“I want him in for questioning. Now. As soon as we’re done here.”
Ågestam nodded, turned toward Sven.
“You do it. Your theory, Sven, I buy that.”
Grens interrupted.
“So do I. But Hermansson will do the questioning.”
Interrogating Officer Mariana Hermansson (MH): Hi.
John Schwarz (JS): (inaudible) MH: My name’s Mariana.
JS: (inaudible) MH: I can’t hear what you’re saying. You’ll have to speak up.
Lars Ågestam looked at Ewert Grens in surprise.
“Hermansson? Isn’t Sundkvist better suited for this?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Ågestam? I’m sure that a smart young woman will get a lot further than a smart middle-aged man in this case.”
MH: Are you sitting comfortably?
JS: Yes.
MH: I understand if you’re nervous. Sitting here. It’s a strange situation.
“Trust. Hermansson will win his trust. She’ll help him with the small things first.”
MH: Do you smoke, John?
JS: Yes.
MH: I’ve got some cigarettes. Would you like one?
JS: Thanks.
“She’ll be friendly, continue to help him, she’ll be completely different from the rest of us bastards.”
MH: What’s your name?
JS: John.
MH: What’s your real name?
JS: That is my name. John.
MH: OK, so that’s your name. John?
JS: Yes?
MH: Did you know that your wife was here a couple of hours ago?
“You see, Ågestam, it gets fucking tough after a while, even when you have to . . . to sit there lying to someone who only wants the best for you. And Hermansson—Schwarz will be convinced—Hermansson will only want what’s best for him.”
MH: You have full restrictions. And you will until you talk. So long as you obstruct the investigation, you won’t be able to see your wife. Do you understand?
JS: Yes.
MH: She had a child with her too, a little boy, four, five years old. Your son, I guess? You won’t be able to see him either.
JS: I have to . . .
MH: But I can arrange it.
“After a while, interviewing officer Hermansson will start to pop up outside the interview room. And she’ll help him then too. She’s kind. She understands.”
MH: There’s a small park outside this building. Do you know it?
JS: No.
MH: You can meet him there. If I come with you. I find it hard to believe that you meeting with a five-year-old might complicate the investigation. What do you think?
“He’ll talk, Ågestam. They always do in the end. There will be a moment that crystallizes all Hermansson’s friendliness, kindness, and understanding, and when Schwarz feels it, Hermansson will take the next step, then she’ll make demands, she’ll demand something back.”
Ewert Grens stood up and walked to the door. He waited until the three people on the sofa had stood up as well.
“And then it will be his turn to give.”
The meeting was over.
He was convinced. Schwarz would talk soon.
Soon they would know who he was, where he came from.
KEVIN HUTTON SAT WITH THE BLINDS DOWN IN ROOM 9000 AT 550 Main Street in Cincinnati. He always did—the daylight irritated his eyes when he had to read onscreen and he was doing it more and more, staying in the office and communicating via the Internet. He was thirty-six years old and had worked in the FBI office in western Ohio for ten of them. The work had changed following the explosion of information in the digital world, he was special agent in charge and that was as far as you could get in a local office, and yet the jobs were not really what he’d imagined when he’d first opened the door to what was still his office. He should be out there. In reality. All this, more and more office work, sometimes he just longed to be somewhere else.
He drank a lot of water. It was ten in the morning and he was already on his third bottle of expensive mineral water from the shop on the corner by the garage. He had put on weight with all this damn sitting, and water instead of morning coffee meant a lot of running to the toilet, but it worked.
He had just poured a glass when the call came from the head office in Washington.
They didn’t say much. But he realized that he should put the water to one side, that today had just taken on another dimension.
He was given a phone number, a Marc Brock at Interpol, he was to call him, he had all the information there was.
Having searched through all the accessible databases, a procedure he repeated three times, Marc Brock had gradually come to understand over the past hour that whatever it was that wasn’t right, was in fact right.
The man in the photo, the man who was wanted, was a dead man. Every single time. And yet, it couldn’t be right. Not if you took into consideration where he died.
Brock had phoned the person who had sent the information, the officer who had requested help: someone called Klövje in Sweden. He had had time to reminisce about Stockholm again, the woman whose name he still remembered, and he had envisaged the beautiful city built on islands with water everywhere while he waited for an answer—they had walked around hand in hand for several days—with the receiver to his ear, and he had wondered who he would have been now, if it had worked out, if he had stayed with her.
The Swedish voice had been formal and spoken correct English with a Swedish accent. Brock had apologized, realized that he had no idea what time it was—the afternoon, he had suddenly remembered when Klövje answered the phone, six hours’ difference, that was it.
The stiff smile, the uneasy eyes.
Brock had insisted. He wanted to check the photo he had of a man who called himself John Schwarz. He wanted to compare, not with the photo stuck in a Canadian passport, but with the real thing.
Klövje had confirmed the picture’s veracity twenty minutes later. He had been to the jail, the cell where the suspect was being held, and he had with his own eyes seen that both faces, the one in the passport and the real one, were one and the same.
Marc Brock had thanked him, asked if he could get back to him, and lifted the receiver again as soon as he had put it down, convinced that his colleagues over at the FBI head office would think he was completely crazy.
Kevin Hutton had been ordered to call Interpol, someone called Brock.
He would do it in a moment.
He swung around in his chair and looked out over Cincinnati, where he’d lived since he applied for and got the job in the local Ohio office. The tall buildings, the busy main roads.
A few more deep breaths—he was still shaking.
Because if the first summarized details from the FBI head office were correct, he should open the window and scream out across the noisy city.
Because it just wasn’t possible.
And he, if anyone, should know.
Marc Brock confirmed everything.
Hutton heard the anxiety in his voice and he realized that Brock also found it hard to believe, that he would happily forward what he had because then he wouldn’t need to deal with this shit anymore.
You’re dead, for fuck’s sake.
Kevin Hutton had immediately recognized the man in the picture.
His face was twenty years older. His hair shorter, skin paler.
But it was him. He was sure of it.
He opened the window, leaned out into the cold January air, closed his eyes, and shivered. He closed his eyes in the way you do when you just don’t want to understand.
SHE HAD MOVED HER HAND.
He should sing, laugh, maybe even cry.
Ewert Grens couldn’t face it.
All these years, he had somehow given up hope. And now, he didn’t know, it was sorrow, guilt, loss. Like a curse. The more she waved, the clearer everything else became. What she wasn’t doing. The damn guilt that he’d learned to suppress, it was ho
unding him again, he couldn’t escape it, it knew where he was and smeared him with its terrible fucking blackness.
They had had each other. And he had driven over her head. A split second, then they had ceased to be, midstep.
He loved her.
He had no one else.
He wasn’t going to go home this evening. He would sit here with the Schwarz investigation in front of him until his eyes couldn’t see any longer, then he would lie down on the sofa, sleep, get up again when it was still dark; he needed the dawn.
Grens ate a sandwich with some cheese from the vending machine out in the corridor by the coffee machine, the plastic packaging was greasy, butter or something else.
She had done a good interview, Hermansson. Schwarz would trust her, it wouldn’t be long now. Strange guy. As if he was trying to hide from them, despite the fact that they were sitting on the chairs directly opposite him, looking at him.
There was silence in the room. He looked at the shelf on the wall and the cassettes and the photograph of Siw, but it didn’t work. Anni had waved and there was no room for music in the room. Just wasn’t. Just fucking wasn’t.
He had never felt like this before.
It was her voice that comforted him, that filled the room with what had once been.
Not today. Not now.
Jens Klövje knocked and pushed open the door that was standing ajar. He was red in the face, having just walked fast along the corridor and down the steps from C Block. He was carrying a bundle of papers in his hand, still warm from the fax machine, and explained that Ewert might want to see what was written there, that he was leaving it with Grens and was going back to his desk to wait and see if any more had come.
Grens finished his cheese sandwich, brushed some crumbs from his desk into the greasy wrapper in the bin.
He looked at the thin pile of documents, counted five pages and picked them up.
He had read several thousand reports written by overzealous policemen before. This one was obviously American and had different names and different addresses, but was just as detailed, just as fearful of making formal errors as all the others.
Grens stood up. He was restless. There were other thoughts inside him, far more interesting than Schwarz and his past. A couple of times around the room, he could feel the silence now, he wasn’t used to it and it was louder than either Siw or chatty investigators.
She had done something the bastards had claimed was impossible.
It had taken twenty-five years, but she had done it, and he had seen it.
He knew that he was pushing it, but he couldn’t help it. He sat down again and dialed the number of the nursing home.
“It’s Grens. I know it’s late to be calling.”
A brief hesitation.
“I’m sorry, but you really can’t talk to her at this hour.”
He recognized the voice that had answered and that continued, “You know she needs her sleep. And that she’s in bed by now.”
Susann, the young woman who wanted to be a doctor, who was going to accompany them out onto the water. He tried to be friendly.
“It was you that I wanted to speak to. About our little trip later on in the week. I just wanted to make sure that you’d been informed.”
It was hard to make out whether she sighed or not.
“I’ve been told. And I’ll be coming with you.”
He apologized again, then hung up, maybe she sighed again, he didn’t know, quite simply chose not to listen.
He picked up the American fax again. More focused now—he’d rung and checked, and she was asleep, she was comfortable. He might as well work, continue searching for the man who had once been John Schwarz.
Grens leaned forward.
That feeling. When it’s the start of something.
He read on and it slowly dawned on him what Klövje had meant, why he had been so out of breath, why his swollen face that had popped around the door a while ago had been so red.
A person had died. She had been lying on the floor in a house in some goddamn hole called Marcusville and she had gradually ceased to be.
Jens Klövje had said that there was more to come. Other documents from an investigation carried out eighteen years ago in connection with the man who now called himself John Schwarz and who was sitting in a locked cell in the detention center a few hundred yards away.
Suddenly Ewert Grens was in a hurry.
STILL JUST AS COLD.
Vernon Eriksen stared in anger at the heater that hung dead on one of the institution’s concrete walls. He was freezing—he would give them to the end of the week, that was long enough, then the heating in the prison had to go back on. They weren’t animals, the inmates, even though the world out there sometimes expressed views that were to the contrary.
It was worst in the East Block that housed Death Row. The prisoners there froze like dogs at night and there was a damned racket in the cells because they couldn’t sleep—the Colombian who always made such a noise and the new guy in Cell 22 who was crying for the second night in a row was enough in itself, but now, with the damned cold, the others were worked up, even those who normally never made a sound.
Vernon looked over at the long row of metal cages.
Everyone who was in there knew.
They were counting down. What else could they do? They waited, sometimes asked for clemency, sometimes had their date postponed, but they got nowhere, they stayed where they were and waited; days, months, years.
He should have gone home. He’d clocked off four hours ago. Normally at this time of day he’d walked from the prison to Sofio’s for his blueberry pancakes, taken a detour along Mern Riffe Drive and as he passed looked into the kitchen, felt the warmth he always did when he caught a glimpse. In fact, by this time he would normally have reached his house on the outskirts of the town, maybe he’d already fallen asleep, at least gone to bed with the morning paper lying unread on the empty pillow beside him.
He was putting it off on purpose.
Soon.
He’d go soon.
He hadn’t been prepared when the warden had suddenly called him to his office. They seldom talked, although they knew each other well, but as long as everything was working they had no reason to meet.
That was how it felt, even when he first called.
That this was something else.
The warden’s voice had been tense and excessively clear, as if he was anxious and therefore had to hide it by pretending to be anything but.
The warden had smiled at him and shown him into his spacious office: leather sofas and a meeting table and a window twice the normal size that looked out to the main entrance. He had offered him fruit and after-dinner mints and not looked him in the eye, had managed to pull himself together and asked how long Vernon had actually worked as senior corrections officer at the prison in Marcusville, on Death Row.
Twenty-two years, Vernon had replied.
Twenty-two years, the warden had repeated, that’s a long time.
Yes, it sure is long.
Do you remember them all, Vernon?
Them all, who?
The people who’ve done time here. In your section.
Yes. I remember them.
The warden had played with a piece of paper that was lying in front of him on the desk. There was something written on it. The reason why he had asked Vernon to come. His fingers along the edge of the paper—Vernon had tried to see, but the letters were too small and impossible to read upside down.
More than a hundred in your time, Vernon. Some released, some executed, most just waiting. And you remember them all?
Yes.
Why?
Why?
I’m curious.
That piece of paper. Vernon had leaned forward, wanted to see but hadn’t managed, the warden’s arm had been in the way.
I remember them because I’m a corrections officer here. My job is to look after them and rehabilitate people. I care about them. I don�
�t have many others to care for.
The warden had offered him more fruit. Vernon had declined but took another mint, which he let melt in his mouth, and he started to realize, just then, after the fruit and the second mint, what the conversation was about.
He hadn’t been prepared.
Even though he should have been.
So, you remember . . . the warden had started . . . so you possibly remember an inmate called John Meyer Frey?
Vernon had perhaps gasped, he had perhaps changed position on the leather sofa, he wasn’t sure, the question had been so sudden and he had heard it and responded and tried to tackle it, and that was precisely why it had been so hard to see himself from the outside—with all that was going on inside, he had enough on his plate trying not to suffocate.
Of course. Clearly. I remember John Meyer Frey clearly.
Good.
Why?
Vernon, how many of the inmates have actually died here in prison before they were executed?
Not many. But it does happen. But not many.
John Meyer Frey. When he died—do you remember anything in particular from that time?
Anything in particular?
Anything.
While Vernon pretended to think, he had tried to use the pause to pull himself together, find the thoughts, the answers that he had practiced.
No. I don’t think so. Nothing in particular.
No?
Well, he was young, of course. There’s always something special about people who die young. But no more than that.
CELL 8 Page 9