“By all means,” said the receptionist, not without pride.
He didn’t comment on the rest. But it seemed likely that the priest and the receptionist had a few things in common.
They were back at the hotel. Per Persson handed over the key to room eight and said that he and the priest could discuss the room rate another time. Quite a bit had happened for just one Sunday, and he was hoping to turn in early.
The priest thanked him in as worldly a fashion as she could manage. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for a nice day. I expect I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night to you, Per. Good night.”
* * *
On the night following the day he had met, first, a priest, then a count, and subsequently become a consultant to the hitman he already knew far too well, Per Persson lay on his mattress in the room behind the reception desk and stared up at the ceiling. A broken arm here and there probably wouldn’t be the end of the world, especially when they were dealing with people who deserved nothing better, and when it also enriched both the executor and his management.
The priest was one of the strangest people he had ever encountered. The receptionist was able to say this, even though he had encountered a lot of strange things in his years at the Sea Point Hotel—the hotel God had forgotten.
But she moved things forward, and she did so in a financially ingenious manner (even if she might have prepared her prayer on the park bench a little better—she had lost herself twenty kronor back there).
“I think I’ll hitch my wagon to your train for a while, Johanna Kjellander,” Per Persson said to himself. “I think I just will. You smell like money. And money smells good.”
He turned off the bare lightbulb next to his mattress and was asleep in only a few minutes.
And he slept better than he had in a very long time.
CHAPTER 6
A company specializing in the field of assault and battery has more to deal with than you might expect. The allocation of income, of course, was originally set at eighty percent to Hitman Anders and twenty percent for the receptionist and the priest to divide between them. But one had to consider the cost of doing business as well. For example, Hitman Anders would need new work clothes when the old ones had become too bloody to salvage. There was no controversy there. But he also argued that the cost of the beer he consumed before each shift ought to be divided between the parties. He claimed he was unable to beat anyone to a pulp while sober.
The receptionist and the priest responded that, with a little practice, it would certainly be possible to commit assault while sober; it was just that Hitman Anders had never tried. They maintained their position that he ought instead to decrease his consumption of alcohol on days he was supposed to work.
Hitman Anders lost the beer negotiation. He did, however, convince the group that it was unreasonable to expect him to take public transport to work, or to make use of a stolen bicycle with a brännboll bat on the luggage rack. It was unanimously decided that the firm would cover the cost of a taxi. The receptionist negotiated a fixed price with Taxi Torsten, a former regular at Club Amore. The girls had called him the Taxi Trick, which was the only reason the receptionist even remembered him. Per Persson looked up the former purchaser of sex and got straight to the point. “What would it cost for you to act as a private chauffeur in the Greater Stockholm area for one or two hours on one or two afternoons a week?”
“Six thousand kronor per fare,” said Taxi Torsten.
“I’ll give you nine hundred.”
“Done!”
“And you have to keep your mouth shut about anything you see or hear.”
“Done, I said.”
The group felt their way forward, with follow-up meetings every Monday. The original price list was constantly adjusted, based on Hitman Anders’s stories of how troublesome various types of task had been to execute. The prices also varied based on the combinations ordered. A broken right leg cost five thousand kronor, for example, same as a broken right arm. But the combination right leg/left arm cost forty thousand rather than thirty. That had come to be after Hitman Anders had given a vivid description of how a person who had just had his right leg smashed to bits with the brännboll bat flailed around on the ground, which meant it took a hell of a hokey-pokey to get at his left arm. Especially for the perpetrator in question, who had a hard time telling right from left (as well as right from wrong).
They were also particular with the ethical guidelines. The first and most important one was that children must never come to harm, either directly or indirectly, by being forced to watch as Mommy or (for the most part) Daddy got a licking.
The second rule was that any injuries that arose should, as far as possible, be of the sort that healed with time: one who had paid for his crime shouldn’t have to limp his way through the rest of his life. This involved, to name one example, being judicious about a broken kneecap, because it was well-nigh impossible to put back together again. One cut-off finger, however, was acceptable. So were two. Per hand. But no more.
The most common order was for plain old broken arms and legs, with the help of the brännboll bat. But sometimes the client wanted it to be clear, when looking at a person’s face, that he hadn’t minded his p’s and q’s, and then it was time for fists and brass knuckles, which led to just the right amount of fractured jawbones, nasal bones, and zygomatic bones, preferably in the company of a black eye and a split eyebrow. (The last, incidentally, usually appeared all on its own.)
Per Persson and Johanna Kjellander convinced one another that anyone who got a thrashing by way of their agency had had it coming. After all, each buyer had to argue his case carefully. So far, the only one they had refused was a recently freed heroin addict who, during psychodynamic therapy in prison, had come to realize that his ninety-two-year-old preschool teacher was to blame for everything. Hitman Anders thought there might be something in that, but Per Persson and Johanna Kjellander said the proof was lacking.
The heroin addict slouched helplessly away. To top it all, the old woman died of pneumonia two days later, thereby killing off every possibility for revenge.
* * *
The division of labor was such that Per Persson, who had to man the reception desk anyway, accepted incoming orders, named the price, and promised a decision within twenty-four hours. Thereafter he called Johanna Kjellander and Hitman Anders to a management meeting. The latter attended only occasionally, but each individual order could still be accepted by a vote of 2 0.
When payment in cash had been made, the assignment was carried out as stipulated, usually within a few days, always within a week. Although left sometimes turned into right and vice versa, the customer never had reason to complain about the quality of implementation.
“Your left arm is the one you wear your watch on,” the priest tried.
“Watch?” said Hitman Anders, who, since his first murder, had learned to tell the time in years and decades rather than hours and minutes.
“Or the hand you hold your fork in when you eat.”
“In the slammer I mostly ate with a spoon.”
CHAPTER 7
Life would have been good at the Sea Point Hotel had it not been for the fact that the business hadn’t really taken off. Rumors of Hitman Anders’s excellence weren’t spreading quickly enough to the right circles.
The only person in the group who had no problem working just a few hours a week was the protagonist. Hitman Anders, though he had sampled alcohol in all its forms, could not be accused of being a workaholic.
The receptionist and the priest regularly discussed how best to market his skills. Their conversations went so well that, one Friday evening, the priest went ahead and suggested they round things off with a bottle of wine in the receptionist’s room (which essentially consisted of a chair, a wardrobe, and a mattress on the floor). It was a tempting idea, but Per Persson remembered their first encounter, when she had tried to trick him out of his money, far too vividly. He would go along with sh
aring a bottle of wine, but it would be best to continue holding their meetings where they usually held them, then go their separate ways.
The priest was disappointed. There was something harsh and lovely about the receptionist. She should never have put a price on the prayer back on that park bench. Now that—to her own surprise—she was fishing for a little bit of love, that first encounter put her at a disadvantage.
But a shared bottle of wine there was, and maybe it was thanks to that bottle that they were able to agree that media attention would be an admittedly risky yet effective method of reaching their stated goals. It was decided that the hitman would give an exclusive interview to some suitable Swedish medium, and his unusual talent would become evident.
The receptionist read morning papers, evening papers, weekly papers, and magazines; he watched all sorts of programs on various TV channels, listened to the radio—and decided that the best and most immediate results could be obtained from one of the two national tabloids. His final decision was Expressen, because it sounded faster than Aftonbladet.
Meanwhile, the priest explained the plan to Hitman Anders and practiced patiently with him for his coming interview. He was fed information about the message they were reaching out with, what must be said, and what absolutely could not be said. The long and the short of it was that he would appear, in the newspaper, to be
1. for sale
2. dangerous, and
3. insane.
“Dangerous and insane . . . I think I can manage that,” said Hitman Anders, without sounding totally sure of himself.
“You have all the prerequisites,” the priest said encouragingly.
Once all the preparations had been made, the receptionist contacted the news editor at the chosen paper and said he was able to offer them an exclusive interview with the mass murderer Johan Andersson, better known as Hitman Anders.
The news editor had never heard of any mass murderer by that name, but she knew a good headline when she heard one. “Hitman Anders” fit the bill. She asked to hear more.
Well, Per Persson explained, the thing was, Johan Andersson had spent his entire adult life behind bars for recurrent murders. Perhaps it was an exaggeration to call him a mass murderer, but Per Persson didn’t dare to guess how many skeletons Hitman Anders had in his closet, beyond the ones he had gone to prison for.
In any case, these days the living murder machine was free, out in the world, and sent word via Per Persson that he would be happy to meet Expressen to say he had become a better person. Or not.
“Or not?” said the news editor.
It didn’t take more than a few minutes for the newspaper to look up Johan Andersson’s pathetic history. Hitman Anders was not a name that had been used in the media previously, so the receptionist had prepared an exhaustive argument about how the name had come about and stuck during the man’s most recent jolt in prison, but his worry in this case was unwarranted. Expressen’s reasoning was that if your name is Hitman Anders, then your name is Hitman Anders. This was brilliant! The paper had its very own mass murderer on the hook. That was better than any old sensational murder story.
A reporter and a photographer met Hitman Anders and his friends in the slightly spiffed-up lobby of the Sea Point Hotel the very next day. His friends began by taking the reporter to one side to explain that the two of them must not figure in the report because such exposure might jeopardize their lives. Did they have the reporter’s word on this?
Young and plainly nervous, he had to ponder this for a moment. It would never do for outsiders to dictate the conditions of the paper’s journalism. On the other hand, Johan Andersson was the subject of the interview. It seemed reasonable to leave out the tipsters. But it was tougher for him to comply with their demand for still images only, no audio or video recordings. Here, too, the receptionist invoked his own security and that of the priest, if on somewhat murkier grounds. The reporter and the photographer’s faces clouded, but they accepted.
Hitman Anders described in detail all the ways he had killed people over the years. But, according to the prevailing PR strategy, he said nothing about being under the influence of drink or pills; instead, he was supposed to list the things that might make him fly off the handle, that might make him turn violent again.
“I hate injustice,” he told Expressen’s reporter, because he remembered the priest talking about that.
“I suppose pretty much everyone does,” said the still-nervous reporter. “Is there any specific type of injustice you had in mind?”
Hitman Anders had gone through them with the priest, but his brain was at a standstill. Should he have had a breakfast beer to get himself into proper shape? Or had he already had one too many?
There was nothing he could do about the former, but the latter seemed unlikely. He snapped his fingers and got the receptionist to fetch him a fresh pilsner from the fridge. The hitman had it in his hand and open within fifteen seconds, and by the time half a minute had passed it was empty.
“Now, where were we?” said Hitman Anders, licking the beer foam off his lips.
“We were talking about injustice,” said the reporter, who had never before seen anyone down a bottle of beer so fast.
“Oh, right, and how I hate it, right?”
“Yes . . . but what kinds?”
During all of their practicing, the priest had learned that the hitman’s sense of reason came and went of its own accord. Right now it was likely out for a stroll, all on its own.
And she was right about that. Hitman Anders could not for the life of him remember what it was he was supposed to hate. Plus, that last beer had really hit the spot. He was very close to just sitting there and loving the whole world instead. But, of course, he couldn’t say so. All he could do was improvise.
“Yes, I hate . . . poverty. And terrible diseases. They always get the good people in a society.”
“Do they?”
“Yes, the good people get cancer and stuff. Not the bad people. I hate that. And I hate people who exploit regular people.”
“Who are you thinking of?”
Yes: who was Hitman Anders thinking of? What was he thinking? Why was it so terribly difficult for him to recall what he was supposed to say? Just take that part about killing. Was he supposed to claim that he didn’t kill people any more, or was it the other way around?
“I don’t kill people any more,” he heard himself saying. “Or maybe I do. Everyone on my hate-list should probably watch out.”
Hate-list? he asked himself. What hate-list? Oh, please, don’t let the reporter ask a follow-up question about . . .
“Hate-list?” said the reporter. “Who’s on it?”
Dammit! Hitman Anders’s brain was spinning fast and slow all at once. Have to gather my thoughts . . . What was it again? He was supposed to appear . . . insane and dangerous. What else?
The priest and the receptionist did not pray to any higher power for their hitman to find his way: they considered themselves to have far too poor a relationship with the power in question. They did, however, stand there hoping. Hoping that Hitman Anders would land on his feet somehow.
Over the shoulder of the Expressen reporter and through the window, Hitman Anders could make out the neon logo of the Swedish Real Estate Agency on a building a hundred yards down and across the street. Next to it was a small suburban branch of Handelsbanken. He could hardly see it from where he sat, but he knew it was there, because how many times had he stood there smoking in the bus shelter outside, waiting for the bus that would take him to the nearest den of iniquity?
In the absence of sufficient order inside his head, Hitman Anders allowed himself to be inspired by what he saw before his eyes.
Realtor, bank, bus stop, smoker . . .
He had never owned a rifle, or a revolver, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t shoot from the hip. “Who’s on my hate-list? Are you sure you want to know?” he said, lowering his voice, speaking a little more slowly.
T
he reporter nodded, his expression grave.
“I don’t like realtors,” said Hitman Anders. “Or bank people. People who smoke. Commuters . . .”
With that, he had included everything he’d seen and remembered across the street.
“Commuters?” the reporter said in surprise.
“Yes—do you feel the same?”
“No. I mean, how can you hate commuters?”
Hitman Anders seemed to settle into playing the role of himself, and he made the most of what he’d happened to say. He lowered his voice a bit more and spoke even more slowly: “Are you a commuter-lover?”
By now, the reporter from Expressen was truly scared. He assured the man that he did not love commuters: he and his girlfriend both biked to and from work and, beyond that, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to what sort of attitude he ought to have towards commuters.
“I don’t like cyclists either,” said Hitman Anders. “But commuters are worse. And hospital workers. And gardeners.”
Hitman Anders was on a roll. The priest thought it best to break in before the reporter and his photographer realized he was messing with them, or that he had no idea what he was saying, or a little of both.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us, but Hitman Anders, I mean Johan here, needs his afternoon rest, with one yellow and one orange pill. It’s important to make sure that nothing goes wrong later this evening.”
The interview hadn’t gone as planned, but with a little luck they could still make it work in their favor. The priest was just sorry that the most important part hadn’t been said, the part she had repeated twenty times to her hitman. The advertisement, so to speak.
And then a miracle happened. He remembered! The photographer was already sitting behind the wheel in the Expressen car and the reporter had one foot in the car, but Hitman Anders hailed them: “You know where to find me if you need a kneecap broken! I’m not expensive. But I’m good.”