The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  Mary turned the stove’s gas burners on and off, as if to see if they still worked. She cast a brief glance at N. Then she said quietly, “I always fast after I’ve traveled. If you want something, there’s canned soup—tomato or cheese.” She pulled out a drawer in an old file cabinet that served as a pantry.

  CHAPTER 15

  Diego Garcia, 2008

  ERNST GRIP WAS STUCK. REGARDLESS of the half-truths they poured over him, he had to find out whether that broken heap in the cell on Garcia was a Swedish citizen. No way around it. At dinner that evening, Grip said he realized he’d be there longer than he’d originally thought. Friedman said the formalities with Washington were no problem, and she’d make sure that someone informed Stockholm.

  “Skip Stockholm,” he said, then: “Can you get me newspapers?”

  The answer took a few seconds. “The largest US dailies get sent regularly to Garcia.”

  “I mean foreign newspapers.”

  “You need newspapers for your job?” asked Friedman.

  “You could say that. For the man in the bunk.” Grip handed a list of foreign newspapers to Friedman.

  “We should be able to round up some of these by tomorrow,” she said, reading over the list.

  “No rush. First, by tomorrow I want somebody to bring him a table and a chair.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Friedman with a shrug.

  Grip had expected more of a fight. “You give Stackhouse orders, despite the fact that he doesn’t belong to you?”

  “In this case.”

  “Did you know that the air-conditioning in the cell was turned off?”

  “I’m not here to crusade against my own side.”

  “But you accept what they’re doing.”

  “My privileges are limited.”

  “The torture—who was responsible?”

  She removed a strand of hair from her shorts. “You know the talk and walk here as well as I do. Who acknowledges what and who doesn’t. The man in the cell has been in a third country. He arrived here only recently.”

  “Which country?”

  Friedman hesitated.

  “Do you know what country it was?” Grip went on.

  “Oman, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia—you choose. I don’t know.”

  “But that’s where they did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you sent him there.”

  “Not the FBI.”

  “The United States sent him there.”

  “Give up,” said Friedman, setting down her glass.

  “And now you have a goddamn mess to sort out.”

  “We . . . we have a goddamn mess.”

  They were both silent for a while, condensation dripping down their glasses.

  “And you need my help,” continued Grip. “So let’s stop pretending that I’m here out of charity. What do I get in return?”

  “Maybe a sunburn,” Friedman shot back. “The real prize could be saving a Swede’s skin.”

  The first newspapers arrived two days later. Grip sorted them into stacks. One stack for each day. Then he took the first and headed with Shauna to the building with sagging floors where the prisoners were held. Stackhouse, sitting in the monitoring room, said he’d bring in the papers after lunch. Apparently Friedman had already given him instructions. On the TV screen, Grip saw a small table and a chair. The man, the prisoner, whatever he was, half-sat in the corner at the head of his bunk.

  “Air-conditioning?” said Grip.

  Stackhouse finished drawing a meaningless figure on his paper before he replied. “It’s on.”

  “That must have hurt,” Grip said, and left the room.

  Shauna Friedman had accompanied him only on the first few days. After that Grip was trusted. She never asked him what he was doing—the daily stack of newspapers, but no attempt at questioning inside the cell. Grip figured the explanation was simple: he would get the job done. She had all the time in the world.

  Diego Garcia: eternal sunshine, cottony clouds over the atoll, sometimes a late-afternoon storm. Each day the same, unchanging. Every day Grip left the newspapers and then watched the previous day’s surveillance tapes. He fast-forwarded through them. At first the days were pretty much always the same. Apart from eating some of the food he was brought and using the toilet a couple times, the man in the cell stayed on his bunk. It was like watching an animal in hibernation—asleep, or half asleep. His movements were slow and ineffective when he had to get up, as if gravity itself tormented him. As he lay, he sighed and scratched himself often. The newspapers remained untouched in their stack on the table, every day new ones. When he ate, he didn’t leave his bunk, wedging his back against the wall. The table and chair were simply obstacles on his way to the toilet.

  “I’ll leave the old ones there,” said Stackhouse on the third day, about the newspapers.

  “No, replace them,” replied Grip, tapping the fresh stack.

  “Should I put out warm croissants too?”

  “If you want, absolutely.”

  On the fifth day, the man took his plate to the table and sat there and ate. The next day, he gently pushed apart the papers with the end of his plastic spoon. As if to see what they were, without seeming too interested.

  Grip played through the sequence on the tape a couple of times when he found it. Watched how he moved his hand, looked at his eyes.

  “And he doesn’t say a word?” he asked Stackhouse, who was leafing through a glossy boating magazine behind him.

  “Not to us,” Stackhouse muttered.

  “And his hair?”

  “It was already long when he came here.”

  “Came from where?” Grip tried, halfheartedly.

  Stackhouse didn’t even bother to reply.

  The swelling in the man’s face had gone down, but Grip couldn’t yet analyze his facial features, only imagine. His movements were still fumbling. Grip thought he’d like to see him naked, to see how bad it was. If he’d only been roughed up, or if they’d been more sophisticated. The loose overalls hid most of it. With only a TV image, Grip couldn’t see if he still had nails.

  The days went by. The man, the prisoner, ate at the table and spread the newspapers apart with his spoon. Friedman didn’t ask Grip what he was doing. Nor how long it would take. He still hadn’t been in touch with Stockholm.

  Grip met Shauna Friedman at the officers’ club every night at seven. It was their baseline, their checkpoint at the end of the day. They started with a drink and usually sat at the same table, a little apart from the flight suits and the other uniforms, who sat closer to the bar.

  “No, they don’t,” Shauna had said on the second night, stopping Grip when he tried to order a mojito. “A place like this serves three or four kinds of drinks, period. Look around”—she nodded toward a group of airmen—“beer and whisky.” The waitress who’d stood waiting for his order wore the blank look of someone who’d been waiting too long for a bus. She appeared to be Filipina.

  “He’ll also have a dry martini,” Shauna said.

  That was then. Now it had been a week, exactly. The same waitress had just placed a dark rum on the rocks in front of him.

  “I told you,” said Shauna, “the ice is disgusting.”

  “I know, chlorine,” said Grip and drank.

  They’d talked about New York. What seemed to be small talk. A little competition over showing you knew your way around. From the huge stone lions in front of the Public Library to the gallery at the corner of this street and that avenue, the sandwiches at the Polish deli, the clock tower in Brooklyn. Grip held back, let himself sound initiated but basically still a tourist.

  “Other places then. Where do you like to spend time?” Shauna glanced toward the bar and away again. “Someone like you?”

  “Someone like me . . .” He drank again, tasting the chlorine. “Where I like to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “The well-known places are just clichés.”

 
“What does that mean?”

  “I like Cape Cod.”

  “That is a cliché.” Shauna laughed.

  “Exactly.” Grip nodded.

  “Sand and sea and outrageously priced ice cream in August.”

  “Have you been there in April?” he asked.

  “The thought never crossed my mind.”

  “The light . . .”

  “Hopper,” she interrupted, lifting her glass.

  Grip flinched. “Hopper, yes . . . Edward Hopper.”

  “Paintings of a different kind of sand, a different kind of light.”

  “Don’t you agree?”

  “Maybe.”

  Grip pondered for a moment. Thought it wouldn’t cost him anything. To make his case.

  “In one of Hopper’s paintings, there’s a small hotel. It’s in Provincetown, and it looks the same now as when he painted it in 1945. Whitewashed wood, two stories. If you walk past, you hardly notice it—but if you look at the painting, you long to spend the night there. Two ways of seeing one place.”

  “Mm.”

  “Two realities.”

  “There’s a lot of Hopper to see in New York,” she said. “Have you—”

  “I think I’ve seen everything.”

  Shauna nodded slowly. “That hotel,” she continued, “you’ve obviously stayed there. If the painting was so irresistible, I mean?”

  “It is.”

  “Hopper’s subject being loneliness?”

  “I wasn’t there alone.”

  “At Hopper’s hotel?”

  “The painting is called Rooms for Tourists.”

  Shauna smiled, sat with her glass in her hand. “You made love?”

  The empty glass from her first martini was still on the table, next to the drink she was now working on. Grip held the silence for a moment.

  Then he said: “We did, all night in fact. Until it hurt.”

  “Hopper,” she said, unfazed, and smiled again.

  Then she raised her napkin and dropped it like a parachute over her empty glass.

  “Have you ever heard of Chung Ling Soo?” she asked. “Speaking of things you care about.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Yes, a magician. Around the turn of the last century, Chung Ling Soo was the biggest thing in London, legendary performances, everyone wanted to see him.” She took a sip of her second martini and put the glass down again, half full.

  “You and Soo . . . ,” said Grip, not entirely following.

  “Not me, Dad. My dad needed an expensive hobby, so he started collecting posters from Soo’s performances. Originals—the most sought-after can go for a few hundred thousand. May I?” Shauna reached for Grip’s napkin, lying beside his glass. She unfolded it, continued: “Dad bought posters, and when he told me about his tricks, I got interested in magic.”

  His napkin fell through the air and landed on her half-full glass.

  “The thing was, the posters weren’t enough. I wanted to do it myself.”

  She took hold of the second napkin, pulling it off the glass with a quick gesture.

  Not only the martini but even the olive had disappeared. A lift of the other napkin was simply confirmation. What had been in one was now in the other.

  “You . . .” Grip was speechless. He glanced under the table. “Impressive.”

  She took her once-empty glass and drank again. “Nothing to it, really,” she said. “Like this . . .” She slid off her ring, and for several seconds made it appear and disappear everywhere in her hand. “It’s just dexterity, something to do when you’re bored.”

  A group of officers started yelling down by the bar. Shauna looked at them and then at the clock. “Shouldn’t we order? It’ll take forever to get our food if we let the flyboys get there first.”

  She called to the waitress.

  They were in the middle of their meal when she came back to the subject. “Art,” she said, “that’s what we were talking about when I interrupted you with those martini glasses.”

  “Not interrupted,” said Grip, with a dismissive wave.

  “In any case. You like Hopper, and for me, the Soo posters weren’t enough, I had to get to the magic itself. For me, art needs to be more tangible. Have you seen the sculptures of Jean Arp?”

  Grip chewed. Nodded once.

  “Their shapes, almost human, but not quite. You can’t resist wanting to touch them. Even own them. That’s what explains the prices, you know.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Grip got out.

  “Man and woman, in the same form.”

  Grip sat in his underwear and a T-shirt at the desk in his room. He’d stacked up the next day’s batch of newspapers. Most printed in languages he didn’t understand, foreign alphabets and characters. Next to them lay the copy of Expressen he’d saved from his flight to New York, wavy from being stuffed into seat pockets and bags. The tabloid reminded him of Sweden, made him think of Stockholm. He hadn’t made himself known yet, hadn’t even sent an e-mail. Something made him resist—Shauna Friedman. She ordered newspapers for him but asked no questions. And Stackhouse, who rocked in his chair and had something on the tip of his tongue, something he so wanted to spit out, that look in his eye—I know something you don’t know.

  And then. Suddenly Shauna Friedman started talking about art. Hopper, even though he’d been the one going on about his paintings, but then—Jean Arp. Women always liked Jean Arp, but within the space of ten minutes, first the magic, switching stuff around, and then she started talking about Arp. Why the hell had she done it? Jean Arp, of all bastards.

  CHAPTER 16

  New York, autumn 2004

  THIS TIME, BEN DIDN’T NEED to get drunk before telling Grip. His cough was only the tip of the iceberg. The problem wasn’t his health, now in a fragile equilibrium, but the havoc the virus left behind. It was the money—the old debts threatening to sink them. The total amounted to many times more than what it had cost to end Ben’s hacking over the sink at night. As with icebergs—one to ten—people get blinded by the part above the surface, and can only imagine the immensity below. But the law offices’ stream of white envelopes could no longer be pushed down among the takeout cartons and eggshells. Dates were now written in stone, orders sent without any deadline for appeal, all exemptions expired. No longer was anyone willing to sign anything new, no pen was raised to an appeal. Cash only. Pay!

  But the town was full of money. New York rolled along with its usual extravagance—supply and demand. And now Christo, the monumental artist who had wrapped bridges and tropical islands in cloth, would transform all of Central Park into a billowing orange temple with his draped gates. The newspapers wrote that he’d worked on the concept for nearly thirty years, and now it would happen. The Gates would show up one morning, gates by the thousands, on walkways, paths, and roads, stand for a few weeks, and then disappear in a flash—every single gate. According to the concept and agreement with New York City, nothing in the park would be permanently impacted, and every component of the gates would be recycled: ground up, melted, incinerated. Only the memory would remain. It became an unbeatable slogan, a sort of impossible dream.

  Seven thousand gates that New Yorkers and visitors from around the world would feel compelled to wander through during the month of February, while Central Park was leafless and gray. This was art. A Braque oil of a village, or one of Giacometti’s figures in bronze—wait long enough, and they’d eventually come up for auction. All art has its collectors. But Christo’s The Gates could never be bought like a Giacometti or a Braque. This aspect appealed to the rich who had everything. Surely, the fingers of one of those fuckers would start to itch.

  “They don’t need me, but they want you,” said Ben. They both knew, though at first Grip pretended otherwise. Ben stood in the door of his small office at the gallery and fixed his sober, anxious gaze on a lone visitor.

  “So now they want The Gates,” Grip said at last. He sat in Ben’s desk chair, flipping through one of the bo
oks that had already been published on Christo’s project. It was still a few months away.

  “Not all the gates,” said Ben. “A couple, maybe one. I don’t know.”

  “I could do ten jobs like that, and it still wouldn’t be enough.” Grip turned several pages at a time as he went through the illustrations, all of them billowing with orange.

  “It’s not your opinions they want, they want you to plan the entire job.” Ben gazed out at his gallery with fragile pride.

  Grip opened the book to yet another spread before he said anything. “Are you the one who convinced them?”

  “It’s only art. People don’t need to get hurt.”

  “Not art, just plastic and cast iron, so it says here.”

  “Picasso’s bull was nothing more than a handlebar on a saddle.”

  “So you figured that if it’s called art, there would be money involved, and then there are always collectors—and you told them I should be their man.”

  That made Ben turn around to look Grip in the eye, and Grip saw less hope there than fear. Ben turned away again. “Yes, I offered them the Swede, the Swede who’s becoming quite valuable around here.”

  “They pay well?”

  Ben mentioned the sum. Grip flipped another page. Ben continued: “They want it to be you and one of the others who did the Arp job.”

  Grip was surprised that Ben suffered more than he did. This was obviously their unholy opportunity. It was a fact that as Grip crossed the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere in the middle he became a different man. But even if he gave in to attractions and cravings here that were impossible for him to play out on the other side of the ocean, still there was always something of the security police left in him. Certain guiding instincts. Such as, he didn’t want to deal with cash-in-transit robbers. Better to keep those types at arm’s length. But then there were all the other parts of the equation too. Such as, life as he and Ben knew it would be over on the last of February—that was the date carved in stone. Then the bankers and the bean counters would come break down their door. The sum Ben had mentioned would go a long way toward covering the debt, but not all the way. So why not shoot down the foreclosure and overdue notices for good, and make the insomnia go away with one stroke?