The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

In the reflection of a kiosk window, he saw that no one was following him. He turned the corner, no hurry, and then another corner.

  As he went by, the boarding pass disappeared into the bag of a cleaning cart, a pair of glass doors slid apart with a whisper, and he felt evening air. The taxi driver hadn’t even gotten out of the car before Grip sat down in the back.

  “Yes?” said the driver, as he accelerated onto the highway ramp and still didn’t know where they were going.

  “You choose. The best place to buy a cheap used car.”

  At Ed’s Motorcar Gallery, they probably hadn’t expected any more customers that day. An office hut under a canopy of silver streamers, hundreds of cars in rows, with prices painted in rainbow colors across the windshields. Grip paid for the taxi while a single salesman, sitting on a hood, cautiously stood up and looked him over.

  But then it was done in five minutes, even a quick wash for the sake of it. A black Ford Taurus with anti-rust paint across the rear bumper. Grip stood in the office holding an instant coffee and looking at a shelf of motocross trophies while the salesman feverishly rooted for the documents that required signatures. The quick handshake had stressed him out. He tried to tell stories about the trophies, but descended into profanity when he kept looking in the wrong folders. Finally they got a couple of signatures down, a cash payment, and the seller turned out the light behind him before he went out to rub off the price on the windshield with a rag.

  And Grip drove off.

  The gauge was on empty, so he tanked up on the next block before heading back out to the highway. Northward, he’d gone through the first tank by midnight, left Georgia behind for South Carolina—and by then his eyelids were closing too often. He checked into a motel, threw his little bag into the room, turned on the air conditioner, went back down to the night clerk, and asked for the Internet. The man showed him to a computer in the office behind the desk.

  “No kiddie porn now,” said the clerk, and went out again.

  Grip was tired, his mind a blank. He rubbed his eyes for a while and tried to remember the temporary account password.

  Then he logged in. Vladislav had replied.

  “I found Adderloy down in Houston. It took me three years, but I found him.”

  Vladislav had found Adderloy. Grip thought about Maureen Whipple in West Virginia, about the stake. What did he mean by found?

  “Is he alive?” he wrote, and sent. He wasn’t sure which answer he actually wanted. Couldn’t feel the different weights on the scales, blamed it on being too tired. Adderloy, Vladislav, Central Park, Shauna, Ben. Vladislav wanted revenge on Adderloy—that part had to play a role, no?

  Then his in-box blinked. A new message.

  “He’s still alive” was Vladislav’s reply. Reading him so directly felt like having a séance with a ghost.

  “Be careful,” wrote Grip. Mostly just to hold on to Vladislav, a quick answer to show that he too was sitting there.

  “Why?” came next.

  Why? Grip ate sugar cubes out of a bowl on the desk. Why? Wasn’t that the ten-thousand-dollar question? Why? Because! Because if Vladislav got caught, so much else would go down with him. Can’t get busted now. Not a single one of them.

  “There are more people looking, FBI looking,” Grip typed in.

  He got the answer right away: “Do you work for them?”

  Grip sensed it, how the ghost was about to fade away. No bluffing now; he had to hold on to Vladislav.

  “Among other things,” he replied.

  Grip remained seated, one, two, he looked at the clock, five minutes.

  Took the last sugar cube, peeled off the paper, and sucked on it until it fell apart in his mouth.

  “Excellent,” said the e-mail, when Vladislav had decided. Then a second followed: “If you want to earn gold stars from the feds, get in touch again in exactly one day.”

  Grip slept, got back into the car before the sun rose. After a couple of hours, he stopped for breakfast—eggs, sausage, and bacon—at a truck stop outside Greensboro, North Carolina, then relied on doughnuts and burgers all the way up to New York. He could have gotten there a day earlier, on the flight from Atlanta. But now no one knew where he was. No one. It was late, he had an hour to go, yet the calm decisiveness had begun to spread inside him. He passed the clock tower in Brooklyn, and at that exact moment felt at once totally anonymous and completely at home. He checked into a hotel, where he could see a piece of the East River from his room, as a reminder. Only a corner of Manhattan, but still: there on the other side of the water, Ben probably held court with a small circle at a bar—stubbly, smiling.

  When Grip logged in, his in-box was empty.

  “I’m here,” he wrote and sent. Waited.

  “That makes two of us,” came soon.

  “Well—the gold stars?” wrote Grip.

  “Tell the feds to go see what’s at the bottom of Adderloy’s freezer.”

  Grip read the sentence twice, and thought of a few stuffed plastic bags. A “?” was all he wrote.

  “It’s in the basement.” There was an address that apparently belonged to Adderloy.

  “?” he wrote again.

  “It’s not Adderloy lying in there, but let them find out. It’s enough.”

  “They’ll be looking for you.”

  “Everyone is looking for me. That’s just part of life now.”

  Nothing more was said.

  Adderloy’s freezer—that and a couple of days in New York before Grip had to show a sign of life. A balance of terror with Shauna. A quid pro quo. He’d have to stay steady along the slackline, the whole way.

  The next day he bought a prepaid phone card and started calling: got to the haulers, checked addresses, moving in a slow spiral toward his goal. He was an old investigator at heart—locating people, that he could do. Crisscrossing Brooklyn in the black Taurus: offering someone a cigarette with a flick of his wrist, having pastrami with mustard for lunch with the drivers at Delvecchio’s Deli, doing a scratch card with a bored cashier in a convenience store. Asking little questions, sometimes getting little responses back. Finding him wasn’t particularly difficult, Romeo Lupone. Even the guy who turned out to be his lawyer had spilled over the phone, said something about a judge allowing him to go free on bail until further notice. He needed to quickly master his habits. Grip predicted there would be a bar. Lupone was the type—a stool at a counter that no bastard sat on if he was nearby.

  It took Grip those two nights to find the hangout. At last he saw Lupone leave a neighborhood bar; Grip already knew where the apartment was, so he didn’t follow. Instead he went in. It smelled of sweat. A topless dancer with a worn-out body was gyrating in a corner without an audience, otherwise mostly leather jackets, slicked-back hair, and silicone bustlines.

  “Romeo?”

  The bartender said he’d just left. A shabby-looking guy with a girl on his knee nodded in agreement. The seat next to him, swung out, empty. Good enough. Lupone would be back, free on bail with a probation violation hanging over his head—the snitch would claim his territory to the bitter end. It was only a question of tomorrow night, or at most, the night after.

  The next day Grip went into a hardware store and bought some screwdrivers for show, and a sharp awl. On Kent Avenue, there was an Army Surplus with uniform overcoats and Marine Corps T-shirts from floor to ceiling. Above the rows of hangers hung naked mannequins wearing only gas masks. A handwritten sign at the counter said RAPE SPRAY. Grip fingered one of the containers.

  “My wife wants something stronger than pepper spray,” he said, and put the container back.

  The bearded clerk looked incredulously at him. Finally decided with a smack of his tongue, and bent down to the shelves behind the counter.

  “Two,” added Grip, laying bills on the counter.

  “Be careful,” murmured the clerk and gave him a brown paper bag. No change, no receipt.

  Grip ran back toward Williamsburg, stopped at a FedEx office, wrot
e a note by hand, and stuffed it into a large envelope made of stiff cardboard. Got help with the address, paid. Then he called FBI’s general tips line from his car.

  Once he reached a live voice, he said, “An item will be delivered to your office on Kew Gardens Road during the afternoon. It’s addressed to Shauna Friedman—make sure that she gets it.”

  “I can’t guarantee—”

  “I know you can.”

  “There are thousands here who—”

  “She’s a special agent with you, with her own secretary and a pretty office here in New York.”

  “Who may I say it’s from?”

  “Forget it—the item is for Shauna Friedman. And if she’s not there, someone has to call and read her the message.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’m sure we will. And tell her that starting tomorrow night, I’m staying”—Grip pulled the note from his pocket and read—“at the Best Western in Newark.” It was the hotel she had originally booked him into.

  “But?”

  “She knows who I am.”

  CHAPTER 37

  THE CLOCK SAID NOT EVEN two in the afternoon. Grip was back in place, with his views of the East River. He was starting to get restless. Not nervous, not afraid, just restless. It was the night that mattered. In a few hours he would become his opposite, the type a bodyguard would never manage to spot when he looked over oceans of people. Not the man with the stare, not the obvious threat, but the fish in the water. The invisible, the deadly. The facades and the river outside the window looked mostly like dead scenery, nothing worth a gaze. Grip squeezed one of his own shoulders. Reassuring—he could strike as hard as anybody. But it wasn’t about that.

  He lay in only his underwear on the narrow bed, felt himself above the arms and then down across the stomach. Slid his hand into his underwear; his sex was cool and unperturbed. He got up, got dressed. When he pulled on the heavy jacket, he was standing by the bed again. A second of hesitation, but then he had full control of himself. It wasn’t his life that mattered. It was Ben’s.

  So he left.

  He drove out and parked near the power plant by the Brooklyn Bridge. He still had a few hours to kill, so he walked to the subway station and rode into Manhattan. The tools, the paper bag with the spray, were all that he left in the car. This was a detour, his ritual. One way to become a fish in the water, his way of harnessing his own restlessness. No fuck-ups, not like in Central Park—he depended on no one.

  Given the situation, it was obvious he’d head to the Whitney Museum. A late weekday afternoon, not many people there. Not deserted—that wouldn’t have been good—but sparse. He had the rooms to himself a few minutes at a time.

  Grip bought his ticket, glanced into the café at the inside table where he and Ben usually sat, and took the stairs, not the elevator.

  He passed a couple on the way out of the room, and then he was alone.

  There was no painting calmer than this one. Hopper’s Seven A.M., so still. Another hung next to it, South Carolina Morning: a woman in a red dress and hat, waiting. Morning light, that’s what the two had in common. But Grip’s favorite painting didn’t contain a single figure. Seven A.M. showed distant trees on one side, and on the other a storefront that time had passed by. So still. Some kind of story could probably be told, but one refrained from asking questions. The light and shadows convinced the viewer to exist in the moment. Hopper had drawn sharp lines where the sun cast shadows on the white walls inside the window, while outside the ground gleamed like warm sand. The hands of an old wall clock suggested that the time was seven. Someone who should have been there was somewhere else. Yet nothing was missing. With the morning light streaming down on the ground and in through the window, time might as well have stopped—so the clock always stood at seven.

  Just like that, a place where nothing ever changes.

  Romeo Lupone didn’t even flinch but turned slowly around. Grip had kept watch outside the bar and then hurried ahead when Lupone came out. At a corner piled with garbage bags next to a basement stairway, Grip had stepped forward. The sudden sound of someone nearby made Lupone turn around. But before they made eye contact, he was hit, completely unprepared by the tear gas, his scream half smothered by the surprise and stinging pain. Grip threw himself forward with a swift knee straight to the thigh, making Lupone crumple down among the garbage bags. Then Grip straddled him, with one hand clutching his jacket and the tear gas spray ready in the other. Held still, while Lupone yelped and cramped. Blinded, he’d emptied his lungs, and once he was gasping for air like a drowning man, Grip emptied the spray bottle into the gap. He inhaled everything.

  Mucus like from a dog foaming at the mouth, vomit in convulsed waves, but no screams to attract attention from the neighborhood. When the second spray can was empty, all that could be heard were little peeps. Grip was grimacing, coughing, his own eyes filling with tears. He wrenched Lupone up to kneeling and dragged him along like a package, bouncing him down the basement stairs beside them. At the bottom was a cramped concrete chamber they barely fit inside. Empty plastic containers and cans bounced up against the walls as they made impact, like two wrestlers. Lupone’s legs kicked feebly around him. Grip blew snot from his nose and wiped his eyes on his sleeves to see in the murky cellar hole.

  Then he pulled out the awl.

  CHAPTER 38

  JUST AS HE’D SAID HE would, Grip checked into the hotel in Newark. After he’d left the Atlanta airport, there were four days that didn’t exist. The clothes were new, the car was sold. He was walking without any luggage through the evening darkness.

  “How long?” asked the desk clerk.

  Grip shrugged. “One night, unless you charge by the hour.”

  The receptionist laughed uncertainly. Grip let him put an advance on his credit card before he went up to the room, turned on a pay TV channel, and sat down to wait.

  The final scene of the movie was approaching when the phone rang. It was from reception. There was a message for him to pick up.

  An envelope.

  A note with an address and a time. He could make it, of course he could. Everything always so orderly. Grip went out and got into the first taxi. He’d put in his appearance—round trip to Newark—and now headed back toward the Holland Tunnel and the Manhattan skyline.

  The address was in Gramercy, the entrance behind a row of well-tended trees. Perhaps he’d passed through the neighborhood before, but in any case Grip had never noticed the discreet location. The buildings mostly older. No sign that suggested anything to him, either on the street or inside the gate.

  “Mr. Grip, welcome,” said a man in a black-and-white-striped tie behind an old-fashioned wooden desk. There were moisture cracks in the walls, and the air smelled of chlorine.

  Ten minutes later Grip stood in a borrowed bathing suit, tried to regulate a shower with separate handles for hot and cold.

  “Locker forty-seven, then head directly into the baths,” the man had said.

  Tile, slightly yellowed, with black-and-white mosaics: a diffuse pattern of shields and emblems on the floors, ancient gods posing naked along the walls. In the locker room, all the furnishings were dark wood, with polished edges, solid. The few other men he saw inside moved remarkably slowly; someone carried a racket. He got the feeling that the place was about to empty. It was after all quite late. Grip showered off and continued inside.

  “Well, here you are,” she said quietly.

  Shauna Friedman sat with her arms outstretched along the edge of a quiet Jacuzzi. She was alone. The air bubbles made silver beads around her.

  “Salt water,” she said, “and it shouldn’t bubble more than this, they say.”

  They were above the pool and inside a row of columns in the hall’s covered arcade. The light was pleasantly dusky. The pool’s glimmers danced across the walls and reflected on the ceiling, while the Jacuzzi’s blue-gray water seemed almost bottomless.

  “Are you a member of this . . . temple?” said
Grip.

  “No, but I know someone who is.”

  “How convenient.” He looked around. “Through your politician husband, one may assume?”

  “Maybe.”

  Grip nodded.

  “As you see, not many people take a dip at this time of evening,” she explained.

  “Members with both money and packed schedules?”

  “They come here in the morning or right after work. This late, they’re at the opera or eating dinner with their auditors.”

  In the pool below, only two heads glided back and forth. Of their conversation, no more was heard than an echoing murmur.

  “Come in, it’s just warm enough.”

  “Salt water?”

  “Like the sea.”

  Grip put down his towel.

  The Jacuzzi’s pleasant warmth had reached up to his knees when Shauna said, “There was an empty seat on the flight from Atlanta—you disappeared.”

  “Yes,” said Grip, “a whim,” and sank completely.

  “Whim?”

  “I realized that I was in the American South. The Civil War, you know, Gettysburg, it wasn’t far. I’ve always wanted to see . . . the battlefield.”

  She smiled a prosecutor’s smile. “Gettysburg?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “I bought a car.”

  “There you go. General Lee and Pickett’s Charge—why don’t you tell me a little about them?”

  Grip swept his hand through the water, ignoring the question.

  “You can never prove it,” she continued.

  “I don’t feel that anything needs proving.” Grip looked at her again. Soaking with Shauna Friedman, trust hanging in the balance.

  “The Civil War . . .”

  “We can let it go,” he interjected.

  “I just wanted to say about the Civil War,” she continued, “that some would argue America is returning to it. The same kind of destructive atmosphere, the same kind of—”

  “Unholy alliances?”

  “Adderloy’s freezer—someone deserves thanks for the tip.”