The Considerate Killer by Agnete Friis, Lene Kaaberbøl Page A

even the pressure. He was just barely able to fight his body’s intense impulse.
    The world around him had turned a dusty grey. He had left the bottom and was surrounded by water on all sides now and in a brief confused and panicked moment he lost his sense of up and down. Then he saw Vadim’s body floating in the sunlight above him—on his way up.
    Vincent had stayed down too long.
    His chest kicked again, and he instinctively reached his arms above his head and stretched toward the light. Lashed out with his arms and legs. But nothing happened. He stayed where he was, floating right above the bottom of the sea.
    The lead belt, he thought. I have to get that belt off.
    He fumbled with the buckle, which slipped under his soft and slippery fingers. Impossible to open. Fucking impossible. He hurt inside now, and someplace far, far down in his consciousness he began to cry. Because he was lost. Because he was going to die and would never see Bea again.
    An enormous school of black-and-white-striped damsel fish danced around him now, and his chest gulped in a bit of salt water. He couldn’t prevent it. Dark blotches began to creep across his vision. Then something hard and living hit his shoulder and knocked him backward the second before all light disappeared from the world.
    â€œYou’re an idiot. You know that, right?”
    Vadim’s voice and the blue sky. A boat that rocked beneath him, and a painful contraction in his abdomen which made him curl up and vomit. The taste of saltwater and stomach acid.
    â€œVincent?”
    Victor’s face slid in front of the blue sky. His gaze was serious, and he placed his fingers against Vincent’s throat and counted his pulse beats quietly out loud with the sun surrounding his head like a halo. The light was so sharp that Vincent had to squint.
    â€œIt was Big V who got you up,” said Vadim. He stood right behind Victor and fiddled with the diving gear. “What on earth were you doing, fumbling around down there on the bottom? You could have got yourself killed.”
    â€œThe belt . . .” It hurt his throat to talk. Actually it hurt in his entire skull and also in his chest. “I couldn’t get the belt off.”
    Vadim lifted his head and looked at him with a half smile.
    â€œBut you got the ring, my man. Well fought. Brothers in arms, eh!”
    â€œWe’re not at war.”
    Victor’s voice sounded cold and severe, unusually so.
    Vincent closed his eyes and remained lying in the bottom of the boat, letting the sun bake his body while they drifted across the shallow part of the reef. Vadim jumped in with his harpoon and reappeared shortly afterward with two large silver-colored milkfish that still wriggled on the spear when he threw them down to Vincent on the bottom of the boat. The long, powerful tail fins flapped against the hull.
    Vadim climbed out with the water dripping from his slippery body and his knee-length bathing trunks and then, as on a sudden impulse, he bent over Vincent and tousled his hair.
    â€œI love you, man,” he said darkly. “Never doubt it.”
    They sat silently on the way home across the darkening oil-smooth water.

H ello, Nina-girl.”
    He came in the door, hung his windbreaker on the hook, and then opened his arms as wide as he could, as if there had to be room not just for her but also for the rest of the world. His eyes were warm and happy. It was a good day.
    â€œDaddy?” Her heart did an uncertain summersault, because she thought . . . there was something . . . wasn’t he . . .
    But her longing wiped away all reservations. She melted into an embrace that pushed both the fear of dying and the headache into the background. His hands were warm. He smelled a little of sweat and even more of freshly worked wood. He must have come directly from his shop class, the subject he liked to teach best of all. That was where he let loose and charmed even the most uncertain