The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  “Lift it up,” said Mary, and clapped her hand once in her lap. N. raised one leg so that she could reach. He was wearing only a pair of thin shorts. With the bandages rolled off, once again she examined him with keen little movements. Felt around the edges of his kneecap, massaged a tendon in his knee, then touched a sore on the inside of his leg that extended down the calf.

  Her fingertips subtle, he got an erection. His hips responded but, overcome by shame, he pulled back his leg and sat up. He avoided looking at her.

  “Lift up your leg,” she said, rolling the scalpel between her fingers. “Leg.” When he didn’t respond, she bent forward and lifted it into her lap again.

  The small threads from the stitches looked like black pine needles when she laid them on the table.

  One last tug as a thread was cut, and N. let the other foot slide down on the floor.

  “Did I get them all?” she asked.

  He looked down at his legs. They had been the worst. He looked at all the twisting scars that branched like white roots. He was about to say something when Mary leaned forward so that her lips just touched his shoulder. Felt her warmth, her hair falling over his arm. Her fingers found their way in between his fingers. A white stripe revealed where there had once been a ring. He didn’t remember if he had lost it or taken it off.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “not anymore,” and stood up. Once again, the tattooed cat’s eyes in the gap on her back when she turned around.

  “Not anymore,” repeated N. He stood up too. Mary moved slowly in front of him, as if she were dancing. Slowly, lightly. She touched her own shoulder with her cheek and came closer. Like a wave.

  “Did you have children?” she whispered.

  N. floated inside, as if he had drunk a truth serum. She felt it.

  He turned to her without looking. Her closeness there anyway, sensed as warmth, a scent. What he saw was his children’s faces. As clearly as if they were standing right in front of him. Saw the color of their eyes. The blue.

  He held up two fingers, but Mary had already put her index finger over her lips.

  “Ssh . . .” Then she whispered, “No past . . . no future, just like me.” She smiled.

  He tried to smile as well.

  “You can live that way,” she said, with a slow shrug. “Can’t you?” She stood with her back to him, hesitating. N.’s breath moved through her hair. He exhaled again, making the loose hairs tremble. Then he stretched out his hands, gently, as if reaching out in a completely dark room, felt the skin beneath his fingers. Brought them to her hips, saw her shoulder blades relax. Slowly, as when a tree starts to fall, she leaned back against his chest.

  “No,” she said quietly, but not wanting him to stop. Took hold of his hands and led them over her stomach, guiding his movements with intertwined fingers. The inviting indent of her navel. Then it was his power that carried them forward, still with her hands over his. The hip bones’ relentless inward trail, fingertips balancing as if on a tightrope. Her gasp like that of a frightened audience. His own lustful sound when he brought his hands together over her mound. Thin fabric, a hint of hair. He pressed himself hard against her.

  “Does it feel awful?” she asked and turned around, taking hold of his hand and gently licking the palm. “Is it terrible?” That same vigilant, fearless gaze as when the pelicans were shot.

  She resisted when he forced her hand down and held it there so she could feel him.

  “It is . . .” She squeezed so hard that he fell silent. Moaning, he heaved his hips. She braced herself and held her head so he could reach her neck. A slow bite, over skin and hair.

  Swirling naked together on the floor. The tip of her tongue drew tracks, he bit where he could. The whole time she kept his sex in a firm grip, her hand at the root. He looked down, tried but did not want to pull free. There was nothing gentle in her movements—a thin silver bracelet and something blue twitched restlessly around her wrist. She shivered and swore quietly with her eyes closed when he took her breasts. The glaring cat showed his arched back when Mary stretched out in the dark. She said something loud and turned around, took him in, and he moaned. In lust, the teeth she bared were very white.

  N. woke up during the night, a few moments of consciousness in the dark. When he moved, he felt the dirt on the wooden planks beneath him. He shivered, feeling sandy and naked. Behind his eyeballs, a headache from the whisky had taken hold, and his groin ached with exhaustion. Mary was no longer next to him, though he heard a sound from her bed.

  He listened, sensed her there. Then he rolled over on his side, curled up, and fell asleep.

  He saw a vast ballroom floor, light shining just above its surface. A man came walking, the sound of his heels against the wood. He was visible only up to the waist, his two legs and one hand on a cane. The tip of the cane was silent—nothing could be heard as it hit the floor, only the heels of his shoes. Its head was carved like the skull of a starving animal. The man paused, as if waiting, or seeing something. Then, from somewhere behind the man with the cane, came a gust of wind, a whispering wind. It was Mary’s voice N. heard, saying, “Let’s do it . . . Let’s do it . . .”

  CHAPTER 9

  Indian Ocean, April 28, 2008

  IT TOOK A WHOLE DAY to reach their destination, with one stopover at a foreign military base somewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere. Nobody told them where they’d landed to refuel. Passengers stretched for a few minutes outside the airplane: heavy tropical air and fuel fumes, uniformed Asians dragging snaky black hoses over the tarmac in the heat.

  Off again. Up at altitude, crossing over the next sea. The hours crawled by.

  Landed.

  Diego Garcia: a remote location in the Indian Ocean, where the land barely rises out of the sea.

  “You know about the island?” asked Shauna Friedman when they got their bags.

  “Not much,” said Grip. Buses arrived for the other passengers; a car came for Grip and Friedman. In fact, he did know a few things about the atoll. Diego Garcia, a ribbon of sand and vegetation, made into an outpost for strangers. No one called it home. There were no permanent residents. A world of antennas, barracks, tanks, and depots—that was the picture. A deep harbor, that was important, and even more so, the two-mile-long runway. The biggest ship in the navy’s arsenal could anchor there, and the heaviest plane in the air force could take off. All the eyes there were America’s own. Surrounded by unbroken water, hundreds of miles in all directions.

  A place out of reach, created mostly as a way to get to everybody else.

  There were rumors about Garcia. Overheated websites suggested many things: blurry satellite images with arrows on buildings, lengthy records without references, testimony without names. People who tracked airplane routes saw flights that hopped all over the world and finally landed on Garcia. Excluding the supernatural nonsense, the UFOs and the superweapons, there were still a few items worth noting. Things that any security police analyst would mention in a follow-up meeting. True, it stank. There were those who said that Guantánamo was a place that did, after all, tolerate the world’s attention. Not Diego Garcia.

  But why bother to mention it? Here he was, Grip—a reluctant tourist.

  They drove out of the airport and through buildings on the base. An entire community whose signs, flagpoles, and shops all showed unmistakable military style—soulless. Khaki, concrete, bare lawns.

  “I’m a foreigner,” said Grip after a moment of silence in the car. “Don’t I have to get stamped?”

  “That’s not necessary,” said Friedman.

  “You’re familiar with the rules here?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  They were given separate rooms in a hotel reserved for officers. It looked like a cheap motel stuck in the 1970s. In Grip’s room the walls, ceilings, and thick carpet were all beige, and the doors and dressers were paneled in fake dark-brown wood. As if someone had packed up a den in Alabama and moved it out to the Indian Ocean. The clattering ai
r conditioner was wired right into the wall; the bed had only a thin cotton sheet.

  A few hours later, a piece of grilled meat sat on a plate in front of him, bloody as an open cut. Friedman had been smart enough to get a salad. He took a few bites before his travel-battered stomach said enough. Not many had shown up at the officers’ club.

  “Still too early,” said Friedman, looking at the empty seats. “The heat.”

  The evening disappeared mostly in silence. Fatigue, travel, the unlikely place: all those were excuses enough. But things were so cool between them that talking didn’t help, as if they were on a bad date. She drank a dry martini, saying she didn’t like the water on the island. After a few thousand miles too many on an airplane, Grip had decided not to drink, contenting himself with the water, which stank of chlorine.

  One night, then reveille from a scratchy speaker off in the distance. Toast and a couple of fried eggs, which they didn’t eat together. Not breakfast. For a while, this would be their pattern.

  Friedman had picked up a car earlier in the morning. Distances on the island were small, but still too far to walk. She came and got Grip, drove a few minutes, and stopped.

  The building was low and windowless with a plain entrance. Past the door, they had to go through a barred metal gate. Grip saw a camera in the ceiling; the lock clicked open. Around the corner, Friedman showed her ID, signed something, and they went in. All doors they passed closed as soon as they went through. It was strangely quiet, just the sounds of their own footsteps. The floor sagged slightly under them, and Grip got the feeling that he was surrounded by something makeshift, a facade.

  Friedman walked first into a sparsely furnished room where a man sat balancing on a chair with his back to them, watching a small TV. He turned and mumbled a greeting when they entered.

  “Clay,” said Friedman, with a gesture in the man’s direction that was both introductory and dismissive. Then she said, “Well, here we are,” and pointed to the TV screen.

  In black and white, they saw a room about the same size as the one they were in. The grainy image from the surveillance camera showed what clearly was a cell: bare walls, an open toilet up close, and at the far end of the floor, a bunk right on the floor. Distorted by the wide-angle lens, the toilet’s curves loomed huge, while the bunk looked distant and tiny. There was someone on it. Nothing moved in the picture; the figure lay still in a vaguely unnatural position. Maybe it was just the perspective, or maybe he was dead.

  Grip had been in many jails before, but seldom had he been seized by the discomfort he felt now. He saw that the man on the bed—for it was a man—was barefoot and wearing overalls. Had a beard and unkempt hair, he thought. A speaker crackled. The man in the cell shifted on his plastic-wrapped mattress. The sound was so amplified that it sounded like an insect, as if a microphone stood right next to the bed.

  “We need help determining his nationality. We have indications that he might be Swedish. Is he?” Friedman asked abruptly. She said it as if she was expecting an immediate and uncomplicated answer. As if the person inside was someone familiar, a person any Swede would instantly recognize as a compatriot. Grip neither replied nor looked at her. The man called Clay held up a couple of photos for Grip.

  He took them, the black-and-white mug shots, front and profile. The man’s gaze was apathetic, telling a tale of insomnia, defiance, and something else that had gone on far too long. There was no name, no number, nothing to identify him.

  “Is he a Swedish citizen?” repeated Friedman.

  Grip turned from her. “Clay, isn’t it?” he said, with a questioning gaze toward the man on the chair.

  “Clay Stackhouse,” she filled in.

  Grip nodded. “Must Mr. Stackhouse be involved here?”

  “Go get a coffee, Clay.”

  He was already on his way.

  They were alone.

  Friedman threw up her hands when Grip said nothing for more than a minute. “Well?”

  “What is it you want me to tell you?”

  “Just say whether or not you think he is Swedish.”

  “No,” said Grip. “Clay’s gone. Now it’s your turn to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About what—You’re making yourself look silly. Okay.” He waved once with the photographs and then said with deliberate slowness, “What the hell is this about?”

  “Determining the man’s identity.” Friedman shrugged, searching for words. “The FBI would love to know who this man really is.”

  “And this is how you go about it?”

  “We are not going about anything in any particular way. We are looking at a fait accompli.”

  “Fait accompli . . . a lone man in a cell at Diego Garcia?”

  “Something like that.”

  “He just showed up out of nowhere, overnight?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What is he suspected of?”

  “Can we take one thing at a time? He isn’t suspected of selling cigarettes to minors, okay. Soon enough, all right?”

  “One thing at a time. Why would he be Swedish?”

  “Because someone said so.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “No.”

  “A Swede,” said Grip to himself. Then he held up one of the pictures, pointing at it. “How the hell do you think I could identify someone who has been beaten up like this? Who did this to him?” He turned to Friedman again. “Or for the sake of being completely obvious, maybe I should ask why you tortured him.”

  Friedman looked completely unmoved. She didn’t answer.

  “It isn’t very nicely done,” said Grip. “Maybe it wasn’t meant to be.” He nodded, for drama. “Nothing you feel responsible for?”

  “Not the FBI. We just want to know who he is.”

  “And how many are working with you on this?”

  “Right now—just me.”

  “Stackhouse—”

  “Stackhouse isn’t FBI,” interrupted Friedman.

  Grip suddenly felt an unseen audience in the room. “But Stackhouse doesn’t belong to the military. He’s wearing civilian clothes.”

  “No,” said Friedman. “Stackhouse isn’t military.”

  The repetition was a whispered insight. Shauna Friedman was conducting an investigation in enemy territory. Perhaps trusting reality in that room as little as Grip himself. The perspective shifted—he needed to buy time. Time to think.

  “But the cell is here?” he asked, just to say something.

  “In the same building, a short distance away.”

  Grip nodded. “I’m thirsty,” he said. Then, “Maybe Stackhouse can bring us something?”

  “When we pick up Clay, we can get ourselves a drink.”

  Clay Stackhouse was obviously CIA, or part of their loosely affiliated enterprises and covert agencies known by other letters. Grip could tell after only a few minutes. Stackhouse was the type who could have done a hundred push-ups in a row twenty years ago, when he was in the marines. A guy who thought of himself as still in good shape. But many belt holes later, after the years of barbecues in the Virginia suburbs and the heavy-bottomed glasses of Jack Daniel’s, he’d be lucky to do five. The type who thought he knew the Middle East, who liked to drown out everyone else by saying what his Arab friends thought whenever he heard arguments he didn’t like. Friends who in fact were mostly businessmen from Beirut and Riyadh, whose sons already went to private schools in the United States and who hoped their useful American contacts would help them get out when everything collapsed and the jihadists took over. These days, you bumped into Stackhouse types all over the world. A dime a dozen.

  All three were back in the room. Stackhouse sat on the table next to the television screen, holding a cup of iced coffee. He called Grip by his first name and talked about the food that the man in the cell could soon look forward to. How the prisoner would be able to shower the next day. It gave Grip the feeling that someone had captured a rare animal and got
stuck taking care of it.

  “He answers when spoken to?” asked Grip.

  “That was a long time ago, Ernst.”

  “When?”

  “Several months ago.” Stackhouse looked down at the TV picture whenever sounds of movement broke the silence through the speaker. Only when the picture was still and the sound had stopped did he look up again. “He spoke English, in case you’re wondering.”

  “With an accent, any accent?”

  “No one who attended the sessions was trained to determine that.”

  “Trained to determine . . .” Grip let it go. “Is he a Muslim?” he asked instead.

  “We haven’t noticed anything that would suggest that.”

  “So what have you noticed?”

  Stackhouse looked at him blankly.

  “What do you know about him?” Grip repeated.

  “He has dark hair.”

  “Colombian, perhaps,” suggested Grip. He gestured toward the photographs on the table. “No one can tell anything about him, not from these.” Neither Stackhouse nor Friedman looked at the images. “Half his face is bruised. He was still bloody when those pictures were taken. He could be Portuguese or he could damn well be Japanese. Christ!”

  Stackhouse spun his cup so that the ice cubes rattled around in the coffee. “We have very reliable intelligence, Ernst—”

  “That may be true,” interrupted Grip. “And I look forward to receiving it.”

  Stackhouse continued to spin his cup. The man on the bunk lay motionless with his back to the camera. A cautious silence filled the room.

  “You want me to interrogate him?” said Grip eventually.

  Shauna responded first. “We are offering you the chance to find out if he is one of yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “If he is Swedish.”

  Grip humphed.

  “Shouldn’t you take the opportunity to go in to him?” asked Stackhouse, chewing on a piece of ice.

  “Not today.”

  Stackhouse shrugged.

  A moaning sigh could be heard through the speaker. As Friedman signaled that they were leaving, Grip noticed cool air blowing in through a vent behind him. That and the prisoner’s moan made him ask, “How hot is it in there?”