Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (15 page)

I
t certainly was a tall order for Jerry the Knife to convince his team of bodyguards that they should not resemble the country's most dangerous motorcycle gang, wearing leather jackets and brass knuckles, and bearing fully visible thirty-five-thousand-krona Soviet Avtomat Kalashnikova model 47s obtained via what was easily the nation's least trustworthy weapons dealer.

Instead, chinos and jackets were the order of the day—garments the majority of the bodyguards hadn't worn since the graduation none of them had actually had. Where appropriate, machine guns should be kept hidden under a light overcoat and the American hand grenades tidily placed in each jacket pocket.

“We are here to take out the hostile element,” Jerry the Knife explained, “not scare off good, honest visitors.”

The most expensive investment had been a metal detector for the entrance. The biggest advantage in Jerry the Knife's opinion was that he could make sure no weapons were smuggled in. The priest and the receptionist realized that in time, with the help of the metal detector and hidden cameras, they would learn who had coins to put in the collection plate and who had bills. They had no intention of wasting church space on people who wanted spiritual care but weren't prepared to pay for it.

The cemetery had been transformed into a parking lot with space for five hundred vehicles. Under the asphalt lay an unknown number
of the dead, dating from 1800 to 1950. No one inquired what these souls might think of the paving; the souls in question made no noise about it.

If the parking lot filled, that would surely mean a thousand visitors, but the church, while certainly ample in size, could seat no more than eight hundred. So the receptionist had a giant screen installed outside, with a sound system of such quality, for such a price, that he came down with stomach ache. The screen arrived on the morning that the first sermon was to be preached. The installation was paid in cash. All that remained of what had once been a fortune was in the two suitcases.

“Don't worry!” said the priest. “Remember that faith can move mountains, both in the Bible and outside it.”

“Outside it?”

Why, yes. During her theological studies, the priest had become engrossed in alternative theories, beyond Genesis, where God whips up both Heaven and Earth in just a few days. Another truth one could choose to believe in was what they called Pangaea, the supercontinent that broke itself apart and formed all the current-day continents, mountains, valleys, and so on. Maybe because someone believed in it hard enough—who was the priest to judge?

The priest's calm made the receptionist feel calmer as well. The state of affairs was such that soon the yellow and the red suitcases would likely again be filled to the brim with money. What did it matter if the priest's faith moved a mountain or two at the same time? And she could decide for herself whence she gathered that faith.

“Then I will go with the Bible just this once. Solely to save time. God took a week. Pangaea slid apart over thousands of millions of years, and I can't tolerate Hitman Anders, campers, and all the rest of it for that long.”

“All the rest of it? Not even me?” the receptionist wondered.

“For a thousand million years? Well, maybe.”

***

There were just hours left until Hitman Anders's première. Jerry the Knife stood on a small rise in the northwestern corner of the churchyard and swept his eyes left to right and back again. Everything seemed nice and calm.

But what was that on the gravel path? An old man with a rake! A threat? It looked like he was doing what people usually do with rakes.

He was raking.

Was he planning to do the entire path, all the way from the road to the church entrance?

“We have a problem at the end of the gravel path,” he informed his staff, via the communication equipment, which hadn't exactly been free either.

“Should I waste him?” wondered the sniper in the bell tower.

“No, you idiot,” said Jerry the Knife. “I'll go and find out who he is.”

The old man was still raking. Jerry clasped his favorite knife in his jacket pocket. He introduced himself as the head of security with the Church of Anders and asked who the man was and what he was doing.

“I'm raking the path,” said the old man.

“Yes, so I see,” said Jerry the Knife. “But who asked you to do it?”

“Asked me? I've raked this path before each service for the last thirty years, once a week, except it's been less frequent for the past two years, ever since the ungodly decision to shut down this house of God.”

“Blast it all,” said Jerry the Knife, who had been practicing for several days to avoid using swear words at his new job. “My name is Jerry,” he said, letting go of the knife to shake hands with the old man.

“Börje Ekman,” said the raking man. “Churchwarden Börje Ekman.”

C
hurchwarden Börje Ekman did not believe in luck, good or bad. He didn't believe in anything beyond himself, God, Jesus, and rules and regulations. But an outsider, a not particularly religiously inclined observer, would likely say that his coming encounter with Hitman Anders was unlucky.

The man who had reason to wish his life might take a different direction from the one it was about to take had, until the day before, been a civil servant in the Ministry of Labor. Forty years at the same workplace, although it had changed names a few times. He had undertaken the work as churchwarden for what had now become the Church of Anders on a voluntary basis, in the hope of sitting well in the eyes of St. Peter on Judgment Day.

For the past three decades, the ever more disillusioned man had merely been serving out his time at the ministry. Things had been different in his early years. Back then he'd worked for his salary. And that wasn't all. He'd waged an out-and-out war against the Wild West attitude that prevailed in at least one of the departments Börje Ekman's ministry was in charge of. Börje discovered that agents at the employment agency regularly left the office at irregular intervals to wander aimlessly about the city on the hunt for available jobs to be the agent of. This they called going out to “meet employers,” to “make connections,” to “build trust.”

According to the young Börje Ekman, this roll-up-your-sleeves
strategy was thoroughly vile. Just think of the risk: with no one sent out to check on him, an agent might visit an establishment to have a beer.

Alcohol. During working hours. My God!

B
ö
rje Ekman would have preferred the employment agency to be so perfectly structured that unemployment in the country could be described in detail: age, sex, trade, demography, education, almost down to the individual. Making that happen required clear organization: a hierarchical structure without internal tension or conflict. The employment agency would become the perfect workplace. In the long run, this would lead to a completely predictable result. For Börje Ekman, it had been a joy to think about.

But as long as the agents were running around looking for available jobs, it would be impossible to control the results. At one time an agent in Täby had become so friendly with an executive that he had managed to convince the man in question to add an extra shift to his business, which had created eighty new jobs in the community, a nightmare for any employment analyst. There were no columns to calculate the results that might be achieved between businessmen and employment agents in the sauna or after a round of golf (which the employment agent in question would lose on purpose, even if it sometimes took double strokes into the water hazard on the eighteenth hole).

Börje Ekman was not so stupid that he didn't understand that eighty jobs were eighty jobs, no matter how they had arisen. But there was always the bigger picture to consider. Because what the employment agent in question had done, besides play golf during working hours, was overlook the administrative side of things. Thanks to a single employment agent, that quarter's statistics ended up skewed and incomplete for the entire northern district of Greater Stockholm. What was more, the agent had refused to certify the activity reports of the eighty formerly unemployed persons.

“Grunt work,” he'd said to Börje Ekman. “I can't spend weeks
sorting through papers about people who already have jobs, can I?” And then he'd hung up, before going to golf his way to seven new jobs in the plumbing and HVAC industries.

Those were, however, the last things he did before being fired for refusal to work and for a few other infractions that Börje Ekman had been forced to make up to get the guy off his back. In some ways it was too bad, because the man was fantastic at arranging new jobs. And he'd done so right up to the end, because the result of his dismissal was the opening of a new opportunity at the employment agency's Täby offices. Börje Ekman immediately pulled enough strings to make sure that the man's replacement had a different perspective. Above all, structure and statistics, so the politicians could clearly see what the employment market looked like. With madcaps like the man who had just been let go, the risk was close to one hundred percent that the quarterly prognoses would not reflect reality. The political opposition
loved
prognostication errors, so they were the worst thing a civil servant could spend his time on.

Now, it goes without saying that a written prognosis cannot adapt itself to reality, for the simple reason that it has already been written down. Thus reality must adapt itself to the prognosis. For Börje Ekman, this was a truth that applied to all situations except the weather. That was something the Lord ruled with an extra-steady hand, to the presumed despair of the prognosticators at the weather service in Norrköping. Time and again the meteorologists predicted sun for the next day, upon which God called for rain. Börje Ekman shuddered at the thought of having to work at such a place, but he was simultaneously intrigued by the idea of being the one with a direct line to the Lord, with a bit of help from the weather stations and satellites. He would take meteorological accuracy to new heights.

Loosely translated, then, the important matter was the degree of predictability rather than the quality of the result. Even more loosely translated: from a strictly weather-related perspective, all citizens should be forced to relocate to the area just north of
Gothenburg. Then it would be clear exactly how many meteorologists were needed: none. All anyone would have to do to be correct on 200 to 250 days out of 365 was predict rain the next day. Add to this Börje Ekman's contact with God, and the accuracy would rise to around eighty-five or ninety percent, depending on the Lord's availability at any given moment.

When applied to the Ministry of Labor, Börje Ekman's logic dictated that nothing should happen from quarter to quarter. On those occasions when something happened anyway, a bunch of analysts within the department were forced to start their calculations again from scratch. While this certainly supported employment in that particular department, it was also the sort of thing that annoyed politicians and could even cause them to lose elections. And if there was anything civil servants had learned over the years, it was that no office or desk in the Ministry of Labor was so small or remotely placed that there wasn't another somewhere else that was even smaller and even further from all the action.

Börje Ekman was a living example of this principle. In forty years he had made so many missteps that by the time he retired he had been moved, moved again, and ultimately moved and forgotten by the organization he ought to have been part of. Börje didn't bother to remind any of his colleagues of his existence. Instead, he slowly counted down to the day he turned sixty-five, when the head of the department, the minister herself, gave a short speech about what an extraordinary colleague Börje Ekman had been, but only after she had carefully looked up his name and what sort of work he might have been involved in.

For the last time, Börje Ekman left his office, which was not much bigger than a large pantry. He was not bitter in the least! He found that now, several decades after his burning enthusiasm, the Ministry of Labor had begun, step by step, to adopt his vision of statistics and supervision in place of the fumbling,
ad hoc
arranging of jobs. But the work of not arranging jobs as a primary task was done half-heartedly.
The doomed politicians interfered, as did the doomed citizens in general. Every four years there was a democratic election, before which the political parties promised to combat unemployment in one way or another (or a third way). No matter how they did it, it made a muddle of the ministry. If only the voters would stop changing parties all the time. Now, after each election, the civil servants had to administer a new unsuccessful jobs policy instead of continuing with the old, equally unsuccessful one.

The civil servant, single all these years, would thus have had a relatively meaningless life if it hadn't been that he made sure to self-actualize in other ways. He left unemployment behind, placing it in God's hands, to build himself a career in the divine.

And a good career it was. It consisted of constantly building up churchly structure in the congregation to which he belonged and of which he eventually controlled all aspects.

His religious existence brought Börje Ekman outright happiness. And he had intended to become even happier once he retired. He would get to spend all his waking hours as the congregation's unofficial shepherd. And the sheep all listened and obeyed, including the ram in the pulpit.

Until catastrophe struck. The church closed its doors, and the congregation—including eighteen of the nineteen active members—joined the neighboring church. Instead of going with them, as the nineteenth and final member, Börje Ekman walked around lamenting his old church. Now and again he made sure to keep the gravel path free of weeds. Granlund, in the neighboring church, was nothing but a conceited ass (that is, someone who wouldn't allow Börje Ekman to decide what he wanted and how he wanted it).

And then, a few weeks earlier, the former churchwarden's former parish was sold, church, cemetery, and all—to the newly saved former hitman the whole country seemed to be talking about. The thought of reporting to such a man was not inviting; it might even have caused him to reconsider the position he intended to occupy
until reaching the Pearly Gates. But this was his church, after all, and he would soon help the hitman to realize that fact (unlike Granlund, who understood nothing). Sweden's best churchwarden was back, although no one knew it yet.

Börje Ekman had already been over two or three times to rake before the fresh start, but no one discovered him until the grand opening day. Jerry, his name was. Head of security? Over what?

Between rakings, Börje had got through his last few days in his pantry at the ministry with a smile. In his mind, he was working full-time with his new congregation. Three days left, two days, one . . . a cakeless farewell—and now, on the first day after his last day, it was time for the grand opening of his beloved church.

He had purposely avoided making himself known. He'd been planning to wait until after the first sermon. He would pop up like a pleasant surprise for the congregation leadership, who would surely be at a loss, and who had everything left to learn.

These were the sorts of thoughts that called up the very smile that, in the not-too-distant future, would stiffen.