Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (26 page)

D
ear friends! God's peace be upon you, Hallelujah and Hosanna.” Hitman Anders initiated the meeting in the prison visiting room.

They hardly recognized him. He looked hale and hearty, and his entire face was practically overgrown. The explanation for this last bit was that the priest had once taught him that, according to the Old Testament, one must not shave one's face. He did not remember exactly how those words had gone, and he hadn't been able to find them on his own, even though he'd looked, but he trusted his dear friend.

“Leviticus nineteen,” the priest said automatically. “‘You shall not eat anything with its blood. You shall not practice augury or witchcraft. You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard. You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you: I am the Lord.'”

“Oh, right, that was it,” said the former pastor, scratching his beard. “It's tough to do anything about the tattoos, but Jesus and I have worked through that and put it behind us.”

Hitman Anders was thriving like a fish in water. He held Bible study groups three times a week and had snared at least three disciples, plus just as many who were wavering. His efforts had gone awry only once, and that was when he had tried to start everyone saying grace in the cafeteria, at which the cook, who was in for life, was
struck by a fit of rage and started a brawl. The man who had happened to be standing closest to him in the food line when it all began was a small foreigner whom everyone called ‘Chatterbox' because he never said anything (mainly because he didn't have anything to say in any language other than the one he and no one else understood). The cook thrust a broken bottle into the neck of Chatterbox, who actually said, “Ouch!” in Swedish, the last word he uttered in this life.

The guy with the bottle got his sentence extended by another lifetime for that. And he was downgraded to dishwasher.

One or double life sentences, it was all the same to Hitman Anders (although it might have been a fate worse than death to stand there washing plates for two whole lives in a row). Instead, he was eager to tell them that, although he had weaned himself off communion in the time he'd been locked up, his relationship with Jesus had suffered no ill effects. Now, the priest and the receptionist must not be offended, but Hitman Anders had discovered, during his Bible studies, that the two of them may have misunderstood a thing or two about communion. Just because a person turned to Jesus didn't mean that he had to down one or several bottles of wine each day. If they liked, he could explain in greater detail?

“No, thanks,” said the priest. “On the whole, I think I understand.”

Well, they could always come back to it at a later date. The long and the short of it was that the cook, who would now have to wash plates every day until he'd died twice, served only milk and lingonberry juice, in accordance with the current prison regulations. Since none of the prisoners really got going on either milk or lingonberry juice, a smuggling operation brought in large amounts of the kind of stuff Hitman Anders hadn't downed in several years and would never go back to.

“Like what?” the priest wondered.

“Rohypnol and terrible stuff like that,” said Hitman Anders. “Nothing used to make me as crazy as Rohypnol along with a little liquor would. That was a long time ago now, thank the Lord.”

The only cloud in his bright blue sky was that the Prison Service had discovered what a shining example of a good prisoner he was, and they had forged a plan behind his back to give him early release.

“Early release?” said the receptionist.

“In two months,” said Hitman Anders. “And barely even that. What will happen to all my Bible students then? And to me? I'm absolutely beside myself with worry.”

“But that's fantastic news,” said the receptionist, in a tone so genuine that the priest was shocked. “Let us come and pick you up on the day you're freed. I think I have a job for you,” he said, to the priest's double shock.

“God be with us!” said Hitman Anders.

The priest said nothing. She had lost the ability to speak.

* * *

Per Persson had, during the present meeting, noticed something that had not occurred to the priest. Thanks to Leviticus 19:27–28, Hitman Anders had transformed himself into an exact copy of Santa Claus. All they would have to do was groom his tousled hair and put a more Santa-like pair of glasses on him. The beard was real, of course, and it was just the perfect shade of white.

The receptionist took this as a sign from . . . someone . . . and one instant later, the Santa Concept came to him. It was as though a higher power had been involved, if only he hadn't known beyond all shadow of a doubt that
no
higher power, no matter how high, would ever lift a finger to help either him or his priest.

A
s soon as the receptionist and the priest were alone again, one explained to the other what had been revealed to him in the visiting room at the prison. Once they got home, they sat down to page through some old issues of the local
Gotlands Allehanda
and more or less immediately found reason to believe that the receptionist's idea would hold water. It was an article about a man who could not continue to live in his rental apartment because the walls were full of bedbugs. The landlord refused to consider the bedbugs his problem, and now the man had nowhere to live, yet he was forced to keep paying rent.

“All I have to live on is my retirement pension,” said the old man to the newspaper, feeling sorry for himself with good reason.

The old man's miserable situation didn't much interest the receptionist or the priest. He was far too wrinkled and stooping to have any sort of commercial value. He and his bedbugs, therefore, would have to manage as best they could, although the receptionist spent a second or two considering whether he should phone the old man and tell him about bleach, which seemed to kill just about anything.

But the fact that the old man had told his sob story to a local newspaper and that another unfortunate soul of a different sort had done the same in the competitor paper,
Gotlands Tidningar
, just a few issues later, gave the priest and the receptionist all the confirmation they needed.

The number of distressing stories in daily publications across the country ought to be nearly infinite. Even if they didn't count old men with bedbugs, millionaires with Spanish slug infestations in their yards, and wounded rats tossed into garbage cans by emotionally disturbed teenagers with airguns, there would still be an infinite number.

The receptionist took out one of the two tablets he had purchased a few years earlier with money from the collection buckets and got to work.

* * *

“How's it going?” the priest asked, as she rubbed her belly and watched her husband, who had his nose in an iPad and a notebook at his side.

“Good, thanks,” said the receptionist, telling her that the final order of an electronic copy of a Swedish daily paper was done and done.

“
Ljusdals-Posten
,” he said. “One hundred and ninety-nine kronor per month.”

Well, why not? the priest wondered. Ljusdal was lovely, but that didn't mean there weren't people there for whom one might feel sorry. And then she made the mistake of asking to which other newspapers they had electronic access (because the answer almost never ended).

“I've got the list here,” said the receptionist. “Let's see . . . Okay,
Östersunds-Posten
,
Dala-Demokraten
,
Gefle Dagblad
,
Uppsala Nya Tidning
,
Nerikes Allehanda
,
Sydsvenskan
,
Svenska Dagbla
—”

“Stop! That's enough,” said the priest.

“No, it's not, if we're going to build up the infrastructure we need to represent every little corner of the nation. I've got more here and just as many again on the other side of this piece of paper. There must be around fifty altogether. And it's not free, although a few have
introductory offers. Hats off to
Blekinge Läns Tidning
, by the way. One krona for a month-long trial period.”

“We could practically afford two of those,” said the priest. “Too bad it would probably say the same thing in both.”

The receptionist smiled and called up his internal Excel spreadsheet. In the long run, their subscription budget would cost around a hundred thousand kronor for the whole year, but introductory pricing, short-term subscriptions, and trial periods had brought their initial investment down to an amount their available funds would allow. This would probably end well for both giver and (above all) taker. Other people's generosity was generally a bit greater than their own, which guaranteed a positive number on the bottom line. Maybe not from the start, but within a time frame short enough that they could feel good about it.

“Aside from the fact that I think other people's generosity is generally
much
greater than our own, I am in complete agreement, my dear,” said the priest.

The greatest threat to their success, she thought, was Santa Claus himself. Hitman Anders was and remained a security risk. But if their plan went to Hell for one reason or another, they'd just have to accept it. The receptionist's idea was far too attractive not to try out on a full scale immediately.

“So let tomorrow bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today. Matthew six, verse thirty-four.”

“Did you just voluntarily quote the Bible?” asked the receptionist.

“Yes. Imagine that.”

* * *

Humanity, in general, is a potpourri of many traits. For example: stinginess, self-involvedness, jealousy, ignorance, stupidity, and fear
fulness. But also: kindness, cleverness, friendliness, forgivness, considerateness—and generosity. Not all of these traits find room in every soul, as the priest and the receptionist knew, not least from personal experience. Philosopher Immanuel Kant very possibly hypothesized that each person bore a functional moral compass within himself only because he never had occasion to meet our priest or our receptionist.

The new take-and-(by all means)-give plan, which had vague origins in a fake commercial Santa in Visby whose sole gift was gingerbread for children, was now fully cobbled together, polished, and ready.

First the receptionist had opened an investigation, led and implemented by himself. He needed to gather knowledge of what the market and any potential competitors looked like.

There were several competitors out there to consider. For example, it turned out that the Swedish postal service accepted more than a hundred thousand letters to Santa Claus each year, addressed to “Tomten” (Santa's Swedish name) at “17300 Tomteboda, Sweden.” The postal representative proudly told the receptionist, over the phone, that everyone who wrote received an answer—along with a small present.

The receptionist said, “Thank you for the information,” hung up, and mumbled that the value of that “present” must surely be less than the cost of the postage. Which meant that it entailed a combination of extremely limited goodness and extremely limited profitability. Not such a bad idea, at the heart of it, but it wouldn't quite do. Taking into account administrative costs, such an enterprise would likely result in zero profit at best. And the only numbers the priest and the receptionist disliked more than zero were those that began with a minus sign.

Beyond the postal service, there was Santa Land in Dalarna. Because the receptionist read what he wanted to read into what Santa Land had to offer, he came to the conclusion that it was an amusement park in which a person who paid the entry fee, ate and drank at a cost of a few hundred kronor, and stayed overnight for a few
thousand, was allowed to hand over a wish list to a fake Santa, who in turn could use said lists as kindling later that evening.

This idea wasn't so bad either, but it was clearly biased towards taking rather than giving.
Balance
was crucial in this matter!

Another Santa Claus, with a polyester beard, lived in Rovaniemi, Finland. The concept seemed similar to that in Dalarna. With the same problems and shortcomings.

Incidentally, it turned out the Danes were of the opinion that Santa lived in Greenland. The Americans bet on the North Pole, the Turks on Turkey, and the Russians on Russia. Out of all of these, only the Americans made a proper industry out of their Santa, partly in the way he seemed to prefer Coca-Cola over all other beverages, and partly in the form of at least one annual Christmas film in which Santa first screwed everything up and then, at the last minute, made all the children in the entire world happy. Or at least one of them. For pretend. For twelve dollars per movie ticket.

Then, of course, there was also Santa's cousin, Sinterklaas, or St. Nicholas. According to what the receptionist learned, he had begun as the patron saint of all former thieves, and that was certainly a lovely thought. But, still, he didn't really count because he brought children presents too early—on December 6.

“Though doesn't it depend on how global we want to go with this?” said the priest.

“One country at a time,” said the receptionist. “Just take Germany, with ten times as many citizens as Sweden has. That would probably require ten Santas of a Hitman Anders nature, and all would need the ability to say at least “
Frohe Weihnachten
” without going totally off the rails.”

Two words in foreignese. That was two more than Hitman Anders would be capable of dealing with, as both the priest and the receptionist were aware (unless they were talking about the Latin names of mushrooms). There was also the risk that “Hosanna” was German for “Hosanna” as well.

***

So, for a Santa who gave out presents for real, without being paid ahead of time, competition was limited if not non-existent.

The profitability of this business venture would depend on how many sob stories they could find in the papers. Preferably involving single mothers, sick children, or abandoned pets of every adorable ilk. Ugly old men with bedbugs would not set quite as many hearts afire; neither would tortured rats in a trash can. When it came to multimillionaires with Spanish slugs in their yards, Swedish tradition would seem to hold that the millionaires deserved it.

The plan to proceed, based on carefully selected stories in the local paper, was truly brilliant in that the recipient in question had by definition already spoken to the media once, and thus ought to be willing to do it again, following a surprise encounter with Santa Claus.

This, in turn, would generate traffic to the website where one would discover Santa—with a beard that could withstand tugging.

And if God was adequately good (the receptionist was about to say), this, in turn, would lead to a donation or two. Or a hundred. Or why not a thousand?

All that remained before the plan could be set in motion was for the Prison Service to follow through with its own plan—as crazy as it was splendid—to set Hitman Anders free.