The Swede (11 page)

He went to a meeting like the one where he’d explained his plan for taking the Arp sculptures. A new address in a bad neighborhood. This time, the difference was that Grip would be physically present, albeit in the background. That he was in, that was the important thing. Briefly, they singled him out as “the Swede.” Someone else,
a new face, went over who should do what. The man stuck meticulously to the plan Grip had laid out in the briefcase left at the Whitney Museum. Among those gathered, some looked familiar from that night in the Brooklyn workshop, others new. Someone saw him and nodded. It felt like being on the wrong side of a witness confrontation. The edgy driver, wearing the same mottled sweater and hat as last time, tried to pretend he didn’t recognize him.

Grip had been taken hostage by his own plan. They already had enough men as it was for the hit itself—they’d put him in a place that made no sense, at the last minute. It was obvious. He would stand and “keep track” with a cell phone in his hand, standing on a sidewalk two hundred yards from where the truck would stop. Stand there and watch—to make sure he really had thought of everything, and that he couldn’t sell them out. If it all went to hell, Grip would be along for the ride. The Swede would burn with them.

They’d gathered in a closed-up pizzeria. The men pulled chairs off the tables to sit with the people they knew. It exposed a division: one side of the room asking questions, while the other already seemed to have it down. Two gangs brought together for a bigger job.

“No guns,” said the one who led it all. Mutters in reply.

“But Central Park is full of muggers,” someone said, getting a few laughs.

“Exactly,” said the man who stood in the middle, and no one laughed. When he wasn’t speaking, his jaw muscles twitched as if he longed to bite into something.

“It’s a lot of money,” said someone from the side that asked questions.

“I cannot fucking afford to lose this,” someone beside him added.

“You, motherfucker, cannot afford to do time either.” It fell like
a whip, because it came from the other side of the room. Grip sat on that side, and the man who stood in the middle never even bothered to glance at that side. The support was obvious.

The driver (Grip remembered that his name was Romeo) took off his cap and threw up his hands. “Should we crack some skulls instead?”

“This is no bank robbery. Just do the job. No guns.” The man spoke calmly and forcefully, as if dealing with a child. A child he wouldn’t hesitate to thrash. Grip liked what he saw—at the time, he did.

The murmur of distrust continued.

“You heard me.” The man’s jaw tightened again. “Are you in or out?” Sirens passed outside. “Well?”

It was Romeo who eventually stretched, slowly, as if about to yawn. “Obviously, we’re in,” he said, and turned to Grip with a smile. “Now we’re talking.”

G
rip stood completely still in his new short leather jacket and jeans. He would throw them away later that same evening. It was almost two in the morning, and there were more people in Central Park than he’d expected. They were about to dismantle
The Gates
, but the sounds and voices seemed far away. Sometimes they disappeared altogether. Grip had the lights of Central Park West on one side and the park on the other. A few pathways of
The Gates
came together on the sidewalks leading away from the park, behind him. A single row continued down in an arc toward the tunnel. In the distance he saw it, the last gate. It was cold. A frosty mist was in the air; ice crystals circled the lights with shimmering halos.

He’d wanted to get a coffee first, had looked for an all-night
spot—but no luck. It gave him an odd feeling of desolation, being in the middle of the city, finding nothing open. He was barehanded, and the thin pockets of his leather jacket gave no warmth. He looked like a pimp shivering on his dimly lit street corner. Another figure stood a hundred yards away. The same silhouette as his own: hands in pockets and elbows straight out at the sides. Stamping now and again in the cold. Eyes checking to see that Grip was in place.

When some of the men had gathered a few hours before, to take a head count and distribute cell phones, Grip smelled Jack Daniel’s on several and noticed that some had oversize pupils. Romeo had also been there. The mood was anxious. Grip had just picked up his phone and walked out.

Ten minutes to go . . .

Five . . .

Grip blew a little warmth into his hands. A truck came and went. Ten past two, then quarter past. Now they were five minutes late.

The truck came from the north, not the south as planned, but then turned where it was supposed to. Grip didn’t care about the rest of the surroundings anymore, just followed the truck with a wary gaze.

A pause, some running around, and then the traffic cones were put in place and the warning lights started flashing, making the reflectors on their jackets shine. Clatter, whiz of pneumatic tools, the crane’s arm stretched out.

The cold made Grip stamp the asphalt again. The gate’s crossbar was lifted up onto the truck bed, then the two vertical supports. He heard the scrape of metal on the pavement before the first cast-iron foot was lifted clear by the crane. As Grip slowly clenched his hands in his pockets, killing the pain from the cold, the missing coffee crossed his mind. He glanced at his watch without pulling his hand
from his pocket. Half past two. Then it came to him, a place that stayed open all night, off in the other direction. He knew it for sure.

A shiver made him pay attention. A voice, a bit far away, but still too close. Wrong tone, too many fast words. It echoed, at first he didn’t know where it came from.

It was down by the truck. There was movement around the truck, and the voice was a woman’s. He couldn’t make out the words, but she was protesting—loud accusations.

Where had she come from? Grip hadn’t seen anyone. The second figure with hands in his pockets stood as still as he.

What did she want? Why didn’t the truck clear out? Grip saw only reflections and moving feet. No confrontation, but something going on. He couldn’t see her, only heard her voice. Had they gotten caught?

Then he heard more clearly, a man: “Fuck you, fuck you!”

And then a shot.

Grip flinched from the muzzle flash before the sound even reached him. And so the little world of footpaths and trees, not far from the intersection of Central Park West and Ninety-Sixth Street, went still. Calm and quiet, a hole in time. Grip didn’t move from his spot. But soon the truck started to move, on its way. Then it was gone, the gate was gone, leaving behind a heap.

A small movement—it puffed fast, exhaling mist a few times. Just a shapeless figure at a hundred and fifty yards. Grip turned away and started walking. The second watchful figure did too. Away, along different paths. Grip had houses on one side, the park on the other. He sensed vague sounds and voices, but all infinitely far away. Shifted to another world. His feet got faster. A taxi slowed down and took off again when he didn’t look up.

“How’d it go?” asked Ben, in a pretended half-asleep voice
from the dark bed, when Grip tried to quietly shut the front door behind him.

“Completely . . .”

He’d thrown his clothes and the mobile phone into a Dumpster. The clothes he was now wearing had been lying in a box beside it, waiting.

“. . . no problem. Let’s get some sleep. I want to sleep now.”

T
he following day, when they were together just before Grip left for the airport, Ben told him that a woman had been shot at night in Central Park. “You . . .”

“Nothing like that, no. No one there. No one.” Grip shrugged. “The flight,” he said then, pointing at the clock. “Can’t have food poisoning forever.” He smiled.

Accomplice to murder.

Nowhere was it said or reported that a gate had been stolen. Nobody was heard from, not about anything. But the money came in, and the lawyers were never heard from again.

T
hat night in the park, the last white breaths out of the heap on the ground. Others had made the mistake; the burden had shifted. There was never anything to remind him. Not until three years later, when Shauna Friedman couldn’t seem to get enough of talking about art.

Topeka, Kansas, February 2005

A
COUPLE TIMES A DAY, HUGE
diesel generators went on inside the factory building. Automatically, without warning. The floor shook. It was hard to make yourself heard even at close range.

The first tremors traveled across the floor just as Adderloy was about to say something. Then came the noise. He paused and sat down, knowing the routine. They waited it out.

They were in their third day. Some kind of plan had taken shape, and they lived on pizza and Thai food. They went out, sometimes one at a time, more often two and two, learning the roads into town and the escape routes. They sketched maps, bought stuff. Adderloy had gotten rid of the rentals and bought three used cars in town. The papers were in the glove compartment. (To be on the safe side, he’d gone over what they should do if stopped by traffic police. All the registration and insurance documents were legit. No sense doing anything rash.) But Vladislav nixed the first batch of guns that Adderloy brought, saying the weapons should be the same caliber—9mm—as the submachine guns he’d been promised. Adderloy never questioned Vladislav’s opinions on guns, though in
pretty much everything else he was used to getting the final say. He’d claimed one of Mary’s armchairs, where he usually sat and handed out directives, cigarette smoke coiling above his head. He didn’t seem bothered by the fusty air of the factory, always wore a jacket and tie. N. never saw him head up to any of the rooms off the hallway to sleep. If N. got up in the middle of the night, Adderloy was always sitting in his armchair, reading under a single bulb.

When the generators went off, the stillness startled them, as if a film had snapped. They fumbled a moment.

Adderloy shifted in his chair. “Yes . . . ,” he began. Before the interruption, they’d been ticking off items in the master plan. “Suits?”

“We got everyone’s size,” said Reza sleepily. “Mary and I will buy them tomorrow.”

“Cooler and toolbox?”

“Making a run to Walmart tonight,” said N. “I’ll get the dry ice tomorrow.”

There were lists.

“City maps?”

Vladislav gave a thumbs-up.

Everything was broken down into detail, in matériel, in sequence. One at a time, in cardboard boxes and plastic bags, the critical events took physical form.

Everything else disappeared. Reza could tell you about a fight he’d seen in Toronto, and Vladislav joked about the newlyweds getting tangled in the wedding-dress train, posing for a photographer at Niagara Falls. But no one talked about anything farther back. Even Weejay’s seemed to be forgotten. All memories had begun to fade. Certain things would be bought today, others things get done tomorrow. Looking ahead, never
mentioning a date. Time was becoming blurry and soon would stop altogether.

When Adderloy brought in bags with the right guns, Reza began to act nervous. After the submachine guns arrived, he stood by a window and aimed out over the city roofs in the night.

“We are not going to kill anyone?” he asked.

“We’re going to rob a bank.”

Time and again, it had been said. But what remained unspoken was that their plan would require someone to face the death sentence. That’s what it would really take, to give the minister payback.

“Cartridges?”

“A thousand,” said Vladislav, pointing to bright orange boxes on the shelf.

I
’ll just be a minute,” said Mary, picking up her shoulder bag and disappearing into a bathroom.

N. was with Mary, back at her former workplace: the hospital. It was two o’clock in the morning. The idea was that no one on the night shift would recognize her. “Crabby night nurses—they won’t remember me,” she explained. She’d come to the hospital dressed in her usual black, but without any makeup. To N., it was a different face. Her eyes looked small, and she looked older.

N. sat in the empty waiting room. He looked around, took a magazine off the table. Celebrities smiled vacantly at him from the worn cover. He leafed absentmindedly, stopped at blurry paparazzi pictures of suntanned bodies on a sandy beach, then flipped through more pages of smiles and dresses hanging on scrawny bodies.

The bathroom door opened, and Mary came out again.

Although N. was expecting her, he looked surprised. “All white!” he couldn’t help saying. Not just dressed like a nurse, but transformed.

“Around here, you don’t exactly have a choice,” she said. She had sharp creases on her short-sleeved blouse, a name tag, pens. It was Mary, but then again it wasn’t. She dropped her bag on the floor in front of him and slipped a bill into the soda machine in the corner. Down fell a Dr Pepper—she took a few quick gulps, and the cold took her breath away. She looked at her watch. “We’re going this way.”

Without the slightest hesitation, she stepped into the small office. “It’s pretty urgent, will you excuse us?” The nurse at the computer muttered and walked out without looking at them. The minute the woman disappeared, Mary sat down at the terminal. N. stood in the doorway so he could check the hallway. He’d come to the hospital dressed as a janitor, or maybe an electrician, the kind of workman who always shows up unannounced in stained clothes. Behind him, he heard the clicks of Mary’s keyboard. A doctor, busy tagging a small bottle of medicine, passed by.

“Now the sun goes down, Charles-Ray,” said Mary, and stood up. She drummed her fingers impatiently on the printer that just started up. “He still gives blood,” she said to N.’s back. “Type AB, Rh negative.” The paper came out. “What’s yours?”

“What?” said N.

“Blood type?”

“No idea.”

“Something you should keep track of.”

They set off farther into the hospital. Mary went first, looking both homely and anxious. N. read the signs as they passed by: U
ROLOGY,
E
LECTRICAL
R
OOM
, S
URGERY
. . . A big toolbox rattled
against his legs with every step. Mary pushed the elevator button, and they went down a few floors.

N. knew from the silence that they were underground. Dull green hallways with fluorescent lights, a vague chemical scent. A sign said B
LOOD
C
ENTER
. They could see a figure moving behind the frosted glass.

Mary drew N. aside. “Right now they’re trying to save an old woman up in surgery,” she said, taking a sip from the soda bottle she still carried. “There’s a man in there too, quite young. Traffic accident. Soon he’ll be brain-dead. With bodies leaking like sieves, there’s an exhausted team with each, pumping in the blood and sewing them up. According to the computer, the young guy has already received ten pints, the old lady six, and now I’ve placed another order. It’s urgent, and almost three in the morning. She’s here in the Blood Center alone. Surely there are rules, saying this and that about how it should be done, all very carefully. But not at three in the morning, when up in surgery they’re letting the stuff flow all over the floor anyway. So I’ll go in and won’t even say hello. Just tell her that I’ll get the bags myself. The papers are already in order—she’ll be happy not to have to take out bags again, after all the running around.”

Mary dropped her half-full soda in the trash. “You can wait here,” she said, pointing to yet another empty waiting room.

Even Mary’s sneakers were white. When she disappeared, N. looked down at his own, which had left black lines on the polished floor. He sat down on a chrome bench and leaned his head against the wall. Felt the night burning behind his eyelids, and the ventilation fan’s humming. The hospital’s smell pressed into him, its sweetish chemical. Something unhealthy, the odor of bodies. He remembered a hospital far away: the heat, the shapeless, swollen
sores, backs covered with marbled bruises. He rubbed his hands over his arms, felt a chill up his legs as if someone had sliced them with a razor. Shivered.

He’d started to search for something to drink when Mary came back.

“Here!”

There were two bags of frozen blood, in separate sleeves of protective foam. N. took them and opened his toolbox.

Mary looked out into the corridor, turned again. “The freshest you can get out of Charles-Ray Turnbull.”

The toolbox was big enough for N. to store a small cold bag in the bottom compartment. Soft, filled with blocks of dry ice. When he opened the zipper, white mist slowly poured onto the floor.

“So simple,” said Mary. Her look was triumphant. “Just like that.”

She slammed shut the toolbox, and N. started walking. As it banged against his leg, he read the signs: MRI, T
RASH
, M
ORGUE
. . .

M
ary’s industrial loft didn’t have a freezer, but the twenty-four-hour pizzeria on the corner did. So after a few kind words to the Lebanese guys who ran the place, they squeezed the cooler into the back of a big icy freezer, which otherwise held nothing but ground beef.