The Holgers and Nombeko pushed from behind while the angry young woman took care of steering up front.
Their journey progressed slowly along a small, paved road straight into the Sörmland countryside. Half a mile away from the besieged Fredsgatan. One mile. And so on.
It was, at times, hard work for everyone but Celestine. But after one and a half miles, as soon as they had pushed the cart over an invisible crest, it was easier. And with that, for the first time, they were on a slight downhill slant. One, Two and Nombeko got some well-deserved rest.
For a few seconds.
Nombeko was the first to realize what was about to happen. She ordered the Holgers to push from the other side instead. One of them understood and obeyed her immediately; the other eventually understood, too, but he had just stopped and lagged behind to scratch his behind.
One’s temporary departure did not make any difference, however. It was too late as soon as the 1700 pounds started rolling on its own.
The last to give up was Celestine. She ran ahead of the bomb and tried to guide it along the right path until it was moving too quickly even for her. Then she locked the handle and jumped aside. With that, there was nothing more to do other than watch three megatons of weapon of mass destruction roll down the increasingly steep hill of the narrow country road. On one side of the crate: a lashed-down backpack containing 19.6 million kronor.
‘Anyone have any idea how to get thirty-eight miles away from here in ten seconds?’ said Nombeko as her gaze followed the runaway bomb.
‘Ideas aren’t my strong suit,’ said Holger One.
‘No, but you’re good at scratching your arse,’ said his brother, thinking that these were peculiar last words.
Two hundred yards on, the road made a slight jog to the left. Unlike the wheel-borne atomic bomb, which kept going straight ahead.
* * *
Mr and Mrs Blomgren had found in each other a person who felt that thrift was the finest virtue of them all. For forty-nine years, Margareta had been holding tight to her Harry, who held even tighter to all the couple’s money. They considered themselves responsible. Any outside observer would more likely have called them stingy.
Harry had been a scrap dealer all of his working life. He had inherited the business from his father when he was only twenty-five. The last thing his father did before a Chrysler New Yorker fell on top of him was to hire a young girl to handle the company’s bookkeeping. Heir Harry thought that this was an unfathomable waste of money until the girl, Margareta, invented something she called invoice fees and overdue interest. Then, instead, he fell madly in love, proposed and got a yes. The wedding was held at the scrapyard, and the three other employees were invited via a notice on the bulletin board in the hall. To a pot luck.
They never had any children. That was a cost Henry and Margareta calculated continuously until they no longer had any reason to calculate it.
On the other hand, their living situation worked itself out. For the first twenty years they lived with Margareta’s mother in her house, Ekbacka, until the old woman died – what luck. She was sensitive to cold and had spent all those years complaining that Harry and Margareta refused to keep the house warm enough in the winter to keep frost from forming on the insides of the windows. She was in a better place now, lying there at a frost-free depth in the cemetery in Herrljunga. Neither Harry nor Margareta saw the point in wasting money on flowers for her grave.
As a nice hobby, Margareta’s mother kept three ewes, which grazed in a small pasture along the road. But before the woman was even cold, even though she had been rather cold from the start, Harry and Margareta slaughtered the animals and ate them. A leaky sheep shed remained; they let it rot.
Then the couple retired, sold the scrapyard, and made it past both seventy and seventy-five years of age before they decided one day to actually do something about that ramshackle shed in the pasture. Harry tore it down and Margareta piled up the boards. Then they set the whole thing on fire, and it burned vigorously as Harry Blomgren watched over it with a hose in case the fire got out of hand. At his side, as always, was his wife, Margareta.
At that instant, there was a sudden crash as the 1700-pound atomic bomb in a crate on wheels shot straight through the fence into the Blomgrens’ former sheep pasture and didn’t stop until it was in the middle of the fire.
‘What on earth?’ said Mrs Blomgren.
‘The fence!’ said Mr Blomgren.
Then they stopped talking and looked up at the group of four people who were following the trail of the cart and crate.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Nombeko. ‘Would you be so kind, sir, as to spray water on that fire so that it goes out? Without delay, please.’
Harry Blomgren didn’t answer. He did nothing.
‘Without delay, as I said,’ said Nombeko. ‘That is to say, now!’
But the old man kept standing where he stood, with a turned-off hose in hand. The wooden parts of the cart were starting to react to the heat. The backpack was already blazing.
Then Harry Blomgren opened his mouth after all.
‘Water isn’t free,’ he said.
Then there was a bang.
With the first explosion, Nombeko, Celestine, Holger and Holger were struck by something similar to the cardiac arrest that had ended the potter’s life an hour or so earlier. But unlike him, the others recovered when they realized that it was a tyre that had blown up, not an entire region.
The second, third and fourth ones followed suit. Harry Blomgren continued to refuse to spray water on the box and the backpack. First he wanted to know who intended to compensate him for the fence. And the cost of water.
‘I don’t think you quite understand the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in,’ said Nombeko. ‘The crate contains . . . flammable material. If it gets too hot, things will end poorly. Frightfully poorly. Believe me!’
She had already given up hope for the backpack. The 19.6 million were no more.
‘Why should I believe a total stranger and her accomplices? Tell me who will replace the fence instead!’
Nombeko realized that she wouldn’t get any further with this man. So she asked Celestine to take over.
The angry young woman was happy to. To avoid prolonging the conversation more than was necessary, she said, ‘Put out the fire, or I’ll kill you!’
Harry Blomgren thought he could see in the girl’s eyes that she meant what she said, whereupon he immediately set about doing as she said.
‘Good work, Celestine,’ said Nombeko.
‘My girlfriend,’ said Holger One with pride.
Holger Two chose to remain silent, but he thought it was typical that when the angry young woman finally said and did something that was of use to the group, it was in the form of a death threat.
The cart was burned half away, the crate was scorched at the edges, and the backpack was gone. But the fire was out. The world as they knew it endured. Harry Blomgren cheered up.
‘So can we finally discuss the question of compensation?’
Nombeko and Holger Two were the only ones who knew that the man who wanted to discuss compensation had just burned up 19.6 million kronor because he wanted to save water. From his own well.
‘The question is, who ought to compensate whom,’ Nombeko mumbled.
When the day began, she and her Holger had a concrete vision of the future. A few hours later things were the other way around and their very existence had been threatened – twice. Now they found themselves somewhere between the two extremes. To say that life is a bed of roses, Nombeko thought, would be an exaggeration.
* * *
Harry and Margareta Blomgren didn’t want to let their uninvited guests go until they had made things right. But it was starting to get late, and Harry listened to the group’s arguments: there was no cash to be had; there certainly had been some in the backpack that had just been burned, but now they couldn’t do anything until the bank opened the next day. Then they woul
d put their cart in order and roll on with their crate.
‘Yes, the crate,’ said Harry Blomgren. ‘What’s in it?’
‘None of your damn business, you old bastard,’ said the angry young woman.
‘My personal belongings,’ Nombeko clarified.
The group worked together to move the scorched crate from what was left of the cart it had been on to Harry and Margareta Blomgren’s car trailer. Then, after a lot of nagging and a little help from Celestine, Nombeko managed to get Harry Blomgren to let the trailer replace his car in the farm’s only garage. Otherwise, of course, the crate would be visible from the road, and the thought of that would keep Nombeko from a good night’s sleep.
At Ekbacka there was a guesthouse that Mr and Mrs Blomgren had previously rented to German tourists until they were blacklisted by the rental agency for trying to get extra money out of their guests for practically everything. They’d even installed a coin-operated toilet.
Since then, the guesthouse had stood empty, coin-operated toilet and all (one ten-krona coin per visit). But now the intruders could be quartered there.
Holger One and Celestine took the living room, while Two and Nombeko laid claim to the bedroom. Margareta Blomgren showed them, with a certain amount of delight, how the coin-operated toilet worked and added that she wouldn’t stand for any peeing in the garden.
‘Could I exchange this for ten-krona coins?’ said the full-bladdered Holger One, handing a one-hundred-krona note to Mrs Blomgren.
‘I dare you to say “exchange fee”,’ said the angry young woman.
Since Margareta Blomgren didn’t dare to say ‘exchange fee’, no exchange took place. So One did his business in a lilac bush as soon as it was too dark for anyone to notice. It was just that of course someone noticed, because Mr and Mrs Blomgren were sitting in their kitchen with their binoculars at that very moment.
It had clearly been negligent of the intruders to propel a cart through the couple’s fence, but they had hardly done it on purpose. To then bully the couple into wasting water so that their belongings wouldn’t burn was remarkable – a criminal act – but if worst came to worst it could be excused by the desperation one could imagine they had felt at the time.
But wilfully, and contrary to clear instructions, to stand by a lilac bush and urinate in the couple’s garden – this was so outrageous that Harry and Margareta were beside themselves. It was theft; it was disorderly conduct; it was perhaps the worst thing that had ever happened to them.
‘These hooligans will be our financial undoing,’ Margareta Blomgren said to her husband.
Harry Blomgren nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do something before it’s too late.’
Nombeko, Celestine and the Holgers went to bed. Meanwhile, the National Task Force was preparing to break into Fredsgatan 5 a mile and a half away. The woman who’d called the police was Swedish, and a Swedish-speaking man had been spotted behind a curtain on the fourth floor – the man who later jumped. A post mortem would be performed on the corpse, of course, which for now was being kept in an ambulance down the street. A preliminary examination showed the dead man to be white and in his fifties.
So there had been at least two occupiers. The police who had witnessed the incident suspected that there had been more people behind the curtains, but they weren’t sure.
The operation began at 11.32 p.m. on Thursday, 18 August 1994. The task force started to break in from three different directions with gas, a bulldozer and a helicopter. There was a lot of tension among the young men on the force. None of them had experienced a real-life operation before, so it was no wonder that a few shots had been fired in the muddle. At least one of them caused the pillow-storage area to catch fire, and the resulting smoke made it nearly impossible to operate in.
The next morning, in Mr and Mrs Blomgren’s kitchen, the former inhabitants of Fredsgatan were able to hear how the drama ended on the news.
According to the correspondent from Sveriges Radio, there had been a bit of a struggle. At least one of the task force members had been shot in the leg; three others were poisoned by gas. The force’s twelve-million-krona helicopter had crash-landed behind an abandoned pottery because it had become disoriented in the thick smoke. The bulldozer had burned, along with the building, the warehouse, four police cars and the ambulance in which the body of the man who had committed suicide was being kept while waiting for a post-mortem.
On the whole, however, the operation had been a success. All of the terrorists had been defeated. It remained to be seen how many of them there were, because their bodies had been burned.
‘Good Lord,’ said Holger Two. ‘The National Task Force, at war with itself.’
‘Well, at least they won. That suggests a certain amount of competence,’ said Nombeko.
Not once during breakfast did the Blomgrens mention that they would demand payment for the same. Instead, they said nothing. They were reticent. Almost ashamed, it seemed. This put Nombeko on her guard, because she had never met two more shameless people, and that was saying something.
Her millions were gone, but Holger Two had eighty thousand kronor in the bank (in his brother’s name). In addition, there was almost four hundred thousand in the business account. The next step would be to buy themselves free from these horrible people, hire a car with a trailer and move the bomb from one trailer to the other. And then leave. They had yet to figure out where to go; it just had to be far away from Gnesta and the Blomgrens.
‘We saw you peeing in the garden last night,’ Mrs Blomgren said suddenly.
Damn you, Holger One, thought Nombeko.
‘I didn’t know about that,’ she said. ‘I apologize, and I suggest that we add ten kronor to the bill, which I thought we could discuss now.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Harry Blomgren. ‘Since you can’t be trusted, we have already made sure to compensate ourselves.’
‘How so?’ said Nombeko.
‘“Flammable material”. Bullshit! I’ve worked with scrap metal my whole life. Scrap metal doesn’t burn, damn it,’ Harry Blomgren continued.
‘Did you open the crate?’ said Nombeko, who was starting to fear the worst.
‘I’m going to tear open their throats with my teeth,’ said the angry young woman, who had to be restrained by Holger Two.
The situation was far too difficult to follow for Holger One, who walked off. Besides, he needed to visit the same lilac bush as he had the night before. This he did as Harry Blomgren backed away from the angry young woman. A profoundly unpleasant person, he thought.
And then he went on saying what he had to say. The words poured forth, because he had rehearsed them during the night.
‘You chose to abuse our hospitality, you withheld payment from us, you urinated in our garden; you are thus untrustworthy. We had no choice but to secure the compensation you had surely been planning to evade. Consequently your bomb scrap has been forfeited.’
‘Forfeited?’ said Holger Two, getting a mental image of a detonated atomic bomb.
‘Forfeited,’ Harry Blomgren repeated. ‘We took that old bomb to a scrap dealer during the night. And we received half a krona per pound. Which was quite stingy, but still. It should just cover the costs of the damage you have caused. And that’s not including the rent for staying in the guesthouse. And don’t think I’m going to tell you where the scrapyard is. You’ve done enough as it is.’
As Holger Two continued to keep the angry young woman from committing a double murder, it became clear to both him and Nombeko that the old man and woman apparently didn’t realize that what they called scrap and an old bomb was actually a rather new – and fully functional – one.
Harry Blomgren said that there was a surplus from the transaction, however limited, and consequently the matters of the water, the broken fence and the urinating in the garden could be settled. Provided the guests urinated in the toilet and nowhere else from now until their imminent departure, of
course. And didn’t cause any more damage.
At this point, Holger Two was forced to carry the angry young woman out. In the garden, he got her to calm down a little bit. She said there must have been something about the sight of the old man and woman that she couldn’t tolerate. Plus everything they did and said.
This rage was not something Harry and Margareta Blomgren had reckoned on during the previous night’s trip to and from the scrapyard they had formerly owned, and which was now owned and run by their former colleague Rune Runesson. The deranged woman operated beyond the realm of logic. In short, both of them were scared. Meanwhile, Nombeko, who never became truly angry, was now truly angry. Just a few days earlier, she and Two had found a way to move forward. For the first time there was hope; there was 19.6 million kronor. All that was left now was . . . Mr and Mrs Blomgren.
‘My dear Mr Blomgren,’ she said. ‘May I suggest an agreement?’
‘An agreement?’ said Harry Blomgren.
‘Yes, my scrap is very dear to me, Mr Blomgren. Now I intend that you, Mr Blomgren, will tell me within ten seconds where you took it. If you tell me, I promise in return to keep the woman in the garden from biting you and your wife in the throat.’
The pale Harry Blomgren said nothing. Nombeko went on:
‘After that, if you let us borrow your car for an undetermined period of time, you have my word that we might give it back some day, and in addition we will not immediately smash your coin box and burn down your house.’
Margareta Blomgren attempted to answer, but her husband stopped her.
‘Quiet, Margareta, I’ll handle this.’
‘Up to this point, my suggestions have been veiled in politeness,’ Nombeko continued. ‘Would you like us to switch to a firmer tone, Mr Blomgren?’
Harry Blomgren continued to deal with events by not answering. His Margareta made another attempt to speak. But Nombeko beat her to it.
‘By the way, Mrs Blomgren, are you the one who made this tablecloth?’