The Swede (21 page)

N
.
SLOWLY PULLED HIS FINGER
across his throat. What was at stake—
a life for a life
—meant that someone had to die. If you’d only seen his finger move, you would have missed it; you had to catch his gaze as well. It was there that the death sentence lay.

And now they had an agreement.

Grip left the cell as usual and entered the monitoring room. He lingered, made small talk with Stackhouse, got him to lower his guard. Said they were done with the crossword-puzzle thing, showed some understanding. Asked about the waters off the reef, and if he’d ever been out fishing in Garcia. He had. They talked lures, hooks, and a huge yellowfin Stackhouse had reeled in one time off the Florida coast, or maybe it was the Red Sea. Memories of the outside world—and then Stackhouse decided to send for some coffee. And soon he was the only one talking, polite conversation about how fine Stockholm was in the summer and how fucking ruined everything was in Beirut.

Grip just nodded.

He had to search for a while for a way to get back into the conversation and regain control. But through a sensitive deportation case he made Stackhouse recall, and an imaginary meeting in London, Grip finally had an opening to say, “Yes, and she was there. Maureen . . .”

As if he was racking his brain for the rest of her name.

Impossible to say whether it was curiosity or discomfort that made Stackhouse delay his answer.

Grip put his hand on his cheek, as if to draw out details from his memory about the woman’s appearance.

“Birthmark?” said Stackhouse.

“Yes.”

“Whipple, Maureen Whipple.”

“Whipple, that was her name, yes,” said Grip. “Tell her I said hello.”

Of course Stackhouse never would.

Maureen Whipple—so that was her name. According to N., she was the worst, that much Grip understood. During the worst of the torture, Maureen had turned up in different parts of the world. They couldn’t possibly have been introduced, her first name something N. had picked up when he wasn’t supposed to hear, and he’d seen the odd mark on her cheek. MAUREEN. BIRTHMARK. Two words in the crossword, and a finger across his throat.

Stackhouse had spilled enough. It was late afternoon, and Grip sat at the Internet computer in the hotel lobby. The first e-mail he sent was a short, informal intelligence inquiry. The kind you can only ask if sender and receiver know each other well. “What you got on Maureen Whipple?” He appended a list of keywords: interrogation, CIA, birthmark, Guantánamo, torture . . . Grip fed in a long list. The woman who got the e-mail—an old analyst from the security police who collected comic books and who’d reportedly made a fortune in Bulgarian pyramid schemes—wouldn’t find the question particularly strange, and wouldn’t need to tell the whole world that he’d asked. Grip must be in a tight spot, she’d think, and need it fast.

That was the easier e-mail.

Since the crossword puzzles ended, Grip and N. had developed a more subtle language, but now that they understood each other, there wasn’t much they needed to say. It could be woven in. The idea was to remain low key, not go into overdrive—and therefore the method didn’t allow for many details.

But there was enough for Grip to gather a few things. It was obvious that Shauna kept up the nightly interrogations of N. because the FBI was trying to solve the art theft and murder in Central Park. One fact they seemed to know with unshakable certainty was that a Swede had been involved—the question was just which one. The evidence was complicated by the fact that there were two passports circulating under a single name.

What N. had conveyed to Grip was this: he was willing to take the blame. Take the blame for everything. But it would cost him.

And then Vladislav’s name came up. N. had torn a piece from one of the newspapers and written down an e-mail address that he’d apparently kept clear in his memory through it all. He poked the scrap in between a couple of pages, the day Grip told him that there’d be no more newspapers or crosswords. After that, Grip left the cell.

Being able to come home and walk in Ben’s door, to have something resembling a life. That would cost him. Grip wrote his second e-mail of the evening—to Vladislav, who was at large, as free as he was dangerous, somewhere in the world.

He wrote:

I represent an old friend of yours. A friend who, like you, survived the tsunami. A friend who had the habit of ordering for you, whenever you ate together at restaurants. You last saw each other in a car driving out of Kansas. Your
friend is now in indefinite detention. He wants to exercise his option—a life for a life. Does it still apply?

Grip stayed away from the officers’ club that night. He wasn’t particularly hungry, and he had no desire to engage in another matchup with Shauna. He’d give her this last day’s round as a walkover.

A
lready the next morning, Grip had a reply, signed V. All it said was:

First I want to know, who said we should shoot the pelicans?

G
rip did nothing, just logged out and left. The rest of the day he kept to himself, let the hours pass. Sat on a deserted beach with a few cans of beer in a cooler in the morning, then slept through a violent downpour in his hotel room until evening.

At dusk he sat down at the computer again and wrote, “It was Mary.”

He got a hamburger, extra-large fries, and a much too frozen milkshake at a fast-food place not far from the hotel. From there, he went to the gym for noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. It wasn’t the best-equipped gym on the base, but it was the most lived-in. It had the heaviest weights on the bars, the most laughter and crude jokes, no staff majors to turn down the loud music—and views of only the best-built naked torsos. Grip lifted for an hour and watched a marine platoon holding its own bench-press competition. He would have done fine, but could never have beaten the Puerto Rican medic who howled like an animal when he lifted the last bar and took the pot. Estevez, his name was.

When regular business hours were over for the security police in Stockholm, and it was almost midnight in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Grip tapped on a mouse to bring the hotel lobby computer to life, and logged in.

Maureen Whipple. A day’s work. Grip’s pyramid-scheming analyst had sent him everything she’d found. Mostly excerpts and quotes taken out of context, single sentences from here and there, Swedish and English, something in French. Connecting the scattered dots, it wasn’t hard to see that Maureen Whipple lived her life in the seams between the major US covert organizations. She’d been seen out in the world, and at times certainly devoted herself to interrogation. There was a picture too, a highly enlarged grainy clipping from a group photo. With someone’s shoulder on the right, and another’s on the left, a uniformed chest behind and a face at the center. Short-haired, ruddy, middle-aged. She tried to smile. And there was something on her right cheek. Was it a birthmark? Or just an incidental shadow? At any rate, her address had been traced to an office complex in Charlestown, West Virginia. The kind of office you put in a bland place, so no one will notice.

Grip wrote up a summary in English and saved it in Drafts.

Just as he finished, his in-box showed he’d gotten a message. It was from V. Apparently, Vladislav now trusted the person who’d become his friend’s acquaintance.

I’m ready.

Nothing more. The words were like a whispered destiny, the last words spoken before the soldiers stormed from their trenches. As they mounted their bayonets, everyone still alive. In the last quiet moment.

I
’
VE STAYED HERE ON THE
island much longer than I was supposed to,” Grip said.

“You’re not the only one,” said Lance Corporal Estevez, laughing. “Garcia,” he said meaningfully and shrugged. He had chalked hands, two hundred and eighty pounds on the bar behind him, and a sweaty bandana across his forehead.

“And now I’ve run out of pills, didn’t bring enough.”

“Don’t need ’em, no malaria on the island,” said the medic from the Marine Corps.

They spoke for a while, Grip congratulating him on winning the title the night before.

“It’s true,” said Grip, about the malaria. “But you know the rules, we have to take them when we’re out here.”

“Like us with nerve-gas pills. Any time there are minarets and muezzins around, we fucking have to eat that shit.”

“The hospital here, the doctor is only available . . .”

“It’s just awkward, fuck him. You can’t need very much.”

“Chloroquine . . . what’s the word?”

“Chloroquine phosphate. Also called ‘fucking malaria pills.’ How many d’ya need?”

“For a week or two. One pack, whatever that is, maybe thirty or forty tablets.”

“No problem. I can get ’em from the platoon pharmacy. Stop by when you’re done.”

Grip nodded. Estevez beat his fists on his chest to bring the muscles back to life and leaned back on the bench under the barbell.

I
n his cell, N., introspective, slowly rocked back and forth in the chair. He was lost in his own world, while Grip wrestled with his usual dilemma of having to find something to wrap their case in. Although N. didn’t reply, he had to convey the impression he was still conducting an interrogation.

“Did you ever contact the consulate . . . ? Did you perform your actions under threat . . . ? Where did the money come from . . . ? Did you feel your life was at stake?”

The cell was so air-conditioned that it felt cold. Grip had goose bumps, and the more he repeated his nonsense questions, the more he felt the eyes watching them from outside. N. rocked and hummed vaguely, like someone who needed electroshock therapy and psychiatric drugs, not more questioning. It wasn’t fatigue but hopelessness that characterized him now. He could no longer play the game. He showed none of his usual provocativeness or nonchalance but only gave terse replies for the sake of the television monitor and the invisible translator. When N. completely stopped talking, Grip kept going, as monotonously as someone reading stock market quotes.

Through certain hints, Grip managed to get across that he was in contact with Vladislav. And that Vladislav was the type who remembered old promises. N.’s eyes flickered and then said to the wall, “He’ll give it to her, right, get her good . . . for all her savagery?”

Grip didn’t let on, only tried to cover the words by raising his voice and pulling some new question from his exhausted supply.

N. turned so that their eyes met, fought with defeat, then automatically uttered a familiar and irrelevant answer. Just a few words, while his shining eyes looked toward the real question.

Grip closed his eyes and nodded as inconspicuously as he could. Afterward, N. sat lost in his own world again. Grip ground on monotonously, gave the appearance of finding new questions in some loose papers, and finally just went over his notes when it became all too obvious that N. wasn’t there at all.

He waited.

Until N.’s eyes moved, and Grip sensed a fleeting moment of consciousness. He leaned forward.

“You know . . . ,” he said, and caught N.’s hand as it moved across the table. They’d never come close to touching each other, and now it lasted not even a second. Just a tender hold on the wrist, which he released again. “I think you need a new pencil. Take this.” Grip pulled a pen from his breast pocket.

“A new one?” said N. slowly and looked at the pencil on the table.

“Yours is worn down,” said Grip. “I’ll sharpen it tomorrow.” He tapped once as he put the pen down on the table. “If there’s any detail you remember that you want to tell me, use this to write it down.”

“I’ll go now,” he said then. He stood up.

“By the way,” he continued, “you asked me about a crossword-puzzle clue the other day: Masada. Where the Jews defended themselves against the Romans, remember? When all hope was gone, they threw themselves on their own swords.”

N. gazed straight ahead. “Thanks,” he said after a moment, and looked at him for a long time, before Grip turned and went.

T
he afternoon cloudbursts had continued late into the evening, but now the puddles reflected flatly in the dark, the rain and thunder having stopped. Grip sat with his coffee in one of the base’s all-night hangouts, a combination convenience store and fast-food restaurant. The shelves held mostly chips, cookies, and wrapped magazines flashing bare breasts; grilled hot dogs and glazed doughnuts sweated in the warming oven. Grip sat at a counter made of scratched imitation marble, entirely bare and immensely long. A few black guys sat at the far end, dressed in evening civvies: sports jerseys and basketball shoes. They seemed just as restless as they were at home in the place, with nowhere else to go. Here at least they got away from the barracks’ crowds and their own uniforms. Music played from small speakers in the ceiling.

The woman behind the counter offered Grip sugar for the second time, and he turned it down again. The front door banged.

“I thought so . . .” The sound of steps. “That it was you, Ernst.”

He turned around—Shauna.

“I drove by,” she said, and waved her hand. “It looked like you through the window.” She looked a little tired and at the same time very happy. Grip pointed to the chair next to him, which she was already settling into. She refastened the hair clip behind her neck and pointed at Grip’s cup to the waitress.

“Well?” she said then, as if it had been several weeks since the last time.

“Just killing time,” said Grip with a shrug.

Shauna waited for her coffee. “He admits to it now,” she began. “N. admits it, says he was present when the woman was shot in Central Park.” She rubbed her eyes. “We’ve pieced it together. What he told you is only part of the story. N. wasn’t arrested in Florida, he
was free for several weeks. Went up to New York, joined in there. Thought he could make some money.”

“So much to do,” said Grip.

“It makes everything fall into place.”

“If N. says that it was so, then it was so. Is it that simple?” Grip couldn’t resist.

“Of course not. But we have Romeo.”

At first, Grip didn’t understand.

“We have a driver who was involved, a slippery bastard with a clever lawyer,” Shauna explained. “It was around the time that Reza began to piece together memories in his cell in Kansas. He had the idea that one of them was Swedish. Meanwhile, as I said, we arrested a driver for participating in a little operation in Brooklyn. I wasn’t connected to it, but pretty soon he demanded to talk to someone about—” She stopped, dug something out of her bag. “Here, read for yourself,” she said, handing him a clear plastic sleeve containing a few pages.

Transcript of Hearing. Tape: 1 (1), D432811

Appearing:

Examining Officer Shauna Friedman (SF), FBI

Defendant Romeo Lupone (RL), detained on suspicion of complicity to commit forgery

RL:
Do we have to record this?

SF:
It won’t be worth much otherwise.

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.

A
t 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.

T
hey 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.