The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  Mary was back. “Blackberry,” she said, and licked a dollop of cream dyed blood red from the juice. She slid into the booth while Vladislav dried his hands with the napkin and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Yet another motel room with paths worn in the carpet. After the whine of the concrete highway through three states and all the fried food, a syrupy fatigue overtook them. They were slow to get ready for what was left of the night. They didn’t even turn on the TV and the news. The atmosphere was somewhat aimless—sitting, lying down, picking up things, as if by not actually going to bed they could manage to escape something.

  N. opened his bag of money and looked down. “You can’t just deposit it.”

  “You could,” said Vladislav, lying on his back and looking at the ceiling. He was silent for a few seconds, as if chewing on something. “Go to Florida,” he said, and sighed as if he felt a little nauseous, “take a cruise to the Cayman Islands. . . . While the others run ashore to shop for cheap jewelry, take your bag and pick a bank.”

  “Any?”

  “There are hundreds to choose from.”

  “And what do you say?”

  “Poker, you won at poker.” He sighed again. “That’s what people do nowadays.”

  “Poker,” said Mary. “So that’s your tip for the two of us.” She lay on the side of the bed. “I get the feeling that—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “That I’m not following you there, no. I’ll leave you in the morning.”

  N. tied his bag and closed his eyes for a few seconds.

  At a bus terminal in Jackson, Vladislav disappeared. He got out to take his bag. His palm twice on the roof, like a hitchhiker saying thanks, and then he was gone.

  The sun shone brightly. N. and Mary drove on, among the trucks and motor homes heading south. Louisiana, wetlands on both sides of the road, then east, Pensacola, insects smeared over the windshield. They lived on bright red hot dogs from gas stations and cinnamon rolls that glistened with syrup. They saw the first signs indicating the distance to Miami.

  Last-minute tickets for a cruise, that was the idea. The Caribbean, maybe South America.

  When they arrived in Florida, their motel was all white. A pine forest surrounded the parking lot, where a warm breeze swept through the darkness. One last night before Miami. A clean place, wall-to-wall carpeting so thick that you swayed. N. showered; Mary said she would go down to reception and pick up cruise catalogs.

  When he came out of the bathroom with a towel around his hips, the room was dark. He seesawed on the carpet, trying to see where she was.

  A movement to the left.

  And then a hand from the right, like a blow across his shoulder, and at once more hands that wrestled him down. The men in the dark were quiet, and he himself made not the slightest sound. Just gave up.

  Life as he knew it had once again come to an end. Apprehended and abducted. Days, weeks, months. Never any formal charges. Years would go by, float away.

  Of everything they subjected him to, the hardest to resist was a man who one day walked into his last cell, speaking his mother tongue.

  CHAPTER 28

  Diego Garcia, 2008

  SHAUNA FRIEDMAN HAD A TRUE swimmer’s body. With just a slight movement of her hips, she took off through the water. The first time they’d eaten together in New York, the way she’d pecked with her chopsticks said something about who she was. Beach and water proved to be just as much a part of her nature.

  It was she who’d arranged for the masks and snorkels, it was she who drove when they set out. Alone, she and Grip on a private beach, first the sandy-bottomed shallows, then a reef. The remote little beach lay on the far side of the atoll. It was morning, without a breeze, yet not unbearably hot. No ships in sight, an unbroken horizon. The water enveloped her hair and stretched it into a billowing veil down her back as she left the surface and dived down to the corals. She descended faster, deeper, even though they had no flippers and she only used her legs. It was she who found the fish, pointed, made explanatory gestures Grip didn’t always understand. He nodded. At one point she took him by the arm and led him a few feet deeper, to see a moray eel that lay pulsing with half-bared teeth in its den.

  As she walked out of the water, she pulled the mask down under her chin, and then, where the shoreline lapped, she stopped to sweep the water droplets from her arms and legs with the same fast, barely conscious movements as someone expertly peeling the skin off a fruit. As she climbed out, the white coral sand clung like pearl sugar to her feet.

  Shauna Friedman wore a one-piece black bathing suit. Few people look good in black swimsuits, Grip thought. Friedman did, although the swimsuit wasn’t at all daringly cut and looked like something designed for competition. Color and fit, both right, without making an effort to be noticed, although she usually was. Likely there were men who for years after remembered exactly when they’d caught sight of her, without knowing anything about who she was. Not because of any single detail—the poor guys who wanted only slender legs or shapely breasts fell for other women. With Friedman, it was something else. Her body played a part, that was true, but even more her gaze, which never looked anxious.

  “It’s said they can bite right through a man’s thigh.”

  “Who says what about what?” said Grip, who had just sat down, and now pushed the wet hair from his forehead.

  “About moray eels,” said Shauna. “That they can bite through a man’s thigh. How come they always talk about men’s thighs?”

  Grip looked down at his own, which were stronger than hers. “Only men are stupid enough to approach them—or maybe moray eels only bite men.”

  “No,” she replied, and held up her hand to him. The root of her thumb, two white dots in her tan.

  “There you go,” said Grip and put on sunglasses. “Men’s thighs and women’s hands.” He leaned back. She was still sitting upright on her towel.

  “The man in the cell has started talking,” said Shauna, her gaze somewhere in the distance.

  “Yes, he’s talking, and I’m taking notes,” said Grip.

  “Two whole days now?”

  “Three actually, counting yesterday.”

  “Stackhouse says you lied to him,” continued Shauna.

  “Oh.”

  “When he asked whether the man is Swedish.”

  “Lied, I don’t know—I probably avoided the issue. But if you want to be absolutely accurate, I told him that I’ve drawn that conclusion, though the man has never confirmed it.”

  “But Stackhouse asked you.”

  “True. It was a few days ago, and yes, I lied.” Grip lay on his back and looked straight up into the sky behind his sunglasses, only seeing Shauna’s back at the periphery. “And,” he continued, “I can conclude from this that someone has started translating my conversations inside the cell.”

  “They flew someone in the day before yesterday. And if you’re wondering, I get to see their copies.”

  “Very much us and them in this—they flew in, their copies.”

  “Yes,” said Shauna, “that’s what this has become.”

  Grip felt a drop of water run down his stomach. He was almost dry; only the damp bathing suit still refreshed him.

  Shauna looked at him over her shoulder, head to toe, then turned out toward the sea again. “There are incarcerated people scattered throughout the world, it’s no secret,” she began. “Everyone knows it, everyone is trying to deal with it. But often the big picture gets lost. Information surfaces, confessions are made, it’s used, yet kept half hidden. You’re handed a folder—intelligence. But what it contains is short and lacks all nuance, as if it were a law of nature. Never where it comes from, never any names, never places. Will it ultimately be worth anything? Within different organizations we draw different conclusions, it’s inevitable.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Stackhouse is one side of the story.”

  “CIA?”

  “If you want to bundle them
like that, then fine.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I’ve said—FBI. Does that simplify things?”

  “A black-and-white world always makes everything easier. Stackhouse believes that the end justifies the means, while you have to take laws into account. Or?” There was no missing Grip’s irony.

  “You’re Swedish, you sit on the sidelines.”

  “Exactly. It’s pleasant being the one who always knows what’s right.” Grip shaded his eyes and raised his head. Shauna mumbled something in response. She pinched sand between her fingertips and threw it in front of her, impatiently.

  “The handling of these detainees poses several problems,” she continued. “Once you’ve placed someone outside the law, you can’t get him back inside it.”

  “You mean, confessions made with electrodes attached to your scrotum can’t be used in a regular court. You can’t ever get a conviction, the evidence isn’t admissible.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Do Stackhouse and his gang even want them convicted?”

  Shauna didn’t answer.

  Grip continued: “Don’t they just want a little revenge—some general statements, and then the next names they should capture, drug, and fly around the world?” Always, he had a hard time resisting the chance to give Americans a taste of themselves.

  Shauna had stopped her hand midway, then tossed once more, releasing the sand. “The general turban hunt doesn’t interest me,” she said. “I want to know how things actually stand.” There was silence for a few seconds.

  “The man in the cell, is he what you’d call an ethnic Swede?” she said later.

  “You mean—he is after all quite dark.”

  “He is dark-haired.”

  “I’m also dark,” said Grip. “Beat me enough to blur my features, keep me from getting a haircut or shave for a while, and—”

  “Stackhouse’s team thinks he may have foreign ancestry,” interrupted Shauna.

  “They think he’s a Muslim.”

  “They think that about everyone who doesn’t look like Jesus Christ himself.”

  “Wasn’t he a Jew?”

  “Exactly,” said Shauna emphatically, and the joke fell flat.

  “He’s Swedish,” said Grip after a sigh, “meaning he’s not a lot of other things as well. Swedish—it’s the only thing I’m quite sure of right now.”

  “The only thing?” She seemed surprised.

  “How many more lost souls are sitting there in that building?” countered Grip. “Scarred, shaking little heaps. Doing a tour of your coalition of willing torturers and hangmen.”

  “Keep battering away—feeling any better?”

  “Maybe. Whatever you keep yourselves busy with, we on the sidelines always seem to maintain moral superiority.”

  “You can beat the answers out of them,” countered Shauna, “or wait for the next wave of hijackers headed to Manhattan.”

  Grip didn’t know what to say, laughed, and Shauna gave him a forced smile over her shoulder.

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said then. “You know what they call Garcia, by the way? I mean here, what the military itself calls the island—‘The Footprint of Freedom.’”

  Grip had seen the stacks of stickers in shops on the base: the atoll’s stylized shoreline in the shape of a footprint.

  “A practical little footprint in the world’s backyard,” she continued. “A springboard. From here, B-52s can thread their way throughout Asia and Africa.”

  “A pack of raging dogs, on a very long leash,” said Grip. “To sic on all the bastards who need to know their place.”

  “That’s the whole point. Out here on Garcia, no one sees when they take off and land, no one looks at who comes and goes. So much better than Guantánamo. Here, there isn’t even anything to deny.” She rustled in a bag for a can of soda. A diet cola—she handed him one.

  “B-52s can be seen in satellite images,” he said after the first sip. “Prisoners are more difficult to count.”

  “What’s your estimate?”

  “More than two, less than a hundred.”

  “Correct.”

  “How many cells?”

  “Stop fishing,” said Shauna, unmoved. “I don’t even know the answer myself. I’m FBI, you know, not CIA.”

  “But we’re dealing with delicate goods.”

  “Those who may not exist. Those who may not be seen.”

  “Final disposal?”

  It was the first time since they came to the beach that she thought carefully about her response.

  “I guess so,” she said finally.

  Grip was impressed by her. By the whole thing, the swimming excursion. She was no risk taker. “Come—now,” she’d said. “If you don’t want to swim naked, grab a bathing suit, the rest I’ll take care of. Even got extra towels from the maid.” It seemed so spontaneous—now we’re off. As if just minutes before, the thought hadn’t crossed her mind that they’d be going right then. Out to the beach, alone, into the water, even quite deep. All constructed with the best intentions, as insurance for them both. A bit excessive perhaps, but still. She was thinking he could hide something. A little equipment, some type of microphone, stuff that could eventually compromise and trap. Salt water, the depth—no surveillance technician would guarantee function after that. Did she think that about him—microphones? At any rate, no one could listen in or record, not between them, not from the outside, not now. So apart from the hotel towels and his sunglasses (which he’d bought on the way, when they stopped to get cold sodas at one of the base supermarkets), everything they had with them had been soaked in deep water, and now they sat as unclothed as they could be without breaking taboos. The ideal form of conversation for the paranoid—or how the matter was solved on Diego Garcia. The island of hypocrisy and secrets.

  She needed confidentiality, that he too would feel it. That nothing could be reproduced later. What was said, was here and now.

  Shauna stroked sand off her feet. “Our man,” she said, “your Swede. Stackhouse would have it that he fits the usual profile—they’ve concocted something about religious extremism. I think he’s something else.”

  “Our man calls himself N.,” said Grip.

  “N.,” said Shauna thoughtfully. She tossed aside a thought. “He has been responsible for many deaths.”

  “Says who?”

  “Not least his own statements. Then there’s a thin, thin thread of barely viable evidence, and a Pakistani who has a hole in his skull where he should have a memory.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Not particularly. But I believe the Pakistani.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He sits, waiting to be executed in Kansas.”

  “Quite a collection of characters.”

  “If you only knew.” Shauna took a sip of soda. “For me, I got started on this while investigating art thefts. Not small stuff—it was pretty big-time, and people lost their lives. I was on the main guy’s trail, couldn’t tie him to it, but knew it was him. The name that came up was Adderloy, Bill Adderloy.” She let the name sink in, continued: “Yes, exactly—the one N. told you about. And pretty soon after I had a name, we realized that art thefts were only a part of his story, more of a hobby. The real game was that he had a couple of rebel movements in Asia under his belt. You know, a few hundred godforsaken men in a jungle in Indonesia, with foreign money to back them up. They always need an intermediary, someone to run the game: arrange weapons and ammunition, spread money around, all kinds of stuff. There’s a hell of a lot of illegality involved, and the FBI was on Adderloy’s trail. I had two agents on him, two who got close. Do you understand what the job entails?”

  “Living undercover?” said Grip.

  “Yes. Have you ever done it?”

  “As it happens.”

  “For more than a year? They spent more than a year at it. Long periods abroad: Indonesia and Thailand. My agents’ thing was that they played
a couple, that was what worked. Theater on a tightrope—walking hand in hand through a minefield. But step-by-step they won Adderloy’s confidence. He was difficult, one smart mother. Didn’t leave a paper trail and employed only useful idiots to handle the merchandise. My two agents were arranging a weapons deal. Adderloy himself would come and inspect, that was the idea. His fingers in the cookie jar—then the handcuffs. Cooperation with the police in Bangkok worked brilliantly, but then . . . You never know how it goes with these things. Adderloy suspected mischief, maybe got a tip from inside. Alex and Brooke, my agents—yes, you already understand the rest. How the Thai police could then call what had happened attempted robbery.” Shauna shook her head. “They were shot, two shots in the neck. But first they were tortured for a few hours. I was the one who had to fly out there and identify the bodies, at a Bangkok morgue. And Adderloy left a clear message on those stainless-steel tables: Don’t you fucking come after me! Brooke had two sons, three and five years old. Alex’s first kid was on the way. How many agents back home do you think wanted to take their place? Well, right after the funeral, obviously everyone wants to bust ass. But actually getting someone to go back in, when the whole arrangement stank of insider tips. Although we tried to run it, even though I hate to admit it, the whole operation ran out of steam. Never got out of neutral.

  “But then, all of a sudden on death row in Kansas, a Pakistani starts babbling about Bill Adderloy, and the lights go on again. There were several repercussions when Reza Khan began to remember things. For the first few days, the bank robbery in Topeka was considered simply a bank robbery. When it happened, the police were out chasing around, just like after any violent bank robbery, and we at the bureau helped. When Reza was arrested, it blew . . . wide open. Media circus, TV, the whole shebang. As soon as they realized he was Pakistani—you know the thing with Al-Qaeda—then Stackhouse and his people went nuts. They immediately fell on N. like starving wolves. And they’ve kept him ever since. Fortunately, at least they report to someone higher up, and a few years later when the Pakistani started talking, a guy in Washington connected the dots: Adderloy, Reza, and N.” Shauna turned to Grip. “It was about that time that I got called in.”