The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  “Well?”

  “He’s still on the mattress,” said Mary, and threw up her hands.

  Back and forth she went. Same question, same answer.

  Vladislav, lying stretched out on the couch, dozed off a few times. Occasionally he sat up, rubbed his face, pulled back his long hair, and then sank back again. He didn’t seem interested in the news, but glared at the radio when someone turned up the volume. He gave an impression of completeness—what was done was done. Now he was finished, ready to go into hibernation.

  Mary and Adderloy were the ones tied to the radio. Whatever they did, they did in wide circles around it. Mary was the most restless, kept herself constantly busy: made up lists (unclear of what), showered, sorted papers, changed her shoes. And each time the news came on, she’d stop as if she’d been caught doing something illicit.

  “They’re probably in surgery now,” she’d say during breaks between newscasts.

  Adderloy’s conscience didn’t seem much affected. He wanted details. What did they really know about the bank, who was the mayor’s spokesperson? What was the death toll up to? The time between news reports was worthless to him—it only made him impatient. He puzzled, considered, counted. “Is Reza sleeping? Are the weapons in the shallow end of the pond? Did you catch what Turnbull said while he was delirious?”

  It was after dark when the police press conference came on. Interrupting the music. The mayor, the police chief, and various other officials were introduced inside Topeka’s echoing City Hall. Although many were in attendance, only the police chief spoke—Rudolph Oldenhall. He explained what everybody already knew about the robbery, adding that another person had died at the hospital.

  “The investigation continues unabated,” he concluded, and the room was strangely quiet. The silence was like a sudden paralysis, as if someone had choked. Just a short, short moment of anticipation.

  “Thank you,” the police chief said.

  Then the storm broke. “How can you . . . ? Is it true that . . . ? Chief Oldenhall . . . Why . . . ? Apprehended . . . ?”

  “Quiet!” yelled a voice into the microphone. “One at a time, one at a time.”

  Some held back, but a handful of journalists kept pressing: “. . . school . . . assault . . . the schools . . . police . . .” The same words, in the same feedback loop. No one could hear the questions, yet obviously they were all disputing why the city had been emptied of police officers. As if they’d all agreed to hit where the police were most sensitive: their highest ranks had been thoroughly taken in.

  “There were credible threats to our schools,” began the police chief. He dragged out every word. “We had to act.”

  That was the chink in the wall; he was flooded by questions. The answers the reporters got back were somewhat random. “I consider it a terrorist act . . . a mass murder.” “It was well-planned.” “Yes, the threats were of a religious nature.”

  The pack sensed something; the thrust of the questions changed. Terrorists, fanatics, hordes of bearded men whose names they couldn’t pronounce. “We know nothing about ethnicity,” said the chief. “No, no Muslims have been arrested at the Century Hotel.” Asked repeatedly about arrests, he chose to answer a different question: “The FBI is involved.” Meant as a sign of action, but seen as the opposite. This was, after all, the Midwest.

  “Topeka’s own police are highly competent. It’s not about that,” he replied irritably.

  Chief Oldenhall, Chief Oldenhall,” repeated someone from the floor. An older voice, a tone that expected his colleagues to be quiet. A voice that also got what it wanted.

  “Chief Oldenhall, so far you’ve only spoken about all the things that have not happened. Soon, ten hours will have gone by—you don’t have any leads?”

  “We—” The police chief choked back his anger. He was down for the count. Everyone had fallen silent, waiting for a response. At nine, he had to get to his feet. “Let’s make one thing perfectly clear,” he began, “the odds are totally on our side. Namely, we have arrested one man. He is being treated right now at a city hospital. He’s one of them. Somewhat diminished, but once he recovers he will be held accountable. And before you ask—he is an American.”

  At the factory, Adderloy nodded approvingly, as if listening to a political speech. “There,” he said quietly, “they had it coming.”

  When an ad for marriage counseling broke in, Adderloy turned down the volume and looked around.

  Vladislav looked back, shrugged.

  “Reza?” said Adderloy.

  “Yeah, yeah,” replied Mary, and started walking toward the stairs.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Adderloy, and followed.

  As they disappeared down the hall, N. turned to Vladislav.

  “Why?” he said.

  Vladislav muttered and then replied, “You know why. At least one person had to die inside the bank. You must have understood that calculation.”

  “But there were more—we hadn’t agreed on that.”

  “We didn’t agree on anything.”

  “And the guard, why didn’t anyone check him out?”

  “Fuck knows. This is Adderloy’s cat-and-mouse game. And by the way, what does it matter? We had to shoot the guard, given what the dumb jerk was doing.”

  “I was lying down, didn’t see anything, but Reza believes that what he saw—it wasn’t done in self-defense.”

  Vladislav propped himself up on his elbow. “We’ve become subtle as hell, haven’t we.”

  N. fell silent. Vladislav glanced toward the hallway above the stairs. “And,” he added, “even if the guard hadn’t done anything stupid, we would have shot him anyway. Or we, I—I would have done it. Reza is slow sometimes, but what the hell did you think?”

  N. was still quiet.

  “What did you think?” Vladislav repeated in staccato. “That Adderloy believed a minor bank robbery would be enough to shake things up here in Kansas? Someone said you had to seize the opportunity, don’t you remember? All five of us around a table, in the sand, on a beach. Survivors. Invisible. Someone said you had to seize the opportunity.” He smiled. “Adderloy’s vision. Didn’t you understand? Come on. Or did you just close your eyes?”

  “Is that what you are,” said N., “a hired gun?”

  “Now I am.”

  “All the dead—that doesn’t bother you?”

  “All the dead . . . hmm . . . The world is made up of mistakes. Don’t you know that chance is everything? When my bus was filling with water, I pushed away people around me, everyone trying to get past. I rose to the surface, they didn’t, but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Guilt? No, I feel no guilt. Adderloy has his agenda. And this is a rotten country, it stinks.” Vladislav sniffed. “We all need the money, but Adderloy wants to stir things up. Turnbull was a great scapegoat—but then someone had to die. They have the death penalty in Kansas, but not for everything. So we had to raise it to that level, to the death chamber. Only then would it make a difference.”

  N. shook his head.

  Vladislav got angry. “Didn’t you fucking understand that?”

  “But we didn’t talk about it.”

  “No, we didn’t. For then the fragile beauty would have shattered—we were newly baptized by the wave, a bunch of pure white souls. Right?”

  N. shrugged in a way that could have meant anything.

  Vladislav leaned back again. “One thing Reza was damn right about, fate gave us new destinies. And another thing, I agree with Adderloy about this—you have to go all the way. Put someone on death row, only then will people listen.”

  “When did you decide?” said N.

  “About the guard?”

  “Yes.”

  “We didn’t decide. Adderloy decided a long time ago. Someone would have to die. Then when we got here, Adderloy went inside the bank a few times, to choose. Naturally, it was the guard. The fact that more got hit—you have to chalk that up to Adderloy’s mission.”

  “Last nigh
t, you and he went away to practice shooting. Afterward, when I stuck my finger in the barrels, they were clean. Not a shot.”

  “Yeah, pretty obvious, wasn’t it?” Vladislav laughed and then became serious again. “He wanted to talk. Finally, it had to be said, after all. Who would actually do what.”

  “That you would shoot the guard?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something like that?”

  “Yes, I guess I wanted to exchange a few words with him too. The part about someone having to die—I’d already figured it out—and that he thought I’d be the one to take care of it. So I took the opportunity to raise the ante. Doesn’t Adderloy have a little more money than he pretends? I figured it’d be worth a million bucks, to shoot someone in front of the video cameras at a bank.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else I would have left this stinking factory and walked into the nearest police station. ‘Here I am, call the Czech embassy and tell them they can scratch another name off the list of missing persons after the tsunami.’ Poof, I’d be gone. Poof, another life.”

  “Did you get the money?”

  Vladislav mimicked Adderloy’s way of smoking. “He has constructed his little machine with utmost care, all the players and events, tinkered us together. I can’t quite stomach it, so why not tinker a little myself?”

  “Did you get it?”

  “One million. He’s not much into signing papers or even handshakes, Adderloy. He just nodded. Then if I don’t get it . . .” Vladislav shrugged.

  “For a nod? There isn’t a police officer in Kansas who doesn’t want to see you through a sight right now.”

  “They don’t know who I am.”

  “And you think Adderloy will pay?”

  “You know his type: seemingly smooth, and then that trimmed beard. If you pointed to the devil’s messenger, it would be Adderloy, wouldn’t it. But unless he’s truly in the service of the supernatural, he knows very little about Vladislav Pilk. No more than that he’s a hell of a shot. Or what do you think?” said Vladislav, throwing a new look at N. “If he doesn’t pay up, what would you bet? That I’m the one who will find him and make his life a living hell—and that I’m not just trying to intimidate him when I say that? When I swear it before him, so that he feels the saliva on his face. What does he think about that?”

  Vladislav waited a second, then said, “Adderloy nodded, and the guard is dead, right? Even though the guard shot the others, that does not diminish my effort.”

  They heard voices raised down the hallway, muffled by the distance, yet abruptly as if a door had opened for a second and then closed again. Vladislav and N. listened for more, but heard nothing. Only the old factory’s diffuse murmuring.

  “Hm . . . Reza,” said Vladislav then. “I saw him when I came running around the corner. The idiot stood up. You never know where you are with him, standing up when he should be sitting and vice versa. I like the type, they always take a different path. A blond Pakistani . . . gay, or whatever he is. You know what I mean, entirely his own person.”

  “He’s angry now,” said N.

  “About the deaths—you really believe that? You’ve seen Reza, he’s hot for weapons. Didn’t quite know what we were doing, but wanted it to be real. Arm himself and make himself heard. Isn’t there something about his part of the world, they want to stand there shaking their Kalashnikovs and denouncing the USA. Great fucking theater.”

  “When he yelled ‘I saw you’ to me in the car, he wasn’t talking about the trigger-happy guard being dead. He screamed it at Adderloy. What he saw was the whole scheme: despite all the commotion, despite all the shots and screams—he realized he was just a pawn in something much bigger, something Adderloy had planned long before we got involved. Reza knows Adderloy is American. He doesn’t trust him for a second.”

  Vladislav paused. “Haven’t you thought about that? About what you’re doing here? I—maybe I get a million, maybe I have to shoot Adderloy. I don’t trust him either. And Mary, is she good in bed? Who does the giving, and who the taking?”

  “Enough—not another word,” said N.

  “Her gaze devours more than just your lust.”

  “Shut it. Now.”

  “Goddamn it—you asked me why?”

  “That’s enough,” snapped N., snarling.

  “What did you think was the goal of all this? Sure, part of it was to make the Baptists pay for all the crap they spread. But just by shaking your fist and screaming a little? You shot Turnbull in the leg, and the way I know you, whenever Topeka’s Baptists come up . . .”

  “Him, yes, him I would have shot in the groin . . . and in the head too.” N. shook. “It is the right—”

  “—the right you claim for yourself,” Vladislav cut in, without looking at N.

  They heard footsteps in the hallway. Mary glanced down the stairs. “Reza’s sleeping,” she said.

  Vladislav laughed. “Oh, he does that.”

  Adderloy came up behind Mary and looked searchingly at N., who looked like he’d been caught. Adderloy started walking down the stairs and said something about a pair of searchlights that he’d seen light up the night sky outside the large windows.

  Then Vladislav rolled off the couch and stood up. He passed right next to N. and whispered, “Now we just have to survive.”

  CHAPTER 25

  IN THE ABSENCE OF OTHER heroes, Stan Moneyhan became the man of the day. The dead security guard from First Federal’s robbery was the media darling. He was the cop who, instead of retiring, chose to protect his fellow citizens. That was how reporters spun it, at least—in fact his meager pension had forced him to keep working. Old coworkers bowed to his memory, saying he’d never drawn a gun on anyone. At his second press conference, Chief Oldenhall announced that they should all be grateful to the security guard for his fine aim. The man they’d arrested could now be tied to the robbery, through his blood. The next day, blowups of Charles-Ray Turnbull’s face appeared behind news anchors and on every front page. It was an unflattering picture, Turnbull lying on a sofa in a rumpled shirt, eyes half closed. The picture was obviously cropped, taken at some family gathering—an arm here and a leg there, from others sharing the couch. (Evidently a relative had been tempted by a photo agency to earn some extra cash.)

  In news briefs the aged Turnbull Sr. repeated “We pray for him” with a stiff smile, while trying to hide his face with his hand. Already on the first day police had conducted a raid on Turnbull’s home. Later, when white vans pulled up to Westhill Baptist Church and the plainclothes investigators with gun holsters on their backs carried out hard drives and document boxes, the church was no longer called “a congregation in shock” but instead “a hateful cult.” At the hospital where Turnbull lay recovering, police stopped a man in greasy jeans who tried to enter the ward with a pipe wrench stuffed in his sleeve. As he was dragged away, he shouted to the cameras outside the hospital entrance, “That motherfucker will die soon anyway.” The Republican politician from the last evening’s news showed up, demanding that hanging be reinstated in Kansas, adding, “Nobody fears a syringe.”

  In the factory, Adderloy’s gaze was sharp and clear as he went on and on about Turnbull’s expected execution. Otherwise, he was noticeably silent. Reza remained in his room, and the money from the robbery remained untouched in bags below the stairs.

  It was late morning. They were restless inside the factory, waiting, hidden, dutifully eating their stored food, quietly visiting the toilet. Vladislav, shirtless, complained constantly about the heat. The radio reports became background noise. Mary lived on chips and tried to start smoking. N. woke up every morning with a headache, had already consumed an entire bottle of pain pills, and wrestled with his feeling of powerlessness through long cold showers.

  Still, the night before, they’d finally decided what to do next. Even Reza had stopped staring at the wall and come to sit with them. It was a short conversation. They would get to New York, then divide
up the money and go their separate ways. Everyone agreed. Adderloy would buy a used van big enough for everyone.

  He went out before eleven in the morning to check on some listings. As soon as Adderloy left, Mary got her appetite back. “I want food with taste,” she said.

  Vladislav suggested the Lebanese joint around the corner. Mary wanted to go farther, to a real restaurant, but when Reza predictably didn’t want to come along, both Vladislav and N. thought they should stay close.

  So Lebanese it was.

  The place was almost empty, although lunch had just begun. A few customers made small talk by the cash register, waiting for takeout. One of the brothers said hello to Mary and waved them to a table. In the corner, a TV was switched to the news.

  Vladislav looked skeptically at the chalkboard menu.

  “No fish?”

  “No, Vladislav,” said N. “No fish in Kansas.”

  Vladislav threw up his hands.

  “Shish kebab, you want shish kebab?” N. yelled, “Can we get two shish kebabs?”

  “And a T-bone steak,” said Mary. “So rare that it bleeds.”

  N. turned toward the kitchen and saw the large freezers. Kept his gaze there for a moment.

  On TV, a fanfare announced the noon headlines. The new images caught their attention. In the boredom of the factory, they’d grown numb to the nuances, the reporters’ angles, the latest witnesses. Now the story wasn’t so much about Turnbull but the ones still at large. The bank had come up with a few grainy surveillance pictures: disorder, people lying on the ground. Suddenly Vladislav came into view: straight-backed and masked, a submachine gun at his hip.

  “Quick as TV,” he said quietly and squinted, unconcerned.

  The news anchor pressed on. At the Houston airport, police had been swarming for hours. A flight to Cancun was canceled and the passengers taken off to be screened. Departure boards scrolled with delayed flights. Policemen in black ran in clusters. A federal police officer with a thick mustache said the men from the Kansas robbery had been trying to flee the country.