“Not much to complain about there,” said Börje Ekman, both smiling and lying.
This white lie was his intended beginning of his three-step plan to, in Phase A:
1. have opinions about the contents of the sermons
2. proceed to inform the pastor of the main points he must stick to, so that the churchwarden could
3. write the Sunday sermons himself, just like in the good old days.
And to think that they had chosen to hold Sunday services on an early Saturday evening. He would work on that in Phase B. Or C, depending on how difficult the priest, the pastor, and that other fellow might end up being.
The hitman’s constant companion, Jerry the Knife, had enough sense to tell the priest and the receptionist about the incipient familiarity between the pastor and the self-designated churchwarden.
“Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble,” said the priest.
The receptionist nodded. That Börje Ekman called himself the churchwarden without having been designated as such was a small problem in and of itself. But he seemed to be married to the very church and the area surrounding it, and he would keep coming back, no matter how far Jerry the Knife and his crew chased him off. He would come back and he would discover what he had missed the last time, namely what large amounts of money they were actually dealing with. What was more, there was a risk that he would twist the already twisted mind of the pastor and make a huge mess of everything.
“Next time you and Hitman Anders catch sight of Börje Ekman, try to lead that scatterbrain in the other direction,” said the receptionist.
“Which one? The hitman or the guy with the rake?” asked Jerry the Knife.
CHAPTER 44
The debut had gone better than one might have expected in the present circumstances. The newspapers had been there and delivered further free advertising in the form of reports on Pastor Anders’s success, as well as speculation about who might receive the next half-million from the newly saved, altruistic former hitman. None of the journalists was overly impressed by the sermon itself, but there had certainly been nothing wrong with the pastor’s and the congregation’s enthusiasm.
A few days later, the matter was discussed again in the papers. According to an anonymous source, the free coffee would be replaced next Saturday by free wine. They had been notified that communion was a crucial part of the Anderssonian liturgy. High mass would take place each Saturday evening at five on the dot, year round, according to what the papers had learned. When Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday, the wine would be temporarily replaced by equally alcoholic glögg, but otherwise everything would remain the same.
“Thank the good Lord for tip lines,” said the receptionist, when he read the free publicity in the nationwide tabloids.
“Where in the Bible does it say that God created tip lines?” said the priest.
* * *
Then it was Saturday again, and once more tons of people came streaming in, but this time the place wasn’t quite as crammed. The priest and the receptionist had been aware that this might happen; many people had already got their autograph or photo, and had no desire to pay for the same thing twice. But, still, there were two hundred more visitors than could fit into the church.
Last weekend, one carafe of coffee had been allowed for every twenty seats. This time, there was a wine glass at each seat and a Moldovan box of wine on the floor every sixteen feet.
No one dared to touch the wine before the pastor made his entrance, which he did as the clock struck five.
Standing in the same out-of-the-way corner of the building as the week before: Börje Ekman.
Already deeply bewildered.
“Hallelujah and Hosanna,” Pastor Anders began, before, for strictly personal reasons, he got straight to the point: “Jesus—my friends—took the suffering of all humanity upon himself. Let us begin with a toast to that!”
He filled his glass from the communion vessel as the rows of pews descended into half a riot. After all, there are few things as embarrassing as returning a toast without anything in your glass.
However badly the pastor wanted to knock back what he held, he waited until a sufficient number of the congregation appeared ready. “To Jesus!” he said at last, emptying the contents of his cup in one giant gulp. At least seven hundred of the eight hundred people in the building followed their pastor’s lead. Even this was more than fifty of them could handle.
After an inappropriate “That hits the spot,” Pastor Anders launched into his sermon by explaining that he was a simple servant of the Lord, who had formerly not understood that the path to Heaven was found by way of the blood and body of Christ. But he had seen the light. Above all, he was able to reveal to the congregation where the whole idea of communion had come from in the first place. It was best not to get into details, but the short version was that Jesus had felt hungry before he was crucified and invited his friends to one last hullabaloo. It was him and the apostles, but recent research, conducted by Pastor Anders himself, suggested that they had put away a great deal more wine than had previously been known. And the crucifixion had been delayed for some time, so there is a chance Jesus was dangling there on Calvary with a hangover on top of everything else. That might explain his anguished “My God, my God, why have you done this to me?”
Hullabaloo? A hungover Jesus on the cross? Had Börje Ekman heard correctly?
Pastor Anders had prepared another Post-it, so he was able to elegantly cite the most recent quotation as Mark 15:34. After that he made an unplanned digression into the curse of the hangover before he turned back to Jesus and the cross. For, according to Pastor Anders, the truly interesting thing Jesus said before sailing into eternity was “I am thirsty” (John 19:28).
That was the blood of Christ. When it came to his body . . . No, wait, first it was time for yet another toast in the name of the Lord: no one must stand or sit there becoming hungover himself, and the answer was to keep drinking.
It wasn’t long before almost the entire congregation was tipsy. The pastor fitted in three toasts around his cobbled-together declaration of communion before arriving at the next planned item on the agenda.
“It is said that they also broke bread with their wine, but, hello, dry white bread with red wine, is that how we’re supposed to honor the Lord and his son?”
Here and there, a few weak cries of “No!”
“I can’t hear you!” Hitman Anders said, in a louder voice. “Is that how we’re supposed to honor them?”
“No!” many more cried this time.
“Once more!” said Hitman Anders.
“No!” shouted the entire church and half the parking lot outside.
“Now I can hear you!” said Hitman Anders. “And I take your word as law.”
At a prearranged signal, the classes from Mälar Upper Secondary School times four began their task. Each student carried, in one hand, a bucket to fill with bills and, in the worst case, a coin or two. In the other hand was a tray with various sorts of crackers, seedless grapes, butter, and cheese. The trays passed from visitor to visitor, and when one was about to empty, the students immediately refilled it.
The pastor, at the front of the room, had his own plate. He nibbled at what was offered and chewed with relish.
“Fit for a bishop,” he said.
After having subsisted on the blood of Christ alone for several weeks, plus the occasional hamburger or cinnamon roll, Hitman Anders had seen fit to read up a little on what communion actually was (a little, mind, not a lot). In this he was cheered on by the priest: if only foolishness came out of Hitman Anders’s trap week after week, the consequence would be a pastor who couldn’t arouse enough enthusiasm for the masses to give enough money to get closer to Heaven. And this would soon turn out to be as profitable as running a business in the assault trade without having any assault to offer.
But there was another way, besides communion, to stimulate the flat-out boozing that was now taking place within an
d immediately outside God’s house. This time the priest had inspected Hitman Anders’s Post-it ahead of time and added an item or two she thought might influence the mood and thus the generosity.
That was why the pastor was currently telling the story of Noah, the man who built the world’s first vineyard, and as a result was the first to get raging drunk. Afterwards he passed out naked in his tent, all according to Genesis 9:21, but then he came to again, scolded one of his sons while hungover (“That bloody hangover again!”) and lived another three hundred and fifty years on top of the six hundred he already had behind him.
“Now let’s raise our glasses one last time,” Pastor Anders concluded. “We drink of the blood of Christ. The wine gave Noah nine hundred and fifty years of life. Without the wine he would have been dead long before that.”
The receptionist was thinking that Noah had probably already been dead long enough, but the pastor seemed able to get away with just about anything.
“Cheers and welcome back on Saturday!” said Pastor Anders, draining his vessel, not bothering with a glass.
The receptionist snapped his fingers to tell the students to make another collection, which brought in another ten thousand or so kronor in addition to what had already been given, along with the unfortunate offering of an older woman, with a feather boa around her neck, who had the poor taste to throw up into one of the buckets.
As people staggered out of the church, full of bliss and wine, the priest and the receptionist summed up the evening’s developments. A very rough estimate indicated that they had made over a million kronor this time, which meant that their investment in the Moldovan wine and the snacks had paid for itself many times over.
* * *
The suitcases of money were already closed when Churchwarden Börje Ekman entered the sacristy from which the business was run. He was red in the face; he didn’t look happy.
“For one thing!” he began.
“For one thing, you should probably learn to say ‘hello’ politely,” the receptionist snapped.
“Hello there, Börje,” said the oblivious hitman. “What did you think about this evening’s sermon? As good as last time?”
Börje Ekman had lost his train of thought so he started again. “Good evening to all of you,” he said. “I have a few things to say. For one thing, it is total chaos outside the church. At least four cars have backed into each other, people are dragging their feet as they walk down the gravel path, which will make it twice as hard to rake on Monday . . .”
“Maybe it would be best to pave it, then, so it will match the car park better,” said the receptionist, who was in a fighting mood.
Pave the gravel path? To Börje Ekman, this was tantamount to swearing in church. As he tried to recover from what he’d just heard, Hitman Anders, who was more intoxicated than his body actually needed to be, said, “Hey, listen, tell me what you thought of my goddamn sermon.”
Swearing in church was definitely tantamount to swearing in church, according to Börje Ekman.
“What on earth is going on here?” he said, looking down into the only bucket that hadn’t yet been emptied and hidden in the closest suitcase. It was the one that contained vomit, on top of what had to be several thousand kronor. “The sermon?” he went on. “That was a booze-fest!”
“Speaking of which,” said Hitman Anders, “wouldn’t you like a few drops yourself? I can’t guarantee it’ll make you live to nine hundred and fifty, but I’m sure it’ll put you in a better mood than you seem to be right now.”
“A booze-fest!” Börje Ekman repeated. “In God’s house! Have you no shame?”
Somewhere around that point, the priest had had enough. Mr. Blasted Ekman was the one who had no shame. Here they were, fighting to bring in a few measly kronor for the poorest people on our Earth, all while Ekman was grumbling about a gravel path. How much had he put in the collection plate, hmm?
The self-designated churchwarden had not put in a single krona, which troubled him for a second or two before he collected himself. “You are twisting the word of God, you are turning the service and mass into a circus, you, you . . . How much money have you brought in? And where did it all go?”
“That’s none of your business,” the receptionist said angrily. “And, anyway, isn’t the important thing that each krona goes to the needy?”
On the topic of “needy,” the priest and the receptionist had, a week before, exchanged the camper for the Riddarholm Suite at the Hilton, and that wasn’t exactly free.
But instead of saying so to the self-designated churchwarden, the priest suggested that “Mr. Jerry here” could show him the way out if, perchance, he was unable to find it himself. She also suggested, in a milder tone, that they meet again once emotions had settled a bit. Like this coming Monday, for example, might that work?
By taking action, she intended to do away with the unrest in the room but without spurring him to run to the police or do something equally horrid.
“I can find it myself,” said Churchwarden Börje Ekman. “But I’ll be back on Monday to rake the path, clear up the pieces of glass from all the collisions and, I’m sure, wipe up a patch of vomit or two that I haven’t found yet. And for next Saturday I demand more order than we had today. Do you understand? We will meet to discuss it at two o’clock!”
“Two thirty,” said the priest, because she didn’t want to let Börje Ekman decide.
CHAPTER 45
One of the few who didn’t drink a drop during the second Saturday service was a middle-aged woman who wore a blonde wig and glasses she didn’t need. She sat in the eighteenth row of pews and placed twenty kronor in the bucket every time it went by, no matter how much it pained her soul to do so. It was important not to stick out. She was there for reconnaissance.
No one in the building knew her name. Not many people outside it did either, as it happens. In the circles where she spent her time, she was simply called “the countess.”
Another seven rows back sat two men who emptied one of the Moldovan boxes all on their own. In contrast to the above-named, they did not put a single krona into the collection plate. Anyone in their immediate vicinity who happened to share an opinion about this was offered a thrashing.
The men were there on the same errand. One was named Olofsson. The other was too. And no matter how much they wished to cut the pastor into ribbons, their assignment was the opposite: to analyze his chances of survival up there in the pulpit. To put it simply, Hitman Anders must not die. Especially not before the count and countess happened to do so.
The first thing that Olofsson and Olofsson encountered was a metal detector at the entrance, which led them to make an extra circuit around the lot to hide two revolvers in a bush they were unable to find later because they were too drunk.
While their eyes were still sharp enough, they had time to take note of a considerable security team. Olofsson was the first to discover the two snipers in the bell tower. He asked his brother discreetly to confirm his discovery, so Olofsson did.
Later that evening, the brothers made a report to the other fifteen members of the group, who had unanimously decided that the count and the countess must be taken out. The fact that the informants were drunk made the meeting a muddle, but the others at least succeeded in getting out of Olofsson and Olofsson that Hitman Anders seemed reasonably safe for the time being. It would take a good deal of cogitation and initiative for anyone to get near him.
Unfortunately, cogitation followed by initiative perfectly described the count and the countess. The latter informed her count that, luckily, it would not be as simple as stepping into the church and blasting Hitman Anders’s skull to pieces: security was too tight for that. By “luckily,” she meant that such a procedure would not cause the hitman as much suffering as he deserved.
So, Saturdays were not the best time to strike. But, unfortunately, Hitman Anders existed on the other six days of the week as well, and it seemed he always had one bodyguard at his side.
/>
“One bodyguard?” said the count, with a smile. “You mean that with one well-aimed shot from a distance, he would be standing there alone, a headless bodyguard at his feet?”
“More or less,” said the countess. “I saw at least one sniper up in the bell tower as well, but I can’t imagine he sits there all week long.”
“That’s it?”
“We should probably count on more of them, spread out around the church. It has at least four entrances. One was recently built, and I would guess that all four are under guard.”
“So five or six security guards, one of whom never leaves Hitman Anders’s side?”
“Yes. I can’t be more precise than that. Not yet.”
“Then I suggest that, for our first step, you keep your wig on and stick around the area to see if our soon-to-be-dead killer dares to stick his nose out of the church. When we know a little more about his daily patterns, I’ll take out first the bodyguard, if necessary, from five hundred feet away, and put the next bullet square in the middle of Hitman Anders’s stomach. We can’t be too particular when it comes to how painful it has to be. Bleeding out internally with your intestines in shreds isn’t as awful as we’d hoped but, given the circumstances, it’s awful enough.”
The countess gave a disappointed nod. But it would have to do. Anyway, “intestines in shreds” sounded lovely. The count was the same as ever, she thought, feeling a rare warmth inside.
CHAPTER 46
So Olofsson and Olofsson had been involuntarily saddled with the task of taking out the count and the countess. By pooling their resources, the other fifteen had managed to produce the money that had been promised to the intended perpetrators. However, it was “look but don’t touch” until such time as results were achieved.