He had forgotten about it.
Her soft body. How he used to brush his hand over her skin, he could almost remember how it felt.
He opened the door.
“Alice?”
“Edward, leave me alone.”
“Alice . . . I need you.”
The silence that was at first expectation and heavy breathing slowly became one filled with awkwardness, the feeling of being rejected. For a moment he was a little boy again, an uncertain boy trying to be seen.
“Alice? What’s wrong with you?”
She was lying with a blanket pulled right up to her ears, her head turned away, the light from the window on the small area of her face that was visible. He went in, his short, overweight body was winter white.
“Don’t you understand, Alice, the release, he exists, he can die, we can watch him die, for Elizabeth’s sake! It’s over! We can move on from all this.
Don’t you understand? We can find peace and quiet in our home once more. It will be our home again, not that bastard’s, he’s going to die and we can watch while he does it!”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her feet.
She pulled them to her, as if it had hurt.
“I don’t understand, Alice, what’s the matter with you?”
He knelt down on the floor, forced her to look at him.
“Alice, it’ll soon be over.”
She shook her head.
“Never.”
“Never? What do you mean?”
“It won’t make a scrap of difference. You’re filled with hate. You don’t listen. Edward, when the boy is dead, when you’ve had your revenge, it will still continue.”
He was freezing. His erection gone. It was cold in the room, they didn’t use much heating up here, and winter had its way.
“It
will
be over. For God’s sake, it’s what we’ve been waiting for!”
She looked at him and demonstratively pulled the blanket over her head. And when she spoke, he wasn’t able to see her.
“You’ll still be full of hate. Haven’t you understood that? Edward, you’ll still hate, only you won’t have anyone to kill anymore. Your hate, your damn hate has taken everything, everything! It’s sat down there on a chair in our kitchen and mocked us, ruled us, it’s ruled everything. It will always be there, Edward. And he can only die once.”
Edward Finnigan was naked when he sat down at the kitchen table again. The energy that danced inside him and demanded his attention would not subside. He took the telephone that hung on the wall by the stove hood and called his boss and line manager, the governor of the state of Ohio. It took a matter of minutes to explain what had happened and the governor’s astonishment quickly translated into action—he realized what it entailed to have someone who had been sentenced to death running around in Europe giving the finger to him and the entire American legal system on which he’d based his election campaign. He asked Finnigan to hang up, he was going to call Washington, the U.S. Department of State, he knew whom he had to talk to and he wasn’t going to give up until an extradition warrant had been issued. The bastard was going to come back here. He was going to be escorted home again, to Ohio, to the prison in Marcusville, to the execution that had never taken place.
THEY WALKED TOGETHER THROUGH THE POLICE HEADQUARTERS TO THE
interview room in the detention center. Hermansson had asked Helena Schwarz several times if she wanted to continue listening and she had received a determined look in return every time. It was her life as much as his, his life-lie included her and their son, whether she wanted it to or not, and she was going to listen for as long as John told what was perhaps the truth.
Ewert Grens held the door open while Sven and Hermansson and Helena Schwarz filed in. John was already sitting there, as was Ågestam, they were talking quietly together about something, a conversation that stopped as soon as they had all found their seats, the same places as a couple of hours ago.
Grens sent a questioning glance to Ågestam,
what were you talking about
, but the young prosecutor just shrugged,
nothing, the weather and the long winter, just trying to get him to relax
.
John Schwarz looked tired.
It had drained him; it was probably the first time he had spoken about what had happened, a pretend death that he had believed was real. He had told them about how he had died in a cell, woken up temporarily in what he later realized must have been a morgue, woken up again in a car, driving away.
Surely it will be easier now, he thought. To continue. The great wall of fear had been smashed, and the rest is just that, the rest.
“I was lying in the backseat. I remember thinking that it was dark outside. That it was night and that the streetlights looked strange when you passed them lying down.”
It
was
easier now. He knew that this had happened. He had been awake, conscious, real, it had to be, everything had been real.
“I was so . . . tired. Sick. Like I needed to throw up the whole time. I asked where we were. They said that we were on our way north, to Cleveland, that we’d just passed Columbus.”
“They?”
Hermansson tried to catch his eye.
“It’s not important.”
“Who else was in the car? Who was sitting beside you? And who was driving?”
“This is about me.”
John closed his eyes, for a moment in his own world where no one could get at him.
“We stopped at a bar near Cleveland and bought some food, then kept on going, toward a smaller town that I think is called Erie.”
Ågestam was impatient. He took off his jacket, he was warm, sweating in the confined room.
“We? Who is ‘we’?”
“I’m not going to say. Not to you, not to her.”
John looked at Ågestam and pointed at Hermansson. Ågestam spoke in a low voice.
“Of course. Please continue.”
Helena.
You’re sitting there silent in front of me. Do you believe me?
You’re the only one who knows me in this fucking room. I don’t care about the others. But do
you
believe what I’m saying?
“I was awake. But still . . . muddled, not really with it. I think that we stopped for a while outside Erie, on a private beach with a private pier and the great dark water stretched as far as I could see. There was a boat there. I don’t know much about boats, but I realized it was a powerful one, fast.”
Helena.
I wish you would say something. Even during the murder trial there were people who were close to me who believed me, what I was saying.
Do
you
, now?
“I’ve no idea how long we were on the water. I think I slept a bit. But we came to a beautiful place, Long Point it was called, a peninsula on the Canadian side, a nice little town near St. Thomas. There was a car waiting there. Keys in the ignition. Three hours to Toronto, it started to get light early, as it does in summer.”
Lars Ågestam had gone over to the back wall as John spoke. He pushed and pulled at what should be a fan, the ventilation as nonexistent as the oxygen.
“You’ll have to excuse me, this stuffy heat, I need some air.”
John took the chance to stand up, he straightened his back and bent to each side with his hands on his hips, stretched a couple of times. On the other side of the room, Ågestam hit a duct a couple of times, then gave up and sat down and raised his hand to John to continue.
“We waited at Toronto airport for a few hours, I think. I’d been given new ID documents in the car, I looked at the name, John Schwarz. There was a person somewhere, I’d understood that much, whose name and past I’d taken over.”
He continued.
“Eight, maybe nine hours to Moscow with United Airlines, don’t know why I remember that. Then a few hours of waiting and another flight to Stockholm.”
Ågestam was still sweating, he wiped his hairline.
“Who flew with you?”
John gave a scornful laugh, shook his head.
“OK, what about Stockholm, then? When you got here? Someone must have helped you.”
“All that’s of no interest. I’m sitting here now. And I’ve done what you asked me to. I’ve told you who I am, where I come from, how I got here.
I’d like to talk to Helena now, if that’s OK.”
“No.”
Ågestam was abrupt; he didn’t want any more questions.
“You can’t talk to her on your own.”
“I can’t?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then I want to go back. To my cell.”
John stood up and turned toward the door, as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“I want you to wait a bit. Sit down.”
Ewert Grens had remained silent throughout the informal interview. He had consciously let Hermansson and Ågestam ask the questions, the fewer people who made the suspect feel uncomfortable the better. But he couldn’t wait any longer.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Schwarz or Frey or whatever you want to be called.”
The obstreperous detective changed his position and stretched out his long legs.
“I can understand that you could pretend to die in the cell. Very talented,
I have to admit. A couple of doctors can, of course, in medical terms, make it
seem
like someone is dead. And if those same doctors happen to work in a prison and have decided to help one of the inmates escape from his cell, dead, well then he’d get out. And I understand all that with the car and the boat and inheriting another person’s life with a false ID and the flight to Sweden via Moscow. A few good contacts in the underworld, a competent tour guide and plenty of money, then everything’s possible.”
Ewert Grens waved his hands around in the air, awkward gestures as he spoke.
“But what I don’t understand, Schwarz, is how the hell you got from the morgue to the car. Out through the gates, from one of the America’s maximum security prisons.”
Grens’s eyes met John’s, he demanded an answer, this wasn’t a formal interview, but all the same, he wasn’t going to let him go until he had one.
John shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
Grens wasn’t going to give up.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Schwarz, I now understand even less.”
The pale man in prison-issue clothes that were too big took a deep breath.
“All that I remember, all that I know . . . that I came to in what I later realized must be a morgue. And then . . . the car. The rest . . . I
don’t
know.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
“No. I didn’t. I had just died. Or at least thought that I had. There were other questions that were more pressing then. And suddenly, after having been in prison for ten years, I was on a plane to Europe. Of course I’ve wondered, in retrospect, but there’s no one to ask.”
Grens put no more pressure on him.
It was true. He could feel it. Schwarz had no idea how it had happened. They had been careful, didn’t let him know, that in itself must have been a prerequisite for them to succeed.
Grens sighed.
The way they’d done it, the mock death and then not a trace. It was fucking obvious that the American authorities would start to put on the pressure. Prestige and power could be tarnished by people on the run from a death penalty.
IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY, AND EVEN THOUGH THE AFTERNOON HAD
slipped into evening some time ago, he knew that he still had several more hours to go before he could turn off the light on his desk, leave the office in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and walk through the city back to Nybrogatan.
The state secretary for foreign affairs, Thorulf Winge, had been woken at half past four in the morning by an urgent phone call from Washington and had since devoted the day to canceling all the meetings he could, in order to try to understand the circumstances surrounding an American, with a false Canadian passport, who had been sentenced to death but was now locked up in a holding cell at Kronoberg. Thorulf Winge wasn’t tired and he didn’t complain, he almost relished it, he was good at dealing with madness and diplomatic wrangling, and those around him had absolute faith that he would come up with the solution that was now taking shape.
He was prepared, he had gone through two different scenarios and knew what advice to give the foreign minister, regardless of the position that official American channels might choose to take. He had, what’s more, managed to silence the cocky young prosecutor—John Schwarz would not become a Swedish concern publicly until, and unless, the ministry so desired.
When the phone rang, it was sooner than he’d anticipated. He had known that the call would come, but it was only twelve hours since the news had reached, and been forwarded by, Washington.
The secretary at the American embassy explained briefly that the ambassador would appreciate an informal meeting as soon as possible, whenever it suited the state secretary.
Winge was in no doubt as to what the purpose of the proposed meeting was and replied equally tersely that anytime that evening would be fine.
He must have been waiting outside.
Winge studied the American ambassador as he came through the door into the large office. Precisely fifteen minutes had passed from the time that he received the phone call to security announcing his arrival. Leonardo Stevens was a nice enough man; Winge had had quite a lot to do with him in recent years. The September 11 tragedy had opened the way for closer contact and at times had even forced it, not just here but between most American embassies and their host countries throughout the world. An attractive man in a slightly old-fashioned way, gray well-groomed hair, clean features that turned your mind to aging actors. Winge had often thought that it felt as though the American ambassador had just stepped off the silver screen, even the way he moved and talked: his deep voice with what Winge presumed was an East Coast accent.
It was a short meeting, steeped in the ritualistic correctness and politeness that diplomacy is built on.
Stevens explained that the State Department in Washington would very shortly issue a formal request that the American citizen identified as John Meyer Frey be extradited from Sweden.
The request would be issued directly to the Swedish government, in accordance with the Agreement on Extradition between the European Union and the United States of America, which states that
all EU member states must cooperate in connection with the extradition of suspected criminals to the United States of America.
Stevens did not bother to mention Article 13 of the Agreement, which states that
any EU nation can refuse extradition if the criminal has been accused of a crime for which the penalty is death.