It was blowing. Ewert Grens felt the wind tugging at them in the open space, he saw the snow lift from the concrete and followed the solid flakes that danced across the airstrip.
He had the whole time been holding a plastic folder with some documents in his hand, it was light and the wind caught it, the papers were ready to fly when he reluctantly handed it over. The colonel read over every page, took out a pen and signed one after the other, still standing out in the open, in the strong wind and without anything to write against.
Grens looked at Hermansson, who was waiting to his left. Her face showed nothing. Behind her Sven, furrowed brow as always when he was stressed, but he still gave off an air of calm, and only someone who had known him well for many years could see that that wasn’t the case.
Schwarz, on the other hand—he was almost hanging from the handcuffs that were attached to Sven’s wrist. The noise was still with him, like a song, monotonous and the same English word mumbled almost inaudibly over and over again.
Ruben Frey ran out of the conference room, down the short flight of white marble stairs and out through the glass doors of the main entrance. He had no overcoat, didn’t know where he was going, just that he had to get away from the press conference where he couldn’t breathe.
He was crying and two women coming in the opposite direction peered at him curiously, turned when he’d passed and watched him disappear toward Vasagatan.
His extra pounds weighed heavily on his knees and hips as always, and he soon stopped and leaned against a wall when the pain made it impossible to continue.
He didn’t care about the passersby who looked for slightly too long at the man who was sweating despite the cold. He waited until his heart was no longer pounding, until he thought he could talk more or less normally.
He took his mobile phone from the inner pocket of his jacket and dialed the number of the prison in Marcusville.
He then did what they had agreed. When he heard Vernon Eriksen’s voice, he asked the senior corrections officer to call him back from another phone. Eriksen instructed him to wait fifteen minutes. They both knew that he would rush into town to Sofio’s, where there was a pay phone, by the toilets, that they had used before.
When Sven Sundkvist unlocked the handcuffs and Schwarz was officially handed over to the colonel who had signed the documents in the plastic folder, the American citizen was promptly positioned in the middle of the formation of armed and alert soldiers.
He was taken away immediately. Six uniforms marching in front, beside, and behind the object they were to escort one thousand feet to the far corner of the newly built terminal.
The intense light made it difficult to see anything other than the outline of the waiting plane.
But the colors painted on the wings looked like they could be an American flag.
The Russian colonel was still standing with the three Swedish police officers, and he felt Grens glaring at him. His face was just as stern, his back just as straight, and he shrugged as he spoke English slowly, with a thick accent, for the second time.
“We’re just doing the same as you.”
Grens snorted, his English equally clumsy.
“What are you talking about?”
“That.”
The officer pointed to Schwarz and his troop a couple of hundred yards away, and the airplane they were now approaching. It hadn’t taken more than a couple of minutes to escort John there.
“You got rid of a problem in Sweden. We get rid of the same problem in Russia.”
Vernon Eriksen sat down on the large brown leather armchair in the cloakroom at Sofio’s with the pay phone receiver to his ear. Ruben Frey had sounded terrible and he had suspected he knew what it was about but still harbored a small hope, as you do until you know for certain.
Now he knew. He had gone to a phone that they guessed would not be tapped and called back. It had taken Ruben nearly ten minutes to summarize what had happened. A matter of days and the Swedish government had yielded. A tiny scrap of a country that pissed itself the moment the big boys so much as coughed. He could see John in front of him. Six years ago. He had hoped then that the past would stop here, on the far side of the Atlantic.
Ruben had found it difficult to talk, his voice had broken several times. Vernon had never had children himself, but in recent years he had made a concerted effort to try to understand and believed that he had come close to what Ruben was feeling, what it felt like to be a father who was about to lose his son.
He put the receiver down and looked around the twenty-four-hour diner.
A few guests sitting alone spread out among the empty tables, some with a sandwich and tepid whiskey in front of them, others with a beer in one hand and the evening news in the other, while a slow Miles Davis number played over the loudspeaker above the bar.
Vernon Eriksen knew that it was over.
It was far from over.
He didn’t want to live in a society that murdered its own citizens. This time he would carry out his plan to the full. The one he had had from the start but had lacked the courage to complete once everything got going.
Now it didn’t matter a damn anymore. John was on his way toward death once again. There was nothing to lose.
Vernon listened to the haunting trumpet, looked out into the dark.
This time.
This time he had to dare to go the whole way.
Ewert Grens, Sven Sundkvist, and Hermansson had just sat down in the plane again when they saw the humiliation through the oval windows.
The light was filtered for a few minutes through some thin clouds and it was not difficult to see what was happening some way off.
Six armed uniforms deposited John at the bottom of the steps up to the American plane. To new guards. Dark suits, four, possibly five of them.
It didn’t take long to cut up his clothes, it was cold and his thin, pale frame was shaking. He was body searched and then had to bend forward while a sedative was stuck up his anus.
The diaper they put on him was a plain white, the orange coveralls declared
DR
in big letters on his back and outside leg. No shoes, his bare feet on the asphalt.
Handcuffs around his wrists, leg irons around his ankles.
Short, shuffling steps as they led him onto the plane.
When Ruben Frey went to the reception of Hotel Continental to pick up his room key, a man dressed in a blue uniform waved to him from the back office. He was given his key by a young woman who smiled at him from behind the counter, then stood there waiting for the older man who had attracted his attention.
“Mr. Frey?”
“Yes?”
The man gave him a friendly, practiced smile, just like the girl behind reception who had given him the key.
“A woman called here looking for you. She seemed to be very keen to get hold of you, she didn’t give in until I promised to pass on the message personally. Which I’m doing now. Here. She left her number.”
“A woman?”
Ruben Frey thanked him and asked if he could use the phone in reception—he didn’t particularly want to use his own and leave traces when he didn’t know who would answer.
Her voice was high.
“Ruben Frey?”
She pronounced his name perfectly. And she was nervous, he could feel it.
“Who am I talking to?”
“My name is Helena Schwarz.”
He felt winded, just under the ribs. As if someone had punched him where he was least protected.
“Hello?”
It was difficult to speak.
“Schwarz?”
“I took the name when I married John. Our son, Oscar, is also named Schwarz.”
Ruben Frey sat down on a chair by the reception desk.
“I have to meet you.”
“I didn’t know that you existed. That I had a father-in-law. That Oscar had a grandfather.”
“Where are you now?”
His breathing started to even out again and was almost regular by the time she answered.
“Turn around. The table by the window, about halfway down the big room.”
They cried as they embraced. For several minutes they stood in the hotel dining room and held someone they had never met before, tight. He kissed her on the forehead and she stroked his cheeks, and she smiled when she loosened her grip and pulled back a bit so they could look at each other.
“There.”
She pointed over his shoulder.
“Can you see him?”
At the back of the lobby there was something that looked like a children’s corner. Colorful cardboard figures in a tepee, two tables beside it with books, paper, pens, and big multicolored Lego pieces. A boy was sitting at one of them, drawing with great concentration on a sheet of green paper. Ruben found it difficult to gauge his age, it was so long since he had had anything to do with small children, but he guessed around five or six.
“Five. The year after John came here. I must have got pregnant the first time we met.”
She took Ruben by the hand and started to walk slowly toward the boy.
They stopped just behind him, didn’t move, and the boy, Oscar, didn’t notice; all that existed for him was the big house that he was drawing with a red crayon.
Ruben had short, robust legs that normally stood solid. But now they were shaking and there was nothing he could do.
“Oscar.”
Helena Schwarz had squatted down beside her son, one arm around his shoulders.
“There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
He hadn’t finished the house. There should be some smoke coming out of the chimney, and a flowerpot in the window and the sun, half hidden, in the top right-hand corner.
“Nice house.”
Ruben swallowed, felt stupid, he’d said it in English, as he couldn’t speak a word of Swedish.
The house was finished and the boy turned toward the man who had just spoken.
“Thank you.”
Oscar flashed a smile and then turned around again. Ruben looked at Helena, she laughed, the kind of uninhibited laughter that sometimes is surprisingly loud when in stark contrast to everything else.
“He’s bilingual. I’ve always spoken Swedish to him, and John always spoke English. We thought that was the best way, to learn two languages naturally. Which means you can talk to each other.”
Ruben Frey sat down at the low children’s table in front of the colorful tepee and stayed there for the next two hours. To live six years in the remains of a morning was impossible, but they tried, and at times it was as painful as it then was easy to embrace a minute later. He glossed over the boy’s questions that interrupted every now and then: did he know where his daddy was, when was Daddy coming back, why wasn’t Daddy where he should be.
They ate lunch in the hotel restaurant and then went upstairs to his room. Oscar lay on the bed and watched cartoons on a children’s channel with characters that all looked the same, so Ruben and Helena were able sit in the armchairs at the back of the room and speak together quietly.
Ruben Frey talked about his son who had grown up in Marcusville alone with his father, how things had gone wrong early on, an aggression that none of them could understand and two short stints in juvenile correctional institutions for convictions of assault. It hadn’t been easy, and at times John had not been particularly lovable.
Ruben held his daughter-in-law’s hands tight.
John’s baggage, his dark past, had become his noose the day that the Finnigan girl was found dying in her parents’ bedroom.
He is not a murderer.
Ruben had for a moment forgotten Oscar in front of the TV with the cartoon characters, and raised his voice.
He is not a murderer.
John had at times been a damn fool, he had undoubtedly had a relationship with Elizabeth Finnigan, and it had been proved that they’d had sex earlier that day, there were traces of him all over the house,
but that doesn’t make him a murderer
.
Ruben Frey explained to his son’s wife that he believed in capital punishment, that he had voted for it every time since he’d come of age, and that
if
John had been guilty, he would also have deserved to give up his life. But Ruben was certain, the lawyers who had gone through the judgment later had all supported him, there were flaws, a long chain of circumstantial evidence, but nothing else.
He told her about the escape.
Helena Schwarz listened and she realized that John’s vague memories tallied with what she was hearing.
So he had been telling the truth in the interview room.
He had also said he was innocent.
She clutched the round man’s hands, looked over at her son who was half asleep on the bedspread listening to the familiar sound of the TV, and she couldn’t bear to think where her husband might be right now.
THE INTENTIONAL HUMILIATION OF JOHN SCHWARZ WAS POSSIBLY THE MOST
offensive that Grens had ever seen. During his thirty-four years in the police he had investigated many acts that he didn’t think living beings were capable of, met people who were so disturbed that he found it difficult to describe them as human. Only a couple of years earlier he had seen, on the autopsy table, what remained of a five-year-old girl’s genitalia that had been shredded with a metal instrument, and he had been convinced that a person could never be abused in a more grotesque way.
But this, this was just as terrible.
Not the physical pain, not the physical consequences, not anything that could be seen externally; Schwarz had only had to stand naked in minus fifteen on the open airstrip and have a enema stuck up his anus before being pushed barefoot across the asphalt.
It was more a question of who the abuser was.
A person who stuck sharp metal objects up a little girl’s vagina was a sick bastard who should be locked up, Grens was convinced of that, just as someone who raped another person should be locked up, or someone who assaulted another person should be locked up. Anyone who deliberately abused someone else should, in the world that Ewert Grens tried to inhabit, be penalized. So far, so simple. Even though it was not possible to understand the abuse, it was in certain cases possible to imagine that the sick people he encountered when they were arrested were capable of it.