If their assumption was that her mother had truly been clairvoyant, there was no way for them to move forwards. After all, Sabine hadn’t inherited an ounce of her mother’s talent.
But if in fact she had been a charlatan or, alternatively, believed in her own fantasies, thanks to her regular intake of happy pills, well, that put things in a different light.
Julius belonged to the small group of people who think that charlatans are a lovely thing. So he said encouragingly that Sabine shouldn’t worry that her mother had been anything but.
Sabine thanked Julius for his kind words but said that the fantasy explanation was the most likely. ‘And it’s possible to copy those. Or even develop them further.’
For all those years, her mother had talked about how she wanted to take her operation and herself to new heights; Sabine knew her stories by heart. There were reasons nothing ever happened on that front. Towards the end, she could hardly get out of bed.
Her favourite story was the one about Olekorinko.
What if he was still alive? And she could find him and his operation via the internet?
‘You’re not touching my tablet,’ said Allan.
‘Oh yes I am.’
Sweden
The Americans returned to Los Angeles without touching base with Johnny and without letting him touch base with them. There is nothing you can say to a person who has buried one of the brotherhood in a pale blue coffin with bunnies on it. Perhaps you could beat the bastard to death, but that was the problem. Kenneth’s little brother was spared because he was Kenneth’s little brother. With that, the Stockholm branch closed; it died with its founder. All planned future payments to the Aryan Alliance would be immediately cancelled.
Yet Johnny still wanted to be optimistic about the future. Once those guilty of the coffin mix-up were properly executed, he would try to contact Los Angeles again.
Via the thoroughly distressed woman at the morgue he came to learn that Kenneth had at least ended up in the right coffin, but the coffin had ended up in the wrong place. Now that it had been returned, it was time for a new funeral. Unfortunately the pastor in charge was indisposed after sustaining injuries from a bad fall. Johnny dropped the idea of finding a new pastor. There was no time. He bought a bouquet of tulips at the closest corner shop and paid an evening visit to the battered man at the hospital. The pastor thanked him for his concern, told him of his fractured nose and the crack in his right cheekbone, and said he could probably be back in service within six to eight weeks.
‘You’ve got two and a half,’ said Johnny.
Meanwhile, Kenneth would stay at the morgue. Johnny, seeking to comfort himself, reasoned that it was no colder there than in the ground.
His priorities were clear. Before anything else, the coffin marauders must float in a puddle of their own entrails. Thanks to the coffin shop’s website, he knew he was looking for one Sabine Jonsson. But he’d spoken to a man on the phone when ordering the coffin – probably the man next to her in the car when they’d fled. If Johnny could just find Sabine and the hearse, he would get the strange man too.
It didn’t take long to learn more about the woman, via the internet.
She was the CEO and only permanent board member of Die with Pride AB. The other member was one Allan Emmanuel Karlsson, who had to have been the man next to her in the car; he could no longer hide his identity. Sabine had also been a board member of Other Side AB, which had since been liquidated. Other Side AB? What the hell was that?
Oh, right, the internet. Other Side had specialized in clairvoyance! They talked to people who had departed life on earth. Johnny brushed aside the sudden urge to spend one more moment with Kenneth. One last conversation. No, dammit! There was no point in believing all that nonsense.
Sabine Rebecka Jonsson and Allan Emmanuel Karlsson. In a black hearse registered to the company. With a residential address they seemed utterly unlikely to return to. He would find them, he knew it. He just didn’t know how.
Russia
‘Good morning, Volodya. How are things? You look concerned.’
Yes, that was true. President Putin had some thinking to do. His colleague Trump was about to go entirely off the rails.
‘That idiot in Washington has seriously riled that fool in Pyongyang,’ he said. ‘What will we do, Gena?’
Gennady Aksakov took a seat at his friend’s desk. They were an unbeatable pair. Not just good, they were the best. Just as they had once been on the sambo and judo mats.
But, as they say, it’s possible to be too successful. That was more or less what the Russian president was brooding over now.
Under Gena’s discreet leadership, Russia had started a war with the United States without telling anyone. A whole army of young men and women had marched onto the internet, literally donned American baseball caps, opened a Dr Pepper and gone on the attack.
From within.
The battles took place on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blogs and websites. From those positions, the fake American web soldiers aimed shots in every direction: they undermined left-wing movements one day and right-wing movements the next, supporting NFL players’ right to kneel before the flag on Facebook and calling those same players unpatriotic on Twitter. They expressed support for stricter gun laws and protested against the very same thing. They demanded walls against Mexico and the opposite. They praised and cut down every new attempt at health-care reform. Opined every possible opinion on LGBTQ issues. They fired up the masses, no matter who the masses were and what they stood for.
The point was to set American against American. A divided country was a weakened country, after all.
When the dust of war settled, the president and his friend found that their troops had won every single battle. But what about the war itself?
Putin wondered if it had all gone too well. Gena had even managed the impossible: placing the extreme divider Trump in the White House. Was it a Pyrrhic victory? Had they created a monster that could no longer be reined in?
The United States was definitely going to pieces; that part was good. But nations are like the Siberian tiger: a wounded one can be lethal. The USA was still the greatest military power in the world. The man who was running his own country into the ground, with Russia’s help, might now, in his monumental unsuitability for the job, be on his way to a nuclear war with North Korea. Which was in the immediate vicinity of eastern Russia.
That hadn’t been part of their calculations. And it was impossible to predict what it might lead to. In hindsight, they never should have sent over that goddamn plutonium centrifuge.
‘Perhaps not,’ his friend admitted. ‘But what’s done is done.’
What had once seemed like a good idea was about to bite them in the butt. One or more true nuclear weapons tests in North Korea, while the United States and China were talking trade agreements, was meant to mess things up for them. It was not in Russia’s best interest for the Americans and the Chinese to enjoy each other’s company.
The risk now was that they would realize they had a common enemy. And Xi Jinping had found a way to talk to Trump. Or maybe he’d just made sure to lose by the proper number of strokes on the golf course. Whatever he was doing, it appeared to be working.
‘What’s done is done,’ Gennady Aksakov said once more. ‘Let it go, Volodya. Let’s focus on Europe.’
Putin nodded. ‘You swung by Sweden, then? How are things there?’
Gena made a face. ‘You don’t want to know. Let’s talk about Spain and Germany instead. I have some good German news for you.’
Putin smiled. ‘Oh, really? Does that mean Merkel isn’t sitting as securely on her fat arse as she thinks?’
Sweden
Journalist Bella Hansson with Eskilstuna-Kuriren wanted readers. What was the point of her job, otherwise? To realize this goal on a day like today meant delivering something terrorist-related. People didn’t want to read about anything else anyway.
She browsed through the incident r
eports from the police. A bar fight from the day before? No. Alleged maltreatment of animals on a farm? Upsetting just about any other day of the year, but not this one.
Nor was it possible to make terrorism out of two cars that had backed into each other in the car park outside a department store, even if one of the drivers was Muslim.
But perhaps here was something.
A hearse had been searched just a few hours after the attack in Stockholm. No measures taken, case closed.
But there had been an interrogation.
Why?
In Sweden there’s something called the principle of public access. It means that everything a public official does, writes, says and almost thinks must promptly be reported to any citizen who wishes to know. Citizens in general seldom go to the trouble. But journalists are a different matter.
The pockmarked lead interrogator-slash-Inspector Holmlund was on his way home after a long day – a Saturday, to boot – but had the misfortune of running into young reporter Bella Hansson at the door. With an inaudible sigh he invited her into the office.
He was far too experienced to lie to the reporter’s face. However, he did elect to leave out parts of the truth. In doing so he imagined she would lose interest in the story and he would be spared extra work with troublesome follow-up questions.
The truth was, then, that a car transporting a coffin had been stopped at a routine checkpoint, and an interrogation had been held. No, the coffin had not contained any deceased person: the inspectors had ascertained this on site. But at least one of the people had been unbelted.
‘You brought in an undertaker for questioning because he or she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt?’ Bella Hansson asked.
The fact was, they weren’t undertakers but coffin manufacturers, yet Holmlund opted not to correct the reporter. ‘It’s been a very special day, as you know.’
Bella Hansson gave Inspector Holmlund a sceptical look. ‘Where did the interrogation lead? Were you in charge of it?’
‘Yes, I was. Honestly it led to nothing but a talking-to from me to the man who’d neglected to use a seatbelt.’
Of course, it wouldn’t be possible to turn this story into terrorism either, but after Bella had asked a few more questions, and received answers, she changed perspective. She’d had an idea that felt even better. The article she’d almost finished composing in her mind was really too good to be put online. The problem was that the physical copy of the paper didn’t come out on Sundays.
Online it would be. But Bella sat on her story until the next morning so it would remain at the top of the news feed for as long as possible. In the new world, it was important to amass clicks.
Sweden
Yes, indeed, Olekorinko was more active than ever. It appeared a lucrative business to be a witch doctor of his calibre. But to copy his ideas Sabine needed to study them on-site. And since Africa wasn’t exactly next door, she would have to stick to what she already knew for the time being.
First they had to find out what the clairvoyant competition looked like. Sabine spent the evening and half their night at the pension on market analysis. It was depressing work. Not just because Allan whined non-stop about how she had stolen his toy, but also because it was all there in black and white, how the market for various types of clairvoyance had just about exploded in the past year. The supply was enormous. It would be easy to enter the branch anew, but it would be hard to position herself for financial viability, even ignoring the fact that Sabine had no talent for running economically viable businesses.
Julius left her in peace, partly because he believed she needed it and partly because he was busy wondering about the bloody asparagus. The old lady at the pension had an old-fashioned telephone on a table in the hall. It would have been possible to borrow it for an intercontinental call while she was out shopping, if the scrap of paper with Gustav Svensson’s number on it wasn’t missing. It must have been left behind on the table at the restaurant in New York.
Without Gustav’s number, and without Gustav having a number at which to reach Julius (who didn’t even have a phone), there was a considerable risk that the friends and business partners would never meet again. Julius thought some more and realized it was almost certain they never would. This was tragic on several levels. After all, he liked the Swedish Indian. And he also felt the need to hit him on the head with something hard.
While Sabine and Julius were otherwise occupied, Allan found a sofa in the pension’s common room upon which to settle himself. He lay there waiting for Sabine’s short breaks from the tablet so he could catch up on his surfing. Among other things, about the Swedes’ fury that postal delivery wasn’t working as it should. Far too many letters took two days to arrive rather than the stipulated one. The postal service’s solution was to change the rules rather than the routines. Now all letters would take two days, in accordance with the new regulations. Suddenly, delivery assurance was approaching a hundred per cent. Allan guessed the director of the postal service had a considerable bonus coming.
In other news, a leader of the National Front in France had sat down at a North African restaurant to eat couscous. And liked it! This was considered beyond unpatriotic. Soon the leader had been kicked out of the party, or perhaps he had stepped down of his own accord. Allan wasn’t sure what couscous was. Perhaps the Arab world’s answer to pea soup with ham. Too much of that stuff and he, too, would probably have stepped down. From what, however, was unclear.
Before Sabine demanded the tablet back, Allan also managed to read about the Swedish military’s investment in a fleet of helicopters so expensive that there was no money left to use it. But the helicopters looked nice sitting on the ground.
After the night’s work, Sabine had a list of forty-nine women and one man who all offered services in the same arena as her mother had.
‘How’s it going?’ Julius wondered, as they breakfasted together. He noticed how grim Sabine looked.
‘Not great.’
She expounded her statement. The world outside was swarming with angel cards, tarot cards and pendulums. Women devoting themselves to long-distance healing. Breaking up blockages in the soul. Speaking with animals. Telling love fortunes. Giving telepathic guidance. Having the universal laws of energy down pat. Seeing the past, present and future in glowing ash, coffee grounds or crystal balls.
‘It can’t be that hard to see the past,’ said Allan. ‘I could, before my memory got too bad. And isn’t the present the present?’
It wasn’t quite that simple. The past was made up of parallel events that together created an individual’s now and would do the same with said individual’s future.
‘Without the proper knowledge of the guardian angels, you are spiritually lost. With the wrong energies in the room, it’s still worse.’
Julius had known for a long time that Sabine was as spiritually lost as he was. Not to mention Allan. But business was business. What sort of focus did Sabine think they should have, in this clairvoyant muddle?
Well, that was the thing. The reasonably good news in all of this was that few of the mediums focused on ghosts, driving out ghosts, or conversations with the other side. Sabine saw potential market success in what had once been her mother’s speciality.
Allan delivered the good news that the ranks of those on the other side had recently increased by one. He read from the tablet about the hundred-and-seventeen-year-old Uzbek farmer’s wife who had just passed away after her only cow happened to sit on her.
Sabine was growing more tired of the old man with each passing day. Perhaps on his hundred-and-second birthday they could buy him a cow, and hope for the best.
Sweden
The day after the terror attack in Stockholm, Eskilstuna-Kuriren revealed evidence of surprising incompetence at the local police station a hundred kilometres away. In the hysterical hunt for the terrorist, they had not hesitated to terrorize the most innocent of citizens. Not even the dead were spared (Bella Hansson chose not to mention tha
t there had been no dead person in the coffin, and the fact that there had been a living corpse within it was beyond her knowledge).
The individual inspectors and police leadership were portrayed, in her article, as a bunch of nitwits who didn’t understand the concept of prioritizing. Cracking down on an innocent hearse! What next?
The article was sharp, even if it did peter out a bit towards the end. It was also rather long. Thus, at the last second, Bella cut the sections in which the police assured her that the crackdown, which incidentally was not a crackdown, had occurred due to suspicion that there actually was a link to the terrorist act in question.
Foolish police make good local-paper reading.
Foolish police make good national-paper reading too.
In no time, the Stockholm papers’ online editions had cranked out a recap of the hearse story.
As a result, two things happened.
One was that a clearly not-so-foolish police officer in Märsta noticed a possible connection. He was investigating a reckless shooting in a coffin shop from the day before, and this new clue might move the investigation forwards. He would just have to make a phone call or two.
The other was that the membership of Aryan Alliance – that was, Johnny Engvall – now knew for certain that those who must die at any cost were on a trip through Sweden.
‘You’re heading south, you pigs,’ he said to himself. ‘On back roads?’
At first he smiled at his own great intelligence. Then he realized that there were many back roads to choose from in southern Sweden. And the trail had already gone cold.
Johnny needed to know more than the article’s reporter had given him.
Sweden
The concept development continued. While Allan, aged a hundred and one, showed Julius, aged sixty-six, how to maximize one’s reach to the proper target group via Facebook ads, Sabine drove around in the hearse to obtain pendulums, crystals, divining rods and nasty-smelling myrrh. She respected the group’s limited budget. For a pendulum she used a plumb line she found on sale at Byggmax. She whittled her own divining rod with the help of a stick stolen from the pension’s garden. Ordinary sea salt would do for crystals. And she produced myrrh with the help of an oil lamp, whose fuel consisted of one part shrimp soup and nine parts oil. The rest of the secret was double wicks: one to burn and one that just glowed, spreading smoke and smell.