Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (9 page)

E
x-con Olofsson, the man who'd been knocked out by a freshly saved prison colleague at a pub in Södermalm, came to after only a few minutes. He was rude to the ambulance crew who had just arrived, swore at the poor waitress who wanted to be paid, threw the remaining glass of Cabernet Sauvignon at the wall, and staggered off. In less than half an hour he was at the home of his brother Olofsson (it is not unusual, in ex-con circles, to skip people's first names). As soon as the little brother had explained the situation to his big brother, Olofsson and Olofsson immediately took off for the Sea Point Hotel to dispense justice.

The hotel appeared deserted. There were a couple of confused guests standing in the lobby, wondering where the receptionist might be: they couldn't access the keys to their rooms. Another guest had been waiting to check in for at least ten minutes. He told Olofsson and Olofsson that he had rung the lobby bell to no avail, and when he had called the hotel from his cell phone, he had been the closest person available to answer the phone on the desk.

“Have you two booked a room as well?” asked the man.

“No,” said Olofsson.

“We haven't,” said Olofsson.

And then they left, grabbed a can of gasoline from the car, walked to the back of the building, and set it alight.

To make a point.

What sort of point was unclear.

Things often turned out this way when the brothers were together. Olofsson was almost as temperamental as his brother.

One hour later, the incident commander from Huddinge fire station decided there was no point in calling for reinforcements. The property was engulfed in flames and lost, but there was no breeze and the conditions were otherwise favorable, so no nearby property was in danger. All they could do was to allow the hotel to finish burning. It was impossible to be certain at the moment, but witness statements indicated that no one had been trapped inside, and that two unknown men had purposely started the fire. Legally, this was tantamount to arson.

Given that no one seemed to have come to harm, the newsworthiness of the event should have been limited, from a national perspective . . . if an alert night-shift editor at
Expressen
hadn't remembered where the interview with the guy known as Hitman Anders had been held. That must have been a year or three ago by now, but the hitman had lived there. Might he still? After some hasty but effective journalistic work, the next day's headline was drafted:

War in the Underworld:

HITMAN

ANDERS

On the Run from

ARSON

ATTACK

Two full pages in the paper, including, among other things, a full recap of how mortally dangerous Hitman Anders was said to be, accompanied by speculation about the causes of what was presumed to be an attempted murder. Plus the assumption that the hitman,
who had not died in the fire, might be somewhere out there—on the run!—looking for a new place to settle. Perhaps somewhere near you!

A frightened nation is a nation that buys evening papers.

* * *

According to the receptionist, the fact that the Sea Point Hotel had burned to the ground was perfectly wonderful for two reasons and seriously unfortunate for one. The priest and Hitman Anders asked him to elucidate.

Well, first and foremost, the hotel owner, that old porn lover and cheapskate, had lost his main source of income—which was great! If the receptionist remembered correctly, the owner had also considered it unmanly to pay several thousand kronor per year to insure the premises. Which meant he had no fire insurance: even better.

“Unmanly?” said the priest.

“Sometimes the line between manliness and sheer stupidity can be razor-thin.”

“What do
you
think, in this case?”

The receptionist gave an honest answer: given how things had turned out, it seemed stupidity had won the match, though manliness had been in the lead for quite some time.

The priest refrained from digging deeper into masculine wisdom and foolishness. Instead, she asked her receptionist to continue his theme of good versus bad.

Right. It was also good that all the fingerprints, personal effects and anything else that might have identified the receptionist and the priest had also gone up in smoke. The priest and the receptionist were more incognito than ever.

More or less like Hitman Anders—only the exact opposite. The newspapers, with
Expressen
in the lead, were repeating the story of
the dangerous man and piling on very good pictures of him. There was no chance that the hitman would be allowed to leave the camper with anything less than a blanket over his head. And there was no chance that he would be allowed to leave the camper
with
a blanket over his head, because just think of the attention it would attract. In short, Hitman Anders was not allowed to leave the camper.

* * *

The next day, the newspapers offered a second helping in the form of further information about Sweden's most exciting person of the moment. The rumors of his crimes had spread so far that at least a handful of the diaspora of small-time criminals called up a contact at the newspaper to earn a thousand kronor in tip money: “Yeah, listen, that bastard went and took advance payment to off people, and then he took off with the dough but didn't do the jobs. Easy money, heh heh, but how much longer d'you think he'll live
now
?”

I
t would be an exaggeration to call it “roving,” but the camper headed south without overthinking its destination. Away from Greater Stockholm was one of the basic ideas. Keeping in motion was another. After two days they were in the SmÃ¥land city of Växjö, heading for the more central parts of town in the hope of finding a hamburger bar for an early lunch.

Blazing from the newspaper billboards outside kiosks and stores, headlines warned that the dangerous and likely desperate hitman might be in the vicinity. By plastering a whole country with billboards of this sort, it stood to reason that the premise held true somewhere, for example in Växjö.

The priest and the receptionist didn't have a very solid image of what their common future would be like. But the half-finished one did not include living in a smallish camper van with a moody, recently saved, alcoholic hitman who was being pursued by a large percentage of the nation's criminal element.

The papers and front pages all over Växjö, full of giant photographs of an angrily glowering Hitman Anders, prompted the priest to mumble that it would be a while before she and the receptionist would get the chance to do some private cuddling.

“Aw,” said Hitman Anders. “Cuddle away. I can cover my ears.”

“And your eyes,” said the priest.

“My eyes too? Can't I . . .”

At that moment, the camper passed a sight that pushed Hitman Anders's thoughts in a different direction. He ordered the receptionist to turn around, because there was . . .

“A restaurant?” asked the receptionist.

“No, screw that. Turn around! Or go around the block—just make it snappy!” said Hitman Anders.

The receptionist shrugged and did as he was told. Soon the hitman's suspicions were confirmed—he had seen a thrift shop owned by the Red Cross. It was a quarter past ten in the morning, and Hitman Anders was in his most loving mood, having been encouraged by the romantic conversation that had just taken place.

“Five million belongs to me, right? One of you go into that store and give them five hundred thousand kronor in Jesus's name.”

“Are you nuts?” said the priest, although she believed she knew the answer.

“For a rich man to give money to a poor man—is that nuts? And this coming from a priest? You're the one who suggested a few days ago at the hotel that my money could go to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army if I so desired.”

The priest responded that she had been trying to survive one situation at the time, and that now she was trying to survive a different one. And that meant the outcomes might vary. Hers and the receptionist's unknown identities must be protected at all costs.

“Surely you realize we can't just walk in and say, ‘Here, have some money.' They might have security cameras, or someone might take a picture on their phone, or they might call the police, who would find us and the camper. I can give you any number of reasons if you just let me have a few seconds to—”

That was as far as the priest got. Hitman Anders opened the yellow suitcase, grabbed two large piles of money, closed the suitcase, opened the side door of the camper, and stepped out.

“I'll be right back,” he said.

With a few long strides, he was inside the store. The receptionist and the priest thought they could see a tumult through the window,
but it was hard to tell . . . Was someone putting their hands up? Then there was an uproar that could be heard all the way out on the street, something smashing to pieces . . .

Within thirty seconds, the door opened again and out came Hitman Anders, but no one else. He leaped nimbly, for his age, into the camper, shut the door, and suggested the receptionist make a getaway, preferably a quick one.

Per Persson alternated between cursing and turning left, turning right, driving straight through a roundabout, driving straight through another roundabout, driving straight through yet another roundabout (that's what it looks like in Växjö), taking the second right out of a fourth and fifth roundabout, and driving straight and for a long time out of the city, followed by a left turn onto a forest road, another left, then yet another left.

There he stopped, in a clearing in an apparently deserted SmÃ¥land forest. Judging from the activity in the rear-view mirror during the journey, no one had followed them. But that didn't mean the receptionist wasn't angry. “Shall we take a vote of how fucking stupid that was, on a scale between one and ten?” he asked.

“How much money was in those bundles?” asked the priest.

“I don't know,” said Hitman Anders. “But I trust that Jesus picked up the right amount for me.”

“Jesus?” said the receptionist, still upset. “If he can turn water into wine, surely he can conjure up money without having to steal it from us. You tell him I said—”

“There, there,” said the priest. “Everything seems fine. But I do agree that the world's almost unparalleledly stupid former hitman could have acted differently from start to finish. Now tell us what happened in the store.”

“Unparalleledly?” said Hitman Anders.

He didn't like it when he didn't understand something, but he let it go in favor of the new—to him—information that Jesus had made wine out of water.
Will I ever get that far in my own faith?
he wondered.

A
fter the ordeal at the Red Cross shop, the only option was to drive a left-hand circuit around Lake Helga and continue south without coming too close to the same town again. Their early lunch ended up consisting of gas-station hot dogs and instant mashed potatoes. After lunch, there was no trouble until they reached the outskirts of Hässleholm in northern Skåne. There, Hitman Anders signaled a stop at Systembolaget, the state-controlled liquor outlet, as he was beginning to suffer withdrawal from the wine that maintained contact between himself and Jesus. He had also failed thus far to transform the bottle of spring water he had found in the vehicle into anything potable. But practice made perfect, as the saying went.

The priest, who had taken over driving duties, was not happy with the hitman's demands. She would have preferred to put more distance between them and the debacle in Växjö before taking on another city center, but she did as he said, since one of the few things worse than Hitman Anders was a sober Hitman Anders.

The receptionist made no protest either, for approximately the same reasons. The hitman was assigned the task of hiding in the very back of the little camper (where, for reasons unknown, he had been chatting with a bottle of water for some time), while the receptionist undertook a short stroll into the shopping center that housed this particular liquor outlet. And a short stroll it was indeed, for the priest
had been lucky enough to get the best parking spot, right outside.

“I'll be right back,” said the receptionist, “and, you there, don't leave the camper! What kind of wine do you want, by the way?”

“Anything, as long as it's red and has a bit of a kick. Jesus and I aren't too picky. We don't like to waste money on communion if we don't have to. It's better to think of those who—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the receptionist said, and walked away.

Not much time had passed since Hitman Anders had learned from the priest that the ways of the Lord were unfathomable. Now he could see, through the curtain that covered the rear side window of the camper, how true that was. For who did he see, not five yards away, but a Salvationist, strategically placed outside the much-frequented Systembolaget. She stood there with a collection box in her hand, scraping together an occasional few kronor.

The priest, sitting behind the wheel, her thoughts elsewhere, did not foresee the danger. Hitman Anders silently gathered a pile of money of a similar size to last time, placed it in the plastic bag from the gas station, and opened the door quietly so he didn't alert her. Then he waved his hands until the Salvationist noticed him, without, as luck would have it, recognizing the most dangerous man in the country. She took the necessary steps up to the camper once she realized that she was the target of this man and his sign language. When she was right next to him, Hitman Anders whispered to her through the half-open door, thanking the Salvationist for her work in the service of the Lord. And then he handed her the bag of money.

Hitman Anders thought the Salvationist looked worn out. She could probably use a word of comfort while he was at it.

“Rest in peace,” he said kindly, but a bit too loudly, then closed the door.

Rest in peace?
The priest behind the wheel had time only to be shocked by what she saw, shocked again by the image of an elderly
Salvationist staggering backwards after she, in turn, saw what she had just received as a gift, and shocked a third time as the Salvationist in question bumped into the receptionist with two bags of communion wine in his hands.

The bottles survived. The receptionist apologized to the Salvationist. But what was the matter? Was the lady feeling unwell?

Then he heard the priest's voice from the front side window of the camper. “Forget the old bag! Get in the van right now! The idiot's done it again!”