As previously reported by this newspaper, several analysts believe that the arcane acts of Reza Khan and his group indicate that religious war is now a permanent fixture of American life. When Kansas Republican senator Barbara Freeman heard the news of Khan’s execution, she stated: “This is the first terrorist who has received his just punishment since September 11.”
Grip stopped. In the corner at Storkyrkobrinken, people gathered around a small table. Four Lithuanians, but only the one in the dirty black hat and neck bandanna caught your attention. He stood behind the table, he with the nimble movements. Already last summer, the police had intervened after someone called, even taken them into the station. But they’d had been obliged to release all four again. “People give us their money, we do not take it, never. We are not thieves.”
Three cups on a table—which one hid the ball? Tchuff, tchuff, tchuff, the cups shuffled around with the lightning movements of his hands.
Grip had heard they were back this summer. Had to go see them. Stood at the corner opposite, a few steps away from the crowd.
“Put down a tventy, double back if you get right,” the man said with an accent in several languages to the audience. The guy in the hat behind the table, and three of his own in the crowd. A note on the table—tchuff, tchuff, tchuff. A slight push from behind, or a loud comment at the right moment, enough to distract the bettor’s attention: small movements here, bigger gestures there, they even invented little arguments. When the bidding was slow, the three played themselves—tchuff, tchuff, tchuff. At those times, it was possible to keep up. Then you thought you could see.
“Amazing,” said an American voice when the ball rolled out of the cup in the middle. A short Japanese man raised a hundred in the air and put it down. A real bidder. The tempo changed. Tchuff, tchuff, tchuff.
At the baths. In Gramercy. Grip had remained for a moment beneath the steps after Shauna left. By the time he’d climbed up and was heading for the locker room, he’d already put it all behind him. Topeka, Mary, N., everything had fallen away. Or so he believed. He came to a halt when the thought struck him, and Shauna had already disappeared. He mumbled as he took a few hesitant steps, then turned and walked back. Out to the pool and past the colonnade.
The women’s locker room. A little profile of a naked woman on the door. He assumed that they were alone, went inside.
An empty corridor. Farther down he heard water running, moved closer, saw no one but realized she was showering. A door stood wide open in the aisle in front of him, a linen closet. He would just make sure it was her, didn’t want to scare anyone, risk making someone upset. One step inside, only to see without being seen through the gap, so he could call out—then put on a towel and come back out again.
The idea that struck him came from his last meeting with N. inside the cell, when N. was so tired and absent, almost confused. That was what he wanted to ask her about.
Grip looked straight into the women’s shower room. She was only a few yards away, standing alone with her back to him, her bathing suit lying on a marble bench behind. Nude and almost on tiptoe, she reached around and rinsed out the hair that lay slicked down like a tail at her neck and along her back. White tile and marble, her dark hair. Strong and beautiful.
Like a goddess.
The water streamed, and Grip was hidden, her whole figure framed by the gap.
The nightly interrogations of N. at the end, the FBI’s questions about Adderloy, New York, whatever else—it wasn’t Shauna who asked the questions. She had people who did it for her, Grip realized that even then. The last time he sat opposite N., he’d murmured, “She came in,” but Grip thought it had something to do with traumatic memories from the tsunami. But of course: at the last moment Shauna herself went in, and after that N. had given up. What had they talked about? That was what Grip wanted to ask.
But.
Naturally. She hadn’t said anything at all, she had simply appeared in his cell.
N.’s exhausted gaze, like a prayer to die. And Grip had seen his chance, the powdered malaria pills that filled the pen.
The images flowed by, like movie clips. One of N.’s small figures drawn in the newspaper: a cat’s narrow eyes. The water poured down in the shower. “Who was it that told us to shoot the pelicans?”
It wasn’t only her dark hair that broke up the white of the shower room. The swimsuit was gone; everything about her was exposed. Everything. She was facing away from him, but a pair of eyes looked straight at Grip behind the door. Precisely above her lower back. It was as if the water trickling down her body made it arch. The tail was black and raised to lash, the eyes narrow and gleaming.
The door to the linen closet shut again with a bang. The woman in the shower looked hastily over her shoulder, smiled when she met the maid’s gaze, and then turned up the flow again.
A new stack of towels was being brought out to the pool. The maid carried them under one arm, and when she came out the door to the colonnade, she saw the back of a man walking away from her.
“We’re closing now.”
He didn’t answer. A towel around his hips, a toned back.
“Is everything all right?” There was something about his step.
He didn’t answer. A moment of light in the gloom, when the door to the men’s locker room opened. And the man disappeared.
The feeling of malaise lingered. The maid stood for a moment before she continued away with her stack.
Amazing.” The Japanese man at the corner at Storkyrkobrinken was five hundred Swedish crowns poorer. The American woman’s husband had lost that and then some. A nudge, a well-timed sneeze, a round of bets in between that someone else had won.
“Just because you’ve exposed the trick doesn’t mean they’ve committed a crime,” said the lawyers who appeared when the Lithuanians were in custody the summer before. “Magic always has an explanation.” Tchuff, tchuff, tchuff. “People love to be fooled.”
A puzzled curse, the ball that rolled from under the wrong cup. The Americans walked away.
Grip looked down at the newspaper. Read again: “Someone described him as smiling when Reza Khan said: ‘Now I recognize you.’” At the end of the article, the names of all those present were listed. Grip seethed: Topeka’s chief of police, a judge, Khan’s lawyer, a few family members of the bank victims, some journalists, and then from the FBI—Grip nodded—Shauna Friedman.
Tchuff, tchuff, tchuff.
Grip read again: “. . . he mumbled something heard as ‘Fairy.’”
The cups stopped on the table; a hand from the audience about to point hesitated. Grip reeled off quietly: “Fairy, fairy, fairy.”
The cup was lifted. Grip stretched and corrected himself. “Mary . . . Mary . . . Mary.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROBERT KARJEL is a lieutenant colonel in the Swedish Air Force. His job as a helicopter pilot has taken him all over the world, from peacekeeping in Afghanistan to pirate-hunting in Somalia. He is the only Swedish pilot who has trained with U.S. Marine Corps and flown its attack helicopters. He lives in Stockholm. The Swede is his first novel published in English.
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CREDITS
Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015
Cover illustrations: © Henry Steadman (main male figure); © by CollaborationJS / Arcangel Images (man running); © by iofoto / Shutterstock (city skyline); © by Richard A. McGuirk / Shutterstock (city)
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE SWEDE. Copyright © 2015 by Robert Karjel. English translation © 2015 by Nancy Pick and Robert Karjel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive,
nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as De redan döda in Sweden in 2010 by Wahlström & Widstrand.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Karjel, Robert, 1965–
[De redan döda. English]
The Swede / Robert Karjel ; translation from the Swedish by Nancy Pick and Robert Karjel. — First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-233958-4 (hardback)
EPub Edition July 2015 ISBN 9780062339621
1. Intelligence service—Fiction. I. Title.
PT9876.21.A67D4313 2015
839.73'8—dc23
2015003363
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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The Swede: A Novel Page 28