CELL 8

by Anders Roslund; Börge Hellström

  He was going to make a phone call. He should have done it a long time ago. Grens lifted the receiver, wished the switchboard lady good evening, and asked to be connected to a number in Ohio, in the United States. It felt good to hear Ruben Frey’s surprised voice a few seconds later, and he explained that he just wanted to say to him and Helena Schwarz that he was thinking about them.

  The warden of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility looked at the telephone demanding attention on his desk. He turned around, let the ringing beat against the walls of his big office. He moved slowly from the desk to the group of sofas and a small dish of after-dinner mints, from there to the window with a view of the town that was waiting, a few miles away. He had taken the phone calls to begin with, explained to each journalist and anyone who was interested that he had set up an inquiry, that he, especially, was anxious to establish how, six years ago, an inmate had managed to escape his execution, from a prison from which it was impossible to escape.

  He looked out into the dark, counted the streetlamps along the road that linked a wall with the rest of the world, balls of light that softened the night that was finally free of snow.

  Eight weeks and still he knew nothing.

  Frey had refused to talk, he had been questioned by the FBI and the prison’s head of security. And all the others, the corrections officers and anyone who had ever had anything to do with Frey, which eventually was the greater part of Marcusville’s inhabitants, all those interviews and still absolutely nothing.

  It was evening outside, and he longed to be out there.

  Twenty-four hours to go. He turned around and looked at the telephone that was now screaming for his attention, he would just let the noise echo around the room, it would soon be over. The investigation and interviews had led to nothing, but he didn’t begrudge them—quite the opposite—there had been no revelations of any errors on the part of the prison at the time of John Meyer Frey’s disappearance.

  What had happened had happened.

  The sooner the truth about the escape was forgotten both inside and outside the prison, the better.

  He remembered the conversations with Marv. John missed having someone to talk to, about death, someone who knew, someone else who knew exactly when.

  Marv had often spoken about a town.

  About two hundred white people and one black man.

  John knew all about that now. He’d been on his own in towns like that all his life. On the lawns of Marcusville as he grew up, a decade in the corridor in East Block, six years and two days in Sweden. He knew who the town’s only black man was. That fucking veil all around him everywhere, he couldn’t touch them, he could never reach out to them.

  A couple of times he’d knocked on the wall and waited for Marv’s answer. It had all felt so familiar, so easy to forget the years that had passed since they spoke to each other for the last time, before he was taken away.

  Alice Finnigan was putting her clothes on the chair by her bed when she felt the hands stroking her back. They carried on up and grabbed her breasts from behind and held them like no one had held them for years.

  She heard her husband’s warm breath on her neck. She didn’t dare move at all, scared of doing something wrong, scared of feeling the wrong thing. Edward hadn’t touched her for so long. Not even tried, apart from the day when they’d heard that John Meyer Frey was still alive and therefore could still be killed. She had rejected him then. She couldn’t do it again. She felt the force of his erection push against her bottom and she turned around. His cheeks were red, his neck flushed, he held her so tight that it hurt when they lay down. His eyes were almost happy when he looked at her, and he moved back and forth with an energy she thought he no longer had, he was so fervent, he wanted to feel her around him.

  She tried to suppress her revulsion when he wanted to lie close to her afterward, when his sticky penis nudged her thigh.

  Sven sat on a chair in Jonas’s room. Anita had been asleep for a few hours now in the room next door and his son was breathing deeply in the bed in front of him, the sleep of babes, free of worry. In the weeks that had passed since he broke down in tears in front of his family, they had spoken several times about the prisoner who Sven had accompanied out of the country and who was now going to die. Jonas had been actively interested in the at times intense media focus that was so evident on TV and in the papers. He had written an essay in school about people who had to be punished and die, in art he had drawn pictures of people lying in front of executioners with black hoods on their heads; a catalogue of execution methods from the mind of an eight-year-old.

  Sven looked at his son, his small body that twitched every now and then under the covers and soft, fluffy animals. Perhaps it was good to talk to his son about life and death, he had thought about it many times. But not like this. He was certain that a child’s reflections on death should not start with the question of a state’s right to take life.

  John Meyer Frey had been informed that Revised Code 2949.22 no longer gave every prisoner the right to choose his or her own method of execution, but the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction guaranteed that the execution would be carried out in a professional, humane, and dignified manner.

  He had ironically asked for the firing squad—it had to be that quick— but the warden who was standing in front of him waiting for his answer told him curtly that the state of Ohio wasn’t allowed to shoot people to death.

  He had asked to be hanged, as it meant that your neck was broken and you weren’t slowly strangled, just a few seconds, alive one minute, dead the next—but the state of Ohio wasn’t allowed to hang people.

  He had asked for the electric chair, but the state of Ohio was no longer allowed to generate nine hundred to two thousand volts and pass them through a person’s body.

  His choice: lethal injection.

  He had been dreaming a lot, last night as well.

  Helena Schwarz stood in the hall of Ruben Frey’s large house in Marcusville. She looked at her father-in-law’s back, concentrated on the telephone conversation he was about to finish. She had listened to his responses and understood that it was someone calling to see how John was, how they all were, waiting. She wasn’t sure, but it could be that middleaged policeman from Stockholm—a few of the things that Ruben had said gave that impression. It was hard to understand, it had been so intense, but she hadn’t thought about him or anyone else at all since she came here nearly six weeks ago now; the only things that mattered were here.

  “Mr. Grens.”

  So it was him.

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing, I don’t think. Just to ask how we were.”

  Helena had been trying to put her son to bed since eight o’clock. It was now nearly half past nine. He could feel it, of course he could, something that was more important than sleep, that made his mother and grandfather anxious and sad, he had picked up on it and was therefore anxious and sad himself.

  They couldn’t pretend any longer.

  Helena didn’t try to avoid it, to hide away. She cried for the first time since they’d come to Ohio, while her son watched. Maybe it was his right to see, maybe she didn’t care.

  She sat on the flowery sofa in Ruben’s sitting room and read a long and well-written article in the Cincinnati Post about how the twelve members of a special execution team at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility had for the past month been preparing to carry out the execution of John Meyer Frey at nine the following evening. She didn’t know why she was reading it—she had previously avoided all information of this sort on purpose—but it felt like she’d given up now, as if he really was going to die, and if that was the case, she had to know, maybe for John’s sake, maybe for her own.

  The most difficult thing, according to the journalist who had drawn on research from several executions and had met all the members of the execution team, was getting the needles in the right veins. Since the first execution by lethal injection in nineteen eight
y-two in Huntsville—a black man called Charles Brooks—several had turned into a shambles when the execution team couldn’t find a usable vein. The journalist gave several examples where the convict was lying strapped to the bed while they tried to find a suitable vein for thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes, in front of the waiting witnesses. In a couple of cases, the prisoner had a long history of drug abuse and had eventually offered and been allowed to identify a suitable vein. In another case, the execution quite simply had to be abandoned when the needles came loose and the shunts pumped chemicals out into the room and on to the glass window in front of the shocked viewers.

  “Mommy?”

  His pajamas were blue, different colored crocodiles in something that presumably was supposed to look like water.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to come too.”

  “Not this time. I’m going to meet Daddy by myself this evening.”

  “I want to.”

  “Tomorrow. You can come with me tomorrow.”

  He snuggled into her, curled up on a cushion. She stroked his cheek, his hair. One of the local channels—she could never differentiate between them—was on the TV. A reporter standing in front of the solid wall of Marcusville prison spoke excitedly about the fact that there were only twenty-four hours to go until Ohio’s third execution of the year, about John Meyer Frey’s escape and return, and the sentence that now, many years later, was about to be fulfilled. Then a short clip from a press conference with the governor of Ohio that was interrupted when a group of activists opposed to the death penalty had leapt onto the stage and handed over hundreds of letters of protest, long lists of names and signatures.

  Helena Schwarz listened but wasn’t sure that she’d understood.

  That it was her husband they were talking about. That it was for real.

  When a Catholic priest was interviewed and condemned the death penalty as a barbaric relic in a modern society, she looked at her son again, wondered whether he understood, if he knew that his father was going to die, that it was him who all these people they didn’t know were talking about.

  She watched him for a few minutes without saying anything, then stood, lifted up her son and held him in her arms, explained that she had to go, that Granddad was going to stay at home with him.

  It was cold out, windy, and more snow.

  She was on her way to the prison, she would soon see him alone for the last time, in a new cell and for two hours.

  She knew that it was unusual to be allowed to go there at this time of night and she was grateful to Vernon Eriksen, who had made it possible, and yet she resented every step she took, wanted to turn around, go home, close her eyes, and wake up when it was all over.

  John heard them before they’d even passed through central security. Not because they said anything—they weren’t talking—not because their keys were rattling, it was the footsteps of the five men in the corridor, black boots with hard heels on dirty concrete. He was lying on the bunk with his face turned toward the bars and he waited until they were outside, until Vernon Eriksen cleared his throat and John felt the words on his skin.

  “Are you ready, John?”

  He stayed lying there for a few minutes longer, the newly painted ceiling, the light that was always on, the smell he couldn’t bear to swallow anymore. He got up and looked at the senior corrections officer, whom he respected, at the four others standing a bit farther back, whom he didn’t know.

  “No.”

  “We have to go now, John.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “You’ve even got someone waiting for you there.”

  Handcuffs, leg irons. He’d seen others being taken away. He knew what it looked like. They were on their way to the Death House, an even smaller cell with a red floor that sat next to the chamber where he would be strapped to a gurney twenty-four hours later, while people watched on the other side of the glass window.

  wednesday morning, 0900 hours

  twelve hours left

  THE UNREST IN THE CORRIDORS OF MARCUSVILLE PRISON INCREASED during the night, loud cries for help, the uncontrollable fear that a long wait might stop; someone was going to be executed and every time that happened their own end came closer. It was not unexpected, the unrest was a malignant tumor that could never be removed, the prison staff had often experienced it since the state of Ohio had resumed capital punishment a few years back.

  That was why none of them even questioned the prison management’s decision to keep all cells in all corridors locked for twenty-four hours from nine o’clock that morning. The unrest could escalate into protests and riots, and keeping the doors locked until an execution was over and the anguish of the following night had eased was the simplest way to guarantee continued security.

  John Meyer Frey sat on a stool in one of the cells of what was called the Death House. Even smaller than a normal cell, clean to the point of sterile, there was nothing personal here, there was no smell here, a stool and a washbasin and a pot to shit in, a red floor covering that did the hating for the prisoner who no longer had the energy to do that himself. He had been informed that the camera on the wall opposite was constantly on and the images were transmitted to a monitor in the observation room that was watched by no fewer than three people at any one time. With only twelve hours left to live, the likelihood of a breakdown was acute.

  John had a piece of paper on his knee, a pen in his hand.

  He had been trying to write the instructions for his funeral and a will for a couple of hours now, but found it impossible; he couldn’t formulate the consequences of his own death.

  He looked up at the camera, threw up his hands, asked in a too loud voice for those watching to come to the cell and take away the paper, to throw it away, things could run their own course.

  Anna Mosley and Marie Morehouse had been two very young law school graduates when they had worked with Ruben Frey and Vernon Eriksen six years earlier in the Ohio Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which had used the prayer room in a hospital in Columbus as its base. They were now partners in their own firm with an office on the ground floor of a dilapidated building on North Ninth Street.

  They had been devastated the day that John was found dead on his cell floor.

  They had for the past six years known absolutely nothing about the escape that a small part of the pressure group had planned and carried out.

  They could therefore have been justifiably angry about not being told, but if they were, it was not something they showed. Since John had been returned to Marcusville prison, a great deal of their shared—and unpaid—work was dedicated to appealing for a reprieve, bombarding all legal institutions in Ohio with arguments for a stay of execution.

  With only twelve hours to go, they were sitting close together in a large waiting room in central Columbus. They needed each other, as everyone needs someone when all they want to do is lie down and give up. They were tired, they had been working all night and knew that their chances of influencing the decision were as good as next to nothing; John Meyer Frey’s execution was a matter of concern for the whole of Ohio, his death would mean that justice had been served.

  They sat on a bench clutching a bundle of papers, almost alone in the imposing, over-the-top waiting room, green marble floor and something that resembled classical Greek pillars down the main aisle.

  They hadn’t given up.

  They were prepared and would very soon make their last appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. They would then jump in a car and drive to Cincinnati and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. John Meyer Frey had already died once and survived, he could do it again.

  It wasn’t over. It was never over.

  When John stood up and looked at the camera with his will in his hand, the observation group had alerted Vernon Eriksen. A prisoner who was about to be executed had to be healthy and uninjured, but death had already started to eat away at this one. Vernon had run down the bare corridors lined with all the loc
ked doors and when he got to the Death House, he had asked one of the guards to let him into the cell, to the man who had only twelve hours left to live. He had sat down on a stool next to him and they had talked about everything except what was going to happen, their voices quiet, and Vernon had put his hand on John’s shoulder several times.

  All that the people watching them on the silent black-and-white monitor in the observation room saw was a senior corrections officer calming down a condemned man who was panicking. They couldn’t feel their closeness, nor even register John’s surprise when Vernon admitted the major role he had played in John’s escape. It was therefore also impossible to hear the prisoner suddenly start to thank the man who was responsible for looking after him unto death, for the days that had passed and become six extra years, for what had been an extended life, all because a person who he didn’t really know had risked everything to give him the opportunity to continue breathing.

  Ewert Grens was not in the least bit tired. Sleep was overrated. He had continued to get cups of coffee as night lightened into dawn into morning, and his very being had been consumed by a restless energy that came from the anxiety and anger that he no longer had room for but had to go somewhere. He had picked up Sven, who had been drained by too many sleepless hours, and asked him to go with him to the County Communications Center: two months of intense media coverage of a political decision to deport a person in custody with an impending execution for which the date had already been set would culminate today. Great organized demonstrations and violent unorganized clashes thirsting for the attention of every extra police officer who had been called in. When he arrived, Grens offered to relieve one of the operators, and when the first call came from the American embassy, requesting police reinforcement to help control the swelling crowd that was about to break into embassy property, he picked up the receiver and calmly explained, sorry, no cars available. He ignored Sven Sundkvist’s shocked face and went on to the next call, and when a frightened embassy official described the demonstrators as an increasing threat, he gave the same answer, sorry, no cars available. The third time, when the demonstrators’ shouts could be heard on the receiver and the officer was hysterical and pleaded for help from the police, Ewert Grens smiled as he whispered, then call in the marines, and hung up.