After the Monsoon Read online

  “Wipe yourself off” was all Grip could say, picking up the towel again. The bloody young man didn’t take it, didn’t see it, but kept his hands gently cupped around Grip’s tense fist and looked at him with that sadness in his face. He said something strange, it sounded like a plea. Grip didn’t look at him, or anywhere. All attention was on the closed door, and the turmoil behind it. Screams, voices, unintelligible words, splashes, and several thuds heard through the wall.

  The adrenaline was pumping and Grip’s entire being protested. An unholy agreement—they were counting on his muscles and his loyalty to shut out the world. It was within him that the moral line would be drawn, not in the bathroom, but he couldn’t possibly let himself get involved like the other two in there. Not with this, not the splashing and the screaming.

  “Stop it,” he screamed and kicked the bathroom door. “Now!”

  It took a few seconds before there was silence. Grip registered the bleeding youth’s pleas and yet again felt his hands on his own hand. All had gone quiet on the other side of the bathroom door. The man on the bedroom floor swayed and shook his head, and it seemed that he was crying. The young man in his grasp swallowed and repeated something; it sounded like a name. Grip looked at him, tried but didn’t understand. “What are you saying?”

  Again the sound of running water from the bathroom.

  The bleeding man still held on to Grip’s hands, trying to pull him closer, then whispered again what he’d said and continued in broken Swedish: “He man you want.”

  His eyes were terrified; he thought he was next.

  “He is man you want.”

  Grip raised his foot. “That’s fucking enough,” he shouted, and kicked so hard that his shoe broke through the door, and the lock gave way.

  7

  When the first shot rang out, people cheered. It hit the dusty ground of the shooting range, and a little cloud rose up like an exclamation point before falling again. Without a breath of wind, the smell of gunpowder clung to the shooter. In the harsh sunlight, the only shadows were made by the men waiting to shoot and by the row of cardboard figures against the berm. And so only human-shaped shadows darkened the ground—the targets were shaped like soldiers on a rampage.

  One of the Swedish soldiers had tried to give an introduction to rifle shooting, but it became a dull recitation of weapon parts, firing procedures, and which orders meant what. A necessary ritual. Some of the Djiboutians tried to follow along—this was useful information about weapons, after all—but the lesson was ruined by the others, who couldn’t stop fooling around. Even the interested ones lost track, and the Swede sped up to get it over with. He fired a shot for show, afterward explaining how to unload and how to secure the safety on a semiautomatic machine gun. After looking into the barrel and dropping the bolt back with a click, he turned the selector to lock and repeated in English: “Very important, do not forget.”

  The Djiboutians were anxious, once the mandatory introduction was over. When some of the Swedes disapproved, they’d split up into several small groups. Not much was said. A few pushed cartridges into empty magazines, one stood and drank water with a hard gaze, turning away from it all.

  “Okay, one of us for every weapon,” said the sergeant, Hansson, raising his voice to make something happen.

  “Do we start now?”

  “Yes, now we start!” Hansson pushed hard into the back of the soldier who asked, forcing him to get moving.

  This got a few others going, and soon all the weapons had been picked up, and the soldiers began instructing the Djiboutians, the click-clacks sounding as the bolts slid back and forth. The magazines were pushed in with a final slap, at the end. Most of the fooling around was over. Proper shooting positions were tried out, with the rifle butt pressed fully against the shoulder. A helping hand went to the man’s other shoulder, and one to his hip, making his chest turn and lean forward. The back leg was extended to provide support behind, creating stability to absorb the recoil again and again.

  “No one fires until I say,” shouted the sergeant who’d given the lesson. Lieutenant Slunga went up to Mr. Nazir and cajoled the foreman to participate, to get a feel for the weapon, fire a few shots. Wouldn’t it be harmless to try it, have a little fun? Mr. Nazir nodded and smiled, but he retained his island of self-respect and didn’t budge. Slunga clucked, but Mr. Nazir pretended not to notice.

  “Damn it, keep after that one!” someone shouted when a muzzle was pointing every which way.

  “Please, only point forward.”

  A shot rang out and everyone jumped. The shooter laughed.

  “Goddammit!”

  “What did I say?!”

  Glances were exchanged among the Swedes, both among those who were worried and those feeling they maintained a sliver of control. Hansson stretched and grinned with a glance toward Slunga. He thought for a moment and then said: “Let them shoot it off.”

  And so the shooting began. First with a furious volley that whipped across the shooting range, and the shell casings flew among the shooters. Those not holding a gun clapped their hands over their ears. A thin haze spread around them, carrying the acrid and almost arousing smell of burnt gunpowder, airborne dust, and a hint of something metallic.

  The intensity dropped a notch, to a persistent ta-ta-ta of firing. Some wanted to learn something, others just to shoot. Although they stood at only thirty meters, many shots landed in the dirt in front of the targets.

  “Did I hit?”

  “Not even close.”

  Then things grew calmer. The most enthusiastic had emptied their magazines, pressing their triggers in disbelief a few extra times before lowering their weapons. The sergeant who’d volunteered to lead the shooting was trying to say something, but he was constantly interrupted by those who had bullets left. A few still flinched with every shot they fired.

  There was silence for a while. In some of the paper soldiers, light shone through the holes of the hits.

  “Should we check the targets?” asked one soldier.

  “Of course,” said Hansson.

  “There isn’t a single hole in the one mine shot at,” said another soldier. “Can you believe it?”

  “I bet your barrel is warped,” the man next to him joked. He got no answer.

  “Well then,” said the sergeant, “all weapons down, while we check the targets.”

  Most went to see how they’d done, though a few lacked the energy to walk the thirty meters.

  In the next round, the pace was slower. Most of the Djiboutians were still anxious, but the khat and the heat had their effect. There was a kind of low-key disorder: scattered shots and then suddenly one shooter managed to switch to automatic fire and get off a good round. One Swede winced and covered his head; others just looked at their watches.

  They could have stopped right there.

  But the sergeant was feeling ambitious. “We’ll mark again, and then a final round. Don’t we have a little ammunition left?” He got no response. Mr. Nazir looked at Slunga, silently asking to end things. But now it was Slunga who pretended not to see.

  “Well then,” said Hansson. “One more time.”

  “All weapons down,” the sergeant reminded them.

  Half the men went up to the cardboard figures. One of the Africans smiled broadly and pointed to his sweet spot. All his shots were clustered in the chest of the paper soldier. He shouted to the others in Somali. “Rambo-man,” someone said back.

  “It’s always like this,” said a Swede. “They can, if they want to.”

  “Sure, one by one,” replied someone.

  “Put the tape on.”

  “I don’t want to do this, I want a beer.”

  “Tape!”

  They spread out to put black patches over the holes.

  A bang.

  Everyone at the shooting range jumped, looking around in fear, even those who’d stayed lazily in the back with their weapons. It took several seconds before they realized that a shot had
been fired.

  “No!”

  One man’s shadow missing in the afternoon sun.

  Lieutenant Per-Erik Slunga lay flat and motionless on his stomach. The dry sand soaked up the blood that streamed from his head.

  8

  Ernst Grip suffered from insomnia. He never got to bed before midnight. He’d sworn to himself that he’d turn in at a reasonable hour, but then when it came time to get ready, a bad feeling would come over him, or else he’d just sit there. Right there, until the clock said past two in the morning, the hours sifting away like sand. Simply gone. So it was, night after night. Up for work the next morning, no more than four or five hours of sleep in the bank. At the end of the week, he wasn’t all there. Everything felt fuzzy. He ate badly and often had headaches. The world was just something that went on outside the thick glass that surrounded him. And so it had been, for almost a year.

  Or more accurately, since June 5 of the past year. It was at about eleven in the evening when Benjamin Hayden had died. Around eleven—it was always hard to decide which was the last breath, when there was barely any breathing at all. To Grip, Benjamin had only ever been Ben. It was just them in the room. For more than two days, the vigil had gone on. Hour after hour, Grip had struggled with his conflicting emotions, from his powerful desire to keep Ben with him, to the hope that he would finally let go. Hours of silent tears, comforting words—both for the dying and for himself—along with small confessions and the desire for forgiveness for any wrongs that still gnawed at him.

  From Ben, in return, came nothing more than barely perceptible breathing. He’d gotten dehydrated and thin as a thousand-year-old mummy over the past few months. Watching his decline and hearing his sighs had been painful for Grip. Those last weeks, when he barely stuck out from the sheets, had been disturbing. It was more than just the idea of a corpse, it was the tangible presence of death. He saw his own impotence in Ben’s withered figure. There was not the slightest thing he could do to reverse the direction. Death would triumph and told him so. Powerlessness was a condition Ernst Grip despised, as much in himself as in others. Being a victim. And here, there were two. When he thought about it, he told himself that he wanted to remember the way Ben had been before, and that this was his understandable excuse for looking in the other direction the next time the body was exposed. But even though he was ashamed, he turned away.

  For there were still traces of life in Ben: in the heat of his hand, in the squinting, brief glances that occasionally rose out of the fog of death. As long as he was able to look up, he saw Grip. He stared Ernst Grip straight in the eye. Seven years they’d been together, seven years to a greater or lesser extent defined by his illness. Ben belonged to the group of gay men who’d held on long enough for the dramatic arrival of antiretroviral drugs in 1996. But by the time help finally arrived, the disease had already made deep inroads. The virus wasn’t defeated, though Ben’s decline was less steep. In the last year, he’d been in and out of hospitals, at first just a few days at a time, and then, toward the end, he couldn’t stay in the apartment in Chelsea more than an occasional long weekend. They went from the joy of a life together to a split in their roles. One who was dying, the other who looked on—and who had to deal with everything that life involved.

  Grip yo-yoed between Stockholm and New York. Torn between the desire to take care of and to be with, and the need to work all the overtime he could get in order to pay the bills of his dying lover in Manhattan. For despite it all, Ben wanted to have health care, good doctors always nearby. He’d endured it for so many years, survived so many of his friends, not always out of love of life as much as his all-consuming fear of death. It was fear that had kept Ben alive. But the stream of hospital bills was also an excuse.

  Grip’s trips to Stockholm weren’t just about duty and money; they became a way for him to breathe. Not just to be there for someone else, watching and standing by, but to be himself. Himself. To work, to take something on, to do some good. To hear people laugh at a clumsy joke, to get angry with someone without having to hold back. The flow of impressions during the workday kept other thoughts from rising up. There was the vaguely pleasant satisfaction of dealing with the car in the Säpo garage and with equipment in the office, and realizing that he didn’t have to devote every single moment to Ben when he got to work in the morning. But finally, Ben was too weak, and Grip couldn’t work more or borrow more than he already had.

  Then there was a hospice for Ben, with a good reputation but grim single rooms. Run by volunteers, the care they offered was essentially a last few days under morphine. Once they moved in, Ben and Grip realized that these four bare walls would be their last room together. Sometimes Ben yelled out, full of anxiety and accusations. Those who worked there called it the release of a dying person’s unresolved thoughts. Grip knew better.

  A couple of times at the end, they’d still managed to talk about the good times, agreeing on which were their best memories. Trips to Cape Cod, the house with the fireplace they’d sometimes borrowed by the sea. The café at the Whitney Museum, where they’d sat down and decided to try each other out. These were the bright spots, because when the morphine erased the pain, it also destroyed the ability to hold on to thoughts and talk. The awareness in those squinting eyes became increasingly rare. Just a few quiet words. When did everything fall silent? The breathing slowed. One evening in June, shortly after eleven o’clock, Grip let go of the cold hand.

  He sat with the body for a couple of hours and then went home and curled up for the rest of the night. Never in his life had he felt so alone. The worst was knowing it would continue. The feeling of not really knowing what he’d left behind or what would come next.

  Grip had never even met Ben’s family. Lawyers, mostly, with a friendly manner and a penchant for living lies. There was a barrier that Ben himself had created. He’d managed to be out everywhere, except to them. Twice a year he went home to Houston to play the returning son, a little sickly, admittedly, but above all straight. In that world there was no Grip—and what they suspected, he could only guess. Given that even the most casual acquaintances knew that Ben was a gay man who ran a gallery, it was as simple as that. He’d forbidden Grip to contact the family before his death. When he died, his elderly mother came up immediately, and his father a few days later. In their eyes, apparently he’d come to New York to clean. “Thanks for your help” and a handshake, that was all they had to say to Grip. He was less surprised by their attitude than by their efficiency. A family of lawyers, with hired henchmen to slash straight through the administrative details. Not even a week after Grip had let go of his lover’s hand, the Flatiron gallery was boarded up.

  At a tense meeting in the apartment, Grip was permitted to go around and take what was unmistakably his—not much besides clothing. As soon as he picked up or looked at any of the things that represented shared memories, his parents glared. Even when he lifted up an unremarkable piece of driftwood from New London, the mother stretched her neck vigilantly. Despite his mounting anger, Grip restrained himself. But when he was about to leave, and the father held out his hand for the keys, Grip pointedly held the bundle a few seconds too long above his open palm before he released them. A lawyer was also present, which Grip saw as some kind of passing acknowledgment.

  Grip returned that same night. Of course there’d been a spare key. He brought a suitcase with him, and after a half hour going through their possessions, the worst of his anger from earlier in the day had subsided. The twisted driftwood branch lay in his overstuffed bag. When he was done, he moved some furniture around in the apartment, pulled out a couple of drawers, and yanked up the carpet as if someone had kicked it. And then he left, leaving the front door of the apartment unlocked.

  After a few blocks, he threw the spare key into a storm drain. Not so much to hide his tracks, as to make sure he wouldn’t be tempted to return for more.

  9

  It wasn’t until after lunch on Monday that the syrupy feeling st
arted to go away. He hadn’t slept much the night before. Once again, it was past two when he got into bed.

  Ernst Grip was supposed to be with the crown princess that afternoon, but someone had fixed his schedule so he could go to the debriefing after the Husby raid. The meeting was a mere formality, with not a single SWAT guy there, because no matter how you spun it, the operation had failed. Sure, there was still a little game with the evening papers: the prosecutor who approved the action and a security police chief made it sound like something major. But they had failed. Three Somalis with Swedish residence permits, a little over a hundred thousand kronor in cash, and a box of mobile phones with SIM cards. In short, a complete bust. No suicide vests, no weapons, no USB sticks with grandiose plans. Something had gone wrong, or gone cold, and now no one at Säpo headquarters wanted to speak English over the encrypted phone.

  No one said a word about a bathroom.

  He sat through the half-hour debriefing while a chief who hadn’t been on the scene explained to the others what they’d done. A boiled-down version, summarized in a few bullet points on a single PowerPoint slide. Nods, agreement. They’d done what they could—wasn’t that true?—based on the intelligence they had—wasn’t that true! When the review was over, and a paper had been circulated approving compensation for new front and bathroom doors, the two security police officers who’d actually been there went up to Grip.

  “They really didn’t talk?” asked one, while the other sized Grip up. A question repeated from the day before.

  When the bathroom door had caved in from Grip’s kick, and he’d stared at them with rage and contempt, both police officers had worn guilty looks. Later, they told him they’d simply been trying to instill fear. The Somali had been lying on the floor, exhausted and soaked to the bone.

  “So, did he spill his guts?” Grip had asked defiantly, a little later, when it was just the three of them. Obviously, there’d been no confession, only violent splashing, and a man weeping and praying for his life in Somali. But his coworkers figured it was the men in the bedroom who’d give up the important stuff. The two under Grip’s control. They were the ones who’d be scared into talking. The ones who didn’t yet know but who imagined what was coming. Grip had told the officers that they hadn’t said a word, that they were speechless with fear. Now they repeated the question a day later, beyond the chief’s ears: “They really didn’t talk?”