The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  RL: But I’m not testifying now, we agree on that?

  SF: We don’t agree on anything. It was you who wanted to talk to us. I don’t know what this is about.

  RL: I don’t like tape recorders.

  SF: Should I leave?

  RL: No, wait. [Silence.] You know how it works. Some dudes in Brooklyn run a print shop in the evenings, extra income. It was good notes, the paper was only so-so, but the notes looked good. I would have fallen for it if someone shoved one in my hand, but you don’t give a shit.”

  SF: Maybe not.

  RL: So maybe I drove a little extra for that printer in the evenings, I didn’t know what they were loading into that truck. I just drove, some addresses here and there. But now some goddamn feds are trying to nail me, said I knew more than I did. They fucking tapped some phones.

  [Silence.]

  SF: I’m listening.

  RL: I’m on probation, for an old thing. If I take the rap for this shit, I’m going in for at least eight years. [Silence.] What would you say if I told you about Angelico and Metro’s loading dock on October 25?

  SF: Four years ago?

  RL: For example.

  SF: You’ll have to say more than that.

  RL: Hell if I know the name of the guy who made some statues worth a shitload, but two of them were stolen. Nobody has gotten fingered.

  SF: Jean Arp, the artist.

  RL: Maybe. And the statues never turned up, huh?

  SF: No, it’s still unsolved.

  RL: There you go.

  SF: So what?

  RL: Never mind. So finally we get to this week’s big lottery prize, Central Park on the night of February 27, a few years ago. Should we say at the top of 96th Street?

  SF: We can say. What happened there?

  RL: Come on, you know.

  SF: You tell me, I don’t have a probation violation hanging over my head.

  RL: Okay, putting on the screws. Can we at least agree that a woman was injured around there that night?

  SF: She died eventually.

  RL: Oh fuck.

  SF: You could say that—it changes the crime a little. It’s called murder now. What were you saying?

  RL: Is the fucking tape recorder still on?

  SF: Still on.

  RL: Who knows where the fuck this will end up.

  SF: I’m the one who decides what the tape gets used for. Come on.

  RL: Let’s say those two were the same crew, the statues and Central Park.

  SF: Well, anyone could walk off the street and claim that.

  RL: Okay, let’s imagine, then, let’s say . . . I knew someone who drove for them. Who was part of it, saw a lot, met a lot of people.

  SF: Even in Central Park?

  RL: Maybe.

  SF: What do you want?

  RL: What the hell do you think—someone to correct the feds on what they did and did not hear in those telephone calls. And protection from being prosecuted for what I’m going to talk about, in black and white.

  SF: I don’t think we need this anymore.

  [Tape recording ends.]

  Grip slipped the papers back into the plastic sleeve. Romeo Lupone—so the fucker had surfaced again. A little threat of a decade in prison and the chickenshit starts talking. A little buying and selling of his prosecution, the kind of thing they like, the Americans.

  “I’ve talked to Romeo since then,” Shauna said.

  “I’m sure,” said Grip.

  “‘The Swede,’ he repeats constantly. Surely he means N., with your passport?” She wasn’t provoking, she was reasoning.

  “Or me,” said Grip. “Wasn’t that the obvious reason why you brought me here?”

  “N.’s mumbling provides sufficient detail for him to have been involved. It’s him, and that’s easiest for everyone, isn’t it?” Her nail clinked against the cup.

  Maybe he ought to thank his lucky stars, Grip thought. Completely unknowingly, Romeo and N. had vouched for each other.

  At the far end, a palm hit the counter and the guy laughed out loud. Shauna turned and gazed at the young men as if something interested her.

  “Shouldn’t we try the officers’ club?” she said later.

  “It’s late.”

  “A few will still be there cleaning up—they can pour us a drink.”

  Grip muttered that he was fine where they were. Shauna reached for the sugar shaker. There was silence for a moment.

  It was as if Shauna was speaking to her own cup when she finally said, “Reza, N., Romeo Lupone—of course, they don’t mean anything, not anymore. The one I really want to get to is Adderloy.” She turned to Grip, a short, tired smile. “There you have the real destroyer, the black soul.” She stirred, poured in more sugar, stirred again. She let the cup be confessor again. “I want to look into a cell and see Adderloy alone with four walls. So that it’s not the final word, his sending two of my agents, two of my best friends, to the morgue. To gaze inside there, when he knows that I know, and look him in the eye. I need to have that moment.” She drank the coffee.

  Grip glanced at the clock on the wall. Past midnight. The waitress and the young men at the other end were arguing about something. It finished with their questions about what time she’d be off for the night. She giggled nervously.

  “What do you have then?” said Shauna.

  “What I have?” Grip balanced the edge of his empty cup on the table and let it go again. “All I know is that there’s a badly tortured man on Diego Garcia who speaks Swedish. That’s a report of scarcely a page, to someone back home.”

  “Don’t you want him back?”

  Grip continued as if he hadn’t heard her: “Papers will go back and forth, until finally, someone at the Foreign Office—” He looked at her.

  “—shrugs his shoulders,” she suggested. “Because no one actually misses him?”

  He glanced at the clock again.

  “Something like that,” Grip said finally.

  They went back to the hotel in the car. The empty stillness was broken only by the patter of insects against the lights in the stairwell. They were standing in the hallway outside their rooms. Shauna undid the clip from her hair, her shoes already hung from one hand. Grip stroked a finger over a sleepy moth on the wall.

  “Are you married?” he asked.

  “If I’m married?” Shauna said, stretching up. “What is it the airmen say, here at Garcia—”

  “Two stopovers from home, and you’re good to go. I’ve heard that too.”

  She laughed, a little wary. “So why do you ask?”

  “Because I wondered.”

  “No, you didn’t. You pay far too much attention to details, and you’ve seen the wedding ring.”

  “It comes on and off.”

  “No, I had it on until we got to San Diego. Then somewhere along the way, it came off. So you’re wondering to whom?”

  “We’re getting there.”

  “He’s a member of the House of Representatives in Washington, from North Carolina. Impressive, huh?”

  “Doesn’t say much.”

  “We have no children.”

  “That says more.”

  “Sometimes the ring performs its function, sometimes not. At the office in New York, I’m married, and not to just anyone, and he needs a wife. But he knows more about the lower back of his speechwriter than he does about mine. There is nothing we pretend about, at least not to each other. And here on Garcia, there’s no point in being married.” She pushed her hip toward one side, and her hand with the shoes toward the other. “If you’re wondering,” she said then, “I had one of those pilots up in the room here the other night. Not when they were all drunk, I mean a few evenings before. But he hesitated too much, so he had to go.” The hand holding the shoes sank. “And you? Are you as free as you appear to be, in all your guises?”

  “Completely. Or yes, I also live with someone who doesn’t particularly care what I do with strange women.”

  “Who wou
ld lose the most if I invited you into the shower?”

  “You’d do that?”

  “So you think. Are you good?”

  “You’d be shouting yourself hoarse.”

  He smiled, she laughed it off. They parted.

  But Grip didn’t go into his room. He went downstairs again and out into the parking lot. There he stood leaning against a wooden post with his hands in his pockets until the last light in Shauna’s window went out, and then he went back into the lobby and sat down at the computer. He had everything nearly ready. It would only take a minute. To the fact file on Maureen Whipple, he added a few lines about what the woman had actually engaged in, her trail of screams and tormented souls. He clicked send, and the screen blinked. The rest was up to Vladislav.

  He logged off, but remained seated. Dragged his fingers along the leaves of an artificial flower that stood next to him and broke out in a cold sweat. Conscience, anxiety, the flimsy hope: everything converged on him at once, and drops fell slowly down his back and his neck. He felt himself go pale. Someone seeing him would have thought he’d suddenly fallen ill. He hung over his knees on his elbows, completely exhausted. Soon enough, he thought, his breathing would be calm again, and he’d have only the dry mouth left. He just had to wait it out. A few more breaths, and he’d be able to pull himself together.

  Later, as soon as he got back upstairs, he pulled off a long strip of toilet paper and dampened it in the sink. Inside the room, he’d left everything from his desk on the floor—now it was a quick thing to wipe down the shiny surface. He did it thoroughly, the edges too. Making the last traces of white powder disappear. Earlier in the day, he’d sat there and crushed forty chloroquine phosphate tablets by hand, between two spoons, which he then used to fill the cavity of a ballpoint pen. He’d spilled some, he’d been in a hurry to get out of there, but now it was clean. Grip opened the window and threw the paper ball into the bushes. Put his desk back in order, and lay down, naked.

  CHAPTER 34

  GRIP HAD HIS USUAL APPOINTMENT, went dutifully to the white cell block. Just as expected, he was stopped before he got to the monitoring room.

  “Not today,” said the young, unfamiliar face who cut him off, while another man thoroughly studied Grip’s ID card. The atmosphere was edgy, nervous.

  “Where’s Stackhouse?”

  “Not today, we said.”

  Grip grabbed his ID card and turned on his heels. No one said anything as he opened the front door and disappeared again. In other words, he wasn’t yet suspected of anything.

  Because someone had in all likelihood been found dead in his cell. No wounds, no ropes, simply cardiac arrest. A weakened man, years of isolation and torture, it happened all the time. One could think.

  Chloroquine phosphate. Thirty malaria pills killed most perfectly healthy people, forty was foolproof. Possibly in under an hour. The hard part was not the nausea or cramps, but the anxiety. Even if the soul wants to die, the body never does. He just hoped that N. had gone through with it. That he’d kept himself from making noise when his heart rhythm grew irregular, when the beats flip-flopped, and that he’d screwed the top back on the pen. If so, it would be a hard one to trace. A life that ends with a period. Cardiac arrest.

  Sooner or later, someone would come looking for Grip—that would determine his future. He sat alone under the faded advertising parasols on the officers’ club terrace.

  It took a couple of hours.

  “Out there,” he heard someone say from within the club, and then heard the determined steps of a familiar pair of shoes, heading for the terrace doors. Shauna Friedman sat down opposite him with folded arms and glared. She took off her sunglasses, rocked a few times in her chair but didn’t say a word, just stared straight at him.

  “So then you know,” she said at last. Her tone was hard, her skin pale, her eyes sharp.

  “I know nothing, but I can imagine.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “They didn’t let me in earlier.”

  “Flat on his fucking bunk, staring straight up at the ceiling.” Shauna looked around. Farther down on the terrace sat two young officers who’d come out just before, each with a beer. “You two,” she said, raising her voice, “you can go.”

  They disappeared without a word.

  “One guess,” said Grip when their backs disappeared into the house: “cardiac arrest.” With obvious irony in his voice, he added: “Given everything the man has gone through.”

  “Hey, I’ve heard that shit so many times before. It was the first thing Stackhouse said. His crew has left such a trail of crap that they immediately started burning their bridges. Hard to know if they did something, or were just surprised. And here you sit, seemingly untouchable, in the sun.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Did you deal under the table with Stackhouse?”

  “Stackhouse hated me from day one. It was you who brought me here, remember? If you think something stinks, get an autopsy done on N.”

  “Hell yes, it stinks. But you know as well as I do that the moment he’s no longer alive, no one wants to know him, not even us obviously, except as ashes scattered far out to sea.”

  “You can keep fighting your windmills,” continued Grip. “I’m going home now.”

  “There are no flights. And even if there were, you will leave when I say so.”

  “Are you keeping me here?”

  She didn’t pay attention to his question. “Windmills—what do you mean by that? A stupid idealist in a purple bra—is that it?”

  “So you’re holding me hostage?”

  “A Swedish citizen has died under unclear circumstances.”

  “A person who spoke Swedish will soon be burned into ashes, dissolved in lime, or simply thrown into the sea. After that, the man, the body, or even the designation N., never existed.”

  “You’re their messenger boy.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “And you’ll stay here.”

  “I’ll contact my superiors. They’ll send a plane.”

  “Give me something. I have a thousand reasons to keep you.”

  “I’m from Sweden. We remain neutral.”

  “Give me something!”

  Not much more was said.

  The next day Grip didn’t go to the cell block. Instead he borrowed a beach chair from the hotel and sat on an inhospitable patch of grass overlooking the harbor.

  Time passed. The sun burned over his arms. Shauna, he hadn’t seen her since the day before. What did that mean?

  What did Stackhouse believe about N.’s death? Or did he simply think he had one less problem weighing on him? Did anyone understand? Was the pen being analyzed, or had it simply been thrown out?

  He sat and drank beer out of his cooler, waiting to be arrested at any time. Light beer; he didn’t want to cloud his thinking. Shauna or Stackhouse would come. Come walking down the road, that’s the way he saw it. With one or two men, like when the police have located a lost child. It mattered, whether it was Stackhouse or Shauna who came. He just couldn’t make up his mind which way. But whichever it was, he would . . . It was the picture of Ben that came to him. Always the picture of Ben, looking over his shoulder when Grip came home to him, the skewed, easy smile. The few real moments. That was the life he had to protect. No matter what.

  Evening came. Grip felt dehydrated despite all the beer. Were they keeping him under surveillance? He wasn’t being paranoid, he was just surprised that nothing had happened. Were they expecting something from him? He folded up the chair, took his cooler, and started walking.

  At the officers’ hotel, he wrote a note and asked the man at reception to make sure that Shauna Friedman got it. He wrote that the Swedish security police and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to know immediately when he could be expected to leave Diego Garcia. It was nonsense. He hadn’t even been in contact with them. Had he tried, he probably would have been told that he had to travel on whatever flights the Americans made
available.

  Perhaps his bluff nevertheless got him home. The next day he received a note in reply, saying he should be at the airport with his bags no later than six o’clock that evening. His sunburned arms smarting from the day before, he packed up, and reception said his room bill was already taken care of.

  On the tarmac were a half-dozen black B-52s lined up and a single off-white passenger plane from the US Navy, the same kind he’d flown in on the way to Garcia.

  “Mr. Grip?”

  He nodded, and a crew member helped him aboard. A few more uniforms arrived and took seats in the large cabin.

  Last came Shauna.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a bunch of tickets and reservation confirmations. She avoided looking at him. “You’ll take the same route back, ending up in San Diego. Then you’ll fly domestic. They couldn’t find you anything direct to New York, so you’ll have to go through Atlanta. A night in a hotel out by Newark, and from there, SAS to Stockholm. Then you’ll be home.”

  Grip thumbed through the stack, then nodded and waited for her to say something more. Around them, empty rows of seats. Shauna sat on the outer armrest in the row opposite.

  “No,” she said. “I won’t be coming with.” Behind her, a crew member checked off the few passengers on a clipboard and gave it to the cockpit.

  “The first thing you said inside N.’s cell,” she began then, “was something about not lying.”

  Grip looked out the window and gave the impression of searching his memory. “I said I wouldn’t lie or make false promises,” he said, looking up at her.

  “And did you hold to that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now I say the same. No lies, no false promises. We have maybe five minutes left before they throw me off. No matter what is said, I will leave, and you will get to go home. All the way home.”

  Grip didn’t move a muscle.

  “I’ll start,” she continued. “N. no longer exists. His body, everything, is gone.”

  “There you go,” said Grip. He fingered the ticket for New York to Stockholm. At any moment, Shauna could terminate all flight preparations, he knew that. Through the window, he saw the fuel truck pull away from the airplane.