Helena Schwarz sat on a chair in the corridor of the jail and waited while John was escorted by an officer to the cage on the roof. She had asked if she could smoke, Ewert Grens, who was standing closest, had shrugged, which she took for a yes, and so rummaged around in her coat pocket for some menthol cigarettes.
“I haven’t smoked for five years.”
She lit up, inhaled greedily as if she was in a rush.
“What do you think?”
She was shaking a bit when she said it. Ewert didn’t want to, but answered all the same.
“I don’t think anything. I said that before.”
“Is he telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. You know him better than we do.”
“Obviously not.”
Two guards were on the move at the far end of the corridor, a cleaner scrubbing the floor nearby.
“Has he been in prison?”
“According to the American authorities, he has.”
“For ten years?”
“Yes.”
“Sentenced to death?”
“Yes.”
She was crying, quietly.
“So he’s taken someone’s life.”
“We don’t know that.”
“He’s been convicted of murder.”
“Yes. And he’s probably guilty as hell. But at the same time, all the rest, what he said about his name, the sentence, the escape, that’s true. So who knows, he could be telling the truth as well when he says that he’s innocent.”
He handed her a handkerchief that he always kept in a trouser pocket. She took it, dried her eyes, nose, and looked at him again.
“Does that happen?”
“That innocent people are convicted?”
“Yes.”
“Not so often that it’s a problem.”
He had damp hair when he came back; his pale cheeks were red. It was cold outside and it was snowing, the winter hell continued.
The others were waiting when he came in.
The three police officers, the prosecutor, Helena.
They all looked at him, followed each step he took toward the chair where he would continue to talk.
“It’s great when it’s cold. I like it when it’s windy, when you’re freezing, when you come in again and get warm.”
He met their eyes.
“That’s how it was. That’s how it felt. Where I grew up in Ohio.”
Hermansson had for a long time sat quietly. She had known that her turn would come. It was her turn now.
“John, we’re listening. And your wife—Helena—is listening.”
It was she who had started the dialogue with him some days earlier, it was she who would finish it.
“But, John, we’re all thinking, all of us, what do we believe? Is he telling the truth? And if so, why, why is he doing it now?”
John nodded.
“You can believe what you like. What I’m telling you now, is what I know.”
Hermansson waited, then with her arm indicated, on you go.
A clock on the wall behind him, irritating, clocks—he still hated them.
“I know that I was a bastard. Out of order, volatile, I lashed out at everything and everyone. Twice I was sent to a reform school, and I deserved it, I deserved every single minute.”
He turned and looked at the clock, a red plastic one.
“Can I take that down?”
Hermansson weathered his tense look.
“Of course. Take it down.”
John got up, lifted down both the clock and the hook that it hung on, walked toward the door, opened it and put the clock down outside, then closed it again.
“I know that when I was sixteen I met the only woman, apart from you, Helena, who I’ve ever loved.”
He looked at her, for a long time, then down at the floor, which was plastic, a green color.
“I know that one afternoon she was found dead on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. Finnigan. That’s what they were named. I know that she had my sperm inside her, my fingerprints all over her body and all over the house. We’d been dating for more than a year, for Christ’s sake! I know that
the trial was one long circus, journalists and politicians jostling outside the courtroom—she was a minor, she was beautiful, she was the daughter of a man who worked in the governor’s office. I know that they wanted someone they could hate, someone who would die, like she had died. I know that I was convicted of murder. I know that I was seventeen years old and utterly terrified when I was led to a cell on Death Row in Marcusville. I know that I sat there and waited for ten years. And I know that one day I suddenly woke up in a big car on the road between Columbus and Cleveland.”
He brought his hands up to his chest, hit it lightly.
“That’s all. That’s all I know.”
Hermansson stood up, looked at the people sitting in the room, and then pointed to the door.
“It’s really stuffy in here. Does anyone want anything to drink? I certainly need something. And you, John, you sound like you need something as well.”
She came back with six cups of coffee, each one different, with milk and without milk, and with sugar, and with sugar and milk, and . . . She balanced their orders in a cardboard box for photocopy paper. They all drank in silence for a while, waiting for John to continue.
“The other part . . . how I got away . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He shook his head.
“It was mostly just noises. Some smells. Grainy images. Dark sometimes. Light. And then dark again.”
Hermansson drank her coffee, the one with milk and a little sugar.
“Try. There’s more. We want to know, we have to know, what more there is.”
He was sweating in the stuffy room that lacked ventilation, told them about a heart that was no longer healthy, about how he had felt out of sorts for some months and that that day he’d been worse than before.
“Then one of the guards, I think it was the senior officer himself, Vernon he was named, suddenly opened the cell and walked in. Some other officers behind him. I was to be handcuffed. It was always like that. If someone came into your cell, or if you were going to be taken anywhere, handcuffs on and several guards behind.”
“Do you want more?”
Hermansson lifted a hand toward his empty coffee cup.
“Thank you. In a while.”
“Just let me know when.”
Most of the time, John looked at the floor. He glanced up every so often, looked at his wife, at her eyes, no doubt wondering if she was taking in what he was saying.
“A doctor came in. She asked me to take off my pants. A pipette. I think that’s what they’re called. She had one in her hand and then she pushed it up here, and injected something in.”
He pointed to his behind.
“The tiredness . . . but even worse somehow . . . I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so . . . drowsy. And I think that another doctor came in. I’m not sure, maybe I was dreaming, but I think it was a man, younger than the woman, he had some tablets with him, I know that I swallowed something.”
Ewert Grens fidgeted on his chair, it was uncomfortable and his damn back was sore as well. He glanced over at Sundkvist and Ågestam and Hermansson, who were sitting alongside, tried to change position without disturbing the bizarre story that was being unfolded before them.
“I lay on the floor, I don’t really know why, I just lay there and . . .
couldn’t face getting up. Then . . . I felt something prick, exactly here. Do you understand? I was given an injection, I’m almost certain of it, one of them injected something into my penis.”
He put his hand to his forehead and kept it there. He started to cry. Not loudly, not desperately, but tears that have to come out, bit by bit.
“I could count time. Every second ticked inside me. That was what we did. Counted down. But then . . . after the injection . . . I don’t understand. If it was immediately, or much later. I coul
dn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t blink, couldn’t feel my heart, paralyzed—conscious but completely paralyzed!”
Hermansson took his empty cup and disappeared out into the corridor.
John wasn’t crying anymore when she got back. He took the coffee, drank half of it, leaned forward again.
“I died. I was absolutely sure of it. I died! Someone lifted my eyelids and put some drops in my eyes. I wanted to ask why, but I couldn’t move . . .
like I didn’t exist. Do you understand? Do you understand! What you feel, when you’re going to die, that fucking power that turns you inside out.
Someone shouted it. He’s dying! And I think . . . I think I was given another injection. In the heart. And something in my throat, someone who breathed for me. I must have fallen asleep. Or disappeared. Sometimes I think that I died for a while, and someone shouted that as well, he’s dead! I was conscious, I was lying on the cell floor, and heard them pronounce me dead! The exact time, my name, I heard it. Do you understand? I heard it!”
His last words hurtled around the interview room, bouncing between them until he took them back.
“I was dead. I was sure of it. When I woke . . . when I saw . . . I knew it, that I wasn’t alive. It was so cold. I was lying in a room that felt like a fridge and with someone else beside me, completely white, he was lying like me on a stretcher with his face to the ceiling. I couldn’t understand it. How could I see, how could I be cold, when I was dead?”
He had another drink, finished the cup.
“I disappeared. Just disappeared. And after . . . I’m sure I lay in a sack afterward. Plastic. Plastic rustles. You know . . . you know that when you try to fight yourself free with handcuffs on, it doesn’t work. You can’t get your hands any farther than half a foot apart. And when you try to hit . . . it kind of comes to nothing.”
Ågestam and Hermansson looked at each other, they were in agreement. They would stop now. He couldn’t take any more. They would continue later, when the afternoon was older, when he’d had a chance to lie down in his cell for a while.
“Just one question before we take a break.”
Ågestam had turned toward John.
“I just wondered, you said earlier that you know that you woke up in a car on the road somewhere between Columbus and Cleveland?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Well, John, then I want you to tell us who was driving the car. And if there was anyone else there, in the seat beside you.”
John shook his head.
“No. Not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“I won’t talk about that now.”
The two guards who were waiting outside escorted John back to his cell. He turned around several times, Helena Schwarz was still standing by the door—their eyes met. Ågestam and Hermansson beside her, they were talking about something, gesticulating a lot.
Ewert Grens looked at them, Frey, who had been sentenced to death, and his wife, who had had no idea, Hermansson, who conducted the interview with such calm, Ågestam, who for a moment seemed almost wise.
What he had recognized early on as a diplomatic bombshell was no less complicated now. Not for the bureaucrats who would try to assert the EU extradition agreement when John Meyer Frey’s home country came and demanded him back.
They would demand their right to execute him properly.
It was all about keeping the confidence of people who voted for security and hard measures and the ability to act.
He turned to Sven Sundkvist, who still hadn’t left the room.
“What do you think?”
Sundkvist pulled a face.
“This job never ceases to surprise me.”
Ewert waited until they were alongside each other and then lowered his voice.
“I need your help.”
“Of course.”
“I want you to take the on-duty doctor at the detention center, whoever that is right now, to one side for a moment and tell him a bit about what we think we know. And I want him to examine Frey. I want to know what kind of state his heart’s in. If it was just part of the escape. Or if he needs due care. And I want you to report to me as soon as you have an answer.”
“I’ll see to it.”
Sven was already on his way down the corridor when Ewert called after him.
“Because we don’t want him to lie down and die in his cell, do we? It might become a habit.”
IT WAS STILL EARLY MORNING IN OHIO, THE WEDNESDAY THAT WAS already afternoon in Stockholm was about to take form, be lived. Vernon Eriksen had just hung his senior corrections officer uniform in his locker. He had finished his night shift, the last for this rotation, grateful that he would be working days over the weekend.
When he worked nights it was more obvious how life just slipped away.
He wasn’t one for friends really, not one for going out at all; being awake all night and sleeping all day, he was constantly tired and never met anyone from the other reality, the one outside the walls.
He opened the door to the yard and walked toward the main entrance. He had phoned Greenwood and Burk. Neither of them had sounded distressed or frightened. It was as if they had both been waiting as well, had figured that it would happen, and had prepared themselves, maybe it was even a relief when the message finally came, time to stop hoping for one more day, and another after that.
Vernon went out through the gate that was opened by central security and he felt the relief.
Both doctors had known what it was about.
At their meetings, they had rattled off lists of medicines and diagnoses and possible actions, cardiomyopathy and benzodiazepine and haloperidol and Pavulon and morphine derivatives and . . . their hope to temporarily kill a person, to move him from a cell on Death Row to a morgue, to a body bag, to pathology transport, to a car heading north . . . it had worked, it had worked on every point. Afterward, they had stayed on in their posts for a few more months—to resign immediately would have aroused suspicion, but with such a high staff turnover, no one later asked why or how. John had long since been buried when Lawrence Greenwood and Bridget Burk handed in their white coats and took the bus from Marcusville to Columbus and then on to separate destinations with new IDs and doctors’ licenses in their bags.
It was snowing lightly. Vernon looked up at the sky, big snowflakes drifting through the air and making the ground soft. He was approaching the town itself, Marcusville, where he knew every street, every tree; after all, he’d lived here for as long as he could remember.
They had tried to resuscitate him, at least they had acted so that it looked as if they were doing just that.
No one who had seen what they did at close hand would later be able to say anything other than that the medical team had done everything they should to save a person’s life.
Greenwood had intubated John, who was then given the amount of oxygen he needed, at the same time that Burk had started CPR.
One of them had then called for a defibrillator and an officer had come running with the box under his arm; John’s heart needed a high-voltage shock.
They had talked a lot about minimizing the shock, that they would give him only a single shock and then confirm no rhythm and point to the flat line on the ECG recorder.
The final injection had been done straight into his heart, exactly where it should, but filled with table salt rather than adrenaline.
In the middle of it all—it felt almost unreal even though he had been standing right beside them—Vernon felt a strange kind of pride that made him embarrassed.
Manipulating the ECG recorder had been his medical contribution.
And he had managed this with a couple of pieces of ordinary plastic film.
The evening before, he had cut the thin, transparent plastic to exactly the same size as the machine’s electrodes. It had been that simple; to attach the plastic to the underside of each electrode and create an invisible membrane to fool the measuring instrument, and when it was
put on naked skin, to prevent it from recognizing the heartbeat of a dead person.
Marcusville had just woken up, and as Vernon walked down the small streets in the falling snow, he saw families sitting around the kitchen table, candlesticks still in the window despite the fact that Christmas was long past. It was breakfast time and everyone was hurrying to finish their cereal, parents running around trying to put clothes on themselves and their children. He looked into the small houses with the small lawns and for a moment, only for a moment, he felt removed, that he wasn’t part of anything; he had no family—at least, outside the walls.
John had died there on the cell floor. Anyone who didn’t know the truth would not have thought otherwise. They had pronounced him dead.
Greenwood had spoken clearly, John Meyer Frey died at zero nine thirteen at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Marcusville, and Burk who was standing beside him had nodded slowly, looked just as dejected as they had agreed she should.
They had had eight minutes.
If they had taken any longer, John’s brain—the damage would have been serious.
In their report later, they explained that the unfortunate incident had caused considerable agitation among the other inmates and they hadn’t wanted to contribute to it anymore, they had feared that an event like this might spark and encourage disturbances; that it was always hard to predict how people who have witnessed a sudden death might react, there in particular, with people who were themselves waiting to die.
So they had hastily transported him away from Cell 8 and the inmates who had been sentenced to death in East Block.
As they walked along the prison corridors, Burk had bent down over the stretcher at two-minute intervals. Her mouth over John’s, she had discreetly ventilated his lungs, which were still totally paralyzed, when they were certain that no one could see.
A strange feeling then to leave him in the morgue.
But they didn’t have any choice. John had been forced to lie there, in the cold air. Greenwood and Burk had explained that they had to reduce his metabolism fast, his body’s oxygen consumption.
Vernon had stood in the doorway to the morgue for as long as he could.
So many years since he had stood here for the first time. Every dead person he had known and looked after in the section had ended up here, empty shells—he’d always thought that there should be another room, for the souls.
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