The Swede (13 page)

Topeka, 2005

W
ATER RAN OVER
R
EZA’S HEAD
. The metal bowl between his feet echoed with the rivulets. He was about to shave his head.

It was the night before.

Adderloy stood by the row of windows at the factory hall, looking out over the evening lights. A folded newspaper hanging in one hand. He hummed something, its tune unrecognizable. N. sat on the couch and picked among the handwritten notes and maps on the table. On top lay a couple of sheets taped together, Vladislav’s sketch from memory of the bank—First Federal United. By the door on the drawing, he’d scrawled “2:30.” That was all the time they’d have. An absolute, at three minutes they’d have to be back outside and on their way. Vladislav could prove it, had worked out all the details—distances to police stations, alarm times, police responses during armed robberies. There was a city map on the table where he’d drawn lines and written down something like formulas.

“Actually, two thirty-
two
,” he’d said, “but let’s say thirty. That’s something you can remember.” This was one of the few things the
tall Czech took seriously. “When those doors open and you enter the bank, your memory goes blank.”

That was then, a little while ago. Now Vladislav stood by the bookshelf, flipping absentmindedly through some volumes. A few seconds per book, though longer if there were pictures. He wasn’t the type who sat down to read; always some other impulse took over. N. looked at him and remembered the story of the bus. How Vladislav had sat perfectly still as the water rose, how all the others around him drowned in panic. Two and a half minutes. It wasn’t much. Certainly, there were people who could hold their breath that long.

Reza poured another bucket of water over his head, dragging the razor across.

“I told you to burn them,” Adderloy said, with an irritated glance at N.

N. let go of the bank sketch, shoved it into the pile with all the other stuff in the middle of the table. In it were all their notes, checklists, and maps. Adderloy started humming again, watching some distant movement in the night.

“Are there smoke detectors?” said N.

Mary was sitting and flipping through a fashion magazine, eating bacon chips out of a bag. “Some . . . maybe . . . I’ve seen a few.” She turned the pages in the pauses between words, smiled slightly absently down at her magazine. She was swinging one leg impatiently over the other, looking as if she sat in a waiting room. She was the only one who seemed to enjoy the idea that there were only hours left.

“Hey Mary, smoke alarms—if I start a fire then it could—”

“Just burn it,” repeated Adderloy without turning around.

N. filled a pan from the stove with his stack of papers. He
splashed some nail polish remover from a can he found in a cupboard, and set it on fire. The flames burned a fierce blue, big flakes of ash rising straight up as the smoke disappeared in the dark. He didn’t have to poke around for it to be completely incinerated. The flames died down, and soon there were only embers eating their way, like thin glowworms among black leaves.

“Anyone still not have it down?” said Adderloy loudly. All that remained of their lists and plans were specks of soot that slowly floated into the room. Adderloy had been taciturn and short-tempered all night. N. saw behind his gray eyes something like the vigilance of a predator. Capable of anything—flight or furious confrontation.

A few blocks beyond the old mill stood two newly stolen cars: a black Impala for size, and a Nissan with scraped-up rims for invisibility. On a banister inside the factory, four new suits hung in a row, still in their plastic, with matching pairs of athletic shoes and robber hoods in a neat pile on the floor below. The weapons were packed in their trunk, magazines loaded. The medical bag with all the vials was ready. The next morning, they would pick up the blood from the freezer of the Lebanese.

“Are you ready now, you freakin’ suicide bomber?”

If Mary’s smile was inscrutable, Vladislav’s was the opposite. An outright sneer.

“Huh?” Reza turned toward the bookshelf, as if sleepwalking. He was still holding the razor in his hand.

“That’s what you look like. Is this some kind of ceremony, first you cut off that blond shit and then jihad?” Vladislav shoved things around for no reason on the bookshelf, a few inches here and there. “Is this what you have to do to get those waiting virgins—those heavenly fucks?”

Two days before, Reza would have thrown himself at him in blind rage. Now he just looked at Vladislav. Maybe his nerves were already on overload. As of a few days back, he’d stopped asking his contentious questions about everything, and his jerky way of moving, his wandering gaze—those too were gone. As if everything he did was a little too slow, as if he could only do things he’d decided on far in advance. And now the attack was too quick for him to follow. Maybe this saved Vladislav, or whichever of them was being saved.

Vladislav wasn’t satisfied. “You need some kind of fucking ceremony. Don’t they always have shaved heads, your brethren, on the pictures you see afterward, after they’ve killed a bunch of people? Virgin horny fucking martyrs.”

Reza groped for a moment. He pulled his hand through the hairy water, his lips hesitating at first, but then he said, “But we won’t kill anyone.”

“No, that’s right,” said Vladislav, pushing a bookend into a few paperbacks. “Everyone will live happily ever after.”

Only Mary’s turning of the magazine pages broke the silence.

Vladislav waited. No one said anything.

“Poker, anyone?” he said then, suddenly, and kicked the base of the bookshelf. “Where’s the deck?” He started to look around.

“And what would the stakes be?” said Adderloy. His voice was low and self-assured. He straightened his ring and looked sternly at Vladislav.

Vladislav had started a poker game once before. After absurdly cautious bidding, the game had run out of steam. No one wanted to admit it, but who had the nerve to bet, when all that sat in their pockets was Adderloy’s money?

“Oh, all right,” said Vladislav, throwing himself into an armchair.
His legs stuck straight out across the floor. “Who knows,” he said, slapping his hands on the armrests. “Maybe things will be better tomorrow?”

A few hours earlier, when the generators went on and the building was drowned in shaking and noise, Adderloy had pulled Vladislav aside. Earlier, he’d said he wanted to practice shooting, claiming it had been a long time since he’d held an automatic weapon. Best to fire a few rounds when the generators were on—no one would hear. And he wanted Vladislav to instruct him. So with the first tremors, they each took a submachine gun and vanished. Toward the vast halls downstairs, N. supposed.

Soon after the generators died, they returned.

But there was something about their behavior that made N. send himself off on an errand, to the weapons trunk. They kept glancing around too much. While he was checking on a pistol, N. swiped his finger around the muzzles of the submachine guns, just replaced at the top of the bag. On his finger, he found only a hint of shiny weapon grease, but no trace of burned powder. Not a single shot had been fired.

Adderloy and Vladislav had been alone for a while—the generator had hidden not bangs from automatic fire but rather the lack of them. It was then that N. had looked into Adderloy’s gaze, to where the unsafe predator stalked, although Adderloy himself stood still. By now it was clear to him that Adderloy’s intentions didn’t include any of them. An obscure agenda that only he knew. And Vladislav, sneering in mock offense at Reza, had possibly sensed what was going on.

Suicide martyrs, Charles-Ray Turnbull, and First Federal United.

The new world N. had almost unconsciously become part of was a minefield of unspoken threats and creeping conspiracies. He
felt the currents around him, they would all converge eventually, but the only thing that mattered to him now was his goal: to get revenge for his girls. As long as that happened, the rest didn’t matter.

He looked at Reza. The water poured over the top of his head again, he ran his hand over the skin, shaving where the stubble was still rough.

Topeka

A Friday morning in February 2005

C
HARLES
-R
AY
T
URNBULL, BORN IN
O
KLAHOMA
, was as irascible as his father. Afterward, some would recall his bad mood that morning. The church was paying a visit to the state prison, and during the morning parishioners stopped by with homemade pastries. Charles-Ray arrived a quarter-hour late, already a bad start, and when someone thoughtlessly asked how on earth Bethany found time to bake all those cranberry muffins, he snapped something inaudible in reply.

The reason was that Bethany, Charles-Ray’s wife, didn’t bake. Didn’t even try. She was upset by the world’s decay, or at least that was the explanation Turnbull gave for her absence on Sundays. A degenerate humanity was to blame for her red-eyed gaze and hands that never quieted. She spent long stretches in the closed wards at St. Francis Health Center, a convalescence that often began with a high-speed ambulance ride. After treatments, she’d sit in her pew for a few weeks with a smile that made young children curl up in their parents’ lap. And most—not all—knew that when you asked
for help with homemade baked goods, then Charles-Ray drove to the Dimple Donuts across town and put his purchases into plain brown bags.

Charles-Ray Turnbull and Bethany had a childless union. It was Turnbull Sr., Charles-Ray’s father and the church’s founder, who had married them himself. For many years Charles-Ray had made his living providing Shawnee County with road signs. A job that, while not very demanding, he had severely neglected in recent years. Charles-Ray devoted his time to the church, to his mission. Delivering signs on time for Topeka’s new school crosswalks, or keeping accurate accounting records—those were not Charles-Ray Turnbull’s strengths. His talent lay in getting people to pay attention to Jesus Christ, when they were at their most receptive. That he could do.

But the more time he devoted to one, the less Charles-Ray had left for the other—and a few months later, the state’s attorney would repeatedly point to the shaky finances of Charles-Ray and the church as aggravating circumstances.

As usual, the young people in charge of the pastry tables felt insecure in Charles-Ray’s presence. He made a parting comment about how they should devote themselves with whole hearts to the prisoners, unembarrassedly tucked his shirttail into his pants, and then, to everyone’s relief, left. In general, he liked prison visits and invariably reeled in a fish. But today he had yet another pointless meeting with the bank.

He pulled out of the church parking lot in his ’91 Lincoln Town Car. A car that, at least at the time Charles-Ray bought it, carried some prestige. It was red with a black top. Back then, when he and Bethany had their good times, he called it the Demon—a preacher’s joke. Now it was nameless. Its varnish had turned white, and the back fenders were streaked with rust.

It was not quite nine a.m. when his Town Car bumped out onto the street outside the church. That they could all agree on, but then the stories diverged. Police and prosecutors would claim one thing, defense lawyers another. What actually took place was that four traffic lights past the church, the fat doomsday minister’s car stopped at an intersection. Of the few people around, no one noticed enough to be called later as a witness.

H
e’s still in there buying muffins, and he’s late.” Mary sat alone in a parked car outside a bakery, just past Charles-Ray Turnbull.

Eventually, he came out from Dimple Donuts carrying four grease-stained bags.

“That’s a hell of a lot of muffins.” Mary was talking on a cell phone with a two-way radio function.

“Plenty of time.” Adderloy sat at the fourth-floor window of a hotel room in the center of town. N., alone in a car, could see both Mary and Turnbull in the distance. Reza and Vladislav, each with an earphone, sat on a bench in a dirty city park with brown grass and overgrown bushes.

“He’s back in the car now.”

“Switching around the muffins.” It was N.’s voice.

“It looks like he’s putting them in plain paper bags,” said Mary. “Can you believe . . .” She let go and pressed the talk button again. “He’ll probably stop by the church.”

“Plenty of time,” Adderloy reassured.

Reza sat in the park with a Coke, while Vladislav blew on a huge cup of American coffee, which he’d strengthened with packets of Nescafé from his pocket.

“Now he’s rolling again.”

Adderloy had pulled back the curtains from the hotel window. The air-conditioning was broken, and soon the morning sun would make the room too hot. He grinned at the light coming in through the window, lifted the phone from the desk beside him, and pushed to get an outside line. Coolly, he calculated that the call would eventually be traced.

The phone rang a few times, before a woman replied: “
Topeka Capital-Journal
.”

Adderloy was quiet at first, then exhaled with foreboding. “God no longer tolerates your impurities. The fallen will die and their corpses pile up. Punishment is imminent.”

“Who are you?” The voice sounded surprised. “Is this a threat?”

He didn’t answer.

“Hello?” The woman sounded fearful, her voice cracking.

Adderloy gave a forced cough and then hung up.

The police station was only a few blocks away, and a pair of blue lights sped by the Hotel Century.

“He has arrived at the church,” roared the radio. Mary remained closest to Charles-Ray, watching him from across the church parking lot.

“Did he bring the muffins?” That was N. He couldn’t see him, but had stopped at an intersection where he could safely watch Turnbull’s Lincoln pull out.

“The bags, yes.”

I
t took Charles-Ray Turnbull ten minutes to deliver the pastries. When he came out, he walked across the asphalt with quick steps. He seemed annoyed, slamming the car door twice before he turned the key.

N., waiting, saw the dirty vinyl top roll past. “I got him.”

“We’re off,” Vladislav said over the phone. Reza was already up. He forced his empty soda can into an overflowing trash basket.

They’d left the park when Mary began to read aloud into her cell phone, as she crossed the streets: “Baseline . . . Indian Hill . . . red light . . . now he’s moving again.”

Reza wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, Vladislav slowly stroked his beard. They stood and waited on the sidewalk at the designated intersection. Next door was a parking lot, where the attendant scratched lottery tickets in his little wooden shed, with his back to the street. Painters ripped posters off a facade.

“Montclair Street.”

That was N.’s signal. He drove past Mary and caught up with Turnbull, pulling into the outside lane, just behind him.

“Abbott Place.”

Vladislav stretched, trying to see the incoming traffic.

“Miller.”

N. passed him and turned so he was in front.

Vladislav first caught sight of N.’s stolen black Impala. Although the wide hood obscured his view, he glimpsed the dull red Lincoln behind.

N. began to brake. They needed Turnbull to slow down to walking speed. Mary eased up alongside and boxed him in—in case Turnbull decided to swing out and speed up from there.

Turnbull drummed hard with his fingers on the steering wheel, still looking annoyed. The eyes that followed him from three directions couldn’t read what he said, but he shook one hand in front of him, and his cheeks quivered.

Vladislav timed his move carefully, stepping out into the street when Charles-Ray Turnbull’s speed was low enough but still far
too high. Turnbull slammed on the brakes, his seat belt throwing him back. Vladislav swiveled so he stood with legs apart in front of the bumper, then put both hands on the hood and leaned forward. Vladislav’s huge and sincere smile looked scarily hypnotic. The minister’s gaze was fixed, the way a hunted animal stands frozen in the eyes of a predator. Still alive, but already defeated.

Quickly, Reza climbed into the backseat, the gun up and leading the way.

When Turnbull got into the car, the countdown had begun—everything coordinated so that the right clues would be left behind, deliberately confusing.

Adderloy left his hotel room and took the elevator down to the lobby. On the way to the front desk, he removed the gloves he’d worn all morning.

“Checking out, please!”

The only thing the receptionist could tell the police later was that the man had had no luggage.

“Anything from the minibar?”

“Absolutely not.”

Adderloy held out his card. The same card that would later be shown to have paid for a round of drinks at a hotel bar in Toronto.

Mary was already waiting in the car when Adderloy came out onto the street.

“We’re moving,” she said over the radio as soon as he got in, and they headed out toward the outskirts of town.

N. had parked the Impala at the factory and walked eight blocks. He opened the heavy padlock on an old door, painted black. The warehouse, with its row of metal gates, reminded him of engine sheds in a rail yard. It was quiet within the thick walls, like being inside a ruin in the middle of the forest. The light fell in oblique
bands through the skylights, catching the floating specks of dust. He scraped his shoe on the gravelly floor to hear the echo. Emptiness around him, high ceilings. He waited. The gun holstered inside his jacket.

Vladislav and Reza circled around the neighborhoods with Turnbull at the wheel. It was Mary and Adderloy who raced against the clock, just outside of town. Twenty minutes to go.

M
ary pulled into an open space in the middle of the parking lot at Waterstone High School. The lawns were brown with patches of dirt, the bushes overgrown. A group of Latino kids gathered around the hood of a car at one end of the parking lot, while a dozen cheerleaders walked lazily down the slope to the sports fields carrying black and yellow pom-poms, whitewashed wooden rifles, and stiff nylon flags. A whistle blew, someone laughed. Adderloy snorted and got out of the car, carrying a gym bag.

Not even ten a.m.; the school cafeteria was open but hardly anyone sat inside. Adderloy left the bag in the empty foyer and walked back to the parking lot.

Two pounds of saltpeter from a hardware store, an equal amount of confectioners’ sugar from the Cake and Candy Supply at Fairlawn Plaza, a digital kitchen timer from Walmart, along with a few cables, batteries, and a lightbulb with its glass removed to spark it all. “Nothing lethal, just a real good scare,” Vladislav had said when he’d finished wiring the thing in the factory.

Timer set for two minutes. Addeloy checked his watch in the car. Then, not even a bang, but somebody running out a side door yelling, and a second later a billowing cloud of black smoke pushing its way out the entrance.

Another thirty seconds, and Mary dialed 911.

“Help,” she pleaded in a low voice, as soon the dispatcher answered, even closing her hand over the phone.

She played it well, the incoherence, the vagueness. The flat male voice on the other end wanted to clarify details, assured her that a patrol car was already on the way. Who was she, where was she, who had done what? In response, she whispered single words rather than sentences, stopped, changed direction. She seemed to be hiding, while observing something unmentionable. One person had been shot, maybe more, smoke, people screaming and begging for mercy. She saw one, had seen several figures running in black hoodies and boots, shell casings rolling away.

“Help, for God’s sake!”

She hung up.

Twelve minutes left. Mary started the car and pulled out. They saw the first cars halfway to downtown, as three police cars shot past with blue lights and sirens. Soon after, a pair of black vans marked P
OLICE
in small letters, no sirens but lights flashing. The stragglers that followed, just as loud as the first, swerved ominously through the traffic.

“Bloodthirsty,” said Adderloy when they sped past, “like piranhas.”

Downtown Topeka was about to be left without police officers. Soon they were on the scene, taking aim and screaming behind skidded cars, while lines of men with black gear poured in through the school’s emergency exits. First, a threat called in to the local paper, then this. Wholesale panic. It would take more than an hour before they figured it out. Only then would the dark realization sink in, when the casings were swept up and the real corpses counted. At any rate, all the schoolchildren were fine.

M
ary and Adderloy had parked next to the Impala and waited now with N. in the warehouse. Two minutes to go. They heard a car stop, and then steps.

“I have a family,” came Charles-Ray’s voice.

“We all do.”

Vladislav led Charles-Ray Turnbull, with one hand on his shoulder. They’d put a hood over him, and with every panting breath his mouth drew the fabric into a taut little bowl. Fearful, as if anticipating the chair in front of him. The medical bag was open and ready on the floor beside it. Mary had drawn an entire vial into the syringe she held in her hand.

“Sit!”

Adderloy behind, N. and Mary on either side. Vladislav grabbed him with both hands. Mary held her syringe, N. his gun. Charles-Ray Turnbull sat down with his head lowered in resignation, as if awaiting a punch, or a shot to the back of the head.

Mary pushed the thick needle right through his jacket fabric and into his upper arm. It was the only time he fought, and for a few moments they all had to restrain him.

“There, there,” said Vladislav with the voice of someone comforting a dying animal in the presence of a child. The fabric tightened when Turnbull turned his face up to the ceiling. Like the crude outline of an African mask. His movements were already confused.

Charles-Ray Turnbull thought they had bound him with restraining rope, but in fact the injection caused paralysis. After waiting ten seconds, Reza grabbed Turnbull’s left foot, straightening the leg. He looked away when N. stepped forward, aimed for the underside of the thigh, and pulled the trigger. Turnbull twitched so violently that his chair fell over.