Permanently.
The count in the grove had his sights set. There were no obstacles in his way. The shot would strike that bastard Hitman Anders just below his chest and go straight through his body. “See you in Hell,” he said, and fired.
Sure enough, the loud report caused Jerry the Knife to go from a state of general readiness to one of immediate action. He threw himself to the ground, crawled straight to the double doors and made sure they closed. He remained outside (he was truly no coward), in the questionable shelter of the truck, which stayed where it was. Where had the shot come from?
The bodyguard had moved at lightning speed. All the same, the count had been able to see that his task was accomplished, in that Hitman Anders had keeled over backwards. By now the bodyguard was behind the truck, out of the count’s field of vision. This prompted the latter to say to his countess that it would be best for them to leave. One bodyguard more or less didn’t matter, as long as he didn’t pose a threat, but that would only be the case if they continued to lie low in the bushes up on the rise. In order to inspire the bodyguard to stay put rather than take off on a suicide mission, he fired off the half-jacketed bullet as well, for no reason other than to hit the side window of the truck (the driver was lying on the floor, among the accelerator, the brake, and the clutch, and remained unharmed by a margin of eight inches or so).
Börje Ekman, as previously mentioned, did not believe in luck, good or bad. He believed first and foremost in himself and his own excellent qualities. God took second place; rules and regulations came third. But one must, from an objective perspective, call it bad luck for Börje Ekman that Hitman Anders and the crew had settled at his church in particular. And it was bad luck that he had just handed his rake to Hitman Anders when the shot was fired. It was also bad luck that the recipient happened to be holding it in such a way that the count’s jacketed bullet struck the metal part of the rake instead of landing just north of the hitman’s navel and traveling onward through his body. The force of the bullet caused the rake to fly up into Hitman Anders’s face; he plopped onto his hindquarters, his nose bleeding.
“Ouch, dammit!” he said as he sat there.
Meanwhile, Börje Ekman said nothing. A person seldom does when he has just had a jacketed bullet ricochet into his left eye and burrow a good deal further into his brain. The former churchwarden was more former than ever. He collapsed onto the floor. Dead.
“I’m bleeding!” Hitman Anders complained, as he stood up slowly.
“So’s the churchwarden,” said the priest. “But, in contrast to you, he’s not whining about it. With all due respect, your bloody nose is the least of our problems right now.”
The priest looked at her former tormentor on the floor. Blood flowed from the hole in the churchwarden’s head that had once been the location of his eye. “The wages of sin is death, Romans six, verse twenty-three,” she said, without reflecting upon why, if this were the case, she herself was still alive.
* * *
As the count plucked the hand grenade from his pocket—one last security measure before it was time to retreat—Olofsson and Olofsson finally arrived on the scene. They had taken the wrong exit out of a roundabout and lost the white Audi, despite all the electronic equipment they had at their disposal. On the way up to the rise, they’d heard one shot, then another. They were currently standing twenty yards from the count and the countess, who were crouching on all fours in a sparse but considerable lilac bush. The rifle in the count’s hand was clearly double-barreled. This, along with his surprised and slightly desperate expression when he caught sight of Olofsson and Olofsson, led the brothers to realize that he had finished shooting for the moment, unless he were to reload, and where would he find time for that?
“Finish them off,” said Olofsson to his brother. “Start with the count.”
But Olofsson had never killed before, and it was no minor task even for a hoodlum like him. “Since when am I your servant? Do it yourself, if you’re so damn smart,” said Olofsson. “And you should start with the countess. She’s the nastier of the two.”
Meanwhile, the count was fumbling with his hand grenade, and he did so to such an extent that, all in the same second, he managed to show it to the brothers, remove the pin—and drop the grenade among the lilac branches.
“What are you doing, you idiot?” the countess said, her last words in this life.
For his part, the count had already spoken his last.
The brothers Olofsson had time to throw themselves behind a rock, and survived unscathed the shrapnel that tore the count and the countess, plus the bush, to bits.
CHAPTER 54
Jerry the Knife stood up cautiously from his position behind the car. He no longer had to wonder where the attack with its double shots had come from, since it had immediately been followed by an explosion in the grove on the other side of the road. He would find out later what damage the shots had wrought inside the room. His first task was to make his way to the grove and neutralize any opposition that remained.
Since Jerry had to move in a wide curve to avoid making an obvious, easy target of himself, he heard police sirens approaching before he arrived at the spot. It was impossible to figure out exactly what had happened, but miscellaneous body parts suggested that the attackers, a woman and a man, had been blasted into such small pieces that he wouldn’t have been able to say for certain how many people had been involved, if not for the happy coincidence that three feet in shoes lay in a neat row among the rest of the mess. Jerry guessed the first two were a man’s size ten and a half, while the third was more like a woman’s six, with a high heel. As long as the attacker hadn’t been three-legged and bi-gendered, with two different shoe sizes, this meant a woman had been at the man’s side. The count and the countess, perhaps? Presumably. But who had blown them up? Were they in luck—might there be differing opinions, among the hoodlums, about how best to deal with Hitman Anders? Two wanted him dead, and of those two all that remained were three feet that wouldn’t be walking away, unlike Jerry the Knife, who left the scene before the police arrived.
On his way back to the church, Jerry had to repeat this theory to himself to dare even to believe it. Were things really so felicitous that some people who wanted to get rid of the people who wanted to get rid of Hitman Anders had been there to blast the count and countess to bits?
A second later, he realized that the explosion had come after the shots. The second shot had hit the truck, but what about the first? Hitman Anders, one had to presume.
All in all, this meant that the threat scenario against Pastor Anders had massively improved.
And that he was dead.
A minute or so later, Jerry the Knife found that the target he had failed to protect had been luckier than should have been possible.
“Our situation is now such,” he said before the priest, the receptionist, and the hitman with a nosebleed, “that we have a crime-scene investigation taking place hardly five hundred feet away and a corpse on the floor at our feet. Police officers will be knocking at the church door as soon as they put two and two together.”
“Four,” said Hitman Anders, with paper towel stuck in one nostril.
Jerry the Knife wondered if it would be possible to stuff the churchwarden into one of the suitcases, but the body would have to be cut in half to fit, and there was no time for that. Plus, this was in no way a pleasant thought.
The receptionist said that the bullet seemed still to be somewhere inside the skull of what used to be Börje Ekman, and that, if this was so, it was in a good place, probably somewhere in the vicinity of the screw that had been loose in there.
The priest was annoyed that the churchwarden had made such a terrible mess on the floor, though the puddle of blood could be mopped up, of course. She volunteered, and suggested at the same time that Jerry should take the corpse under his arm and load it into the truck, after which he should make corpse and truck disappear. After all, the truck would have plent
y to gossip about to any police officer, what with its broken side window.
That was all they could do. So they did it. Jerry the Knife got behind the wheel after managing to convince the driver on the floor to shift a few feet to the right so he could reach the pedals to drive. What was more, in his new position the terrified driver found the spent bullet: the last remaining evidence that a shot had been fired in a churchly direction.
Wine, grapes, cheese, and crackers had already been unloaded, so there was plenty of room for a dead churchwarden in the back. The fact was, there would have been room for an average-sized congregation to keep him company, had it been necessary.
It was not immediately obvious to the police that the hand grenade that had taken two lives had any ties to the religious building on the other side of the road. It took several hours for one inspector to make the potential connection to the Church of Anders. And the resultant visit from the police wasn’t undertaken until the next day.
The priest received the officers, saying she had read in the paper about the terrible thing that had apparently happened just a stone’s throw away, that they had heard a loud bang as they were receiving goods the day before, and police sirens immediately afterwards, which had felt reassuring “because we knew the authorities were on their way to deal with whatever might be going on. It’s really nice to know the force is so alert. May we offer you a little church coffee? I’m guessing you don’t have time for a game of Pick Up Sticks.”
Approximately ten hours earlier, Jerry the Knife had thrown a triple-bagged bundle containing 175 pounds of churchwarden and 33 pounds of rocks into the Baltic. After this he had conscientiously set fire to the truck on a remote gravel road with the help of ten gallons of gasoline. To be on the safe side, he had done it on the other side of the Västmanland county boundary so that the investigation one had to assume would result from the fire would land on a different desk in a different district than the mysterious explosion north of Stockholm would.
CHAPTER 55
The former churchwarden, who now lay in the Baltic Sea at a depth of sixty feet, would come back to haunt the group one last time, several days after his death.
“Sodom and Gomorrah,” Börje Ekman had said, time and again, the previous Tuesday, as he had sat in his studio apartment, oatmeal simmering on the stove. He had taken a bite of his crispbread with margarine and tried to decide what to do. To start with. “Do I have the right idea, Lord?” said Börje Ekman, who received silence in response.
So he changed tack. “If I have the wrong idea, Lord, tell me so! You know I will not leave your side.”
The Lord still said nothing.
“Thank you, Lord,” said Börje Ekman, who had received the confirmation he needed.
Thus, on Wednesday morning, the self-appointed churchwarden of the Church of Anders took his bicycle and rode from Systembolaget outlet to Systembolaget outlet to speak to the men and women on the park benches outside. Some of them already suspected that the state-controlled liquor outlet would ban them for the day, but they were hanging out there anyway. Others were still sober enough to have a good chance of being allowed in when the doors were unlocked at ten on the dot. Systembolaget had the complicated task of, on the one hand, selling as much alcohol as possible to the people of Sweden, thereby maximizing the amount of tax payable to the nation and, on the other, preaching to the same people that in the name of sobriety they should not drink the alcohol they had just paid for so dearly.
In their ambition to do the responsible thing, they found reason each day to send packing not only ten but up to twenty potential customers, chosen from among those who most needed their visit.
To the joy of this clientele, Börje Ekman biked around with the news that there would be free wine at the Church of Anders north of the city that coming Saturday. The generosity of the Almighty knew no bounds. It was all free, if you arrived on time. Snacks were included. No, you didn’t have to eat; that was optional. No, no one was shown the door before it even opened; this was all arranged by the Lord, not by Systembolaget.
Börje Ekman knew that the students from Mälar Upper Secondary School began their duties at one o’clock. The boxes of wine would presumably be in place half an hour later. “Anyone who arrives before two o’clock is unlikely to come too late,” he said, then bicycled on.
And he smiled as he pedaled onward into the chilly headwind. To the next Systembolaget. And the next. And the next. Just hours before his own death.
* * *
When Saturday arrived, Churchwarden Börje Ekman lay silent at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, while the most wretched examples of humanity he had previously spurred into action took seats in the pews of his church at just after eleven that morning.
Three hours later, the church was full. Another twenty minutes after that, everyone in the church was full. Of wine. In contrast to the boxes from Moldova.
The students had been given their instructions. An empty box must be immediately exchanged for a fresh one. The rule was in place in case an exchange or two became necessary towards the end of the service; no one expected every single box to have been replaced by another long before Hitman Anders had even changed his clothes.
The first fight broke out around four thirty. It began with an argument about who had ownership of the nearest box of wine and ended when no one could remember what they had been arguing about since there was always a refill at hand. Around the same time, visitors who were used to finding spots in the church began to arrive, their pockets full of money, but once they reached the door they turned to go home again.
At twenty minutes to five, the priest saw what was going on. The students had made an initial round with their buckets and collected twenty-two Swedish kronor and a West German Deutschmark from 1982. This averaged out to just over 2.7 öre per visitor. Plus the German mark, which was potentially worth a similar amount, but only if melted down.
At ten to five, the students’ spokesperson informed her that the week’s rations of wine were gone. Did that mean they should dip into next week’s or switch to the trays of goodies?
Neither. It meant that the week’s sermon was cancelled and that Jerry the Knife and his men had to empty the church before a real drunken brawl broke out.
“It’s probably a bit late for that,” said Jerry the Knife, as he gazed out through the curtains at the congregation.
People were sitting in and standing among the pews; someone had lain down to sleep; at least four different groups were arguing with each other; a shoving match was going on; and bickering was breaking out. A filthy woman and an even filthier man had lain down under a fresco of the baby Jesus in the manger and appeared to be trying to demonstrate how it had not gone down, according to the Bible, when the Virgin Mary became with child.
Apparently someone had called the police (Börje Ekman was, in this respect, not a suspect), because by now they could hear sirens outside. The metal detectors started beeping with each new officer that passed through them, which in turn made the two police dogs nervous. One barking dog in a church sounds like an entire kennel. Two barking dogs create chaos.
By the time the smoke cleared, forty-six people had been arrested for drunkenness, violently resisting an officer or both. Two more were taken into custody for disorderly conduct.
In addition, the priest in charge, Johanna Kjellander, was called in for questioning, under suspicion of . . . well, it wasn’t quite possible to decide what.
According to the Law of Public Order, chapter three, paragraph eighteen, an individual municipality may impose further prohibitions in addition to those already in existence, for the purpose of maintaining public order.
Following the articles in the Sunday newspapers, the municipality in question passed a resolution the very next day concerning “a ban on the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the private religious gathering place known as ‘the Church of Anders,’ where the aim of said consumption appears to deviate from that in the given rules and regula
tions.” The municipality’s decision was not complicated by the Church’s vague links to what was presumed to be a double homicide a few days previously, in which two members of the criminal element had been blasted to bits.
CHAPTER 56
After a business strategy based on the assault of people who were, in the best case, not entirely innocent, the priest and the receptionist had steered onto the new track of swindling money out of those whose hearts were full of faith, hope, love, and generosity, and whose circulatory systems, just to be safe, had been filled with wine.
If it hadn’t been for a dead count and countess—as well as the final action of a self-important former, now equally dead, churchwarden—this line of business might have continued even until today. But first it turned out that the newspapers could not be trusted as free distributors of publicity. Instead, the journalists drew murky connections between the presumed double homicide of two of the underworld’s central figures and the Church of Anders on the other side of the highway. A few even broached the possibility that Hitman Anders had reverted to his old self and was behind it all. It was taken for granted that the so-called count and his countess were among those whom Hitman Anders had cheated out of their money a few months previously.
“Goddamn journalists.” The receptionist summarized the situation he and the priest now found themselves in.
The priest agreed. It would have been so much simpler if the media hadn’t bothered to do their jobs.
As if these articles weren’t bad enough, on their heels came the hastily approved local ordinance forbidding the Church of Anders to base its operations on wine (as opposed to a windmill in northwestern Värmland) as the source of all that was good, which meant that both priest and receptionist saw a never-ending uphill battle ahead of them.