CELL 8

by Anders Roslund; Börge Hellström

  He drank the juice full of pulp and filled his lungs with winter as he mulled over the long conversation, the astonishing information, and worked on a solution that was taking shape in his mind. This was what he did; threw himself into looking for solutions the moment a crisis erupted. It was what he was good at, as both he and the people around him knew.

  This, this could have been another fairly straightforward case.

  A prisoner who disappears, a criminal who escapes his punishment and lives the life of Riley in freedom and is then returned to his cell and the penalty.

  But this was something else.

  It was a matter of prestige, principle.

  Crime and punishment and the victim’s right to retribution held a unique position in American society. All those new prisons recently, even longer sentences, and governors and senators and congressmen who had won elections on the promise of tougher measures, of breaking the escalating cycle of crime. This person who was now sitting locked up in a Swedish prison would be a serious and dangerous headline for politicians who wanted to be reelected. They would get him back at all costs, he would be returned to his cell and he would be executed to the applause of the people and the authorities, an eye for an eye, that was the law of the land.

  The United States would definitely demand his return.

  Sweden, a little country in northern Europe, would be expected to comply.

  But in recent years, the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had, in connection with negotiations on the extradition agreement between the EU and the United States, time and again explained that no EU country would ever extradite anyone with a death sentence.

  Thorulf Winge looked appreciatively at his surroundings as he crossed the roundabout in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the building that was called the Hereditary Prince’s Palace. It was still very quiet, not much traffic, only a handful of people to be seen in the corridor of power that ran from here to the parliament and government offices at Rosenbad.

  He opened the door and walked into the impressive building.

  He needed time.

  He needed peace.

  He needed complete latitude, and the longer it was until anyone else knew, the better.

  Ewert Grens had looked at them, he had dazzled them with a broad grin. He was enjoying the situation, Lars Ågestam was sure of it. Once he had explained what had happened, let the statement we have imprisoned a corpse settle in the room, it was as if he quickened, his tired body and bitter face had radiated energy, something awful and awkward had happened and Grens lit up in the way that those who had worked with him before said he did, when he was at his best.

  Ågestam sat still. This whole thing was something he’d never encountered before and he was just about to ask one of the many questions dancing around in his head when his phone rang. He put his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket, apologized, ignored Grens’s irritated expression, left the detective superintendent’s office and went out into the corridor that smelled of dust and something else.

  He knew who it was.

  But had never spoken to him before.

  “Good morning. My name is Thorulf Winge, the state secretary for foreign affairs.”

  Lars Ågestam didn’t really need much more than that. He had understood what it was about, even before Winge continued.

  “I just want to confirm that the information I have is correct, that you are leading a preliminary investigation in connection with a certain John Schwarz who was recently detained.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t bullshit me.”

  “You know that confidentiality prevents me from discussing who has been held in custody and who hasn’t.”

  “And don’t fucking tell me what I already know.”

  Ågestam saw some policemen coming down the corridor who were either about to start their day or had worked the night shift and were on their way home. He moved farther away so no one would overhear.

  “What you’re implying, what you’re getting at, could be interpreted as unconstitutional ministerial rule.”

  He heard Winge take a deep breath, that he was preparing to raise his voice.

  “The John Schwarz case doesn’t officially exist. You will therefore, under no circumstances, answer any questions about the detainee. Keep a lid on it, Ågestam. Keep a lid on it!”

  Lars Ågestam swallowed, in anger and surprise.

  “Am I to understand the state secretary’s . . . words as . . . well, let’s just say that the blackout is a directive straight from . . . the minister of foreign affairs?”

  “You little smart-ass . . . just wait five minutes. And then take the call.”

  Ågestam stood by the coffee machine. The weak disgusting coffee that Grens normally ran around with. He read the square buttons and then pushed one of them. It didn’t look particularly nice. But he took the cup that had just been filled and drank it, as he needed something.

  Exactly five minutes later his phone rang again.

  The voice was more familiar. The chief prosecutor. His direct boss.

  The conversation was brief.

  The preliminary investigation into a case involving a man called John Schwarz, who was being held in detention, was now subject to total confidentiality.

  Ågestam loitered in the corridor, finished the coffee that tasted of nothing. He tried to gather his thoughts. He had received a direct order. Totally incorrect, but an order all the same. He didn’t like the earlier tone of voice, the state secretary’s hiss; it smelled of old men, the tone that old men resorted to, old men who had lived with power for so long that they no longer noticed it, took it for granted.

  He stood outside the closed door, looked at the handle, took a deep breath, opened it.

  Grens was still standing up, holding some reports in his hand, quoting from one of them. Sundkvist and Hermansson were both sitting nearby listening and seemed to be unsettled by what they heard. They all looked at Ågestam, who walked over to the chair he had left twenty minutes ago.

  “Well? What was it that was so much more important than our meeting?”

  Ewert Grens waved the handful of papers at the young prosecutor.

  “It was very important.”

  Grens was impatient, waved his pile up and down several times.

  “Well?”

  “This case. John Schwarz. From now on the preliminary investigation is subject to total confidentiality. We can’t talk about it with anyone, at all.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  Grens threw down the papers he’d been holding. They floated around the room, big white leaves on their way to the floor.

  “It’s an order.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ågestam, you’d better run along and comb your hair. Maybe you should open a preliminary inquiry first, before you make it confidential! The only preliminary investigation regarding John Schwarz that I’m aware of is in connection with a suspected act of aggression on the Finland ferry. And why should I keep quiet about that?”

  Hermansson turned to look at Sven. She’d heard people talk about Ewert Grens’s temper. But even though she’d been with the City Police for a good six months now, she had yet to see it this bad. Sven just shook his head discreetly and she realized that the force of the anger that was now bouncing off the walls couldn’t be stopped.

  “What I want to know, Ågestam, is where an order like that might come from?”

  “My boss.”

  “Your boss? The chief prosecutor?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when did you last suck him off?”

  “I didn’t hear that.”

  “The chief prosecutor! That ass kisser! Then it must come from even higher up. Because he’s a spineless bastard like you, Ågestam, the sort that’s well groomed and diligent and kindly passes the buck.”

  Hermansson couldn’t bear it any longer. Ewert, who was about to lose his dignity, Ågestam, who looked like he was about to t
hrow a punch, Sven, who just sat there and took it all in. She got up, looked each of them in the eye, and said in a quiet voice, almost a whisper: “That’s enough.”

  If she had tried to raise her voice the sound would just have been drowned out by more of the same, but that was now interrupted as she forced them to listen.

  “I want you to stop. I am not going to watch two grown men beating their chests. I appreciate that this investigation is difficult. I mean, if it really is true, if he really has been on Death Row and managed to escape and we’re going be involved with sending him back to a death penalty we don’t believe in, I mean, obviously that’s going to be hard and we’d far rather just stand here and take it out on each other. But we don’t have time.

  From above. The order came from above. Do you understand? This will require even more energy. So let’s save it. Try to work together.”

  She lowered her voice even more, she was whispering now.

  “Otherwise . . . I think everything will just fall apart.”

  VERNON ERIKSEN WAS SURPRISED AT HOW CALM HE FELT.

  I should run.

  I should hide.

  My heart should be confused, beating wildly. I’ve been carrying this lie around for so long, so many times I’ve thought that today, today it will erupt, it’s over, I am over now.

  And yet I’m standing here. In the corridor between the cells on Death Row.

  I can hear them sleeping, I walk up to Cell 8, which is empty, I do all this and yet I feel . . . calm.

  It was half past one, U.S. time, on Wednesday morning in the correctional institution in Marcusville. Nearly twenty-four hours since he’d been called in to the warden, fruit and after-dinner mints in the big room that had a red carpet on the floor and a chandelier on the ceiling, nearly twenty-four hours since John had been taken into custody somewhere in northern Europe, therefore making a death in a cell in Ohio more than six years ago now very puzzling indeed—it demanded attention again.

  You died here.

  I helped you to die.

  You carried on living.

  I helped you to live.

  Vernon stood, as he often did, a bit too long outside the abandoned cell. Their plan had worked. So much that could have gone wrong, but they had nothing to lose, not with John, not when the execution was only a few weeks away.

  He hadn’t known a thing.

  That was the main premise. That John didn’t know. For months he would feel sick and out of sorts because of the haloperidol and ipecacuanha, they wanted him to be as scared as he was when he found out about the cardiomyopathy; he would need treatment, and the doctors, two new doctors who shared a full-time position, would visit him regularly and provide medication for the nonexistent illness that had to exist if the rest of the plan was going to work.

  Vernon smiled.

  John had really died.

  That morning, John had been worse than usual; it was that morning.

  On Greenwood’s request, Vernon had as usual sprinkled haloperidol and ipecacuanha over John Meyer Frey’s food, but this time had also added a large dose of beta blockers, just as finely crushed and sprinkled, and John had felt dizzy, his blood pressure dropped and he had collapsed in his cell, just as intended, in the half hour when Greenwood and Burk were both on duty in East Block.

  Vernon stepped forward and gripped two of the metal bars on the cell door with his hands, looking for traces inside, traces that were never left.

  Each of the medicines had worked perfectly.

  Bridget Burk had come to the cell first, she had knelt down on the floor beside John, who was sweating and clutching his stomach with both arms.

  She had explained as loudly as she could that it was his heart, cardiomyopathy, that he had to be treated.

  She had given him the first medicine. A benzodiazepine. He mustn’t remember. If he woke up suddenly, he mustn’t remember. She pulled down his orange overalls, diazepam enema up his rectum; she had explained before: for this to work he had to be drowsy.

  Lawrence Greenwood had run down from another part of the building.

  As he passed he had looked at Vernon, who was standing outside the cell with three other officers. He had glanced over and their eyes had locked for a split second; they had both known but shown nothing. Burk had informed Greenwood briefly about what he already knew she had done, what they had planned together several months ago, and in the meantime had taken out something that worked fast, that triggered amnesia, and that also affected the patient’s memory—pure morphine caused not only amnesia but also slowed the breathing.

  John had lain there in a daze, his pants down. Syringe in one hand, Greenwood had grabbed hold of his penis with the other and he had injected intravenously into one of the veins on his organ. Pavulon, a preparation similar to curare, totally paralyzing. He had explained to Vernon at their last meeting a couple of days earlier that he could inject in the inner arm or the groin or the neck but that he preferred the penis, erectile tissue, he wanted to leave as few marks as possible.

  John was now in hell.

  He hadn’t known about anything, so the fear of death had engulfed him, he was the living dead.

  Conscious and paralyzed.

  His muscles totally flaccid, he couldn’t move at all, he couldn’t even breathe.

  Vernon had remained outside for the minutes this took and looked on, but not really watched.

  He couldn’t bear it.

  The boy who was lying on the floor had right then been close to death, for real, and he had just stood and watched.

  They were aware that it could end like this, they had discussed it at length, that this was a risk they had to take, they only had a few minutes, no more.

  Burk had also taken out a small bottle of eyedrops.

  Atropine to provoke dull, dilated pupils.

  A dead person’s pupils.

  Vernon remembered how it had felt to stand there and watch while the young man he had come to like so much, whom he knew was innocent, had in effect died in front of him. That was exactly how it looked. He hadn’t moved, seeing those awful eyes that just stared; it had been hard not to forget what they were doing, not to leap toward the door and rush in.

  The pulse had been the only thing they couldn’t do anything about.

  They couldn’t stop it in any medical way that was plausible. Greenwood had used a morphine derivative that had slowed his pulse dramatically, but for the rest they just had to cross their fingers. Both doctors had taken turns to cover up a reduced but still working pulse—it was a case of acting as convincingly as possible and continuing to do so.

  They had a maximum of eight minutes.

  They had to ventilate him every second minute, their own breath in John’s lungs.

  It should work. But only if the process was started within eight minutes. Longer than that . . . his brain would be damaged, severely, perhaps forever.

  Greenwood had stood up, turned toward Vernon and his three colleagues. He had spoken clearly to them, and to the prisoners who had followed the drama from their cells. Vernon could still recall at will, how Greenwood had almost screamed he’s dead.

  A quarter to two, the night outside was alive, the wind howled as always. Vernon looked up at the rectangular window just under the ceiling—should get it fixed, the noise was annoying.

  He left Cell 8, walked down the row of locked cells toward the door that led out to the office block.

  It would be madness to risk anything. But suddenly he realized there wasn’t much time, that he should already have given warning, that it was his duty to do it. He went into one of the rooms in administration, one of the secretaries’ offices—it was unlikely that anyone had the time to tap a phone in here in the middle of the night.

  He had learned their numbers by heart.

  First he phoned Austria. He had no idea what time it was there, and it didn’t really matter, she would answer; if she saw this number, she would answer.

  The conversation with Bridget
Burk lasted no more than a minute.

  He put down the receiver, then called Denver, Colorado. Lawrence Greenwood didn’t say much, listened, and thanked him.

  They both had new identities, new CVs, new doctors’ licenses, new lives, six years ago now.

  They existed, and yet they didn’t.

  MARIANA HERMANSSON WAS STILL UNCERTAIN ABOUT WHAT TO MAKE of the angry outburst her boss, Ewert Grens, had had just over an hour ago. It had seemed so . . . unnecessary. Of course she recognized the absurdity of a blackout, the probable disregard of ethical principles in the case of John Schwarz. But the rage he had unleashed, the aggression that he obviously carried around with him and let loose on anyone who happened to cross him, that frightened others and apparently had done so for many years, it bothered her, she was bewildered, almost sad.

  She knew what aggression was. She had grown up with it.

  But this, she didn’t understand.

  She had a Swedish mother and a Romanian father and had spent her formative years with a mix of around a hundred nationalities in an area of Skåne called Rosengård, part of Malmö where the politicians seemed to have no influence; an immigrant community that many people disliked, others were ashamed of, but that had its own energy and life and a lot of aggression that ran around sparking fires.

  But it was just that. Aggression. That flared up and died down just as fast.

  But this sort, Ewert’s heavy anger that seemed to hang over him and cling to him and hurt, she found it harder to deal with, to accept, it was ugly and intrusive. She would talk to him about it later when there was time. She wanted to know where it came from, if he was aware of it himself, if it could ever be controlled.

  She had worked in Stockholm for six months before her short-term contract was made permanent. Not very long, but she had already been in the detention center at Kronoberg several times. Sven Sundkvist was with her, he hadn’t said very much since they left Ewert’s room either. She realized that he was used to it and wondered whether he’d maybe given up. Or whether after ten years as a close working partner, it still bewildered him, if that was what he was thinking about, withdrawn from any conversation, barely there.