The Swede (17 page)

Then the sound of the jackhammers stopped. There was a moment of silence.

“I’ll call Adderloy,” said Mary, reaching for her phone.

“Wait,” said Vladislav like a thunderclap, without taking his gaze off the Lebanese. The tone of his voice, Vladislav’s relentless expression. The Lebanese excused himself with a hand over his heart and returned to the kitchen.

An ambulance raced past the restaurant with sirens wailing.

“Reza, or one of
them
,” said Vladislav. He stood straight-backed with his creaking leather jacket wide open. “No one calls anybody. Let’s go.”

N. changed the TV channel before placing a salt shaker over the bills on the table.

They walked toward downtown Topeka, avoiding the busy streets. Heard sirens in waves. N. made them turn their cell phones off: “They’ve got Reza’s, they can check and start tracking us.”

At the first ATM machine Vladislav said, “Make a couple of substantial withdrawals, then we won’t touch the cards again.”

Several news helicopters were moving in a restless swarm over the city. Each time the helicopters picked up something new and moved in their direction, Mary stared at her toes and Vladislav muttered oaths. Downtown, more people were around, and there were more ways to disappear. But there were also more lingering glances and cars passing too slowly.

N. observed Vladislav, his long, wavy hair and sturdy eyeglasses, the gaze that caused people on the sidewalk to avoid him. If someone who saw him had heard a police description, there would be no doubt. And Mary, still black from head to toe.

N. was afraid now, truly afraid. He wanted them to take seats in the back of an empty café and wait for dark.

“No!” said Vladislav, uneasy. Mary said nothing.

“So meaningless,” Vladislav repeated at regular intervals.
Then, “Wait here,” and ducked into a hardware store. He came out five minutes later with a couple of screwdrivers and pliers in a bag.

N. understood immediately. They continued walking. Vladislav was searching the cross streets.

“We’ll go this way, just a sec,” he said. After a few blocks, he took off alone again.

N. pulled Mary inside a Laundromat and waited, watching for him through the steamed-up windows.

Half an hour later, Vladislav pulled up in a stolen Ford, honked, and drove halfway onto the sidewalk. Mary and N. ran out and threw themselves into the backseat as if it were the only taxi in a rainstorm.

On the highway they settled down a notch. Being on the road, with the factory and helicopters behind them, was enough for N.

Mary was still searching for helicopters, pressing her cheek against the window so she could look straight up and then turning to see the saw-toothed skyline through the rear window’s gray haze.

“We can’t leave Topeka quite yet,” said Vladislav all of a sudden.

“So when?” Mary asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Not tonight?”

“No, tomorrow.” Vladislav drummed a screwdriver against the dashboard. From the broken ignition switch, cables hung like colored spaghetti. “You should never flee in haste.”

“Overnight at a motel then?”

N. caught his gaze in the rearview mirror. Looked at him for a while. “One night,” he said. “Cash payment, but only if I get to choose the motel.”

“Sure.”

“Good.” N. sat up. They passed a few exits before he pointed to the side at an orange sign on a pole. “There! Looks like the kind of place that prefers cash.”

T
UMBLEWEED
M
OTEL
. Not the tallest in the forest of signs standing beside the exit ramp. A few bulbs framing the name blinked uncertainly, as if they would fail at any moment. Vladislav braked and took the exit. Mary looked at N. in disbelief.

They rented two rooms, made a mess of the linens in one, and then all three of them settled into the other. A quiet agreement was made to do everything together. Two queen-size beds. N. and Mary would share the bed farthest in.

Mary went into the bathroom.

“One more night in Topeka?” N. asked Vladislav. “Give me
one
good reason.”

“We won’t get anywhere without money.”

N. glared at him.

Vladislav weighed his wallet in his hand. “What do we have, a couple of thousand? We have to disappear again, completely disappear. It’s not enough.”

The toilet flushed.

“For Christ’s sake Vladislav, didn’t you see—helicopters and God knows what, a whole fucking posse. This is Kansas. They hang people from trees here. And we stay another night to, to do . . . what? To rob another bank?”

“No more robberies,” said Vladislav.

The bathroom door opened again. Mary had been crying; she didn’t try to hide it. “I hate this place, but if we have to stay one more night, I want clean clothes. I want to feel clean when I leave.”

They drove to a shopping center, bought clothes. Mary found more black. Vladislav stood a long time, feeling the sleeves of silk
shirts between his fingers. N. bought everything he needed in fifteen minutes in a jeans store. Then they raided Walmart for shampoo and toothbrushes. As they closed the trunk, Vladislav decided he wanted something to read.

They stopped at the mall bookstore, and Vladislav headed to the back. Mary searched the headlines in the daily papers, while N. scanned the shiny faces on the magazine covers. Row upon row in racks—a grandstand of smiles.
Time
had a special issue on Pakistan. Vladislav approached from the checkout counter with a couple of travel guides under his arm.

They drove back to the motel, showered. The sun went down and died, deep red at the horizon. Car headlights and neon lights dimmed the stars.

It was impossible to resist TV: yet another person arrested, a massive effort, gunfire. Yet another person held in isolation at a hospital. They saw the factory from every conceivable angle, police cars, breathless reporters. Someone shouted accusingly on a street corner: “Why are all the suspects being shot?”

Vladislav browsed through his travel guides. Mary ate the beef jerky she’d bought, while N. made instant coffee and tore the labels off his new clothes.

Police Chief Oldenhall called another press conference. For the first time, they saw his gray eyes and pockmarked cheeks up close. Oldenhall confirmed the arrest—a foreign citizen—and said they now believed the crime involved religious terrorism.

“An unholy alliance here in the heart of Kansas.”

Vladislav looked up from a guide to Hong Kong. “Masterful, isn’t it?”

N. couldn’t make sense of the police chief’s statement. “What the—”

“It’s brilliant, throwing in a Pakistani.”

“No . . . Reza.” N. moaned as the idea sank in. As if it were a death notice.

A Muslim in a factory full of firearms and money from a robbery. Turnbull already linked to the deed. Westhill Baptist Church and the Pakistani hordes. This was the unholy alliance Adderloy had created. If enough people bought it, there were no rules anymore. Not for anything.

M
ary was already asleep. N. lay next to her, watching a black-and-white movie on TV: Cary Grant in sunglasses, winding roads on the Riviera, a beautiful actress at his side with wavy curls. N. watched the scenery, unable to follow the plot, too preoccupied by other thoughts. He got up and filled the electric kettle for a cup of instant coffee he didn’t really want. Vladislav lay with his arms across his face, sleeping deeply with his mouth wide open, hissing. It was long past midnight.

N. got hit with the stale coffee odor of his own breath as he lifted the blanket to lie back down on the bed. He felt hot. He pulled back the blanket again and saw Mary’s bare back. Lying down on his side behind her, he felt carefully with his fingertips across one of her vertebrae. She was motionless. In the dark he could sense the black cat staring back. He tried to touch its bushy tail.

A
t St. Francis Health Center, as federal agents filled the hallways, Reza Khan spent the whole night in surgery. An impatient, red-eyed senior doctor kept telling the dark suits that he still didn’t know. It was possible the patient might make it.

Diego Garcia, 2008

M
AYBE IT BOTHERS
you
?”

Grip sat as before, in the cell opposite the man who called himself N., at the small table. He’d told N. that not only were the Americans likely recording their conversations, but they might also be getting them translated. Grip had asked if it bothered him.

N. hadn’t responded, and they began to talk about other things. Only much later did he lean forward to Grip and say, “Maybe it bothers
you
?”

It was his eyes that made Grip react, because the look was direct and immediate. Their meetings in the cell had passed through different stages: pure fear, compliance, outbursts of defiance alternating with moments of obsequiousness. But never anything followed by a look of understanding, of insight into Grip. Suddenly the situation was reversed—N. held a split-second advantage.

The idea that the Americans probably recorded and translated everything that was said bothered Grip enormously. He hadn’t felt that way the first time he came into the cell. Then it would have been natural—even expected. But the staged
show had started to shift. For diffuse reasons, Grip felt forced to stay on Garcia. And from what was said in the cell, were the Americans really only interested in the unidentified man’s side of the conversation? “Is he Swedish?” was no longer the only issue.

“Doesn’t bother me at all,” replied Grip in an offhand way. “It’s standard procedure to record interrogations.” They looked at each other.

“I’ve been through all kinds,” said the man who called himself N. Someone had seen to his battered feet, which were wrapped with new white bandages. He was shaven, but his hair hadn’t yet been cut. He reminded Grip of someone who had been in a coma for several years and had now woken up. His movements were tentative, as if he was not yet master of his own body. His hair was neater; someone had washed it. (Grip couldn’t imagine he could do a thing like that for himself.)

“You homesick?” said Grip.

N. seemed unmoved by the issue, only gave a slight shrug.

“Where did you live?” No reaction. Grip got the impression that N. was thinking. Grip continued: “You know I can take a hair and search you through the DNA registry, if anyone reported you missing.”

Grip didn’t know himself what he was looking for. What did he want to know about this man?

“Would you like help from Sweden? The embassy—” Grip paused at the absurdity: Which embassy would that be? That was the whole point of the place where they were sitting. An island without a country.

The man’s gaze was absent again, gone. You wouldn’t see that in Sweden anymore, the gaze of someone held incommunicado
for years. The silence in the room briefly reminded Grip of other interrogations, when he was younger and questioned juvenile offenders. Some car thief wouldn’t talk, had thrown away his wallet—they demanded a name and only got shrugs. But they could scare the wits out of those types, just by using a gentle voice, honeyed. Grip looked at the white bandages on N.’s feet. Cudgels, he thought, on the soles. Apparently destroys the nerve endings. They never really could walk properly again, and what they’d endured was said to be unbearable. So which drew the most useful confessions, the cudgels or the honeyed voice? Grip truly wondered.

“What’s your name?” he asked, dropping the thought.

G
rip waited. The man’s gaze floated. His hands were always folded, resting on his knee. Grip closed the notebook in which he’d written only the day’s date.

“I have no more questions. Nothing more is coming to me. I’ll be back again tomorrow—”

The man—N.—closed his eyes. “Imagine that you wake up, and everything is floating. The ocean is now where you usually walk, you see fish in the streets.”

“Fish?”

“Yes,” the man said, and opened his eyes. “Two, I saw two fish swim past me, next to a car.”

Grip was quiet, feeling more than he wanted to admit. “You were traveling?” he asked at last.

“Yes, an eternity ago. Everything was different then. I was different. Now you’ll have to settle for N. Now I’m just Anybody. The fish swam past me, and I began to walk up the mountain.”

G
rip opened the notebook again. For the first time he heard about Weejay’s and Topeka, eventually about First Federal United and Charles-Ray Turnbull. And Adderloy appeared, along with the others. The guard at the bank, the helicopters, the Lebanese restaurant, the escape, and the night at the Tumbleweed Motel. For three days, Grip took notes while N. talked.

Tumbleweed Motel, Topeka, 2005

I
N THE MORNING,
V
LADISLAV AND
N. went down to eat while Mary showered. On a little corner table in the lobby stood the minimal offering the motel could get away with calling breakfast: a pot of coffee, milk, little boxes of cornflakes, and a pile of pale muffins that had no doubt been there all week. It didn’t take long to eat.

When they got back to the room, Mary was sitting on the end of the bed, looking as if she were waiting for something. She was dressed, her hair smooth and glistening with moisture.

“Want some?” said N., holding out a cereal box.

She shook her head almost imperceptibly. Leaned back slightly with her hands on either side, over the quilt.

“What?” said Vladislav.

“No, no. I’m fine. . . . They have coffee?”

“Can I borrow your phone?” asked Vladislav.

Mary shrugged. “Why?”

“Where is it?”

“In my bag.” She pointed to her new canvas tote.

N., who’d just turned on the television, switched it off again.

Vladislav dug out her phone. “Turn it on.”

“You going to make a call?”

He didn’t answer. Mary turned on the phone, entered her password, and Vladislav took it again.

He went to her menus and then held up the screen: “Last call dialed . . . just five minutes ago.”

“He deserves a chance—”

“—to Adderloy.” Vladislav whipped the phone across the desk.

N. sighed in frustration and snorted as if he’d been punched.

“We can’t just abandon him,” said Mary defiantly.

“No, absolutely not.” Vladislav nodded. He stood with his hands in his pockets, with that ominous calm that N. always found intimidating.

“Adderloy will be here in half an hour.” Mary turned her gaze from Vladislav and looked out the window. Vladislav stood close, no more than an arm’s length from her. She closed her eyes, the sunlight reflecting on her face. She looked up again.

N. had never felt more like a stranger to her.

“Before Adderloy took off yesterday, didn’t he tell you to go out and get something to eat?” said Vladislav.

“Yes, he suggested that,” Mary replied.

“Knowing full well that Reza would say no.”

She sat quietly, cool.

“So you—” N. was furious, but Vladislav stopped him.

“Shhhh.” He crouched down next to Mary, with one hand on the bed just behind her back. She still wasn’t looking at him. He said quietly, “You’re playing, Mary. You’re good at setting up challenges for others to finish.” Mary didn’t flinch. Vladislav edged closer. “You know full well that Adderloy nailed Reza, that he had the police raid the factory—and then you do this.”

Silence, only the muffled sound of traffic outside.

“About half an hour, you say,” Vladislav started again. “Before Adderloy shows up here.” He stood up. “What I should do now is take my passport and go—just go.” He glanced out the window, grinning. “But I don’t want to treat him to losing the two of you as well. I don’t want to give him that satisfaction.”

“But he saved us, made sure we weren’t in the factory. He just wants us back together again, and then we can all get out of here.”

“Is that really what you think? I say, what we need is to get out of his web, and for once get a few steps ahead of him.”

Vladislav took Mary’s phone off the desk, dialed a number, and looked in the mirror while he waited.

“The police, please . . . Main number . . . Connect me.” A few seconds of silence again. “The robbery at First Federal United . . . No, not the tip line, I want to talk to someone in charge, an inspector, investigator, whatever the hell you call it.” He was transferred again, and after saying yes and no a few times, he raised his voice: “Stop typing and start listening. In the raid on the factory yesterday, you got three Glock 19 pistols and four black bags filled with cash. Also you took a Pakistani . . . That’s right, a Pakistani. No, I realize you can’t confirm that, I’m saying it so you understand that I know a few things. Quiet now—the rest of the group you’re looking for is currently at the Tumbleweed Motel, in”—Vladislav fished his room key out of his pocket—“room 230. What my name is . . . Adderloy, Bill Adderloy.”

Vladislav turned off the phone.

N. had already begun stuffing his belongings into a plastic bag. Vladislav looked at Mary. “They’ll be here in fifteen minutes, that’s my guess. Are you coming?”

Vladislav walked over to the bedside table where his stuff was lying. “At least we can give the police a hasty departure. Distract them a bit, give them a little more of what they thirst for.” He moved quickly, tore random pages from a backpackers’ guide to the Arabian Peninsula, which went sailing out over the floor. Mary looked around in disbelief. N. pushed more clothes into his bag. In a guidebook to Los Angeles, Vladislav dog-eared a few pages and drew a line with a hotel pen under the address of an Arabic bookstore before he threw it down.

When Vladislav and N. were done fiddling around, Mary stood up from the bed and took her bag. She was last to go out the door. Their dirty clothes lay in a mess with the sheets and wet towels, Vladislav’s torn-out pages, the travel guide, and their new toothbrushes.

They paid, got into their stolen Ford, and drove away.

Within just a few blocks they passed white police vans, and when Vladislav turned off onto a side street, two identical Buicks rushed by, each with two men wearing sunglasses. But not until they were on the highway did N. see the news helicopters swarming to the strip of motels and fast-food places that were disappearing out their back window.

Vladislav saw a helicopter pass in the rearview mirror. “That was fast,” he said at first, and then a little quieter: “Those fuckers are really on the ball.”

He pulled off the highway and stopped the car next to a concrete ditch where the water flowed slow and brown. He rolled down the window, weighing his cell phone in his hand. “Because we need to trust each other,” he said. And then he threw it.

It bubbled on impact.

“Yours also, both of them.”

N
ext they stopped at the square in front of First Federal United. They got out of the car and started walking.

“This is idiotic!” repeated N. He’d realized that the whole reason they’d spent another night in Topeka was so they could return once more to the bank. Mary’s indifferent look was gone; her eyes were alive again.

They crossed the square. N. watched for police while Vladislav went first, making empty observations all the way to the entrance: “Money, we must have money. Everything stops and starts with that.” His jacket was unbuttoned, his hair blowing around him. “Wasn’t that why we did it? Anyway, it was why
I
did it.”

In the car, N. had come around, after they said it wouldn’t be violent. He also knew that without money, they were doomed. He wanted to finish this his own way, not be thrown at the mercy of the justice system. But now that he was on the square, saw the sign for First Federal. Hesitation. He remembered the shots and screams, and his own confusion.

“Those two,” he said, nodding toward a pair of dark-clothed men with square caps and stitched creases on their pants.

“Guards, they don’t matter, come on.”

N. had stopped but caught up again. Mary ran her hand along the police cordon tape, set up between some cones even though the bank was once again open. Around the bank entrance, temporary glass panels had been glued over the web of cracks and bullet holes.

“What the hell,” said Vladislav, elated. And they entered.

The atmosphere inside was one of almost blunted calm. There were far fewer people both in front of and behind the counters than the last time they were there.

“Wait here, the system is old-fashioned.” Vladislav went alone to a counter, exchanged a few words, wrote a name on the signature
card. He beckoned to Mary and N. as he went on toward the vault. With all its mechanisms and bolts, the open door looked like clockworks made of steel.

“I ran in here,” said Vladislav, passing through the round opening to the vault. He stopped, made sure that they were alone, and then took out some thin plastic bags he’d taken from a cleaning trolley at the motel. Mary looked intrigued.

“Safe-deposit boxes,” said N. “Get to the point, I want out of here.”

“Yes, I rented one, a few days before. . . . Every time you come, they check your identification and make you sign, then you go in and open it with your own key. Look around, no cameras.” He’d already taken a key out of his wallet and opened one of the larger compartments.

“Twenty seconds alone—it was my little addition to Adderloy’s plan.” He pulled the box out of its slot. “I was alone at the bank counters around the corner, alone with everything they had. I took a little detour on the way back—didn’t have to bother with IDs or signatures to get into the vault. Twenty seconds, maybe fifteen.” Vladislav lifted the lid and showed the bundles of money. “Most of what I took from there went in here.”

N. looked annoyed, but Vladislav saw it coming. Grabbed his neck tight and pulled him close. “You’re right. While I was back here, there was an idiot out there, shooting wildly. I could have just run past the vault and nailed that fucker, done it right away. Saved a few bastards.” He shook N.’s head. “And we’d have been standing here completely broke.” He let go.

“It—”

Vladislav put his finger on N.’s chest as soon as he opened his mouth. “Watch it. A shot from you through the guard’s skull could have saved everyone. But instead, you huddled under a desk.

A woman walked into the vault with a key in her hand.

“One moment,” growled Vladislav, as if he’d been surprised naked in a fitting room. She turned, frightened, and disappeared.

“We’ve got money, and we’re getting out of here. That’s it,” he said, holding up the first bag.

N. and Mary stacked it.

They carried the money in double bags, not so much worried about weight as that the print from the bundles would show through the thin plastic. Two bags each for Vladislav and N., as if they’d been out shopping. Mary put on her sunglasses and, carrying her little tote bag, went first out of the vault. Vladislav followed, giving a smile of recognition to the woman who stood outside and waited.

An estate changing hands, or a family suddenly deciding to leave town—there was something sad about the woman in black wearing sunglasses who walked through the bank, followed by two men carrying what appeared to belong to her. The newly hired guard nodded as she passed. From their ladders, a couple of glaziers looked over their shoulders, before they went back to taking down one of the shattered windows.

N
early nine hundred thousand dollars. Vladislav split it down the middle without asking—one half for him, the other for Mary and N.

“Not a whole life, but a beginning,” he said, and tied a knot on the last bag.

He sat in the backseat, Mary drove. Interstate 70 east: Kansas City, St. Louis. Then I-55 heading south with N. at the wheel: Missouri, Arkansas. He kept going all the way to Winona, Mississippi. It was late, but all the motels’ neon signs still said V
ACANCY
,
so they took time to eat before getting a room. A clattery diner with booths, at midnight, where everything served was roasted or deep-fried, iced tea in pitchers and menus with items crossed out or added in marker. The familiar confusion: Vladislav who flipped and asked questions, until finally N. ordered for them both.

But now everything was happening for the last time. The very last.

Mary had gone up to the glass counter to choose a pie for dessert when Vladislav said: “It’s only a few hours to Jackson. You can drop me off there tomorrow.”

“And then?” said N., not sounding particularly surprised.

“That I’ll decide later.” Vladislav glanced toward Mary, who was leaning over the dessert counter. He seemed anxious about something. “You know it too,” he began, “that this is only borrowed time. Senseless escape, by a few who shared only their own downfall.”

“A stolen car from Topeka—nobody’s going to be looking for it down here in Mississippi,” N. tried.

“It’s not the car that’s important. And as I said, I’ll be on my own after Jackson.” Vladislav glanced over his shoulder. “I’m good at this, at banks, at weapons, at stashing money and getting away. I’m going to stick with it.”

“You’re going to live like this?”

“The world’s already full of it. Won’t hurt for someone to do it right.”

“But what did you do, before we—”

“Before the tsunami?” Vladislav laughed. “Well, and you?”

N. just lifted his glass and drank.

“No, exactly,” continued Vladislav. “As for me, I swam out of that bus and then—then I was another person. Shooting, I knew how to do that before, just hadn’t done it this way.”

Mary stood at the counter. A waitress had gone into the kitchen to find something for her.

“Adderloy?” reminded N.

“Adderloy still owes me a million.” Vladislav looked at N. “He sacrificed Reza. God knows what he has in mind for the rest of us. He knows that I’m alive, and he knows he owes me money.”

Mary had gotten a slice of pie slid onto a plate. She looked at it a little quizzically, then stretched back over the counter to get whipped cream sprayed on top.

Vladislav fished a pen out of his jacket and pulled a napkin from the holder. “Whatever you do, remember this address.” He wrote down something and spun the piece of paper. It was an e-mail address. “A life for a life,” he said, tapping with his index finger on the text.

“Huh?” said N., puzzled.

“You got my wallet and my passport out of Mary’s goddamn dungeon. That saved me, and also you put yourself in the doorway of the Lebanese. Remember the address, it will be the way to reach me. You can expect me to do anything for you—once.”

N. leaned forward and read it again.

“A life for a life,” repeated Vladislav.

Mary was back. “Blackberry,” she said, and licked a dollop of cream dyed blood red from the juice. She slid into the booth while Vladislav dried his hands with the napkin and stuffed it into his pocket.