Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (23 page)

T
he receptionist lay in bed next to his priest, under the duvet, unable to fall asleep. He was thinking about how things had gone for them; how things had gone for him. He thought about his devil of a grandfather, who had frittered away all of the family's money and indirectly caused his grandchild to become recreational director of a whorehouse.

And now he and the priest had a respectable number of millions in a yellow suitcase. They were almost as rich as Grandfather had once been. They lived in a suite at a luxury hotel and frequently indulged in
foie gras
and champagne. Partly because it tasted good, but mostly because Per Persson insisted that everything they ate and drank should be expensive.

Per Persson had taken his economic revenge. And he was left with a strange feeling of . . . something. Or maybe it was the lack of . . . something else.

If Grandfather's financial ruin had finally been put to rights just over fifty years later, why, then, was he not completely satisfied? Or at least considerably satisfied?

Did he have a guilty conscience because he and the priest had made sure that Hitman Anders ended up where he belonged?

No, why would he?

In general, man and beast had all got more or less what they deserved. Except maybe the churchwarden, who had first started to
grasp far too much and later ended up being more dead than was necessary, given the circumstances. An unfortunate factor, certainly. But, on the whole, it had been just a peripheral event.

This might be a good time for a minor digression in defense of the receptionist. One might find it an understatement to call manslaughter resulting from a failed homicide a “peripheral event.” But anyone who took Per Persson's genetic heritage into account could find, if not an excuse, at least an explanation.

He had inherited his moral compass from his father, the drunkard (who had abandoned his son for a bottle of cognac when the boy was two years old), and from his grandfather, the horse dealer, a man who had dosed his foals with precise amounts of arsenic from birth onwards so that they would grow used to the poison and be in tip-top shape not only on the day of sale but, in slowly declining degrees, on the days, weeks, and months after that.

A person who sold animals at a Saturday market only to be faced with complaints on Sunday that the animal had died would find that his reputation quickly went downhill. But Per Persson's grandfather's horses stood steady on all fours all night long, and their eyes blinked alertly even the next day. They didn't die until months later, of chronic stomach problems; cancer, lung or otherwise; liver or kidney failure; and other ailments that were difficult to connect to the ever-richer respected dealer. Since he always weighed and measured correctly, his horses' coats never turned greenish just before their death. This was a common side effect of a sloppy arsenic overdose hours before a sale. After all, horses are not green by nature (in contrast to nature itself, and some types of tractor). What's more, working horses should preferably not be dead before they have been put to use. Imagine a farmer who spent a Saturday afternoon first purchasing a hardworking draft animal, then enjoying a weekend bender to celebrate the deal, only to awake the next day with a headache, in contrast to his
newly bought horse, which didn't wake up at all. Such a man had at least two reasons to skip church, take up a pitchfork and track down the seller, who had managed to put a considerable number of parishes between them.

Per Persson's grandfather had been too cunning for that, until he became too stupid to realize that the tractor's infringement on the market was many times worse than any pitchfork tines in the backside.

Since the apple didn't fall all that far from the family tree, it is possible to understand the receptionist's thoughts on the present matter. A skillfully poisoned horse and a felicitously departed churchwarden: what difference could there be, from a purely ethical standpoint?

When Per Persson had tossed and turned in mind and body for long enough, he sought help from the woman who lay sleeping by his side. “Darling? Are you awake?”

No response.

“Darling?”

The priest moved. Not much, but a little. “No, I'm not awake,” she said. “What's the matter?”

Ugh, how the receptionist regretted this, dragging her into his speculation in the middle of the night . . . dumb, dumb, dumb. “I'm sorry if I woke you up. Go back to sleep and we'll talk in the morning.”

But the priest fluffed her pillow and sat up halfway in the bed. “Tell me what you wanted, or I'll stay up all night and read to you from the Gideon Bible.”

The receptionist knew this was an empty threat. The priest had thrown out of the window, on their very first night, the Gideon Bible, a copy of which littered practically every hotel room in the entire country. And yet he realized he had to say something. But he didn't know what to say, or how to say it.

“Well, darling,” he tried, “we've actually been pretty clever on the whole, don't you think?”

“You mean that everyone who got in our way is now dead, super dead, or locked up, while we enjoy champagne?”

Hmm, no, that wasn't exactly what he'd meant, at least not formulated in such a straightforward manner. Per Persson pointed out that they had done a pretty good job of cleaning up after life's historic injustices. This grandson had exchanged his grandfather's financial ruin for a luxury suite,
foie gras
, and bubbly. And they had the money for it because Per and Johanna had pooled their strength to distort the meaning of the Bible her father and forefathers had forced upon her.

“I guess what I might be saying is that we've kind of reached our goal. And that it would be . . . annoying if that woman, the poet, whatever her name was, the one who wrote that the path is worth the pain . . . if she had . . .”

“The path?” said the drowsy priest, starting to suspect that the conversation would not be over for quite some time.

“Yes, the path. If our goal was a luxury suite with the Gideon Bible thrown out of the window, then why isn't our life a walk in the park now? Or maybe you think it is.”

“Is what?”

“A walk in the park?”

“What is?”

“Life.”

“What time is it?”

“Ten past one,” said the receptionist.

W
as life a walk in the park?

Well, one thing was for sure: if it was, this was a new phenomenon for Johanna Kjellander. Up to now life had mostly just jerked her around.

It was all because of that stuff with her dad. And his dad. And his dad. And his dad. In some collective fashion, they had decreed that she should be a he, and that he should be a priest.

In the first instance, it hadn't worked out as they'd desired, and Johanna was forced to hear throughout her childhood that it was her own fault she wasn't man enough to be a man.

But become a priest she had. And if she were to stop and think instead of falling asleep again, perhaps this had less to do with her lack of belief and more to do with not believing as a matter of principle. After all, the Bible could be read from so many different viewpoints. The priest chose her own—and in so doing affirmed her bitterness towards her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, all the way back to somewhere beyond Gustav III (who had, incidentally, certain similarities to the churchwarden, the difference being that the King, in his day, had taken his shot in the back rather than in the eye).

“So you do believe in that book a little bit after all?” said the receptionist.

“Let's not go overboard. There's no goddamn way Noah lived to the age of nine hundred.”

“Nine hundred and fifty.”

“Or that. Remember, I just woke up.”

“I'm not sure I've ever heard you swear before.”

“Oh, it's happened. But mostly after one in the morning.”

They smiled at each other. Not that it was visible in the darkness, but they could feel it.

The receptionist kept talking, confessing that the question he'd just posed might be silly, but the priest had thus far avoided answering it.

Johanna Kjellander yawned and confessed that this was because she had forgotten the question. “But feel free to ask it again. The night is ruined anyway.”

Right, it was about the point of everything. And whether things were going as well for them as they should. Whether life was a walk in the park.

The priest was silent for a moment, then decided to take the conversation seriously. She did enjoy eating
foie gras
at the Hilton with her receptionist. Much more than standing in a pulpit and lying to a flock of sheep once a week.

But Per was right, of course, that each day verged on being the same as the one before, and it was not a given that they should remain in the suite until they ran out of money. Which they probably would rather quickly at this place, wouldn't they?

“If we're conservative with the
foie gras
and champagne, the contents of the suitcase will last for about three and a half years,” the receptionist said, allowing for some miscalculation.

“And then what?” said the priest.

“That's what I'm saying.”

The priest had registered Per Persson's flirtation with one of the country's most famous poems, the one that began “A day of plenty is never blessed; a day of thirst is always best.”

What spurred her into an extra round of pondering their existence was not the poem
per se
, but that the poet had committed suicide just a few years later. This could not reasonably be considered the meaning of life.

When Johanna thought back to the moments she had actually found pleasurable since meeting the receptionist (aside from their sexual relations and the accompanying quality time on a mattress, in a camper, behind an organ, or wherever else was available), it was the times when they had handed out money left and right. The hullabaloo in the Red Cross store in Växjö had perhaps not been a high point, but seeing a Salvationist stagger backwards outside Systembolaget in Hässleholm was the sort of thing you could smile about afterwards. And that time with the camper parked willy-nilly outside the headquarters of Save the Children. And the time Hitman Anders had told off the tin soldier who didn't want to accept a suspicious package meant for his Queen . . .

The receptionist nodded in recollection, but he was also growing nervous. Was the priest trying to say they should give the contents of the yellow suitcase to needy people other than themselves? Was
that
the way . . . ?

“The hell it is!” said the priest, sitting up even straighter in bed.

“You just swore again.”

“Well, stop talking such goddamn rubbish!”

At last they came to an agreement that their life had been a walk in the park for a while because they had given with one hand while no one could see that they were taking many times more with the other. That it was more blessed to take than to give, but that giving did have its advantages.

The receptionist tried to summarize and look to the future. “What if the meaning of life is to make other people happy as long as we have the financial means to make ourselves just a little happier? Like the Church project, but without God, Jesus, or snipers in the bell tower.”

“Or Noah,” said the priest.

“What?”

“Without God, Jesus, snipers in the bell tower, or
Noah
. I can't stand him.”

The receptionist promised to think up a new equation on the theme of goodness versus neediness in which no one had occasion to know that they considered themselves to be the neediest of all. And the equation—whatever it would turn out to be—would under no circumstances include Noah or his ark.

“Is it okay if I go back to sleep while you work out the details?” asked the priest, preparing herself for the “yes” she had reason to expect.

The receptionist thought she was a worthy conversational partner even when she was half asleep. And she might as well stay that way a little while longer. For he had just had a micro-idea on the theme of the meaning of life. So he said she was welcome to fall asleep again, unless she could be persuaded to respond positively to the fact that he had suddenly started coveting his neighbor. Per Persson wriggled closer.

“It's almost one thirty,” said Johanna Kjellander. And wriggled in to meet him.

S
weden's third and third-largest general criminal meeting was held in the same cellar as meeting number two. Fifteen men; since last time, two had been captured by the law after they had committed, while far too high on drugs, an armored-car robbery in which the armored car had turned out to be a bread truck.

Even though their spoils were no more than a ten-pack of sandwich buns from Eskelund's Bakery (one of the robbers was hungry), loaded weapons had been involved and their punishment was handed down accordingly. Eskelund's Bakery was mentioned in every newspaper imaginable, which led the manager of the bakery to send two lovely potted geraniums to the jail where the two robbers sat awaiting trial. The staff at the jail suspected attempted smuggling of narcotics: never before had recent arrivals been sent (or, for that matter, wanted to be sent) flowers as a thank-you for a crime poorly committed. Thus the geraniums were plucked to bits before they could safely be handed over to the recipients, which didn't happen because there was no longer any point.

The current situation for the rest of them was that the count and the countess had departed this life after an intense battle with the brave brothers Olofsson, who were not exactly raring to give any more details about how it had all gone down.

“Trade secret,” Olofsson had said, while his brother nodded in agreement.

What was more, Hitman Anders was locked up and his peculiar church project abandoned.

The question that remained for the fifteen men was what they should do with Hitman Anders's two sidekicks. All reasonable logic dictated that they were sitting on many millions of kronor. Since the hitman was safe and sound in prison, and thus alive, it shouldn't be dangerous to have a not-altogether-friendly conversation with the sidekicks on the topic of “handing over all the money.” There were, however, fifteen different, absolutely unvoiced opinions on how the cash should then be divided among them.

The man called Ox argued that the sidekicks ought to meet the same fate as Mr. and Mrs. Count, like, for example, being forced to swallow a hand grenade each, and he also felt that the Olofsson brothers might as well take care of this, since they were on a roll.

After a certain amount of arguing, it was decided by a vote of 14–1 that it was not possible to swallow a hand grenade, no matter how hard a third party might push (and this was not even considering the security risk for whoever took on the pushing), plus that two blown-up sidekicks might provoke Hitman Anders to reveal things he shouldn't.

So, no more killing for the time being. The consensus was still strong that the information about who had ordered what from Hitman Anders in regard to contract killing and general limb breaking must not get out. Even if the count and the countess were now spending their days in Hell (they would likely all wander that path one day), there were still plenty of revelations to be had about who had wished to harm a hair on whose head. Allowing the priest and the other guy to go free after they'd paid their debts would simply be a security measure.

A decision was made by a vote of 13–2 to assign Olofsson and Olofsson the task of bringing in the two sidekicks. The brothers man
aged to whine their way to a fee of fifty thousand kronor for the job; more was out of the question now that the ending of lives was off the table.

* * *

The unhappy brothers Olofsson had no idea where to start looking for the priest and the other guy. They began by hanging around the church for a few days and then a few days more. But the only difference from one day to the next was that weeds sprouted in the gravel path that led up to the porch. Beyond that, nothing was going on.

After almost a week, one of the brothers realized they could try the handle on the door at the top of the gravel path to see if it was unlocked. It was.

Inside, the church still looked like a battlefield; no one from the Enforcement Agency had prioritized the cleaning of the seized property.

But they were unable to find any clues about where the priest and the other guy might be.

In the sacristy, however, they found what had to be at least two hundred gallons of wine in boxes, and that was worth a try. It didn't taste bad, but neither did it lead to anything, other than making their unpleasant existence slightly more pleasant.

There was also a bunch of comic books in a wardrobe. Judging by the dates, they had been lying there for thirty years or more.

“Comic books in a church?” said Olofsson.

His brother didn't respond. Instead, he sat down to read
Agent X9
.

Olofsson moved on to a wastepaper basket alongside the sacristy's desk. He turned it upside down and skimmed through various crumpled notes. They all turned out to be of the same sort—receipts for cash payments for a room at the Hilton near Slussen in
Stockholm. First one night, then another night, then one more night . . . Had they been staying at the Hilton, those pigs, and paying for it with the money that belonged to the Olofssons and the others? One night at a time. Always ready to take off.

“Come on!” said Olofsson, who had just reached what was, without question, the most gifted conclusion of his entire life.

“Hold on a minute,” said Olofsson, who was now in the middle of an issue of
Modesty Blaise
.