The Swede (20 page)

T
HE GAME OF HINTS WAS
repeated the next day. A nonsense conversation of questions and answers inside the cell, while N. sat doing crossword puzzles. Grip’s issues with the time sequence at Weejay’s meant nothing, and N.’s little interruptions of half-mumbled five-letter words and garden flowers meant everything. The newspaper crosswords went back and forth across the table a few times, while Stackhouse and his simultaneous interpreter heard all about Vladislav’s swims and Reza’s excitable moods.

For Grip, it was like juggling hand grenades. What had they interrogated N. about the day before? And Arp, what did N. know about Jean Arp? Grip wrote: NEW YORK? one time and spun back the newspaper. N. nodded, but what did it mean? Nothing in N.’s earlier story touched on New York. Why had N. asked him about it? Meanwhile, Grip filled the air with words and questions about the other stuff, keeping all the plates spinning. N. tried in turn to have something to say, but held his cards close. He wrote: MAUREEN. Twice he faintly penciled in the name, then erased it each time. On Grip’s list of every name that N. had mentioned, he couldn’t find a Maureen.

A LIFE FOR A LIFE also appeared in the crossword, and PAWN SACRIFICE was some sort of call to action. It was a game with too many possible associations, Grip knew it. The human longing to connect, to see patterns no matter how the dots are scattered.
You want to so badly. Was N. like a fortune-teller, cleverly tricking someone into seeing their own hopes and hidden fears? Plant a seed, and the mind does the rest. A couple of years of torture and interrogation, yet still he gave the Americans headaches. There was cunning embedded in that—what to say and when. N. knew all about the laws of nature in a universe that consisted only of a cell with four walls. The game with the Americans would have been one thing. What was it now: Did N. want to give, or just take?

When Grip wrote CHRISTO, N. seemed not to understand. After taking it in for a long time, Grip finally spelled THE GATES. It seemed to strike N. as vaguely familiar, but nothing more. No hidden nod, no new word back. They danced around each other, Grip deeply puzzled and juggling everything.

He decided to switch tactics. Convinced that N. still held the strongest hand, he had to rush him.

“I’m leaving the day after tomorrow,” he said—a lie—and shifted on the chair so that it would be clear that he was about to be done for the day.

N. quickly wrote down his last two words: TORTURE and MAUREEN, and then wiped them out again.

A
life for a life” was what Vladislav had said to N., about saving him from going back into the factory when the police showed up. Promising to repay a debt.

Thoughts of those words came and went, while Grip looked around inside the door of the officers’ club. It was full of people—a party. Flight suits, beer, and backslapping. Grip tried to find Shauna, who’d left a message at the hotel saying she wanted to meet him there. For the past several days, they’d eaten dinner alone.

He saw her up at a table where they used to sit, surrounded by a half dozen pilots, with a deck of cards in her hand. A couple of them laughed, while the others watched the cards that ran through her hands like water. Among the beer glasses and drinks, she laid down, flipped over, and sorted the cards. Her fingers and the deck flickered, while the rest of her was stillness itself. The queen of spades was the only card that flashed like lightning as it came into view. The black lady constantly disappeared and showed up again, as the crowd tried to pick her out. The stack of banknotes at Shauna’s side said something about how well the pilots had succeeded. They swore and laughed, completely seduced.

Grip watched another few rounds from a distance, more notes added to the pile. Shauna’s hair was down and hung over her back, and her eyes wore more makeup than usual. He thought she did it well, that game about her age. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but somehow she floated—certain small details that couldn’t be pinned down. Most of the aviators around her were younger, yet she fit right in. Was she younger or older than he was? Grip thought it was something he should ask her.

Around them, the party was going full swing. The volume of the music went in waves, while sweaty aviators and a stressed-out mess manager argued about volume control down by the bar.

Shauna neatened up the bill pile and then saw Grip.

“Thanks,” she said to the men around her when he arrived. They hesitated, wanted more, to have their rights. But Grip looked at them as if they were out of line, touching something they shouldn’t get involved with. They stood up one by one and disappeared.

“A beer?” said Shauna. “Nine seventeenth is buying. The squadrons are celebrating.”

“All those B-52s last night—I had a hunch.”

“They’re buying, all night.”

“Obviously they returned unscathed, all of them.” Grip caught a waitress’s attention, gestured toward a glass on the table, and sat down.

Shauna smiled, victorious.

“So what have you given yourself up to today?” said Grip. She didn’t reply. “Are you still getting copies of what N. says?”

“Short summaries. Stackhouse knows I can get to you directly, so I guess he sticks to what is actually being said. Right now, not much. However, he said the fucking crossword puzzling has to come to an end, he intends to take the papers away. He thinks he doesn’t have control over what actually takes place in the cell.”

“He sees us the whole time. What does he think we do, speak through the crosswords? The newspapers get him to relax, wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“In part.”

The beer came. Grip took a sip and then asked: “So what more do you want?”

Shauna thought for a moment. “You realize that I, as FBI, interpret his answers in different ways than Stackhouse’s minions?”

Grip shrugged.

Shauna rolled a peanut between her fingertips as if beginning a new trick. “I’m very interested in when and where he was arrested.”

“He says he was arrested at a motel in Florida.”

Shauna closed her hand and opened it again. The nut was gone. “Stackhouse claims they arrested him on a ship off the coast of Florida. It’s a very important legal detail—otherwise N. could not be sitting here. The CIA is not allowed to arrest people on American territory.” She paused. Grip let her be.

“If Stackhouse says he was arrested on a ship,” she continued,
“then of course that’s the way it is. The fact that I have every reason to distrust what he says doesn’t matter. But let’s imagine for a moment that Stackhouse is playing it straight, and that N. has cooked something up.”

“He’s hiding something?”

“We’ll see. N.’s story ends in a motel in Florida. It’s easy to pinpoint the date by counting the days after the police raided the factory in Topeka. That would make it February 21, 2005—while Stackhouse argues that N. was arrested on board a ship on March 15. If it is as he says, those three weeks are not accounted for. Stackhouse’s and the CIA’s version takes more time. What was N. doing during that period, before he left on that ship?” The peanut appeared in her hand again. She put it in the bowl and then looked around at the bomber crews, the uniforms. Less for dramatic effect than to gather her thoughts. “Truth is,” she said then, “as we both know, a relative term.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Her game of insinuations, of intimate ties. She’d pushed it too far. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing in particular. You are Sweden’s representative. It is you we are talking to.” Her obsequiousness was worse than that of a cheap conference hostess.

“This man who still wants to call himself N.,” said Grip angrily. “After everything that—” He put down his beer glass. “You will never release him, never even acknowledge his existence. The arrest, the torture—pure, fucking illegal.”

“Now you have—”

Grip interrupted her. “No, Shauna. Who is it you want me to represent—Sweden, or just myself?”

Shauna was unmoved. “How many passports do you possess, Ernst?”

“They interrogated him last night—not a word was said to me about it. Is Stackhouse questioning him?”

“I’m sure he sits and listens. No, it’s one of my own, I flew him here a couple of days ago. How many passports do you have?”

“What, why have you started questioning him? And I only have one passport. Why?”

“You yourself said that he has opened up. So one must seize the opportunity.”

“What are you talking to him about, what does he say?”

“He says enough.”

“What about?” repeated Grip.

“Do you celebrate Christmas with your family?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Yes, I am. Do you celebrate Christmas with them?”

“No, not my thing, all the damn trees and elves. I travel, it suits me.” Anger made him bite off his sentences.

“Your Christmas habits are more interesting than you might think.” Shauna reached into her bag and took out something. It proved to be a passport; she held it out to him. “Where were you when you heard about the tsunami?”

“Since it was Christmas, I was on the road. A diving trip in Thailand.” It was a Swedish passport he had in his hand. Grip opened to the middle of the stamped pages. “I was diving, noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Not until the boat was bringing us back did we see the devastation. Personally, I suffered not at all.”

“And the passport?”

“What a question. Like many other beach hotels, mine was completely demolished. My passport disappeared.” He leafed through the one he held in his hand.

And got to the picture of himself.

“Why—”

“—are we sitting on Diego Garcia and discussing your lost passport.” Shauna looked at him, considering the moment. Then she said: “Have you introduced yourself to N.?”

“By name?”

“Yes.”

“Under the rules of conduct, Stackhouse made me promise not to. So no, I haven’t.”

Shauna nodded. “Regardless of where N. was arrested”—she gave him the briefest hint of a smile—“one thing is quite clear: with him was a passport that identified him as Ernst Grip.”

A second, it took him a second to grasp the concept, and then the express train hit him head on. Yet Grip did not drop his gaze; he managed to keep looking at her.

“He had your passport. Can you imagine that, Ernst?”

T
HERE WERE
—”

“I know,” said Shauna. “Tens of thousands of Swedes at those beaches.”

“Someone found my passport, then left it at one of those hospitals that so many passed through.”

“Exactly.”

“And that was where he got hold of it.”

Shauna Friedman nodded.

Somewhere in the back of his head, Grip asked himself why he was trying to appear innocent. He wasn’t guilty of anything. His trip hadn’t been the least bit strange. The tsunami—it was a natural disaster. And his passport had ended up in the wrong hands. There was nothing that needed to be defended.

But still.

“You, both of you, Stackhouse—” Grip threw up his hands. “You asked for me specifically. It was me and no one else you wanted to make the trip from Sweden, here to Garcia.”

“Not both—I was the one who called you.”

“Because of the passport?”

“Yes.” Shauna nodded. “I suggested there were questions that only you could answer.”

“Namely, how my passport ended up where it did?”

“Yes, and I know that now. But then there’s the question of all those trips to New York.”

It was the second blow of the evening, and it fell just as hard. In the midst of the bomber pilots yelling and screaming sat Ernst Grip, raw. He was still holding his passport in his hand, his old passport, which, like his new one, was filled with stamps from trips to New York. Another insight stung even more: when Grip met Shauna for the first time—when they went to lunch and he noticed her hair, her hands pecking so skillfully with chopsticks, a simple detail like the way she listened to Django Reinhardt in the car—even then she had those questions ready for him. Why was there a man in a cell at Diego Garcia who carried the passport of a member of the Swedish security police? And what was that police officer doing, constantly going to New York?

“As I assume you already know,” he replied, “I have belonged for some years to the bodyguard detachment. The royal family travels a lot, the princesses, their daughters . . . their studies, friends, UN visits, Christmas shopping . . . how many reasons do you want? Besides, I like the city a lot.”

“Whatever it is, you hide it well.”

“Who is really hiding what?” Grip grinned. An intimate moment, because everything was at stake.

“You know there are many strands to this knot,” Shauna began. “We’re running several parallel investigations. The interconnections that haunt us, we can get to later. But the case involves an art theft and a woman. No one special, just a schoolteacher, but she was shot to death in Central Park.”

It was time to get out of there. Time to go. He’d been set up, and she kept firing. He couldn’t just sit there and take it.

The break came, quite naturally. One of the pilots stopped and
unzipped the top of his flight suit for Shauna to see. On the T-shirt underneath was the silhouette of a B-52 above the words R
OCK THE
P
LANET
. He was dripping with sweat, or maybe someone had poured alcohol over him. He nodded proudly in time with the music, then someone pulled him along, farther away.

“Rock the Planet.” Grip savored the words.

“He released his first full cargo of bombs,” said Shauna. “That’s what they call it.”

“He looks young, and now, having popped it, he’s officially initiated. And how do you know these things anyway?”

“They explained it to me.”

Grip turned in his chair toward the jerking sea of rolled-up and unbuttoned flight suits, bottles of beer, cigars, and the roar of self-congratulations. “I’m sure they’ve tried to explain all kinds of things.”

“What?”

Grip had hoped for it, that slightly offended reaction. “Your blouse and your tan,” he said, turning back slowly. “And if I could imagine a purple bra strap while you were doing your clever tricks, then certainly a hundred combat-drunk bomber pilots in here have done the same. If you’ve just released ten thousand tons of bombs onto somebody’s head, then no doubt you want to end the day by shooting off the last of your manliness.”

“I know,” she replied. “And there are twenty tons of bombs per aircraft.”

He smiled ingratiatingly. “Is that a lot?”

“Yes, that’s a lot.”

“Then I’m sure they have a perfect right to empty themselves of testosterone, after such a contribution to peace. By the way, who do you think was braver, these gentlemen or the ones who flew into the Twin Towers?”

“Is it courage we’re measuring?”

“Men always measure courage.”

“I think it’s time—”

“—to go, yes.”

And they stood up.

The floor was sticky the entire way. Once they’d made it through the sweaty, noisy crowd and come out into the hall, a lonely old airman appeared who immediately puffed up when he saw Shauna. She didn’t seem either concerned or interested when he started saying, “No, not yet,” and “Come here, baby.” And then he saw Grip. It was his eyes—
Who the fuck do you think you are?
—that made Grip take an extra step between them, blocking Shauna so she couldn’t see anything more than his back. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, smiled, and just when the crew cut with the stubby forearms was about to react, Grip squeezed. No fancy Asian moves, just a pure, relentless hold on his throat. In one second, or not even that—taken by surprise, drunk in the heat—he was nothing more than a hundred and eighty pounds of cells fighting for oxygen. He tugged, couldn’t get loose, his legs buckled in fear. Then Grip released him.

“What happened?” said Shauna, looking up.

The major squatted with his hands on his throat, as if surprised that everything was still attached. He stared vacantly, coughed, and dry-wheezed. Looked ready to vomit.

“It’s the heat,” said Grip. “Too much to drink, too much emotion. Come.”

After they got back to the officers’ hotel, Grip went to his room, lay fully clothed on his bed, and waited about an hour. Then he went out again, just a few hundred yards. He’d seen it before, the recreation area. A bit apart, with a row of trees screening it from
the rest of the base. There was a neglected tennis court, brown grass, and some picnic areas with fire pits and cinder-block grills. Embers were still smoldering in one, and he blew life into them and started tearing pages out of his notebook. When the flames came to life and began to lick the papers, he added the notebook cover and the small folder he collected his papers in. From now on, he would keep everything in his head.

It burned slowly. He prodded and poked with a leftover skewer to make sure everything would be gone. Watching the glow, he let his thoughts drift.

Back home, the Boss had certainly spoken the truth. He’d thought the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the one asking Grip to go; he hadn’t realized that the request came directly from the American side. Had he known it, he wouldn’t have given the nod, Grip was confident of that—they went back far enough not to sacrifice each other. But now Grip was where he was. He’d accepted the fucking ticket and was in for the ride. He’d have to fend for himself. Those were the rules.

And Shauna, what was she doing? Shauna had to figure things out, that was her job—right? Into her lap had fallen N., who couldn’t be shown to anyone, a beat-up remnant who wouldn’t talk. And the bastard had been arrested with a Swedish security police passport in his inside pocket. Grip’s passport. Among all the possibilities, one twisting thread led to another: a robbery in Topeka and a dead woman in Central Park. And that led to—what did it lead to? It led to N.’s cell now holding them both.

However unlikely it seemed, the connection—Topeka and New York—he shouldn’t be blinded by its having been made. There were other elusive threads: Stackhouse had a different agenda than Shauna did, and N. persisted with Maureen, a name that didn’t
fit. Trails and blind alleys that could be useful. Shauna had asked him about New York, straight out. About why he went there so often. But if Shauna knew what Grip knew, she wouldn’t be fishing, throwing out hooks and implying threats, the way she had. That revealed something. And it was too blatant not to be conscious. She was waiting for a reaction. The interrogations of N. she’d arranged during the night—those weren’t about Topeka and the time at Weejay’s. Shauna was wrestling with something. Something unclear. But what? Grip moved the embers, where a few small blue flames still flickered among the burned pages. His thoughts spun once more.

Half an hour later, only a few bright spots remained of the fire. He crushed the last charred pages of the notebook to powder, blew the ashes so they rose in a cloud, and left. The ashes hung for a moment like a gray ghost in the night.

There were two things he could cling to. Shauna Friedman wasn’t sure where the line between him and N. really stood, what actually happened after the passport got lost. Who had been where, when? Grip knew it. And he’d figured out the math. At the same time that N. claimed he’d been arrested at a motel in Florida, Grip had entered New York as himself.
The Gates
, the woman getting shot, all within the space of a few days. Stackhouse said N. was arrested later—it was a lie, but that was the time frame the CIA needed to make the arrest legal. They probably had dates that needed to match up, in case someone checked. And those turned out to be the weeks missing from N.’s life. Shauna wondered whether it was he or N. who had been in New York. That was the first thing he could hold on to. The second was N.’s nighttime interrogations. Shauna had tried to give the impression that N. had told her something, but that wasn’t true. He’d maneuvered and wriggled
while Shauna tried to tie him to New York. Grip had never used his name inside the cell, but N. had nonetheless made the connection. After several years of hell, suddenly a Swedish security police officer turns up. The air-conditioning is turned on, he gets bandaged up, and he’s given a haircut. The old tormentors are lying low. Of course he knows something is going on. Then the last bit, it had probably been gnawing at him—where have I seen that fucker before? Maybe he’d simply recalled the picture in the passport, or maybe someone from the FBI had said too much one night. And then questions about New York and questions about art. Clearly, N. realized that someone would get the blame for something. And Grip himself didn’t understand anything, like a fucking sheep all the way—until Shauna threw everything in his face. How similar were they really, the two faces on either side of the table in the cell? Apparently enough to cause confusion. N.’s face, which had been badly beaten, was now reasonably healed up. Except for the scars, it was true, they were starting to look increasingly alike. Especially now that they’d given him Grip’s hairstyle. And he himself had told them they should give N. a haircut. Then they’d taken the opportunity. He had missed it, but N. had understood—the Americans knew whose identity was shared by two. And now N. was picking up cards. Shauna was skilled, but against N. she had nothing of value to put on the table. N. figured the only bet worth making was on Grip. He had to trust it.

It was the only way out.