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CHAPTER 8

The man who had now become Hitman Anders to a whole people and half a continent woke up at around eleven each morning. He would get dressed, in the event he had undressed at bedtime, and walk down the hallway for breakfast, which consisted of the receptionist’s cheese sandwiches with beer.

After that he would rest for a while before he started to feel true hunger around three in the afternoon. Then he would make his way to the local pub for Swedish home-cooking and more beer.

This was assuming it wasn’t a workday, and workdays had become more and more frequent since all the media attention. The business he ran with the receptionist and the priest was going as well as could be expected. There were jobs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Hitman Anders had no desire to work any more than that. In fact, he didn’t really have any desire to work as much as he did, especially since there ended up being so many more broken kneecaps than planned. Of course, that was what he’d accidentally offered in the newspaper, and it seemed that most of those who ordered sundry limb-maimings had imaginations too limited to come up with something of their own.

The hitman tried to arrange his assignments to take place immediately after the home-cooking but before he had got tanked up for the evening. With the taxi ride there and back, a job was often completed within about an hour. It was important to keep the balance of drunkenness steady. If he had too many beers before work, things would go awry. A few beers more, and he risked a mess of a more dramatic nature. Though not as dramatic as it would have been if he had added spirits and pills to the menu. He could tolerate the idea of eighteen additional months in prison. But not eighteen additional years.

The hours between breakfast at eleven and lunch at three were best in the event that the priest and the receptionist had something to tell their business partner. Around that time, Hitman Anders had recovered from the troublesome hangover, while the current day’s excesses had not yet taken hold.

The meetings might occur spontaneously, but they kept a regular appointment on Mondays at eleven thirty in the hotel’s small lobby, which happened to have a table with three chairs in one corner. Anyway, Hitman Anders would appear at the Monday meeting as long as he hadn’t passed out in some strange place in the city and therefore couldn’t make it.

The meetings all followed the same routine. The receptionist would serve a beer to Hitman Anders and a cup of coffee each to himself and the priest. Thereupon followed a conversation about newly scheduled orders, upcoming activities, financial development, and other such matters.

The only real problem with their business was that the hitman, despite all the good advice he had received, was seldom correct about which was left or right when it came to broken arms and legs. The priest tried new tips, such as: right was the side you used to shake hands. To this, however, the hitman responded that he wasn’t very used to shaking hands. He was apt to raise a glass if the atmosphere was friendly and find both of his hands busy at the same time if it wasn’t.

Then it occurred to the priest that they could write a big L on Hitman Anders’s left fist. Surely that would solve the problem. The hitman nodded in approval, but he thought that to be on the safe side they might as well follow up with an R on the other.

This idea turned out to be both brilliant and stupid: what was L for Hitman Anders, of course, was R for the person who had the great misfortune to be standing in front of him. So the plan didn’t work until the hitman’s left fist was misleadingly marked with an R and vice versa.

The receptionist was pleased to be able to say that their client network was broadening, that client complaints had nearly ceased since left and right fists switched places, and that they had received orders from Germany, France, Spain and England. Not Italy, however: they seemed capable of handling things on their own down there.

The question was whether they should expand their operations. Was it time for the company to enlist some new recruits? Might Hitman Anders know of a suitable candidate, someone who could break arms and legs but knew where to draw the line? Assuming the hitman himself planned to stand firm on his decision not to work more than one or two hours per day, three days a week.

Hitman Anders perceived a tone of criticism in those words and responded that it was possible he was not as interested in accumulating piles of money as the receptionist and priest were, and that he had the good sense to value meaningful free time. Working three days a week was plenty, and he absolutely did not want any rowdy youngster going around windmilling his arms and disgracing Hitman Anders’s good name while the hitman enjoyed time off.

And speaking of all those countries they had just rattled off, he had just one thing to say: not on your life! Hitman Anders was no xenophobe, that wasn’t the problem – he firmly believed in the equal worth of all people: he wanted to be able to say ‘hi’ and ‘good morning’ and behave politely in front of whomever he was about to beat to a pulp. After all, wasn’t that the very least a fellow human being could expect?

‘That’s called respect,’ Hitman Anders said sulkily. ‘But maybe you two have never heard of it.’

The receptionist made no comment on the hitman’s view of the amount of respect it took to exchange pleasantries with someone you were about to beat half to death. Instead he said acidly that he was aware that Hitman Anders was not amassing piles of money. After all, a few nights ago a jukebox had ended up flying through the window of the hitman’s favourite pub just because it happened to be playing the wrong music. ‘How much did that meaningful free time cost you? Twenty-five thousand? Thirty?’ Per Persson asked, feeling a degree of satisfaction in daring to pose the question.

Hitman Anders said that thirty was pretty close to the truth and that that had not been the most meaningful incident of his life. ‘But what kind of person puts money into a machine to listen to Julio Iglesias?’

CHAPTER 9

To Per Persson, it was an objective truth that he had been cheated by life. Since he didn’t believe in a higher power and since his grandfather was long dead, he had no one and nothing specific at whom or which to direct his frustration. So, early on, from behind his reception desk, he had decided to dislike the entire world, everything it stood for, and everything it contained – including its seven billion inhabitants.

He had no immediate reason to make an exception for Johanna Kjellander, the priest who had initiated their relationship by trying to cheat him. But there was something about her misery that reminded him of his own. And before their first day together was over, they had hastily broken bread (that is, the priest had eaten all of the receptionist’s sandwiches) and on top of that had had time to become partners in the torpedo industry.

They’d shared an affinity from day one, even if the receptionist had had a harder time seeing it than the priest did. Or maybe he’d just needed more time.

When they had been in business for close to a year, the receptionist and the priest had earned about seven hundred thousand kronor, while the hitman had made four times that. The receptionist and the priest had eaten and drunk well together now and then, yet just over half their earnings remained, neatly hidden in a pair of shoeboxes in the room behind the reception desk.

The rather squarely inclined Per Persson complemented the daring, creative Johanna Kjellander, and vice versa. She liked his aversion to his existence; she saw herself in it. And in the end he, a man who had never loved anyone, including himself, could not defend himself against the insight that another person on Mother Earth had realized that the rest of humanity was completely useless.

After a visit to Södermalm to celebrate the advance payment for contract number 100 – an extra-lucrative one, for a double leg-and-arm fracture, an unspecified number of cracked ribs, and a rearranged face – the duo returned to the hotel. The mood was such that Per Persson found himself asking whether Johanna remembered the time a number of months earlier when she’d suggested they round off the evening in his room.

The priest remembered her question and his negative response.

‘I don’t suppose you’d consider re-asking the question, here and now?’

Johanna Kjellander smiled and asked in return whether it would be possible to receive an advance ruling before doing so. After all, no woman wanted to be told, ‘No,’ twice in a row.

‘No,’ said Per Persson.

‘No what?’ said Johanna Kjellander.

‘No, you won’t get a “no” if you ask again.’

The summit on the mattress between two of the nation’s potentially most bitter people turned out to be a sheer delight. When it was over, the priest gave a short and, for the first time, sincere sermon on the themes of faith, hope and love, where Paul had considered love to be the greatest of them all.

‘He seems to have had the right idea,’ said the receptionist, who was perfectly giddy over the realization that it was possible to feel as he felt, whatever the feeling was.

‘Well,’ said the priest, drawing out the rest, ‘Paul uttered a lot of nonsense too. Like woman was created for man and shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, and that men shouldn’t lie with other men.’

The receptionist skipped the part about who had been created for whom but said he could only recall a single instance, two at the most, in which it would have been best for the priest to remain silent rather than speak. Regarding who should lie with whom, he preferred the female priest over their male hitman by a long shot, but he couldn’t see what Paul had to do with it.

‘For my part, I’d rather sleep with a bike rack than with Hitman Anders,’ said the priest. ‘But otherwise I’m in complete agreement with you.’

When the receptionist wondered what the Bible had to say about a sexual relationship between a woman and a bike rack, the priest reminded him that bicycles hadn’t been invented in Paul’s time. Neither, probably, had the bike rack.

And no one had anything more to add to that. Instead they began another summit that was just as non-hateful as the one they’d just archived.

* * *

For a while, everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The priest and the receptionist joyfully and contentedly shared their genuine dislike of the world, including the entirety of the Earth’s population. The burden was now only half as great, since each of them could take on three and a half billion people rather than seven billion alone. Plus (of course) a considerable number of individuals who no longer existed. Among them: the receptionist’s grandfather, the priest’s entire family tree, and – not least! – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and everyone else in the book that had persecuted (and continued to persecute) Johanna Kjellander.

While the currently newly in-love couple had earned their seven hundred thousand kronor, Hitman Anders had, according to the contract, brought in 2.8 million. But since he could keep a whole pub going for half the night all by himself, he never had more than a few thousand-krona notes in savings. He burned through what came in at approximately the same rate it came in. If his money ever happened to grow into a pile of cash worthy of the name, it tended to be an extra-lively time at the pub, such as when the jukebox had gone through the window.

‘Couldn’t you just have pulled the plug out of the wall?’ the pub owner said, a bit cautiously, to his ashamed regular the next day.

‘Yes,’ Hitman Anders admitted. ‘That would have been a reasonable alternative.’

This sort of incident actually suited the receptionist and the priest quite well, because as long as Hitman Anders didn’t do what they did – that is, fill boxes with money – he would need to dispense justice on behalf of those who could afford to have justice dispensed according to their own definition of the concept.

What the receptionist and the priest didn’t know was that, during the past year, Hitman Anders had been experiencing an increasing sense that life was hopeless. Incidentally, he was barely aware of it. He had spent his whole life reasoning with other people via his fists. It wasn’t easy to talk to oneself in the same fashion. So he sought out alcohol earlier in the day and with greater emphasis than before.

It had helped. But it took constant replenishing. And his situation was not improved by the way the priest and the receptionist had started walking around side by side, smiling happily. What the hell was so damn funny? That it was only a matter of time before he ended up back where he belonged?

Perhaps it was just as well to put himself out of his misery, hasten the process, off the first prize idiot he saw, and move into the slammer for another twenty or thirty years – the exact fate he had resolved to avoid. One advantage would be that the priest and the receptionist would probably have grinned their last grins before he got out again. New love was seldom as new and loving two decades later.

One morning, in an unfamiliar and awkward attempt to gain insight, the hitman asked himself what it was all about. What, for example, had the jukebox incident really been about?

Of course he could have pulled the plug. And then Julio Iglesias would have gone silent while his jukebox fans went on a rampage. Four men and four women around a table: in the best case it would have been enough to slug the mouthiest of the men; in the worst case, he would have had to bring down all eight. With even a tiny amount of bad luck, one wouldn’t have got up again, and there would have been those twenty additional years in prison just waiting for him, plus or minus ten.

A more practical solution might have been to allow the eight fools to choose the music they liked. Unless it was an indisputable truth that a line had to be drawn at Julio Iglesias.

For Hitman Anders, lifting the jukebox and heaving it out of the window, thus bringing the evening to an end for him and everyone else, had allowed his destructive self to take control of his extremely destructive self. It had worked. It had been expensive, but – crucially – it had allowed him to wake up in his own bed, rather than in a jail cell awaiting transport to somewhere more permanent.

The jukebox had saved his life. Or he had saved it himself, using the jukebox as a weapon. Did this mean that the road back to prison was not as inevitable as his inner voice had started harping on about? What if there was life beyond violence, and, for that matter, life with no jukeboxes flying through the air?

In which case – how could he find it, and where would it lead?

He thought. And opened his first beer of the day. And soon the second. And he forgot what he’d just been thinking, but the knot in his stomach was gone, and cheers to that!

Beer was the water of life. The third in succession was almost always the most delicious.

Whoopty-ding!

He thought.

CHAPTER 10

Then came the day when it was time for the group to make good on their debt to the count. The victim this time was a customer who had test-driven a Lexus RX 450h over the weekend and managed to get it stolen.

So he said.

In reality, he had hidden it in Dalarna, at the home of his sister who, instead of thinking carefully, took a photograph of herself behind the wheel and posted it to Facebook. Since everyone on the site knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, it didn’t take the count many hours to learn the truth. The deceitful customer didn’t even have time to work out that he’d been exposed before his face had been ruined and every more or less accessible tooth knocked out. Thanks to the age of the car and its intended price tag (it was new and expensive), one kneecap and one shin were goners as well.

It was one routine job among many but, according to the agreement made nineteen months earlier, the price was to include two broken arms for the guy who had played blackjack too poorly for his own good and half got away with it, thanks to a baby.

Hitman Anders carried out this job, too, with precision (both arms were always easier than just one, since he didn’t have to pick the correct one). And that would probably have been the end of it, had it not occurred to him to consider the kind thing the priest had said the first time they met. It was something about how nice it had been for Hitman Anders to respect a small child.

The priest had referred to the Bible, of all things. What if there was more of the same inside that book? After all, it was fatter than the devil. Stories that could make him … feel good? Become someone different? Because there was something that came and went inside his head, something he had thus far done his best to drink away.

He would talk to the priest the very next day, and she could tell him. The next day. First the pub. It was already four thirty in the afternoon.

Unless …

What if he were to drop in at the hotel after all and ask the priest to explain this and that about this and that first, then drink away the eternal knot in his stomach? He wouldn’t have to say much while she talked: he could just listen. And a person could always drink at the same time.

* * *

‘Listen, priest, I need to talk to you.’

‘Do you need to borrow some money?’

‘Nope.’

‘Is the beer in the refrigerator gone?’

‘Nope. I’ve just checked.’

‘Then what do you want?’

‘To talk, I just said.’

‘About what?’

‘About how God and Jesus and the Bible and all that stuff work.’

‘Huh?’ said the priest. Who perhaps, even then, should have suspected that a terrible mess was in the offing.

The priest and the hitman’s first theological discussion began with Hitman Anders saying he understood that she knew pretty much everything about religion. Maybe it would be best if she started from the beginning …

‘From the beginning? Oh, well, they say that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth, and that it happened about six thousand years ago, but there are some people who think that—’

‘No, dammit, not that beginning. How did it begin for you?’

The priest was surprised and delighted instead of being on her guard. She and the receptionist had been in agreement for some time that they would dislike everyone and everything together, rather than each on their own. But they had never truly shared their life stories with one another, not beyond the superficial facts. When the occasion arose, they preferred to devote their time to the delightful things two people can do rather than to bitterness and its causes.

At the same time – she was learning now – Hitman Anders had been ruminating on his own. This was, of course, a potential catastrophe, because if he were to start reading books about turning the other cheek when his job was rather the opposite, breaking jaws and noses on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, well, where would that leave their business plan?

Perhaps a casual onlooker might be of the opinion that the priest ought to have grasped this from the start. And that she ought to have warned the receptionist. But, as it happened, there was no casual onlooker present, and the priest was only human (as well as a pretty dubious intermediary between man and God). If someone wanted to hear about her life, even if that someone was a half-deranged assailant and murderer, she was happy to oblige. And that was that.

So she invited Hitman Anders to hear the story of her life, the story no one but her pillow had ever heard before. She was aware that he would offer the same intellectual response as the pillow from IKEA, but this was overshadowed by the fact that someone wanted to listen to her.

‘Well, in the beginning my father created Hell on Earth,’ the priest began.

She had been forced into the trade by her father, who, naturally, opposed female priests. Not because female priests went against God’s will, that was up for debate, but because women belonged in the kitchen and also, from time to time, at the request of their husbands, in the bedroom.

What was Gustav Kjellander to do? The priesthood had been passed down from father to son in the Kjellander family since the late 1600s. It had nothing to do with belief or a calling. It was about upholding tradition, a position. That was why his daughter’s argument about not believing in God didn’t hold much sway. She would become a priest, according to her father, or he would personally see to it that she was damned.

For several years now, Johanna Kjellander had wondered how it could be that she had done as he’d said. She still didn’t know, but her dad had had her under his thumb as long as she could remember. Her earliest memory was of her father saying he was going to kill her rabbit. If she didn’t go to bed on time, if she didn’t clear up after herself, if she didn’t get the right grades at school, her rabbit would be put to death out of mercy because a rabbit needed a responsible owner, one who led by good example, not someone like her.

And mealtimes: the way Dad would reach slowly across the table, grab her plate, stand up, walk to the bin and throw her dinner into it, plate and all. Because she had said something wrong at the dinner table. Heard the wrong words. Given the wrong answer. Done the wrong thing. Or just was wrong.

Now Johanna Kjellander wondered how many plates it had been over the years. Fifty?

Hitman Anders listened to her with great concentration, because you never knew when there might be something worth taking in. The story about her dad didn’t count: it had been clear to the hitman from the start that the old man needed a good thrashing, and that would probably take care of that. Or he could have a second thrashing, if necessary.

In the end, Hitman Anders was forced to say so, in order to put a stop to the priest’s complaints. After an eternity she had got no further than her seventeenth birthday, when her dad had spat at her and said, ‘O God, how much must you hate me to give me a daughter, to give me this daughter. You have truly punished me, Lord.’ Her dad didn’t believe in God any more than she did, but he did believe in tormenting others with God’s help.

‘Please, priest, can I have the old man’s address so I can go over there with the baseball bat and preach some manners to him? Or a lot of manners, it sounds like. Should we say both right and left? Arms or legs, that’s up to you.’

‘Thank you for the offer,’ said the priest, ‘but it comes too late. Dad died almost two years ago, on the fourth Sunday after Trinity. When I got the news, I was up in the pulpit giving a sermon on forgiveness and not judging. But it turned out a bit different. I stood there and thanked the devil for taking my father home. It was not well received, you might say. I don’t remember everything but I’m pretty sure I called my dad a word that relates to the female genitals …’

‘Cunt?’

‘We don’t need to get into the details, but they interrupted me, pulled me down from the pulpit, and showed me the exit. Although I already knew where it was, of course.’

Hitman Anders really wanted to know which dirty word it had been, but he had to content himself with learning that the priest’s choice had unleashed a sensational moment in which two of the congregation’s most devoted lambs had thrown their hymnals at her.

‘Then it must have been …’

‘Now, now!’ said the priest, and continued her story. ‘I took my leave and wandered around until the next Sunday, and that was when I found our mutual friend Per Persson on a park bench. And then I met you. And one thing led to the next and now we’re sitting here, you and I.’

‘Yes, we are,’ said Hitman Anders. ‘Now can we get back to what the Bible says about stuff so that this conversation goes somewhere?’

‘But you were the one who wanted … you wanted me to tell you about my—’

‘Yeah, yeah, but not a whole novel.’