The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  “Funny how the military always gets away with these things—bombs a wedding party, excuses itself, and that’s the end of it. Why can’t the same go for someone sent out by law enforcement? Mary was far behind the front lines, and alone. For obvious reasons, she and I couldn’t often be in touch. She always had to consider whether to quit or keep going, constantly weigh profit against loss. They shot Turnbull in the leg, sure, she was in on it. But they would have shot him even if she hadn’t been there. And as for the bank victims, Mary couldn’t possibly have predicted how diabolical Adderloy actually was.”

  “Insanity.”

  “Don’t pretend you’re upset. You don’t exactly play dollhouse with the world yourself. Yes, a terrible mistake. But she thought . . . and I thought . . . there was more going on. That it would be possible to get more than just Adderloy. This thing with his rebel movements and the question of who was funding them. I imagined there was more, told myself there was, let everything go on too long. Thought he’d lead us to bigger and uglier fish. But there was no one. They’d turned their backs on him. That’s precisely why Adderloy was in Topeka. I understand that now, but now it’s too late.”

  Grip continued to swim in slow circles around Shauna while she floated on her back.

  “Mary found Adderloy in Asia,” she continued, “when he was looking for someone to rob the bank with, to plunge Turnbull and his Baptists into ruin.”

  “And then later they snared the other three.”

  “They chose themselves. Their lives, and especially N.’s life, were a lost cause. He became an easily manipulated victim.”

  “So she reported to you and slept with N.”

  “Do you find it strange? She lived under pressure, that’s what this stuff does to people. Haven’t you ever had your own fantasies?”

  “There are limits.”

  Shauna raised her head slightly and looked at him, then turned on her stomach and took a few strokes again. The light from below turned her shadow into several figures who swam across the walls. “Adderloy had arranged the factory hall,” she explained, “everything that was in it, paid the rent. But in order not to reveal how well planned everything was, he convinced Mary to let the others believe that she had done it, and that she knew Turnbull was a blood donor. This gave the impression that the whole thing was a ‘lucky’ coincidence, and not in fact a small part of a much larger mission that only Adderloy himself knew about. Mary went along with it, as a way to gain his trust.”

  “But it was he who called the police?”

  “Of course. It was Adderloy’s plan all along that Reza would take the fall. But Mary didn’t know that.”

  Shauna and Grip were back under the marble woman. He tried to find a foothold at the edge of the pool, but the tile wall was completely smooth. He glided out again to Shauna, who was quietly treading water.

  “And Mary,” he said, “stayed with Vladislav and N. until it was useless to try to get Adderloy again.”

  “She tried a little later, at the motel. But Adderloy never appeared, or rather: Vladislav came at her, and then the police came between them again.” Shauna glided on her back, looking up at the statue. “But Mary succeeded in one thing. Before Vladislav made them throw their mobile phones in the ditch, she’d sent a text with the car’s license plate. The information was called in, but they didn’t find the car until it pulled into that motel down in Florida. Not the police, and not the FBI. Everything points to it being Stackhouse’s wolf pack that came. I don’t know for certain, because Mary got away and went underground. She never saw N. get arrested, couldn’t confirm if they actually got him and took him away. So I never knew. And frankly, I didn’t care. I was busy getting Mary out of there, sweeping the tracks.” Shauna took water in her hand and splashed it over her face. “I swept like hell.”

  “And the years went by,” said Grip.

  “Yes, the years went by. But as you know, it was a thing that couldn’t be set right again.”

  “Turnbull?”

  “The bungling that left him on death row can’t be blamed on anyone else. Mary and I, we should have put a stop to it. However unpleasant he is, he didn’t deserve that. Not to die.”

  “But eventually, with a little help.”

  “You want me to say thank you?”

  Grip ignored that, asked instead, “And where is Mary now?”

  “Oh, you can live a lifetime in New York without having people know who you really are. She’s doing fine.”

  “And the FBI agents and Kansas police—”

  “They still think that there were only four men who robbed a bank in Topeka. That’s how many they have in the videos, and that’s how many drinks there were on the receipt.”

  “There are many stones that cannot be turned, if this is to last.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Take the Lebanese,” he said. “If anyone questioned the two brothers at the restaurant, they’d talk about her. Maybe other things too.”

  “The Lebanese,” repeated Shauna, “are surely decent people, but running a restaurant with only a student visa. That’s illegal. They were deported. Disappeared. I believe you could trace them on a flight to Ankara.”

  “You do sweep.”

  “I master the details,” Shauna corrected.

  “You can’t ensure against everything. Pelicans, for example.”

  “No, you know about them. But you, on the other hand, have your own pelicans: the trip to Gettysburg, and a night long before that went out of control in Central Park, perhaps at the top of Ninety-Sixth Street.”

  “How was it,” said Grip softly. “N. said he was arrested at the motel, but Stackhouse argued that it happened later. And N. said that Mary was there, and you’re telling Stackhouse she wasn’t.” He drew a long, deep breath. “Maybe it suits more than one of us that N. is dead?”

  The pool water lay still as a mirror.

  “As long as you know where you have each other,” added Shauna, “that means everything,” and took a first stroke toward the ladder.

  CHAPTER 39

  OH, DO WE HAVE AN apology?” said Ben, taking the bottle Grip held out to him. Champagne, a Bollinger ’96. Ben used to point it out in the locked glass cabinet of the neighborhood Polish liquor store often, saying it was absolutely wonderful, and something of an excuse for why his wallet was too thin. “Or are we celebrating?”

  Grip was already sitting at the kitchen table in the cramped kitchen. He’d walked all the way from the bathhouse in Gramercy to the apartment in Chelsea. His hair had dried along the way. It was a half hour he’d never be able to describe—how he’d gotten there, what he’d been thinking. It was a leap between worlds. An airlock had closed behind him, and he hadn’t looked back over his shoulder, not even once.

  It was only when he passed the Pole’s shop window with its sun-bleached labels that he’d felt empty-handed. Once inside the store, at first he had no idea, then recognized the bottle. Grip wasn’t in the habit of showing up with gifts.

  “I know,” said Ben with his back to him, “I won’t say a word.”

  “It’s been more than three weeks since you heard from me,” Grip filled in. His hand moved absently through a stack of magazines and art catalogs on the table.

  “Four.” Ben set down the champagne. The Pole had dusted it off and bowed when he sold it. “No phone, not even Internet?”

  “Sure, there was.”

  “I’m not the jealous queen. But tell me it was necessary.” Ben was standing with his back to Grip, fiddling with something on the kitchen counter. It was after ten. Ben always ate late if he ate at home, said he was too restless early in the evening. At his shoulders, his white shirt still showed traces of having been ironed, but over the hips it hung wrinkled and untucked. He put down his knife and leaned on his hands, waiting.

  “I didn’t want to risk anything,” said Grip finally.

  “Risk, it’s always—”

  “Especially not this time,” interrupted Grip,
raising his voice.

  Ben didn’t listen. “If something had happened to me, it would have been impossible to get hold of you.” His forearms stuck out of the upturned cuffs; they looked thinner than ever. “It’s not enough that you think of me.”

  “I was hardly thinking of you at all, I . . . it doesn’t work that way. There was no time for that, but unlike those fucking doctors, at least I have tried to save your life.”

  Ben turned around, looked uncertainly at Grip, who shook his head. A kind of apology.

  “No more art stuff now,” said Grip then, “okay?” He tried to smile, but it was strained. “Nothing like that, not even appraisals on the side. Nothing.”

  Ben stroked his temple. “You look tan.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been traveling, the sorts of tasks you do . . . for Sweden . . . somewhere.” He squinted uncomfortably. “Or was it about the jobs you did here, Arp and that other thing?”

  “Drop it.”

  But Ben went on. “My appraisals, they’ve never hurt anyone.”

  “Ben, the door. I don’t want you leaving the door open.” An attempt to change the subject. When Grip got there, the door had been unlocked, he’d simply walked in. It was an old quarrel.

  Deaf ears.

  “What you helped with, Ernst, those aren’t exactly things that people have had to die for.”

  “Ben . . .”

  But Ben just laughed and said, “You haven’t had to kill anyone, right?”

  The look.

  For a moment, the airlock opened that would forever be kept closed, and something appeared in the gap. A ghost. As when a soul leaves a deathbed.

  “We exist, Ben—we exist again,” said Grip, then looked somewhere to the side. “We don’t have to worry.”

  A consensus. The gap was closed. Maybe a minute passed.

  “Vegetable soup, yes, with a few small pieces of meat.” It was only Ben, he of anyone, who could shake off death when it hovered in the room. Not his own, but always that of others. He looked at the bottle. “And Bollinger Grande Année ’96. How long are you staying?”

  “I’m just here overnight.”

  “That’s perfect.”

  CHAPTER 40

  THE LONG, LONESOME CORRIDORS OF the security police. Grip was in Stockholm, inside with the Boss. Not the highest-ranking one, not his direct superior either, but the old man. His room had always been smaller than the other managers’, but he at least had a rug and leather chairs. There were standards.

  “Okay, so it all boiled down to nothing,” said the Boss. “Just a case of unsolved identity?”

  “Yes,” said Grip.

  “They figure it out?”

  “No, he died.”

  “And it took you almost four weeks?”

  “American bureaucracy, their usual incompetence.”

  “You questioned him?”

  “A few times.”

  “He spoke Swedish?”

  Grip didn’t answer directly. He leaned back and forth.

  “With an accent maybe?” suggested the Boss.

  Grip shrugged. The Boss nodded.

  Four weeks had disappeared. Not a single paper filing on the matter, not even an ink dot at the end. All that existed was a handwritten note on the Boss’s desk with Grip’s estimates of his own expenses. No locations, no dates, no receipts, just: “Food,” “Lodging,” and the vague item “Other.” The Boss had glanced at the paper and then set it aside. The amounts would be added as tax-free expenses on his next month’s pay slip. Nothing about Diego Garcia, nothing about New York, nothing about the security police reimbursing him for two bottles of tear gas and a very sharp awl.

  The Boss sat. Grip stood with his hands in his pockets and looked out the window.

  “I’d like to have you back,” said the Boss, “full-time. I need—”

  “I don’t want anything to do with Americans for a while.”

  The Boss laughed, like a cough. “It’s true. The world is about the Americans, you run into them.”

  “Exactly.

  “But you like this—the travel, the independence. Being able to disappear. I need people who can do that.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Back to the bodyguards, then?”

  Grip nodded.

  “What a damned dead end.” Some squeaky metal part resisted when the Boss leaned back in his chair. “Overtime, earphone, and practicing two-shot series down at the shooting range, year in and year out?”

  “It suits me.”

  “For now?”

  Grip said nothing, continued looking out.

  The Boss threw himself farther back in his chair. “So where are you packing your suits off to next?”

  “One of the girls is going down to the Riviera.”

  “Babysitting for a princess. And why always the Riviera? What do they do down there?”

  “You already know.”

  “You laugh at royal attendants’ bad jokes, order a taxi for them in the evenings, and shove intrusive photographers in the chest.”

  “It suits me.”

  “My ass. You hate it, but it’s about the vacation time. I get it—you can come and go.”

  Grip stood silent for a moment. “I can avoid the Americans,” he said then.

  “Yes, I guess that’s true. When do you leave?”

  “Tomorrow. The state jet from Bromma.”

  “Shit, for a princess to get a tan.”

  “There’s also the opening of an exhibition.” Grip watched a bird outside the window.

  “And then two weeks on water skis.”

  “Sure.”

  “Water-skiing, for Christ’s sake, Grip.”

  “I’m just a bodyguard.” The bird disappeared. Grip turned around. “As I said”—he made an apologetic gesture with his hand—“I went where they wanted, but the man in the cell died.”

  “Died, yes,” said the Boss, giving up, letting his cheeks collapse, like a dog’s.

  Grip nodded and disappeared into the hallway.

  CHAPTER 41

  EARLY SUMMER SUN. THE SKY as intensely blue as a gas flame. Grip walked back home, after a detour to Södermalm at the southern end of town. Went to the Stockholm City Library at Medborgarplatsen, where a librarian had helped him track down a newspaper. He’d called a few days before; she was an old acquaintance. Once he was standing there, she said he might as well keep it, so now he carried it with him, the Kansas City Star—she’d ordered all the past week’s issues, but there was just one day that Grip wanted. He walked up Götgatspuckeln, came out at Slussen for the view of the water, the green copper church spires, the medieval facades. Along Stadsgårdskajen sat the season’s first cruise ship. The white giant was anchored some distance out, and harbor boats shuttled back and forth, ferrying the masses to Old Town. Grip paused, then decided to take the same path, following the walkway down the stairs to Kornhamnstorg square. Once the Slussen traffic was behind him, he opened the paper and folded it in half so he could hold it one-handed.

  Then walked and read.

  Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, Reza Khan was led into the execution chamber at Lansing Correctional Facility. The condemned prisoner initially wore the same absent expression that reporters observed during his trial. It should be noted that Khan’s emotions were very difficult to read, given that his face bore scars from the severe gunshot wound he suffered in connection with his arrest. He always maintained that his head injuries were responsible for his controversial loss of memory.

  Khan was transferred three days ago from death row in El Dorado prison to a secluded cell at Lansing. Authorities having failed to locate any family members, in recent days Khan met only with his lawyer. His last meal consisted of fried chicken.

  When the curtain between Khan and the witnesses was drawn, Khan was already strapped to the table, with a needle and tubes attached to both inner arms. The table had been raised, and Khan seemed unprepared to see the assembled faces. Warden Richard Hickock
read out the judgment, and only then did Khan become more alert. After Hickock read the judgment, Khan replied sarcastically: “It is hardly a surprise to anyone here that I am going to die.” The warden, maintaining his composure, asked if Khan had any last words. Khan replied coolly: “What would you like me to do, cry ‘Allah akbar’? No, you must find something original.”

  There followed a few moments of confusion, when the warden’s assistants tried to lower the bunk again but had problems with a latch. While they tried to remove the pin, Khan squinted out at the witnesses on their chairs and focused on one face. Someone described him as smiling, others argued that it was more an expression of surprise, when Reza Khan said: “Now I recognize you,” whereupon the pin came out, and the table dropped down.

  Grip turned onto Västerlånggatan. An outdoor spectacle he usually avoided in summer: kids with ice cream, Japanese guides, Viking horns, cameras, and dense flocks that were a pickpocket’s paradise. He was heading for the corner at Storkyrkobrinken, dodged two American cruise ladies in broad hats whose sneakers inched along, found a new path through the crowd, and looked down at the paper again.

  The first syringe lulls the condemned man, the second and third paralyze the lungs and stop the heart. Khan was anesthetized quickly, but before lapsing into unconsciousness, he mumbled something heard as “Fairy” by a few witnesses. This he repeated a few times. Khan was declared dead by the prison physician ten minutes later. No movement or sign of discomfort could be discerned in the process. One of those present claimed to see some twitching in one hand, another described it as “killing a dog.” Reza Khan’s remains will be cremated within the next few days and spread to the winds in an unknown location.

  Outside the prison, the execution was celebrated by Christian groups formerly accused of the acts for which Khan was convicted. With the release of Charles-Ray Turnbull and tonight’s execution, it appears that these congregations’ reputations have been restored. “Wrath of God, Wrath of God,” chanted a group calling itself the Southern Baptist Conference, when the hearse left the prison.