Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (19 page)

W
hile the priest and the receptionist spent Sunday afternoon on worrying thoughts about Börje Ekman, Hitman Anders made another appearance, this time in excellent spirits. He'd been downtown and back again. At Stureplan, there were a pub and a bathhouse next door to each other; together, they comprised chicken soup for a hitman's body and soul.

“Heigh-ho,” he said. “I see we're grumpy today.”

He was freshly showered, freshly shaven, and was wearing a new short-sleeved shirt. Both arms were covered with tattoos, including knives, a skull, and two winding snakes. The priest realized she must remember never to allow him to preach without a jacket on.

“I
said
, I see we're grumpy today,” Hitman Anders repeated. “Shouldn't we go through next Saturday's sermon soon? I have some ideas.”

“We're thinking, so it would be nice if you didn't bother us too much at the moment,” said the receptionist.

“All this thinking,” said Hitman Anders. “What if you just stopped now and then to enjoy life for a second? Or, as it says in Psalm Thirty-seven: ‘The meek shall inherit the land and delight in abundant prosperity.'”

How much must he browse through that confounded book?
thought the priest. But she didn't say it. Instead, she looked him up and down and
said, “And according to Leviticus nineteen, you're not supposed to shave or tattoo your arms, so shut your trap, if you please.”

“Nice one.” The receptionist smiled as Hitman Anders slunk off, freshly shaved, with his skulls, winding snakes, and all the rest.

Sunday became Monday, but no solution to the Börje Ekman problem presented itself. That was, no solution other than the either/or version they had already reasoned their way to: either Börje Ekman would voluntarily get on board or he would be
forced
on board by Jerry and his knife. Might the two-thirty meeting go well: they didn't need any complications right now.

* * *

On Monday morning, the churchwarden began his work before the clock had struck nine. There was a lot to be done. First the gravel path, of course. Then wash selected areas of the parking lot and clear up all the loose parts left by the cars that had backed into each other as a result of what had to have been Sweden's record-breaking drunk-driving event two days earlier. As the Stockholm police prioritized sobriety checks during the times of day and week when everyone was sober (including the police themselves), no one suffered any consequences.

At eleven o'clock or thereabouts, Börje Ekman took a short break. He sat on one of the benches along the path to the church and took out his sausage sandwich and a small bottle of milk. He gazed emptily straight ahead, sighing for the umpteenth time when he caught sight of something in the rosebushes, which otherwise quite serviceably blocked the view of the parking lot west of the church. Was there no limit to how much litter those drunkards could leave?

But what
was
that thing? Börje put aside his sandwich and milk and went over for a closer look.

A . . . revolver?
Two
revolvers!

His mind boggled. Had he found himself in the midst of some criminal matter?

And then he remembered the response when he'd asked how much the collection brought in. Five thousand? God in Heaven, how naïve he had been!
That
was why they plied the churchgoers with alcohol! So that they would put more and then more in the buckets, and, where appropriate, top it all with a pile of vomit under which, one might suspect, rested more money than they claimed made up their entire takings for the week before.

A former hitman, a priest who apparently didn't believe in God, and a . . . well, whatever the other fellow was. The one who said his name was Per Persson. A made-up name, clearly.

What else? He'd heard the name only once. It was probably the pastor himself who'd said it, who called the head of “security,” the man who never left his side, “Jerry the Knife”!
They aren't thinking of the Lord, they aren't thinking of any starving children, they're only thinking of themselves!
thought Börje Ekman, who had essentially spent his entire life doing the very same thing.

In that exact moment, the Lord spoke to him for the first time, after Börje Ekman had spent his entire earthly life in his service. “It is you, Börje, and no one else, who can save this, my house. It is only you who have seen the madness that is going on. You are the only one who understands. It is you who must do what you must do. Do it, Börje. Do it!”!”

“Yes, Lord,” answered Börje Ekman. “Just tell me: what is it I must do? Tell me and I will do it. Lead me on the right path, Lord.”

But God was just like Jesus: he spoke only when he had the time or the inclination. He did not answer his subject, not then and not later. The fact is, God would never reveal himself again as long as Börje Ekman lived.

T
he churchwarden cancelled the two-thirty meeting, citing a migraine and adding that it wasn't very urgent after all to sort out what needed to be sorted out. The priest was surprised to hear that the bushes were no longer burning, but she had plenty of other matters to worry about. She was satisfied to think that what had been about to be either/or
might land somewhere in between.

Oh, how she did deceive herself.

The churchwarden just needed to gather his thoughts. He rode his bicycle home to his studio apartment. “Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said to himself. Biblical cities where sin had reigned beyond all limits, but only until the Lord had put a stop to it. “Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Church of Anders,” said Börje Ekman.

Maybe the situation had to get worse before it could get better.

That had been President Nixon's analysis of the situation in Vietnam, which had ended up getting worse before it had got even more worse. In the end, Nixon's career had perished (albeit for reasons other than Vietnam).

History does tend to have the unfortunate habit of repeating itself. A plan began to form in the mind of the churchwarden. Plus there was always the Tax Authority: he could count that as a plan in and of itself. First worse, then better (was his plan, anyway).

The end result? First worse, then even more worse. At which point Börje Ekman perished too.

* * *

The countess was currently crouching, deep in meticulous reconnaissance, in a patch of forest with a view of the newly constructed double side doors, which were opened and closed now and again. The doors were no more than four hundred feet away, although they were on the other side of the road. It was Wednesday and wine was being delivered; a truck had backed in, the doors were wide open, and box after box was being carried into the church. Between the car and the door stood a guard armed with a poorly concealed machine gun.

Just inside, the countess could see people who must be Johanna Kjellander and Per . . . something . . . Jansson? And beside them: Hitman Anders and his goddamned bodyguard.

The countess had binoculars, and when she used them she found she didn't recognize the guard—it was some hoodlum from outside her circle of acquaintances. It didn't much matter what his name was. If she and the count grew curious later on, they could always find his grave and see what it said on the headstone.

What
was
important was that if they had been ready there and then, they could have taken out both Hitman Anders and his bodyguard. The only remaining problem would have been the man with the machine gun outside the door. If worst came to worst, he would come for them, and they would need time to reload. On the plus side: the road between the church and the woods.

With this positive thinking, she could dispense with her recce for now. There was no rush: the most important thing was to get it right.

The countess returned to her white Audi and took off.

“Let her go,” said Olofsson. “She's just going home to report back to the fucking count.”

“Mm-hm,” Olofsson responded. “We'd better go up to those trees and find out what she was looking at.”

* * *

The mood was once again merry among the leadership of the Church of Anders. A fresh delivery of wine had arrived, along with crackers, grapes, and the ripe pastor cheese.

“We'll do the same snacks again,” said the priest. “They went down well. But maybe we should branch out for next week. We mustn't get stuck in a rut.”

“Burgers and fries?” Hitman Anders suggested.

“Or something else,” said the priest, adding that they had a sermon to prepare.

But the hitman was still coming up with ideas. Wine could be a bit harsh for some people's taste. He recalled his early teenage years, when he and his best friend (who later drugged himself to death; that was stupid) mixed rot-gut with Coca-Cola so they could get the decoction down themselves. When they learned, later on, to put Alka-Seltzer into the mix, it was even more fun.

“Sounds tasty,” said the priest. “Like I said, we'll look over the menu in the time to come and I promise we'll take your views into account. Can we focus on the sermon now?”

The Bible was a cornucopia of homage to wine as a gift from God. The priest jotted down something from memory about wine to make the human heart glad, oil to make the face shine, and bread to give the heart strength (taken from Psalms). And she added another slightly less verbatim quote from Ecclesiastes that said life without a real bender now and then was meaningless, utterly meaningless.

“Does it really say ‘bender'?” Hitman Anders wondered.

“No, but let's not quibble,” the priest said, as she wrote down the prophecy according to Isaiah that on the Day of Judgment there would be a feast of rich food and strong wine, a feast of rich food filled with marrow and well-aged wines strained clear.

“I'm telling you,” said Hitman Anders. “Rich food. Burgers and fries. We can skip the Coke and Alka-Seltzer.”

“Shall we take a little break?” said the priest.

A
fter the third Saturday it felt like things were starting to settle down a bit. For the second week in a row, the party had brought in a net sum of close to nine hundred thousand to the two needy people. The giant screen wasn't serving much purpose anymore, but the pews were still just as loaded as the people sitting in them.

Churchwarden Ekman had returned after a few days' absence, but he mostly seemed to slink around; thus far, he hadn't asked for another meeting with the priest or the receptionist. He seemed like a ticking time bomb, but at the same time there was so much more to think about. Sitting down to chat with him would, at best, lead to bribing him into membership of the club (that is, peace and quiet); at worst, they would be hastening a problem that seemed to have been put on the shelf.

“I'm far from certain that no news is good news in this case, but I still think we should avoid bothering him for the time being,” said the receptionist. “As long as he's not bothering us.”

The priest agreed, even if she felt that things were going a little too well on all fronts. After a life in which everything goes wrong, it's easy to become suspicious when the opposite ensues.

There had, for example, been no incidents in the form of activity from the almost certainly frustrated underworld. Hitman Anders's
threat that the list of contracts taken out would become public upon his demise seemed to have done the trick.

The deliveries of wine and treats each Wednesday at one p.m. were also flowing smoothly. The receptionist realized that this sort of routine was just the type of thing that potential attackers would love, but he trusted Jerry the Knife and his army. One of Jerry's soldiers, incidentally, had been dismissed when it was discovered that he had neglected his duties. He had been caught red-handed, snoring in the bell tower, hugging an empty box of Moldovan wine.

Since Jerry had acted so quickly, the incident inspired confidence more than anything. At the moment the group was one man short, but Jerry was holding job interviews and expected the team to be at full strength again within a month at most.

Aside from the nearly one million kronor they received each week in cash, the receptionist's superb handling of social media brought another couple of hundred thousand straight into the congregation's bank account. That money needed a great deal of attention from a purely administrative standpoint: in Sweden, it is automatically assumed that anyone holding more than ten thousand kronor in hand is either a criminal, a tax dodger, or both. Thus there are rules about how much one may deposit or withdraw from one's own accounts without first meekly petitioning to do so several days in advance. But in keeping with the theme of “going like clockwork,” it just so happened that the receptionist had met and charmed a woman at the bank who doubled as one of the most devoted and thirstiest of their congregation. So, he was able to visit the woman daily and withdraw a reasonable amount, without risking a call to the financial supervisory authority for suspected money laundering. She knew that the capital was being used in the service of the Lord (plus it bankrolled her weekend ragers). Allowing the money to remain in the account was not an option the receptionist considered even for a second. After all, in case of trouble, they needed to be able to take off within half a minute; withdrawing
hundreds of thousands of kronor from a Swedish bank took more like half a year.

“Now that the sun is shining down on us, it's probably not the time to be too greedy,” he mused. “Should we let the fool loose on another half-million?”

“That might be advisable,” the priest agreed. “But this time we'll count the money for him.”

* * *

Hitman Anders was overjoyed when he learned that the congregation had brought in 480,000 kronor in just a few weeks and that they would be able to hand out half a million once again, since the priest, in all her generosity, had donated the missing twenty thousand out of her own pocket.

“You will be given a place at the right hand of the Lord in Heaven,” he said to her.

The priest didn't bother to tell him how unlikely that was. Furthermore, David was already sitting there, according to the Psalms, in Jesus's lap, one had to presume, since according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus had bagged the same spot.

The pastor began to consider where the money could go. Perhaps some non-profit association. But then he happened to recall something he had overheard once: “All this talk about the rainforest, what's that all about? It sounds lovely to save a forest and, what's more, the forests were created by God. Or maybe it would be better to find one where it doesn't rain so much.”

The priest was no longer startled by anything that came out of the pastor's mouth, even if
Boletus edulis
—the porcini mushroom—was still hard to figure out. “I guess I was thinking along the lines of saving a few more sick or starving children,” she said.

Hitman Anders was not a pretentious man. Rainforest or starving children, it didn't matter: it was the act of giving in Jesus's name that was important. He did, however, allow himself to reflect that the combination of starving children
in
a rainforest sounded extra special. But would it be possible to find such a thing in Sweden?