The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  He looked at Reza. The water poured over the top of his head again, he ran his hand over the skin, shaving where the stubble was still rough.

  CHAPTER 22

  Topeka

  A Friday morning in February 2005

  CHARLES-RAY TURNBULL, BORN IN OKLAHOMA, was as irascible as his father. Afterward, some would recall his bad mood that morning. The church was paying a visit to the state prison, and during the morning parishioners stopped by with homemade pastries. Charles-Ray arrived a quarter-hour late, already a bad start, and when someone thoughtlessly asked how on earth Bethany found time to bake all those cranberry muffins, he snapped something inaudible in reply.

  The reason was that Bethany, Charles-Ray’s wife, didn’t bake. Didn’t even try. She was upset by the world’s decay, or at least that was the explanation Turnbull gave for her absence on Sundays. A degenerate humanity was to blame for her red-eyed gaze and hands that never quieted. She spent long stretches in the closed wards at St. Francis Health Center, a convalescence that often began with a high-speed ambulance ride. After treatments, she’d sit in her pew for a few weeks with a smile that made young children curl up in their parents’ lap. And most—not all—knew that when you asked for help with homemade baked goods, then Charles-Ray drove to the Dimple Donuts across town and put his purchases into plain brown bags.

  Charles-Ray Turnbull and Bethany had a childless union. It was Turnbull Sr., Charles-Ray’s father and the church’s founder, who had married them himself. For many years Charles-Ray had made his living providing Shawnee County with road signs. A job that, while not very demanding, he had severely neglected in recent years. Charles-Ray devoted his time to the church, to his mission. Delivering signs on time for Topeka’s new school crosswalks, or keeping accurate accounting records—those were not Charles-Ray Turnbull’s strengths. His talent lay in getting people to pay attention to Jesus Christ, when they were at their most receptive. That he could do.

  But the more time he devoted to one, the less Charles-Ray had left for the other—and a few months later, the state’s attorney would repeatedly point to the shaky finances of Charles-Ray and the church as aggravating circumstances.

  As usual, the young people in charge of the pastry tables felt insecure in Charles-Ray’s presence. He made a parting comment about how they should devote themselves with whole hearts to the prisoners, unembarrassedly tucked his shirttail into his pants, and then, to everyone’s relief, left. In general, he liked prison visits and invariably reeled in a fish. But today he had yet another pointless meeting with the bank.

  He pulled out of the church parking lot in his ’91 Lincoln Town Car. A car that, at least at the time Charles-Ray bought it, carried some prestige. It was red with a black top. Back then, when he and Bethany had their good times, he called it the Demon—a preacher’s joke. Now it was nameless. Its varnish had turned white, and the back fenders were streaked with rust.

  It was not quite nine a.m. when his Town Car bumped out onto the street outside the church. That they could all agree on, but then the stories diverged. Police and prosecutors would claim one thing, defense lawyers another. What actually took place was that four traffic lights past the church, the fat doomsday minister’s car stopped at an intersection. Of the few people around, no one noticed enough to be called later as a witness.

  He’s still in there buying muffins, and he’s late.” Mary sat alone in a parked car outside a bakery, just past Charles-Ray Turnbull.

  Eventually, he came out from Dimple Donuts carrying four grease-stained bags.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of muffins.” Mary was talking on a cell phone with a two-way radio function.

  “Plenty of time.” Adderloy sat at the fourth-floor window of a hotel room in the center of town. N., alone in a car, could see both Mary and Turnbull in the distance. Reza and Vladislav, each with an earphone, sat on a bench in a dirty city park with brown grass and overgrown bushes.

  “He’s back in the car now.”

  “Switching around the muffins.” It was N.’s voice.

  “It looks like he’s putting them in plain paper bags,” said Mary. “Can you believe . . .” She let go and pressed the talk button again. “He’ll probably stop by the church.”

  “Plenty of time,” Adderloy reassured.

  Reza sat in the park with a Coke, while Vladislav blew on a huge cup of American coffee, which he’d strengthened with packets of Nescafé from his pocket.

  “Now he’s rolling again.”

  Adderloy had pulled back the curtains from the hotel window. The air-conditioning was broken, and soon the morning sun would make the room too hot. He grinned at the light coming in through the window, lifted the phone from the desk beside him, and pushed to get an outside line. Coolly, he calculated that the call would eventually be traced.

  The phone rang a few times, before a woman replied: “Topeka Capital-Journal.”

  Adderloy was quiet at first, then exhaled with foreboding. “God no longer tolerates your impurities. The fallen will die and their corpses pile up. Punishment is imminent.”

  “Who are you?” The voice sounded surprised. “Is this a threat?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Hello?” The woman sounded fearful, her voice cracking.

  Adderloy gave a forced cough and then hung up.

  The police station was only a few blocks away, and a pair of blue lights sped by the Hotel Century.

  “He has arrived at the church,” roared the radio. Mary remained closest to Charles-Ray, watching him from across the church parking lot.

  “Did he bring the muffins?” That was N. He couldn’t see him, but had stopped at an intersection where he could safely watch Turnbull’s Lincoln pull out.

  “The bags, yes.”

  It took Charles-Ray Turnbull ten minutes to deliver the pastries. When he came out, he walked across the asphalt with quick steps. He seemed annoyed, slamming the car door twice before he turned the key.

  N., waiting, saw the dirty vinyl top roll past. “I got him.”

  “We’re off,” Vladislav said over the phone. Reza was already up. He forced his empty soda can into an overflowing trash basket.

  They’d left the park when Mary began to read aloud into her cell phone, as she crossed the streets: “Baseline . . . Indian Hill . . . red light . . . now he’s moving again.”

  Reza wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, Vladislav slowly stroked his beard. They stood and waited on the sidewalk at the designated intersection. Next door was a parking lot, where the attendant scratched lottery tickets in his little wooden shed, with his back to the street. Painters ripped posters off a facade.

  “Montclair Street.”

  That was N.’s signal. He drove past Mary and caught up with Turnbull, pulling into the outside lane, just behind him.

  “Abbott Place.”

  Vladislav stretched, trying to see the incoming traffic.

  “Miller.”

  N. passed him and turned so he was in front.

  Vladislav first caught sight of N.’s stolen black Impala. Although the wide hood obscured his view, he glimpsed the dull red Lincoln behind.

  N. began to brake. They needed Turnbull to slow down to walking speed. Mary eased up alongside and boxed him in—in case Turnbull decided to swing out and speed up from there.

  Turnbull drummed hard with his fingers on the steering wheel, still looking annoyed. The eyes that followed him from three directions couldn’t read what he said, but he shook one hand in front of him, and his cheeks quivered.

  Vladislav timed his move carefully, stepping out into the street when Charles-Ray Turnbull’s speed was low enough but still far too high. Turnbull slammed on the brakes, his seat belt throwing him back. Vladislav swiveled so he stood with legs apart in front of the bumper, then put both hands on the hood and leaned forward. Vladislav’s huge and sincere smile looked scarily hypnotic. The minister’s gaze was fixed, the way a hunted animal stands frozen in the eyes of a pre
dator. Still alive, but already defeated.

  Quickly, Reza climbed into the backseat, the gun up and leading the way.

  When Turnbull got into the car, the countdown had begun—everything coordinated so that the right clues would be left behind, deliberately confusing.

  Adderloy left his hotel room and took the elevator down to the lobby. On the way to the front desk, he removed the gloves he’d worn all morning.

  “Checking out, please!”

  The only thing the receptionist could tell the police later was that the man had had no luggage.

  “Anything from the minibar?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Adderloy held out his card. The same card that would later be shown to have paid for a round of drinks at a hotel bar in Toronto.

  Mary was already waiting in the car when Adderloy came out onto the street.

  “We’re moving,” she said over the radio as soon as he got in, and they headed out toward the outskirts of town.

  N. had parked the Impala at the factory and walked eight blocks. He opened the heavy padlock on an old door, painted black. The warehouse, with its row of metal gates, reminded him of engine sheds in a rail yard. It was quiet within the thick walls, like being inside a ruin in the middle of the forest. The light fell in oblique bands through the skylights, catching the floating specks of dust. He scraped his shoe on the gravelly floor to hear the echo. Emptiness around him, high ceilings. He waited. The gun holstered inside his jacket.

  Vladislav and Reza circled around the neighborhoods with Turnbull at the wheel. It was Mary and Adderloy who raced against the clock, just outside of town. Twenty minutes to go.

  Mary pulled into an open space in the middle of the parking lot at Waterstone High School. The lawns were brown with patches of dirt, the bushes overgrown. A group of Latino kids gathered around the hood of a car at one end of the parking lot, while a dozen cheerleaders walked lazily down the slope to the sports fields carrying black and yellow pom-poms, whitewashed wooden rifles, and stiff nylon flags. A whistle blew, someone laughed. Adderloy snorted and got out of the car, carrying a gym bag.

  Not even ten a.m.; the school cafeteria was open but hardly anyone sat inside. Adderloy left the bag in the empty foyer and walked back to the parking lot.

  Two pounds of saltpeter from a hardware store, an equal amount of confectioners’ sugar from the Cake and Candy Supply at Fairlawn Plaza, a digital kitchen timer from Walmart, along with a few cables, batteries, and a lightbulb with its glass removed to spark it all. “Nothing lethal, just a real good scare,” Vladislav had said when he’d finished wiring the thing in the factory.

  Timer set for two minutes. Addeloy checked his watch in the car. Then, not even a bang, but somebody running out a side door yelling, and a second later a billowing cloud of black smoke pushing its way out the entrance.

  Another thirty seconds, and Mary dialed 911.

  “Help,” she pleaded in a low voice, as soon the dispatcher answered, even closing her hand over the phone.

  She played it well, the incoherence, the vagueness. The flat male voice on the other end wanted to clarify details, assured her that a patrol car was already on the way. Who was she, where was she, who had done what? In response, she whispered single words rather than sentences, stopped, changed direction. She seemed to be hiding, while observing something unmentionable. One person had been shot, maybe more, smoke, people screaming and begging for mercy. She saw one, had seen several figures running in black hoodies and boots, shell casings rolling away.

  “Help, for God’s sake!”

  She hung up.

  Twelve minutes left. Mary started the car and pulled out. They saw the first cars halfway to downtown, as three police cars shot past with blue lights and sirens. Soon after, a pair of black vans marked POLICE in small letters, no sirens but lights flashing. The stragglers that followed, just as loud as the first, swerved ominously through the traffic.

  “Bloodthirsty,” said Adderloy when they sped past, “like piranhas.”

  Downtown Topeka was about to be left without police officers. Soon they were on the scene, taking aim and screaming behind skidded cars, while lines of men with black gear poured in through the school’s emergency exits. First, a threat called in to the local paper, then this. Wholesale panic. It would take more than an hour before they figured it out. Only then would the dark realization sink in, when the casings were swept up and the real corpses counted. At any rate, all the schoolchildren were fine.

  Mary and Adderloy had parked next to the Impala and waited now with N. in the warehouse. Two minutes to go. They heard a car stop, and then steps.

  “I have a family,” came Charles-Ray’s voice.

  “We all do.”

  Vladislav led Charles-Ray Turnbull, with one hand on his shoulder. They’d put a hood over him, and with every panting breath his mouth drew the fabric into a taut little bowl. Fearful, as if anticipating the chair in front of him. The medical bag was open and ready on the floor beside it. Mary had drawn an entire vial into the syringe she held in her hand.

  “Sit!”

  Adderloy behind, N. and Mary on either side. Vladislav grabbed him with both hands. Mary held her syringe, N. his gun. Charles-Ray Turnbull sat down with his head lowered in resignation, as if awaiting a punch, or a shot to the back of the head.

  Mary pushed the thick needle right through his jacket fabric and into his upper arm. It was the only time he fought, and for a few moments they all had to restrain him.

  “There, there,” said Vladislav with the voice of someone comforting a dying animal in the presence of a child. The fabric tightened when Turnbull turned his face up to the ceiling. Like the crude outline of an African mask. His movements were already confused.

  Charles-Ray Turnbull thought they had bound him with restraining rope, but in fact the injection caused paralysis. After waiting ten seconds, Reza grabbed Turnbull’s left foot, straightening the leg. He looked away when N. stepped forward, aimed for the underside of the thigh, and pulled the trigger. Turnbull twitched so violently that his chair fell over.

  The bang rang out, and a thin streak of blood splashed out a few feet across the floor. Turnbull murmured low, and moved slowly, like a larva in the dirt. Mary sat with the medical bag beside him on the floor. She waited, poking around the entrance and exit holes in his pants. The thin fingers of her rubber gloves were shiny red. The wounds had slowly started bleeding, but didn’t spurt. He let out a long-drawn cry while Mary quickly bandaged his thigh. That was it. He was gone, stunned. Now all that remained was to let the nightmares descend on him.

  All five of them sat in the Impala, the men in suits and sneakers with the machine guns and some bags at their feet. Reza stroked his head, N. smelled powder from the gun inside his jacket. Mary, after turning off the car radio, drove upright and confident.

  “Do you feel it?” said Vladislav, his eyes in the distance. “It’s like it was then.”

  “What do you mean?” said Reza, who sat nervously, jiggling his legs.

  “Exactly like after the wave. Don’t you feel it . . . everything disappearing. The world disappearing.” No one said anything. He added: “Now you can do anything.”

  First Federal United. In front of the bank, a no-parking zone, completely empty. The lone black Impala disappeared as soon as the men got out, Vladislav going first through the glass doors. White athletic shoes, black suit and hood, submachine guns like exclamation points as to why they were there. From a vast mosaic on the wall behind the tellers, Indians in garish robes stared down at the invaders. N. and Reza leaped and slid, half sitting, across the counters into the office landscape behind.

  “The money—all of it!”

  They tossed nylon bags to the tellers. A young man stood paralyzed, but the woman next to him picked up a bag from the floor and started throwing cash into it.

  Adderloy stood, supervising, by the entrance to the vault with the safe-deposit boxes, while Vladislav went farther in to ta
ke care of the teller booths at the other end himself. As he turned the corner, he fired a few shots straight up. The echo was painful and paralyzing, off the black marble floors and mosaics on the walls. The ceiling was so high that it took a few seconds before the clouds of plaster debris rained down over the crouching customers.

  “Hurry up!” roared Reza, behind the tills.

  Adderloy had locked his focus on a single person. A man wearing a white shirt, blue pants with dark stripes. And a holster. Adderloy tried to keep his eyes on the bank guard’s hands, but they were hidden by the elderly women customers who surrounded him. His face was visible: narrowed eyes, as if staring straight into the biting wind, and his chest was heaving. Something slid along the floor as a bag from Vladislav’s side of the bank appeared from behind the corner. N. and Reza, hanging their bags over their shoulders, started moving.

  In all their detailed planning, they’d never discussed the guard. It wasn’t something they’d overlooked, it was something they’d avoided.

  The guard’s first shot tore a white streak through the brownish-red mosaic of a buffalo herd. The next hit the back of a woman standing near him. She fell headlong as the others threw themselves down around him. The guard, one Stan Moneyhan, retired vice squad, had never once during his career as a police officer drawn a weapon. This time it was different.

  He had tripped over one of the elderly and fallen over. Now he lay on his back holding the gun in both hands between his knees. It looked odd, a low-profile shooting tower, using his heels to turn. Maybe just doing his best after his fall. Getting some initiative back. Only he wasn’t in control. He aimed at Adderloy but kept the gun too low and his head too high. His whole body seemed to shake. He was never even close to hitting him, not even when he aimed. If he saw anything at all. It was totally random—a senseless shooting.