt his body relax a bit. His lips began to quiver. Being here felt so nice, and what a relief it was to hear kind words and to see Eivind smile.
“Guess what, Kaj?” Eivind shouted. “Marco’s come back, can you believe our luck?”
Then he heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock behind him.
Instinctively he wheeled round to see Eivind with the key in his hand and a quite different, threatening look in his eye, his body bent forward as though he were about to charge at him.
Marco turned immediately to make a dash for the kitchen, but was stopped in his tracks by a blow to the head that sent him to the floor in a heap.
“Hold him down, Eivind,” Kaj commanded, getting down on his knees, pulling Marco’s arms toward him and winding something tightly around his wrists.
Marco tried to focus, but inside his head a blitzkrieg of light all but filtered out his surroundings, making them appear blurred and distorted.
Reflexively he tried in vain to draw his arms in toward his body and twist round, only to hear a rush in his ear as a flurry of blows rained down on him.
“Ow!” he cried, and then began sobbing. “Why are you doing this? I haven’t done anything. I’ll go again, don’t worry, I just wanted to fetch…” But the pummeling continued.
Now he felt Eivind’s bony knee digging into his rib cage, making it almost impossible to breathe.
“OK, we’ve got him,” came the sound of Eivind’s voice above him. “Come straightaway, and hurry.”
Marco saw the two men clearly now. Eivind with the mobile in his hand, straddling his midriff, and Kaj crouching in front of his head with a tight grip on his lower arms. Kaj didn’t look well. His face was swollen and battered, with dark bruises fanning out over the delicate skin of his neck.
Marco lay still and felt the tears running down his cheeks as he looked into Eivind’s desperate eyes. Eivind, of whom he had been so fond.
He, too, had abandoned him.
Perhaps it was the tears, or perhaps the fact that Marco seemed so small and helpless, lying beneath the two men. All of a sudden it was as if Eivind saw him for who he was: their boy, whom they had taught to write and speak better Danish and play cards, and to believe that he had a future ahead of him like everyone else.
As this dawned on him, Eivind’s tired features transformed from furrows of anger and frustration to searching eyes and quivering lips. Then, finally, tears burst forth to follow their path through the lines of his aging face.
“I don’t know what you’ve done to them, Marco,” he stammered between sobs. “But if you don’t vanish from our lives for good, they’ll come back again, and we’ll never be able to cope with it. That’s why we have to hand you over to them. I hope to heaven they do you no harm.”
Kaj showed less compassion. “I hope they do to you what they did to me. Do you understand, Marco? They’ve destroyed our lives. We’re too frightened to even go to work anymore and it’s all your fault.”
Marco shook his head. They were mistaken. That wasn’t how it was. It wasn’t like that at all.
He squeezed his eyes shut and wriggled his body slightly so Eivind could tell he would remain still if only he wouldn’t press his knee so hard against his chest.
He knew that in five minutes they would be here because they were all over the neighborhood. Slavs, Balts, Africans, Zola’s people, it didn’t matter which of the gangs came, the result would be the same. Zola had demonstrated with the utmost clarity to what lengths he was prepared to go, and the people working for him certainly had as well.
He turned his head to the side as slowly as he could, his eyes scanning the room for possibilities. They were few.
On the wall above him was a little shelf with a lamp on it, a pair of leather gloves and an oval-shaped bowl containing a few coins and the keys to the storage room in the basement. He knew this shelf well. The cord of the lamp ran up the wall adjacent to his knee, and by his feet were galoshes and the slippers Marco had always worn indoors. Nothing of use to him here.
Now he could tell how Eivind’s position above his body was growing uncomfortable for him because he kept shifting his weight, turning his knees outward until his lower legs were almost resting flat on the floor.
Marco lay quiet as a mouse. Any moment now, Eivind would try to adjust his position once more and then he needed to be ready, for he would have no other chances.
He breathed deeper, and deeper still, tensing his buttocks and abdomen slowly so Eivind wouldn’t notice, and at the same time he cautiously drew his arms inward, prompting Kaj to tighten his grip. Everything depended on Kaj not letting go.
At the same moment the toes of Eivind’s shoes made contact with the floor, Marco thrust his hips upward with all his might and wrenched his arms to his sides. The result was enormous, as was the sound of the two men’s heads colliding above him.
Eivind slumped to the side, toward the shelf, dislodging its contents onto the floor, while Kaj sank backward, his legs buckled beneath him. Both howled with pain, but their wailing did nothing to stop Marco as he kicked Eivind hard in the shoulder, sending him sliding against the baseboard.
Now he was free and leaped to his feet.
Kaj reached out to grab his leg, but Marco kicked his arm back against the wall.
Then he heard a car screech to a halt outside. By the time its door slammed shut he was already in the kitchen. Here, with his heart pounding in his chest, he realized the door to the back stairs was locked and the key wasn’t sitting in the keyhole. So he grabbed a kitchen knife, climbed onto the counter, opened the window onto the backyard, and jumped.
He heard the sound of fists hammering against the front door and Kaj and Eivind’s pitiful attempts to get to their feet and open up.
It was difficult to climb onto the roof of the bike shed with his hands tied and also hold on to the knife. Only when he had crossed through two more backyards and had slipped into the labyrinth of side streets did he dare to stop and sever the bond around his wrists.
He made it precisely twenty meters down the street before he saw the Balts at the other end. They hadn’t seen him yet, but it was only a matter of seconds.
So he ducked into the nearest stairwell where he stood with his back pressed up against the blue-painted door of a massage parlor and kicked at it with his heel.
“Open up, open up, open up,” he repeated silently, in time with each kick.
Now he could sense someone running toward the place where he stood as cries erupted at the other end of the street.
“Open up, please, open up.”
Then he heard a sound behind the door.
“Who is it?” a voice asked, in heavily accented Danish.
“Help me. I’m only a boy and there are people after me,” he whispered.
A moment passed as the thudding feet against pavement flagstones grew ever louder. And then the door opened, so suddenly that he fell backward into the room.
“Close the door, close the door,” he pleaded, lying on his back and looking straight into the sleepy face of an Asian girl without makeup.
She did as he asked, and five seconds later the man outside dashed past.
She called herself Marlene, though her name was doubtless something else. She drew him over to a blue-striped sofa beneath a framed price list on the wall itemizing massage services in a variety of languages. She sat him down so he could catch his breath and have a good cry.