Read The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel for Free Online

nodded to the others in the van who were sitting with their backs against the walls, but no one nodded back. He was used to that. They were all dead tired.
    Tired of the days, of life, and of themselves.
    Marco studied the group. One or two were still wet from the rain and sat shivering with cold. If he hadn’t known better he might have taken several of them to be ill, skinny and consumptive as they looked. It was no cheerful sight, but then not much was, on a clammy November day in Denmark.
    “How’d you do today?” asked Samuel, who was leaning against the wall behind the cab.
    Marco counted in his head.
    “I made four separate deliveries. The second time alone was over five hundred kroner. I think about thirteen or fourteen hundred in all, with the three hundred I’ve got in my pocket.”
    “I did about eight hundred,” said Miryam, the eldest of them. She always drew a sympathetic response with her bad leg. That kind of thing was good at boosting turnover.
    “I only got sixty,” said Samuel, in such a quiet voice that everyone heard him. “No one wants to give me anything anymore.”
    Ten pairs of eyes looked at him with pity. He was in for a hard time once they got back to Zola.
    “Then take this,” Marco said, handing him two hundred-kroner notes. He was the only one to do so, for there was always a risk that one of them would snitch to Zola. As if he didn’t know.
    Marco knew what was wrong with Samuel. Begging became a dwindling option once a boy began to look more like a young man. Though Marco himself was fifteen, he still resembled a kid, so things were easier for him. He was small for his age, unusually so, with the wide eyes of a child, his hair fine, skin still smooth. Unlike Samuel, Pico, and Romeo, whose skin had become coarse, facial hair sprouting. And while the others had already indulged in their first adventures with girls, many still envied Marco for his slow development, not to mention the keenness of his wits.
    As if he didn’t know all this.
    He may have been small for his age, but his eyes and ears were those of an experienced grown-up, and he was skilled at putting them to use. Very skilled indeed.
    “Father, can’t I go to school?” he had pleaded since he was seven, back when they lived in Italy. Marco loved his father, but on this issue, like so many others, the man was weak. He told him his brother, Marco’s uncle Zola, insisted on the children working the streets. And so it became, for Zola was the undisputed and tyrannical head of the clan.
    But Marco had a desire to learn, and in nearly all the small towns and villages of Umbria was a school where he could stand outside and absorb as though he were blotting paper. So when the sun began to warm the morning air he stood close up at the windows, listening intently, ears cocked for an hour or more before trudging off to scrape together the day’s earnings.
    Once in a while a teacher would come out and invite him inside, butMarco would run away and not return. Taking up the offer would mean being beaten black and blue at home. In that respect, moving around the way they did was an advantage because the schools were always new.
    Then came the day when one of the teachers nonetheless managed to get a firm grip on him. But instead of dragging him inside he handed him a canvas bag as heavy as the day was long.
    “They’re yours, put them to use,” he said, releasing him again.
    The bag contained fifteen textbooks, and wherever the clan settled Marco always found a secret hiding place where he could sit and study them without fear of discovery.
    And so it was every evening and all the days when the grown-ups had other things to do than keep watch over the children. After two years he learned to do sums and to read both Italian and English, and as a result his curiosity was turned toward everything in the world he had yet to learn or understand.
    During the three years they had now lived in Denmark, he was the only one among them