CELL 8

by Anders Roslund; Börge Hellström

  Helena, her son, Oscar, and her father-in-law, Ruben, were given permission by Vernon Eriksen to see the waiting prisoner in his cell in the Death House for their last family visit. They could then see him sitting behind a wall of thin steel bars instead of the square of steel-wirereinforced glass that visitors were normally shown to in the final twentyfour hours.

  It was hard to make out from the closed-circuit camera why they didn’t seem to be talking at all, they just seemed to be sitting there, John Meyer Frey with his stool on the inside of the locked cell, his family in the corridor outside, as if that was all they wanted, to be near each other, no more words when everything had been said.

  Thorulf Winge had walked from his home on Nybrogatan to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Gustav Adolfs Torg long before dawn. Yet another long day, he’d understood that much, yet more cameras, yet more questions.

  A day he had been looking forward to.

  When it was over, when night and dark had fallen, the two months of hell would be behind them. He had spent all his adult life in the halls of power, he had fended off a good deal of stupidity, hidden dozens of scandals in the shadows of diplomacy, negotiated a way out of both national and international crises before they had had a chance to grow beyond the embryonic stage. But everything paled in comparison to this damn girl killer.

  Winge had sometimes wondered, when he was on his own in the evenings, when the hate had taken a break, whether he was getting tired, if he didn’t have the energy anymore, he was perhaps just too old. Every day! New claims, interviews, opinion polls, demands for his resignation. All over the deportation of a criminal? The papers, the TV channels, they loved it. The readers, the viewers loved it. It went on and on, but maybe it would ease off once Frey was dead, maybe it wouldn’t be as much fun then to be involved.

  He heard the shouts from the demonstrators—Sweden! Murderer!—that filled the big square outside. They had been chanting without interruption—Sweden! Murderer!—since lunch, he wondered how they could be bothered, if they didn’t have work to go to.

  He left the window and went back to his desk. He wasn’t going to answer any questions today, he would stay in his office in the ministry, wait them out and go home about the time that the execution was due to take place.

  The three officers who were observing John Meyer Frey’s cell in the Death House via a camera had just started to relax slightly when one of the three visitors, a child of five, pulled himself loose from his mother’s arms and ran toward the wall of bars that separated him from his father. It was clear on the black-and-white monitor that the senior corrections officer rushed forward and tried to prevent the child from holding on to two of the bars, that he pulled at one of the child’s hands and that the mother hurried forward and pulled at the other. The recordings were without sound and so it wasn’t possible to hear the voices, but the boy screamed, his face twisted; it took two or three minutes before he let go and then curled up on the floor like a fetus.

  wednesday afternoon, 1500 hours

  six hours left

  IT WAS TWO MONTHS SINCE HE HAD DISEMBARKED FROM THE FERRY together with all the other passengers carrying plastic bags full of duty-free Absolut vodka in one hand and shyly holding the hand of the person they’d met the night before in the other as they walked down the ramp. He had longed to be home, hurried down the sidewalk that smelled of damp and carbon dioxide until impatience got the better of him and he had hailed a taxi to take him back to the block at Alphyddevägen 43. He had lived there, with his wife and son, a life that could have continued.

  They had eaten rice pudding and blueberry jam. Oscar’s choice, Daddy had been away and was home again and now they were going to eat what he liked best in the world, together.

  It was hard to swallow.

  John sat with the plate in front of him, his spoon midair, the blue-andwhite mass seemed to grow as it got closer to his mouth.

  The last supper.

  So absurd. A person who is going to be executed can choose six hours before his death what will be found in his belly if there is a postmortem. He didn’t want anything, said that there was no point in eating when it would soon be over. But Vernon, the senior corrections officer, had insisted, it was important, if not for him then for his family to know that he was as well as could be expected, and that food was a more important signal than John perhaps appreciated.

  He had chosen Oscar’s rice pudding. And he really had tried. But when he swallowed, it was as if it got stuck in his throat, the esophagus pressed against the windpipe, he couldn’t eat.

  He’d asked Vernon to sit with him. He was wise, they’d had their first conversation the very day that he’d come to the prison and Death Row, when he was seventeen. John knew that this level of intimacy was not right for a corrections officer and they had never talked like that when other ears could hear. The people watching them in the cell via the camera saw a dedicated member of the staff who was doing everything he could to calm a prisoner down in advance of his execution, which had attracted considerable attention.

  “I can’t.”

  “At least you tried.”

  “I can’t even swallow a mouthful. Could you ask for someone to come and take the tray?”

  Vernon had nothing more to say, there wasn’t much more that could be said, only a few formalities, he’d never been particularly good at giving comfort.

  “I’m about to go. I’ll take it with me.”

  John wanted to ask about the weather outside. There was no day in here, no weather. A cell without windows in a corridor without windows. Maybe it didn’t matter. If it was snowing, if it was getting warmer.

  “John, you haven’t asked for any family members.”

  Vernon looked at the man who was twenty years younger than him and seemed to be shrinking with every minute that remained.

  “You must.”

  John shook his head.

  “No.”

  “There will be lots of people there. Who you don’t know. Who you’ve never seen. You need to look into someone’s eyes, eyes you trust.”

  “Helena is not going to watch. Dad is not going to watch. And Oscar . . . there is no one else.”

  “John, please think about it, that’s all I’m asking. When you’re lying there, much more will be going on inside than you can ever imagine.”

  John closed his eyes, shook his head.

  “Not them. But maybe you? I’d like that. If you were there. The eyes I recognize and trust.”

  Ewert Grens found it harder and harder to deal with the restlessness with every hour that passed. When the demonstrations in town had grown far beyond what anyone had anticipated, he had asked Sven to stay at the communications center and had himself gone to the car and driven toward Djurgården and the American embassy, to get his own impression of what was happening.

  There was a vast number of people. The traffic had come to a standstill already in Strandvägen as people ran across the road without bothering about cars or buses, on their way to join the hordes of people and chants that now surrounded the various buildings in the block that comprised the American embassy. Grens was in a hurry and had driven along sidewalks, park paths, and then stopped at a distance, laughed for a while at the fools who were sitting in there shitting themselves. Served them right, it wasn’t much justice perhaps, but for a few hours at least, it was a finger up the wide ass of power.

  He had then driven on and realized suddenly that he was crossing Lidingö Bridge, on his way to the nursing home on the other side of the water.

  Now he was sitting here beside her, his hand in hers, looking out of the window.

  He had needed her and she had listened. A long story about a person who was going to be executed in six hours, that maybe it was his fault, that even after thirty-four years in one profession it was still so hard to know which stones should be left unturned.

  More saliva had dribbled than normal.

  He hadn’t liked it, it made him uneasy.

&nbs
p; So he had left her alone for a while, hurried out into the hall back to reception, insisted on talking to another member of staff, someone older and more experienced.

  The nurse had seen him and been unable to stifle a deep sigh when she followed him back. One look would have been enough. But she knew what it was usually like and had stayed a little longer. A hand on Anni’s forehead, her pulse, her breathing, she had examined her for a couple of minutes and then confirmed that she was just as well today as she had been every other time Grens had come running in a panic.

  Ewert looked at Anni again, her eyes gazing out of the window, she smiled and he kissed her cheek, his hand in hers again.

  He said it as gently as he could, that she had to stop scaring him like that, that he wouldn’t manage long without her.

  When the answer came that the Ohio Supreme Court had unanimously voted no to any further consideration of a possible reprieve for John Meyer Frey, Anna Mosley and Marie Morehouse were in the car on the way back from Cincinnati. Anna Mosley immediately pulled in to the coffeehouse they were just passing; too upset to carry on driving, she needed a cup of hot tea and a cigarette to stop her from screaming with disappointment.

  Ruben Frey’s house smelled of chicken and curry. A blue-striped apron around his rotund body, he liked making food and he did it every day even though he always ate alone. Since John had been taken from his childhood room for questioning in connection with the murder of Elizabeth Finnigan nearly twenty years earlier, Ruben had lived on his own, eaten on his own, gone through life on his own.

  And this was all so unfamiliar.

  His son was going to be executed in a few hours’ time, would cease to be, forever. And that was why Ruben Frey’s life was now richer than it had been for a very long time. A five-year-old grandson had moved into John’s old room and was sleeping in his old bed, a beautiful young woman who was his daughter-in-law now sat opposite him at the kitchen table at night and drank twelve-year-old whiskey with him and talked about John and herself and her son, gave Ruben a sense of belonging that he could never have dreamed of. It was a peculiar feeling, the joy he had found in the midst of everything, all thanks to a death sentence, and he didn’t know how to handle it.

  It was Helena who answered when Marie Morehouse called from some café along Interstate 71 from Cincinnati. Morehouse’s disappointment was tangible, they had worked hard and eventually the Frey/Schwarz family had started to hope and even believe that the arguments of the two diligent young lawyers, couched in legal terms, would succeed.

  Helena Schwarz didn’t even have the energy to cry. Morehouse had explained that they were still waiting to hear from several other courts: they expected the final answer from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in exactly three hours’ time, and from a judge called Anthony Glenn Adams at the U.S. Supreme Court; courts that were in themselves powerful enough to stop and postpone the decision to carry out the execution at 2100 hours.

  She had sat down at the kitchen table, eaten what had smelled of curry for a couple of hours now, and given answers to her son’s persistent questions that she herself could not yet comprehend; that he couldn’t see his dad again today, that that was just the way it was, that Daddy didn’t want to live in the house behind the high walls that you could see from Granddad’s bedroom, and of course he still cared about them, but he might not come home again even so.

  Vernon Eriksen hadn’t been prepared. The question was so out of the blue, he hadn’t had time to think it through, he hadn’t had time to formulate a nice way of saying no.

  wednesday evening, 1800 hours

  three hours left

  IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE, HE COULDN’T SEE IT BUT HE KNEW IT, THAT DAY had turned to evening in Marcusville. People were sitting in their kitchens and eating supper together—most of them came home around now, not many of them went to the two bars in town, it had never been that sort of place. John remembered his early puberty, the energy that thumped in his chest, when Marcusville had been like an enormous plastic bag that made it impossible to breathe. He had longed to get away, just like all his peers; life had been waiting far beyond the main road into this town.

  Three hours.

  John tried to catch a look at the left arm of the officer who was standing closest, dark and hairy, with a watch in silver metal.

  Three hours left.

  They were waiting outside the cell. Black caps, peaks pulled down over their eyes, dark green shirts and pants, black shiny boots. Keys hanging on yard-long chains, every step, every movement rattling, four guards in identical uniforms and barely fifty yards from the washroom that smelled of old drains. Two of them walked half a step in front, two of them half a step behind. None of them said a word, he wasn’t sure that they were even looking at him, almost as if he had already ceased to be.

  He was allowed to shower for ten minutes. The water was hot and he liked it, turned his face up and let it burn the thin skin. Once he was used to it, he turned the heat up to the next level, welcoming the pain.

  The diaper was important. He had to bend over, for a moment back at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, different kind that had to be closed at the hip but it felt more or less the same.

  He hadn’t asked any questions then, he didn’t ask any now. He knew why he was wearing it.

  The dark blue trousers were recently washed, he recognized the smell of the laundry detergent, but the red stripe down the leg was new, he hadn’t seen pants like that before. A white top, V-neck, short sleeves, bare skin meant visible veins.

  It was when they were on their way back that one of the guards, the one with the watch, leaned forward and whispered something. John didn’t hear it at first, asked him to repeat.

  Fifteen judges with a unanimous result.

  He’d also gotten a no from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

  wednesday evening, 2000 hours

  one hour left

  MOST OF ALL, HE THOUGHT ABOUT HER SMILE. ELIZABETH HAD ONE OF those smiles that made everyone who looked at her uncertain. Was it tenderness, scorn, insecurity—it was impossible to decide. John had longed for those smiling lips, for several years he had longed for them; they had gone to the same school and walked the same way there and back. He had been sixteen years old when she asked him to kiss them. Soft, that had been his first thought, so unbelievably soft.

  Helena? Probably the way she held a glass. He would never be able to explain it to anyone. She held it so delicately, so hard. It didn’t break.

  He looked up at the camera on the wall. People who were sitting in another room watching another person’s last minutes. Did they enjoy it? Or was it just work? Eight hours watching someone who was about to be executed, then home to make supper? Maybe they were playing cards. Watching a tennis match, one all and the final set, on a sports channel on another monitor.

  He shouted loudly until one of the guards came running. He’d changed his mind. He wanted to exercise his right to use the telephone that stood on a trolley farther down the corridor, which you could call from if the recipient accepted the charge.

  It would never be enough. He knew that.

  But their voices, one more time.

  wednesday evening, 2045 hours

  fifteen minutes left

  THE MESSAGE THAT JUDGE ANTHONY GLENN ADAMS OF THE U.S. SUPREME Court had rejected the appeal for a stay of execution never reached the prisoner who was sitting waiting in one of the two cells in the Death House. Adams, who had the authority to process cases that were urgent unilaterally, had done what he usually did when a case involved the death penalty: he’d left it to the court’s nine members to reason and reach a decision together.

  Their conclusion had been unanimous.

  One of the three phones that hung on a simple wooden panel on the wall of the room behind the death chamber was therefore connected directly to the governor’s office in Columbus.

  The line would be held open until the execution had been completed.

 
; Only a call from the governor of Ohio in the fifteen minutes that remained could now prevent the execution of John Meyer Frey from being carried out.

  wednesday evening, 2050 hours

  ten minutes left

  “MR. FREY?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Rodney Wiley. I’m one of the nurses here at Marcusville. I’d like to ask you to sit down, please.”

  John had been standing in the cell when the small man in an oversized white coat had opened the door and held out a thin, sweaty hand. Less than fifteen minutes to go, maybe ten, he had his clock ticking inside, the one he had carried with him since he was seventeen and realized that the only thing left to do was to count down.

  He’d never seen Rodney Wiley before, he didn’t know him, and yet he would now be one of the last people he saw and spoke to.

  “Completely still, please, Mr. Frey.”

  The liquid that the nurse doused some cotton wool with was pungent. A disinfectant, the thin hand dabbed it carefully on the bend in his arm, around and around with the soft cotton wad. Wiley was about to insert the cannula, and it had to be clean for that, he wanted to avoid infection, someone who was still alive should be seen and treated as such, as a living being.

  “Heparin. Anticoagulant. That’s what I’m about to give you. We don’t want anything clogging up the system, do we, Mr. Frey?”

  It sounded more absurd than intended and Wiley immediately regretted it. He was nervous, scared; every time was just as difficult and he still hadn’t learned how to talk to someone whose death he was preparing.