Helena Schwarz continued to speak too loudly until he was well out of the room and could therefore, in an equally loud voice, ask her to take a deep breath and calm down, to tell him what had happened in a normal voice.
She cried as she spoke.
She had just found out that a judge in Ohio had set the date for John Meyer Frey’s execution.
Schwarz had barely left Sheremetyevo International Airport and Moscow when the process of setting an execution date, which was normally very protracted, was already complete.
Schwarz had not even landed in the country to which he was being transported by the time the court had processed his case and set the
exact
time of his death.
Ewert Grens listened to the wife’s incoherent monologue for a few minutes and then asked her to hang up, he would call her back later, but he had a couple of things he needed to do first.
He then made a quick call to the duty security manager at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and got the answer he wanted. When he opened the door back into the venue, Siw was singing her version of “Lucky Lips” and he stood swaying and smiling through half the old hit before once again walking through the room while the show was going on and drawing looks that quickly changed from enjoyment to irritation—a woman of around his age with fiery red hair set in a bun even shook her fist at him as he passed.
He stopped behind Hermansson, who pretended not to notice, bent forward and whispered in her ear that he had to leave, that she could of course stay if she wanted to, and if not he would pay for her taxi home.
She followed him out, trying to hide behind his broad back to avoid the contempt.
Her light-colored coat that looked new and his dark overcoat that once had been; the boy in the cloakroom put back the empty coat hangers with a look of surprise on his face as the whole house sang along.
“Ewert, what’s going on?”
It was cold outside, just as it had been early in the morning, this day seemed like it would never fucking end.
“I’m going to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I have to talk to the people in charge. A person who called me at home in the middle of the night, less than twenty-four hours ago.”
“I can tell that you’re furious.”
“That was Helena Schwarz on the phone. The date for the execution has already been set.”
Grens had never seen Hermansson get really angry. Control, that was the word that popped up when he thought about how to describe her response to emotions. Now she turned her face up to the dark sky and struggled not to scream, not to cry.
“I’m coming with you.”
“I’m going to do this alone.”
“Ewert—”
“It’s not up for discussion. I’ll get you a taxi.”
“
You
are not going to pay for
me
to get home.”
Someone came out into the foyer behind them and they heard the applause that rushed out through the doors and windows. The audience was having a good time.
“Then I won’t. But I do want you to take a car home. If nothing else, for the sake of an old-fashioned S.O.B.”
Grens dialed the number for the police command post despite her protests and ordered a radio car to pick Detective Sergeant Hermansson up from Jakobs Torg and drive her home to Kungsholmen. Then he started to walk. The clock on Jakob’s Church struck twice and he looked up at the illuminated face: half past ten. It wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the man with a limp, dressed in a smart suit, didn’t meet anyone on his way there, so his face, flushed red with fury, did not draw any attention.
twenty-four hours left
HE HAD LAIN ON THE BUNK FOR THE FIRST FOUR WEEKS. AS IF HE HAD
already died. The green ceiling had been repainted, a shade of light blue. The smell had been the same. A single breath and the six years of freedom had never happened. He had tried not to gag but then had to throw up until he was empty and could smell that smell again and had to spew again. He had lain staring up at the light that was always on, didn’t blink even though his eyes ached—it had been hard to see anything after a couple of days. He had not said a word. Not to the Mexican in the next cell, not to the guy with the German name on the other side. Not even to the senior corrections officer whom he knew so well; Vernon Eriksen had stood outside the cell and asked all sorts of friendly questions, but John hadn’t even been able to get up, turn around, open his mouth.
The cold seeped in from the rectangular windows up under the ceiling in East Block. There was still some snow, as was usual in March, the last remnants before spring took over.
Ewert Grens had fallen asleep around midnight. He had curled up on the too-short sofa in his office at the City Police headquarters until his dreams had stopped hounding him. He sat up now, wide awake, his back aching, his neck stiffer than ever.
The investigation was closed and he had gone back to work. It was still unclear what exactly had happened two months earlier when he’d walked from a show in a restaurant, dressed in a suit, his breath smelling of alcohol, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, got past security, and forced his way into the state secretary’s room. There were witness statements that spoke of arguments and someone who passed the office also thought they heard the detective superintendent shouting words that Thorulf Winge later claimed were unlawful threats when he reported the incident, statements that could not be proved.
Grens looked at the alarm clock that stood on his desk. Just after three, night in Stockholm, evening in Ohio.
Suddenly he realized why he’d woken up.
Exactly twenty-four hours until the execution.
He got up and left the room, wandered down one of the many dark corridors of the police headquarters. A coffee from the machine, a stale bun from a basket on a table in a staffroom, someone had obviously been celebrating and brought in coffee and cake and left what hadn’t been eaten for others.
He had never been prevented from working before. A month without being allowed to come here. The investigation and suspension had transformed daily life into living hell, nowhere to go, nothing to do to while away the time. If it hadn’t been clear before, it certainly was now, crystal clear, that there was nothing else.
The corridors echoed as he limped through the dark. He was at home here, sad or not, that was the truth and he hadn’t thought of apologizing.
Twenty-four hours left. A person was going to be executed, a process that Grens himself had unwittingly started was now coming to a close; a person, maybe even an
innocent
person, was going to die in a nation-state’s name.
Grens would continue to pursue people who abused others forever and laugh every time they spat at him from behind bars. But death? If he had ever wondered what he really thought of the death sentence, he now knew.
Another bun from the basket on his way back to the office again, where he sat down at the desk.
He was going to make a phone call. He should have done it a long time ago. Grens lifted the receiver, wished the switchboard lady good evening, and asked to be connected to a number in Ohio, in the United States. It felt good to hear Ruben Frey’s surprised voice a few seconds later, and he explained that he just wanted to say to him and Helena Schwarz that he was thinking about them.
The warden of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility looked at the telephone demanding attention on his desk. He turned around, let the ringing beat against the walls of his big office. He moved slowly from the desk to the group of sofas and a small dish of after-dinner mints, from there to the window with a view of the town that was waiting, a few miles away. He had taken the phone calls to begin with, explained to each journalist and anyone who was interested that he had set up an inquiry, that he, especially, was anxious to establish how, six years ago, an inmate had managed to escape his execution, from a prison from which it was impossible to escape.
He looked out into the dark, counted the streetlamps along the road that linked a wall with the rest of the world, balls of light that softened the night that was finally free of snow.
Eight weeks and still he knew nothing.
Frey had refused to talk, he had been questioned by the FBI and the prison’s head of security. And all the others, the corrections officers and anyone who had ever had anything to do with Frey, which eventually was the greater part of Marcusville’s inhabitants, all those interviews and still absolutely nothing.
It was evening outside, and he longed to be out there.
Twenty-four hours to go. He turned around and looked at the telephone that was now screaming for his attention, he would just let the noise echo around the room, it would soon be over. The investigation and interviews had led to nothing, but he didn’t begrudge them—quite the opposite—there had been no revelations of any errors on the part of the prison at the time of John Meyer Frey’s disappearance.
What had happened had happened.
The sooner the truth about the escape was forgotten both inside and outside the prison, the better.
He remembered the conversations with Marv. John missed having someone to talk to, about death, someone who knew, someone else who knew
exactly
when.
Marv had often spoken about a town.
About two hundred white people and one black man.
John knew all about that now. He’d been on his own in towns like that all his life. On the lawns of Marcusville as he grew up, a decade in the corridor in East Block, six years and two days in Sweden. He knew who the town’s only black man was. That fucking veil all around him everywhere, he couldn’t touch them, he could never reach out to them.
A couple of times he’d knocked on the wall and waited for Marv’s answer. It had all felt so familiar, so easy to forget the years that had passed since they spoke to each other for the last time, before he was taken away.
Alice Finnigan was putting her clothes on the chair by her bed when she felt the hands stroking her back. They carried on up and grabbed her breasts from behind and held them like no one had held them for years.
She heard her husband’s warm breath on her neck. She didn’t dare move at all, scared of doing something wrong, scared of feeling the wrong thing. Edward hadn’t touched her for so long. Not even tried, apart from the day when they’d heard that John Meyer Frey was still alive and therefore could still be killed. She had rejected him then. She couldn’t do it again. She felt the force of his erection push against her bottom and she turned around. His cheeks were red, his neck flushed, he held her so tight that it hurt when they lay down. His eyes were almost happy when he looked at her, and he moved back and forth with an energy she thought he no longer had, he was so fervent, he wanted to feel her around him.
She tried to suppress her revulsion when he wanted to lie close to her afterward, when his sticky penis nudged her thigh.
Sven sat on a chair in Jonas’s room. Anita had been asleep for a few hours now in the room next door and his son was breathing deeply in the bed in front of him, the sleep of babes, free of worry. In the weeks that had passed since he broke down in tears in front of his family, they had spoken several times about the prisoner who Sven had accompanied out of the country and who was now going to die. Jonas had been actively interested in the at times intense media focus that was so evident on TV and in the papers. He had written an essay in school about people who had to be punished and die, in art he had drawn pictures of people lying in front of executioners with black hoods on their heads; a catalogue of execution methods from the mind of an eight-year-old.
Sven looked at his son, his small body that twitched every now and then under the covers and soft, fluffy animals. Perhaps it was good to talk to his son about life and death, he had thought about it many times. But not like this. He was certain that a child’s reflections on death should not start with the question of a state’s right to take life.
John Meyer Frey had been informed that Revised Code 2949.22 no longer gave every prisoner the right to choose his or her own method of execution, but the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction guaranteed that the execution would be carried out in a professional, humane, and dignified manner.
He had ironically asked for the firing squad—it had to be that quick— but the warden who was standing in front of him waiting for his answer told him curtly that the state of Ohio wasn’t allowed to shoot people to death.
He had asked to be hanged, as it meant that your neck was broken and you weren’t slowly strangled, just a few seconds, alive one minute, dead the next—but the state of Ohio wasn’t allowed to hang people.
He had asked for the electric chair, but the state of Ohio was no longer allowed to generate nine hundred to two thousand volts and pass them through a person’s body.
His choice: lethal injection.
He had been dreaming a lot, last night as well.
Helena Schwarz stood in the hall of Ruben Frey’s large house in Marcusville. She looked at her father-in-law’s back, concentrated on the telephone conversation he was about to finish. She had listened to his responses and understood that it was someone calling to see how John was, how they all were, waiting. She wasn’t sure, but it could be that middleaged policeman from Stockholm—a few of the things that Ruben had said gave that impression. It was hard to understand, it had been so intense, but she hadn’t thought about him or anyone else at all since she came here nearly six weeks ago now; the only things that mattered were here.
“Mr. Grens.”
So it was him.
“What did he want?”
“Nothing, I don’t think. Just to ask how we were.”
Helena had been trying to put her son to bed since eight o’clock. It was now nearly half past nine. He could feel it, of course he could, something that was more important than sleep, that made his mother and grandfather anxious and sad, he had picked up on it and was therefore anxious and sad himself.