Death of a Nightingale Read Free

which was lying on the floor next to the bed along with his wallet and keys. Neat little bedside tables, his and hers, were not part of the apartment’s inventory. The only place where she had made an effort was in Anton’s and Ida’s rooms, and they still hadn’t turned out right. Everything was too tidy. It lacked the clutter of toys and discarded clothing, the scratches on the wall from hockey sticks and lightsabers, the remnants of stickers that wouldn’t quite come off, odd splotches from overturned soda cans and soap bubble experiments. Quite simply, it lacked children. She hadn’t managed to make it more than a temporary refuge. Home was still the apartment in Fejøgade, and that was where they had their life.
    She got up and headed for the bathroom. A small bathtub that permitted only sit-up baths, yellowing white tiles from the ’50s, and if you insisted on having a washing machine in there, you had to accept that you were going to bang your knees against it every time you sat on the toilet. But to sit in a Laundromat at an ungodly hour to have clean clothes for the next day … No, thank you. “Been there, done that,” as Ida would have said.
    After peeing, Nina gargled with chlorhexidine. She was susceptible to thrush and other mouth infections after her attack of radiationillness the year before. All in all, her resistance was not what it had been, she noted dryly. Otherwise Magnus probably wouldn’t be lying in her bed now. The doctor and the nurse. Damn. How much more clichéd could you get?
    He had just been through a divorce. So had she. They were both consenting adults and all that. But she knew perfectly well that it wasn’t because they were adults. It was because they were both so unbearably lonely that any kind of intimacy was better than nothing.
    Through the bathroom door she could hear his voice change from Saturday grogginess to professional clarity, and a rush of alarm raced through her. She spat out the petroleum-blue mouthwash into the sink, plucked yesterday’s T-shirt from the dirty laundry basket and pulled it on, then opened the door.
    He was getting dressed, the cell phone still pressed to his ear.
    “Okay,” he said. “No, don’t give her any more. I’m on my way.”
    “Is it Rina?” she asked with an odd kind of pseudomaternal instinct. There were around 200 females at the Coal-House Camp, yet Rina was the first one she thought of.
    “They’ve given her several doses of Bricanyl,” he said. “But they can still hear crackling on auscultation, and she’s hyperventilating.”
    Sweet Jesus, it was Rina.
    “What happened?”
    “Everything,” he said. “Come on.”

 
    Natasha had ended up on the wrong side of the lake, and there was only one way to deal with that. She had to get hold of a car.
    The realization had been gnawing at her since the previous evening, or rather the previous night, because at that point it had been almost 2 A.M. , and even if she had dared take a train or bus, they weren’t running any longer, at least not to where she was going.
    She had been so tired that her bones hurt. In particular her knees and the small of her back ached from the many freezing kilometers, and she knew that she couldn’t walk much farther without resting.
    Most of the houses on the quiet street lay dark and closed behind the snowy hedges. But she could hear music and party noises and beery shouts, and when she got to the next street corner, she saw three young men peeing into a hedge outside a whitewashed house that was alight with boozy festivities. She stopped, half sheltered by the fence of the corner lot, leaning for a moment against the cold tar-black planks.
    “Laa, la-laa, la-laa …” roared one of the peeing men, loudly and in no key known to man. “Laa, la-aa, la-laaa … Come on!”
    The two others joined in, which didn’t make it any more tuneful.
    “We are the champions, my friend …”
    She realized that they were celebrating some kind of