The Swede (12 page)

T
O LOOK THEIR VICTIM IN
the eye, to meet Charles-Ray Turnbull once before they struck. The idea had been floated before, but in the end it was N. who convinced Adderloy to let him be the one. To watch Charles-Ray in action—a cat toying with a mouse, nothing more. A certain malicious satisfaction. To lay eyes on the man who had celebrated his losses, his suffering. Under Adderloy’s ingenious plan, the minister was going down.

“The two of you go, as a couple,” said Adderloy, and Mary raised her beer bottle in a toast.

The groundwork had already been laid, mapping Charles-Ray’s habits. A simple thing, completed in a matter of days. Not much of a challenge in Topeka, not with someone whose life was as straightforward as Charles-Ray’s. Besides, for their plan, they only cared about his mornings. There were few landmarks, really only two. His house—large, wooden, two-story—in a run-down area, where every little bush looked like a Christmas tree adorned with trash; and the sign-painting company he ran across town: T
URNBULL
—S
IGNS OF THE
T
IMES
. The company sign was peeling, just like the paint on his house. Between the two sites, he drove twenty minutes every morning in his red Lincoln. Reza and Vladislav had followed him a couple of times. When he got to a strip of car dealers, motels, and fast-food joints, he’d stop at a random drive-through for coffee. He didn’t always buy coffee at the same place—that
was as unpredictable as he got. A couple of times he’d gone by his church on some errand, but that was just a stop on the way.

Not much more to it. The final act would be getting a look at him, but at the right distance, among people. At church.

In the half-full parking lot, N. and Mary saw his Lincoln parked near the entrance. The low building had no steeple, no cross, nothing but a sign with red plastic letters. Dusk had already fallen, half the sign disappeared in the twilight from the burned-out bulb inside the glass. When N. walked past, he saw that the plastic characters for church-service times and a Bible quote had fallen out of their grooves. They lay like dead flies at the bottom.

Mary looked, as usual, as if she were dressed for a funeral. Perhaps this was what caught people’s attention, drawing belated smiles when the two of them passed through the church doors. Soon an elderly man came up and introduced himself. He greeted Mary closely, squeezed her paternally on her arm as if testing her strength. Launched into a tirade about premonitions for the future, then asked if they were from the city.

“No,” said N.

“Not so, not so,” the man said, without taking his eyes off Mary. He stood a little too close. “Welcome, you are always welcome.”

Soon after, as if someone had whispered a message, the people around them started moving. Quickly people hung up their coats, ceased their chatting, and made their way toward the sanctuary.

The church hall was white, with high ceilings, but obviously the place hadn’t been built for masses or preaching. Maybe it was an old warehouse. Transformed, it looked like a huge lamp shop, lights suspended everywhere. As if to banish the shadows: lamps at the end of each pew, sconces on the walls, and three brass-and-crystal crowns hanging from the ceiling. The too-bright lighting
made a newcomer feel not so much hot as anxious, although soon people’s foreheads began to shine. Everything sparkled, glittered, and shone. On one of the all-white walls, tall gold letters shimmered: J
ESUS
—S
AVE
U
S
A
LL
.

While people took their seats in the pews, a man paced back and forth on a platform that resembled a school stage without the curtain. His lips moved, mumbling, as the hall murmured.

Mary pulled N. to her and whispered, “That’s Charles-Ray,” with a nod toward the stage.

“Mm,” said N., continuing to stare straight ahead.

“Sit,” said the minister, in a low hiss from the dais.

Some of the buzz ceased. Turnbull, legs spread wide, looked at someone on one side, and then fixed his gaze along the aisle.

“Sit!” He swayed. His deep sigh expressed not annoyance but deep satisfaction. A black leather-bound Bible hung low in his hand.

It was quiet. He looked over the crowd, watching. Nodded.

“Thanks for this, what a night.” A breath in between, then almost shouted: “Thanks for this!” And stretching his free hand straight up, he grinned.

It was that face—it was true. N. remembered the sidewalk by the park: the evening after a rain, it was that face. From the flyer that he picked up, the image of a minister.
Beloved Father.

“Sinners,” shouted the man from the dais, now with clenched fists. Someone clapped excitedly. “We are surrounded by the riffraff, we are led by them. Homofascists, lesbians, surrounded by creeping decay.” He sighed loudly. “The Muslims came flying over to obliterate the Sodomites in New York. And still, and still, no one understands.” He shook with the Bible at the ceiling, as if hordes of flying devils were about to descend on him.

“The Lord’s wave, the Lord’s wave left the pedophiles, rapists,
and self-abusers to rot in unmarked graves. And yet. And yet”—the words tore from his throat—“no one understands!” His lips were already wet from saliva, his nails struck loudly against the Bible’s leather. “‘They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.’”

“Amens” sounded here and there. Beloved Father Charles-Ray Turnbull pulled on his lapels and shook his head, as if his mouth had filled with something nasty.

Mary leaned next to N. “It’s brilliant,” she said. He looked at her, uncomprehending. She closed her eyes. “So completely . . . such reckless hatred.”

“Every day,” said the minister, pointing out over the congregation and then to himself, “we are forced to witness homosexuals who marry. Pictures of smiling dykes and sweaty queers who can barely contain themselves. That even marry in the good Lord’s name. We ask for retribution.” He lowered his head, stretched his hand in front of him. “We ask for retribution, Lord, Lord . . . Amen.”

After a few seconds of silence, just as the most zealous started swaying in the pews, he drew in a fresh breath of air like a drowning man. “And they multiply”—he beat his fists against his chest—“a crawling avalanche aided by science. Artificial inseminations, eggs and sperm from who knows where. Children born already degenerate, bred from paired male and female slime and scum. Have you ever seen such children, have you? I can tell you that a light shines from them. But it is not a Lordly light. Instead they desire their own death, these pitiful mutations of human flesh.”

N. looked at the people around him, their hands trembling, their eyes moist, while others panted, “Yes, yes . . . ,” in an incessant murmur.

Charles-Ray bent his torso into an arc as he read: “‘Shall I
not punish them for these things?’ says the Lord. ‘And shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?’”

“Jeremiah,” someone shouted.

Seeing Turnbull, his blustering style, his wrinkled jacket, his flabby neck, and the sweating assembly, nodding and swaying—it filled N. with rage. He wanted to cut the man’s throat. Never in his life had he been so overpowered by such a desire to kill someone. It was a strange feeling, sweet and driven. In one leap he could be on him. His legs wanted to do it; they trembled with anticipation.

A single leap.

“Just look for now,” said Mary, so close that he felt her breath on his cheek. She took his arm with both hands, pulled it next to her. “I know,” she whispered, “but just look for now. Soon . . . soon you will get to act.”

N. felt a cold, dead streak in his chest, and his hands started to sweat. He lowered his head and closed his eyes. One might have thought him sunk in prayer.

From the stage, the fire-and-brimstone extravaganza circled round and round: whores, homofascists, sodomites, sinners. The minister kept rising to his toes.

“Exterminate them,” he moaned. After a few screams and amens from the congregation, he stood perfectly still, closed his eyes, and in a monotone between breaths urged them to rally: “Our defiant army . . . constantly we shine the light . . . on nests of sin.” He ranted about foreign countries and places, to an increasing murmur of “Yes . . . Yes” and “Hallelujah!” Others in the room had feverish faces. They held hands over their foreheads and chests, someone spoke softly and incomprehensibly to himself, a person in the back was weeping uncontrollably. The minister was soon up and running again on the syphilitic and self-abusers.

The veins on his forehead and neck swelled when he shouted: “Our prayers have deprived the godforsaken of their children.”

N. struck his fist on the counter and shouted: “You bastard!” But amid all the fervent responses, his didn’t even make worshippers in the next pew turn around. Mary forced her hand into his and intertwined their fingers.

Charles-Ray Turnbull dropped his voice as low as he could: “Sacrifices . . . sacrifices against the devil’s legions.” The hall resounded with sacrifice. In a final eruption, he screamed about how the world’s gluttons and pedophiles rotted from the inside, and how the horsemen of the apocalypse now stormed, while voices called out “A hundred” and “A thousand,” as if all the world’s sins were being auctioned. The checks were passed from hand to hand toward the stage.

When Turnbull fell silent, an electric organ began playing, its looping hymn and the assembly’s urgent shouts feeding the flow. A hat was filled, and a last few crumpled bills passed forward. A couple of young men with a fumbling sense of rhythm began playing electric bass and drums. An elderly woman sang into a microphone. She drowned out the murmur of the hall as she gazed somewhere high up, singing to the ceiling and the sky outside.

Charles-Ray Turnbull nodded, smiling, and wiped the sweat from his temples.

N
.
LAY AWAKE A LONG
time in his room. Had lain there, listening to the others through the walls of the factory, and hearing them fall silent for the night in their hall of old offices, with no windows and only a single toilet. That was the last sound he’d heard, the toilet flushing, probably several hours ago now. He was lying on a mattress on the floor, lying on his back shirtless, sweating. The air felt thick and motionless, the old soap factory smells inescapable.

Five rooms in a row, a room for each of them—and there were more farther down in the darkness, he had no idea how many. Beyond his own room, the map was blank. Mary lived at the other end, closest to the factory hall.

Now all was silent through the walls, sunk deep into the night. N. rose slowly.

Out in the hallway, the only light came from somewhere below the stairs leading to the factory hall. It was Adderloy. Couldn’t see him, only the light from the lamp where he sat. He too was silent. N. stood at Mary’s door, hesitant and warm. He held his breath, looked toward the yellow-green light, then pressed down on the door handle again.

He opened the door and went inside.

Gently, Mary pushed the door shut behind him. She took a step back and looked him up and down.

She wore a paint-spotted smock as a nightgown, the kind you’d otherwise think of an artist wearing. It hung unbuttoned and left most of her revealed. Then she came close, but only so that they barely touched. N. inhaled the air around her head, but in the factory she was scentless. He smelled only the old soap from the floor and walls, not her. That strange thing with Mary—dimensions where she did not exist.

He made an attempt against her neck, but she slipped away like a cat—an impossible evasion to one side, so that he brushed past her skin with his lips. Her eyes shone with delight.

She crouched down by a bag, picked up something. Whispered: “Keta . . . Keta . . . Ketalar.”

It was a vial, held so that it spun between her fingers. “Do you know what this is?” She gazed at the liquid in the glass container. “Good and evil, mingled together. It numbs without affecting breathing.” Her lips formed a ring, almost like a kiss, and she inhaled, whistling in the air. “But then there’s the downside.” The vial spun. “You experience what others only see in horror movies—unspeakable nightmares. You can’t begin to imagine, the anxiety. All of Turnbull’s demons gathered in a bottle. With just a pinprick.”

“Is that what he’ll get?”

“A pinprick, then he’s at the mercy of his own demons.”

The whole house shook when the generators turned on. Mary said something more, but it was drowned out by the roar that descended upon them. N. already had his hands on her hips. It was as if freight trains rolled past on every side of them. Her hand pinched his chest. First, just in a playful way, but then she dug her fingers into him. The nails made brands. His mouth felt dry from the pain, and when the blood finally surfaced he jerked involuntarily—but
she pulled back and held him tightly to her. He felt the sensual pleasure of her weight against him and let himself be pushed back against the wall.

Her hand moved from his chest and lay like a mask over his face. They both breathed violently. She circled one finger in his mouth. Noise, waves of excitement, a furious erection. He tasted her thin finger and found the saltiness of his own blood.

H
ard on his back. Sunburn in a remote place had turned his arms dark. Only the scars were winding white, untouched by sunlight, under her clutching fingers. She kept him inside her, braced, the floor shook, her legs clenched his hips in an iron ring.

His body was studded with small darkening fingerprints of his own blood.

Diego Garcia, three years later

T
HE PRISONER HIDDEN AWAY BY
the Americans poked at the newspapers brought to his cell. The days passed by. Grip spent them fast-forwarding through the surveillance tapes, running in the afternoon heat, or lifting weights at the gym.

His hotel room looked lived-in: spread-out running clothes that never dried in the humid air, shirts under plastic on wire hangers from the base’s dry cleaner, a half-eaten bunch of grapes on a plate, corn chips and a package of cookies on top of the humming refrigerator.

On day eight, Grip found the man sitting and reading a newspaper. Grip played it back and forth, studying the bent figure, verifying the times—he read the paper for almost two hours.

Grip interrupted the playback. Thought for a moment, glanced at Stackhouse, who sat engrossed in some papers.

“I’m going in to him,” he said.

“Huh?” said Stackhouse, who’d understood perfectly well. “Now?”

“Yes. I want to go in to him now.”

“Okay,” said Stackhouse, “but keep him guessing, and no names.”

“I’ve questioned people before.” Grip stood up. “Can I go now?”

“No names,” insisted Stackhouse.

“I promise.”

T
he heavy door closed behind Grip. The air was surprisingly cool; somewhere, a ventilation fan buzzed. The cell seemed smaller than it had looked through the surveillance camera. The man lay on the bunk. He didn’t move. Grip couldn’t see his eyes through the long hair, but felt that he was awake and very wary.

“Hello,” said Grip in Swedish and nodded. He took two steps forward, pulled out the chair, and sat down with his back to the cell door. The man on the bunk held his fists clenched. Grip looked around with slow and slightly exaggerated head movements, as if becoming acquainted with a newly discovered room.

Clenched fists, and now the man’s chest started to rise and fall in forced gasps. He struggled in vain to hide it.

Grip placed an elbow on the table. “I’m representing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but actually I belong to the security police.” He paused. No reaction. Continued. “I’ve been called in because they’re wondering who you are. The Americans are wondering. Myself, I know precisely nothing.”

He squinted up at the fluorescent lamps hanging below the ceiling grates. “I was the one who got the air-conditioning turned on, got you the table—and the newspapers, of course.” Grip looked down again, spinning the top paper in the stack his way. A Polish daily. He straightened his back a little. “I suspect that you’ve been sent to many places, and have been through all kinds of questioning. Lots of tricks. To suddenly be showering, have
air-conditioning, newspapers—is this yet another one, you wonder? A man who seems friendly, that’s the oldest trick in the book.” Grip exhaled loudly. “I’m Swedish. I will not lie to you, and I will not make you any false promises. That’s what you must consider.”

The man was breathing as violently as before, but now he no longer tried to hide it.

“The date here is a little misleading,” said Grip, tapping the paper with his fingertip. “This was printed a week ago, and today is the sixth, the sixth of May.”

The man moved his head, a short flick. His hair swept across his cheek, but Grip couldn’t see more of his face. His hair was dark, as dark as Grip’s own.

“Admittedly, the newspapers were a trick,” he continued. “But I had to try something.” He tapped his finger on the pile again. “You’ve poked at them, glanced at a page here and there. And like me, with most languages, you have no idea. But this . . .” Grip took a corner and pulled it out from the other papers. “Of course, you’re Swedish.” It was his own well-thumbed
Expressen
he held. “You sat and read it for two hours. Even the TV listings.”

The man opened the fingers of one hand and clenched his fist again.

“Yeah, I didn’t do it to get some sort of advantage. I might as well have asked, but they said you don’t answer when spoken to. So I thought this might save us some time. You’re Swedish, and now we both know it.” Grip followed the man’s breathing, kept his eyes on his chest. “If I stand up and kick you a few times, hard, then you’ll be on familiar ground, right? Then you’ll know my type, what to expect. If instead I place something to eat on your table, and leave, then you’ll simply think it’s another trick. That’s a problem. Mostly for me, but probably for both of us. I am neither good
nor evil, I’m just from home, and here to find out if you are Swedish. Now I know you understand Swedish, but I’d also like to find out who you are. One more thing. I don’t know how much time I get with you, that’s something the Americans out here determine. It’s not good, but that’s the deal. And it makes us equal—maybe I eat a little better, but right now we’re both their pawns.”

Grip got up, made a gesture in front of the camera’s Plexiglas, and then turned back. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, looking at the man and his whitened knuckles until the door lock rattled.

“Is he Swedish?” said Stackhouse, once Grip was back in the monitoring room.

Grip replied: “How much have you thrashed him? He curls up in a ball and starts to hyperventilate whenever a human comes near him.”

“Is he Swedish?”

“How much? Every other day for a year—more? A guess: first electric shocks and waterboarding, then just kicks and punches when people got tired.” Stackhouse didn’t respond. Grip tucked his shirt into his waistband. “The nails are growing in again, but they look lumpy. Usually takes six months to get them back.”

“It hasn’t been handled professionally,” said Stackhouse effortlessly, but without looking at Grip.

“Thank you. And during all that, no one can be completely silent. How many identities has he claimed?”

“Many. A mess. I’ve said before, nothing we’ve been able to document.” Stackhouse raised his voice. “And regardless of where he was before, he’s here now. That’s enough. A straight question—is he Swedish?”

“I don’t know,” lied Grip. “He said nothing. He only hyperventilated.”