Schwarz, you’ve got nowhere to fucking go now.
He thought about a document from the prison in Marcusville that he’d just read, several times, about a great country that still perpetuated the threat of the death sentence as a way of life, and he thought about the fact that it felt good to lie there and laugh and know that all hell was waiting only a few yards away on his desk, and he was about to let it loose.
IT WAS PAST TEN IN THE EVENING, U.S. TIME, WHEN THE REQUEST FOR
legal assistance came through from Sweden. Kevin Hutton had hung around in the office on Main Street, with a view over Cincinnati: he had been waiting for it to come. A strange afternoon, a strange evening. He’d chain-smoked and downed mineral water until his stomach complained. For the past hour he’d alternated filterless cigarettes with some old crackers that he’d found in the staff kitchen. He was tired but didn’t want to go home. The information from Brock at Interpol had made him flustered at first, and then angry, and then this awful emptiness that clung to him until he had no idea what he needed to do to stand up.
But you’re dead.
All these years in the FBI and he’d never experienced anything like it. So near, so big. This was the sort of thing you lived for, longed for, wasn’t it? The day you could always remember later, that stood out from all the rest. The case that no one else had experienced, when there were no answers because no one had even contemplated the questions. That was when you left your mark. That was when you got noticed in a large organization. All of that, and yet the only thing he had was this bottomless emptiness.
An hour later he was in his car heading south, his colleague and subordinate Assistant Special Agent in Charge Benjamin Clark sitting beside him. Hutton had explained, and realized as he did how implausible the whole thing sounded, but Clark had understood and he’d come to the office as soon as they’d got off the phone.
It was dark outside; the road was covered in black ice.
Kevin Hutton should perhaps have driven more slowly, but now that they were on the way he couldn’t get there fast enough. It was a long time since he’d been to Marcusville. He’d lived there for nearly twenty years, but it meant nothing. Another life, another time. Sometimes when he came across photos from back then, it was as if it was someone else, not him, it wasn’t him. He’d cut all contact with his parents many years ago, and when his brothers then later moved away there was nothing left that he needed, his childhood territory had become that picture he’d left on a shelf somewhere to gather dust.
And now he was about to wipe some of it away.
They had driven there in under an hour and a half. He tried to see as far as he could through the windshield, into the dark—it was all so familiar, and yet not. He hadn’t realized back then how different Marcusville was. A small town with fewer than two thousand inhabitants spread over two and a half square miles. So small. So without a future. You often had to get away, break all ties, in order to see things as they really were. He didn’t even need to compare it with the rest of the States, it was enough to compare it with the rest of Ohio. Income per household was lower than average. Assets per household lower than average. Number of African Americans well below average. Number of Latin Americans well below average. Number of people born abroad well below average. Number of college students well below average. Number of inhabitants with university degrees well below average . . . he could continue for as long as he liked, and he didn’t miss it at all, the memories gone.
The streets were nearly empty at this time of night. Nowhere to go, nowhere to long for. He recognized every single house. There were lights on in several windows, behind the potted plants and flowery curtains, and he saw people moving about inside, Marcusvillites, like he would have been if he hadn’t gone looking for a new life.
They passed Mern Riffe Drive and he looked over at the house that had once been Elizabeth Finnigan’s. He knew that her parents still lived there, that they still grieved. She had been sixteen years old.
Ruben Frey lived just around the corner, the short distance that was a street called Indian Drive. Same house, everything was the same. Kevin Hutton stopped the car and glanced at his colleague. He wanted to talk about how he felt, because he felt something in his stomach when he sat in his car by the tiny lawn and looked at the front door and the windows that fronted the road. He had stayed here so many times. Ruben was short and fat and a bit odd sometimes, but he had understood everything that Kevin’s parents didn’t. Ruben hadn’t pitched a fit when they managed to smash the light out front and he hadn’t made a fuss when they occasionally forgot both time and space and went in with muddy shoes all over the parquet floor. That hadn’t been important to Ruben.He’d asked them to take off their shoes, he’d asked them to clean up after themselves, but never raised his voice, never with that sharp edge that continued to ring in your head.
Such a good man. It wasn’t fair.
Now he was going to get out of the car, knock on the door and explain that he needed to ask some questions.
Kevin was cold—he had his coat on, but he was cold.
Ruben Frey opened the door almost immediately. He hadn’t changed a bit. Perhaps his hair was a bit thinner, perhaps he was a bit thinner, but otherwise it was as if he’d been asleep for twenty years. They looked at each other, the dark that surrounded them and the cold that gave away the fact that they were both breathing deeply.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late. Do you recognize me?”
They looked at each other again.
“I recognize you, Kevin. You’re older. But it’s you.”
“Ruben, this is Benjamin Clark, my colleague at the FBI in Cincinnati.”
They shook hands, the shorter, older man and the tall, young man.
“The thing is, Ruben, we have to ask you some questions. Or rather, a lot of questions.”
Ruben Frey listened, looked Kevin in the eye.
“It’s nearly midnight. I’m tired. What’s this about? Can it wait until the morning?”
“No.”
“So what’s it about?”
“Can we come in?”
It was as if the house embraced him as soon as he walked in. Kevin studied the wallpaper, the wall-to-wall carpets, the small pine staircase that went up to the second floor, the copper tubs that stood lined up in every corner of the hall. But most of all, it was the smell. It smelled the same as it had back then: slightly stuffy, pipe tobacco, fresh bread.
They sat down at the kitchen table, a red Christmas runner in the middle that would probably lie there until summer took over.
“It’s exactly the same.”
“You know how it is. You’re happy enough. And you don’t really see what it looks like anymore.”
“It’s great, Ruben. I was always happy here too.”
Ruben Frey sat at the end of the table, the same place as back then.Benjamin Clark and Kevin sat on either side. They both looked at him, and maybe Ruben shrank a little.
“What do you actually want, boys?”
Clark put his hand into the inner pocket of his jacket; he held out a photograph, put it down on the pine table in front of Ruben Frey.
“It’s about this man. We think you know who he is.”
Frey stared at the photograph. The face of a thirty-five-year-old man, pale complexion, thin, short dark hair.
The cannula is dripping, I can see that. I also see the doctor sticking the needle in and emptying the antidote somewhere in his thigh, he has to wake up, the morphine will slow his breathing, and I try to hold the boy’s legs still whenever the car swings. I see his eyes, the fear of a person who has no idea of what’s going on.
“What is this, Kevin?”
“I want
you
to answer that.”
Ruben Frey continued to stare at the picture. He put out a hand, lifted it up, held it in front of his eyes.
“I have no idea what this is all about. You, of all people, should know that.”
Kevin Hutton looked at the man whom he liked so much. He tried to read the round face, the eyes looking down at the image. He wasn’t sure whether it was surprise, whether it was consternation, or acting.
“Surely you recognize him, Ruben?”
Ruben Frey shook his head.
“My son is dead.”
I look at him. For the last time. I know that. This is how it has to be. He looks frightened. When he boards that airplane it’s over. I don’t like the fact that he’s so frightened. It will get easier. It has to.
“Ruben, look at the photograph again.”
“I don’t need to. The hair is shorter. The complexion paler. This person is like him. With the exception that he’s alive.”
Hutton leaned forward; it would perhaps be easier to say if he was closer.
“Ruben, I want you to listen to me. This photograph was taken twentyeight hours ago. In Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The man in the picture says that his name is John Schwarz.”
“John Schwarz?”
“That’s not his real name. We have his fingerprints and DNA from the Swedish police. Identical to those we have ourselves, but that were taken earlier.”
Hutton paused briefly, wanted to be sure that their eyes met when he said it.
“Identical to those we have from your son.”
Ruben Frey sighed, or did he snort? It wasn’t easy to tell.
“You know that he’s dead.”
“The face in that picture there belongs to John Meyer Frey.”
“You yourself were at the funeral.”
Kevin Hutton put his hand on Ruben’s arm, the shirt folded up to the elbow, as always.
“Ruben, we want you to come with us to Cincinnati. We need to question you there. Tonight. Then you can sleep there. I’ll get a good bed for you. And tomorrow, we’ll probably do a second interview.”
Kevin Hutton and Benjamin Clark waited in the car while Ruben Frey slowly packed a few toiletries and a change of clothes in a far-too-large overnight bag.
They let him take his time.
He had just seen his dead son in a recently taken photo.
THE NEW YEAR FELT OLD ALREADY, NO MORE THAN A DAY SINCE
New Year’s Eve, but Vernon Eriksen was relieved, finally it was over: the constant nagging and expectation, everyone preparing themselves for the party of a lifetime, putting all their glad rags on, only to be as disappointed as they always were when dreams were put to the test and proved to be just that, dreams.
Always that reluctance.
The hours that dragged and stuck to your skin, the last day of the year was a time to remember and he hated it, was almost frightened; everyone who had left him, the loneliness became so acute.
His mother had died suddenly of cancer when he was growing out of his teens, and he remembered his father making her pretty in the funeral parlor—Vernon had stood there and watched as his hands gently washed her white skin, as he cried while he brushed her hair.
Six weeks later his father was hanging from one of the beams in the cellar.
Sometimes Vernon fled from the feet that hadn’t been standing on anything, from the eyes that shone red.
I am the one who decides over life and death
, his father had always said with a twinkle in his eye, always as he attended to the dead, filled them with life again before the family took their farewell.
You see, Vernon, it’s not God, it’s not anybody else, I am the one who decides
. He had always seemed lighter after that, and Vernon had loved him; they had looked at each other and kept on going, even though they were working with something no one else could bear to think about. That afternoon, when he had found him hanging from the beam, he had thought just that, repeated his dad’s mantra to himself over and over again, and it had worked. He had been able to lift him down, hold him, maybe it wasn’t suicide, maybe it was just Dad’s way of showing that it was he who decided, even over his own death.
The hours had passed. The pictures that stuck with him and the loneliness that assailed him, gone.
A new year.
Snow had been falling all night and the air was clear. He breathed lightly and listened to the crunching under his feet. It was still early when he left his home in Marcusville, still dark when he got into his car and took the detour down Mern Riffe Drive, the same ritual, always, since he was a teenager, stolen glances at the Finnigans’ large house as he passed. The light was on in the kitchen and the living room, and the same thing that always struck him when he saw Alice inside: a feeling that was often yearning, sometimes grief, sometimes gratitude for having been close to a woman at least for a while.
He had thought they’d promised each other eternity, he’d been nineteen and didn’t want to understand what she later told him when she left him during those strange weeks after cancer had taken his mother, and then a rope over a beam had taken his father.
The overwhelming emptiness that had suddenly engulfed him, drowned him.
He drove on toward Indian Drive and picked up Ruben Frey, who was ready and waiting on the veranda, the door already locked. They kept their overcoats on, the heating in the car hadn’t been working well this winter. He ought to get it looked at but it was expensive and he had postponed it week after week and now it was only a couple of months more, then spring would be here.
They sat in silence in the front seats as he drove toward Route 23 and the first miles north toward Columbus. They had known each other for years, initially in the way that you knew everyone in Marcusville, a chat in the shop, a few words when you met on the street. Then came the day when all hell broke loose, when Elizabeth Finnigan was found shot on the floor of her home with John Meyer Frey’s sperm inside her, and their relationship had rapidly changed. Vernon was the senior corrections officer on Death Row in the East Block of the prison and Ruben was the father of a seventeen-year-old boy who spent the first nights locked up there.
For some years, Ruben had avoided going into town as much as possible, and if he did occasionally venture out and they happened to meet, he looked away—shame makes people do that.