‘Hi, the SC here. Listen, could you be a pal and fly me down to Italy again?’
There went another 320,000 kronor. Plus another eight thousand, since the SC decided to engage a helicopter taxi for the trip to the airport. Incidentally, he made the trip in a thirteen-year-old Sikorsky S-76, which had once been purchased with the insurance money from a stolen machine of the same type.
The SC made it to San Remo for the evening’s shellfish dinner with his family with fifteen minutes to spare.
‘How was your meeting with the prime minister, darling?’ said his wife.
‘I’m thinking of changing parties for the next election,’ the supreme commander replied.
* * *
President Hu took the call from the Swedish prime minister while he was still airborne. He really never used his limited English for international political conversations, but he made an exception this time. He was far too curious about what Prime Minister Reinfeldt might want. And they hadn’t got very many seconds into the conversation before he burst out laughing. Miss Nombeko was truly something special, didn’t the prime minister agree?
The Volvo had certainly been nice, but what the president had been given instead was absolutely a cut above. Plus, his beloved wife was so pleased that the horse had come too.
‘I’ll make sure the car is shipped to you as soon as possible, Mr President,’ Fredrik Reinfeldt promised, wiping his forehead.
‘Yes, or my interpreter could drive it home,’ Hu Jintao mused. ‘If he ever gets better. No, wait! Give it to Miss Nombeko. I think she deserves it.’
In return, President Hu promised not to use the bomb in its current condition. Rather, it would immediately be taken apart into small pieces and would thus cease to exist. Perhaps Prime Minister Reinfeldt would like to hear about whatever the president’s nuclear technicians learned along the way?
No, Prime Minster Reinfeldt would not like that. This was knowledge that his country (or the king’s) could do without.
Said Fredrik Reinfeldt, thanking President Hu once again for his visit.
* * *
Nombeko returned to the suite at the Grand Hôtel and unlocked the handcuffs on the still-sleeping Holger One. After that, she kissed the equally asleep Holger Two on the forehead and put a blanket over the countess, who had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor next to the minibar in the bedroom. Then she went back to her Two, lay down beside him, closed her eyes – and actually had time to wonder what had become of Celestine before she dozed off herself.
She woke up at quarter past twelve the next afternoon to One, Two and the countess announcing that lunch was served. Gertrud had slept the most uncomfortably, on the floor beside the minibar, so she was the first to get back on her feet. For lack of anything better to do, she had started to page through the hotel’s information booklet – and discovered something fantastic. The hotel had arranged things so that first you worked out what you wanted and then you picked up the phone and told the person on the other end what you wanted, and that person in turn thanked you for calling and then, without delay, delivered what you had asked for.
Apparently it had an English name: ‘room service’. Countess Virtanen didn’t care what it was called, or which language it was called it in – could it really work in practice?
She had started by ordering a bottle of Marshal Mannerheim’s schnapps as a test – and it had arrived, even if it took an hour for the hotel to get it there. Then she ordered clothes for herself and the others, giving her best guess on the sizes. That time it took two hours. And now a three-course meal for everyone, except little Celestine. She wasn’t there. Did Nombeko know where she might be?
The newly awakened Nombeko didn’t know. But it was clear that something had happened.
‘Did she disappear with the bomb?’ said Holger Two, feeling his fever rising at the very thought.
‘No, we’ve got rid of the bomb once and for all, my love,’ said Nombeko. ‘This is the first day of the rest of our lives. I’ll explain later, but let’s eat now. Then I think I’d like to shower and change my clothes for the first time in a few days before we look for Celestine. Very good initiative on the clothes, Countess!’
Lunch would have tasted wonderful if it weren’t for the fact that Holger One sat there moaning about his missing girlfriend. What if she had set the bomb off without him?
Nombeko said, between bites, that if Celestine had done what he’d just guessed, Holger probably would have been involved whether he liked it or not, but that it clearly hadn’t happened because they were sitting there eating truffle pasta together instead of being dead. Furthermore, the thing that had plagued them for a few decades was now on another continent.
‘Celestine is on another continent?’ said Holger One.
‘Eat your food,’ said Nombeko.
After lunch she took a shower, put on her new clothes, and went down to the reception desk to arrange for a few restrictions concerning future orders from Countess Virtanen. She seemed to have acquired too much of a taste for her new, noble life, and it was only a matter of time before she started calling for jet planes and private performances by Harry Belafonte.
Down in the foyer, the evening papers stared her in the face. The headline in Expressen, with a picture of Celestine quarreling with two police officers, said: SINGING WOMAN ARRESTED.
An early-middle-aged woman had been arrested the day before along the E4, north of Stockholm, for a traffic offence. Instead of showing identification, she had claimed to be Édith Piaf and refused to do anything but sing ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. And she had kept singing until she fell asleep in her cell.
The police didn’t want to release a picture, but Expressen did; it purchased a number of splendid photographs taken by private citizens. Did anyone recognize the woman? She was apparently Swedish. According to several of the photographing witnesses, she had insulted the police in Swedish before she turned to singing.
‘I think I can guess what the insults were,’ Nombeko mumbled. She forgot to talk to the reception staff about the room-service restrictions and returned to the suite with a copy of the paper.
The closest neighbours of the sorely tested Gunnar and Kristina Hedlund in Gnesta were the ones to spot the picture of the Hedlunds’ daughter on the front page of Expressen. Two hours later, Celestine was reunited with her mother and father in her cell at the police station in central Stockholm. Celestine realized she was no longer angry with them, and she said she wanted to get out of this goddamned jail so she could introduce them to her boyfriend.
The police wanted nothing more than to get rid of the bothersome woman, but there were a few things that needed to be taken care of first. The potato truck had fraudulent licence plates, but – as it turned out – the truck itself wasn’t stolen. The owner was Celestine Hedlund’s grandmother, a slightly crazy eighty-year-old woman. She called herself a countess and claimed that this meant she ought to be above any sort of suspicion. She couldn’t explain how the fraudulent plates had ended up on the truck, but she thought it might have happened sometime in the 1990s, when she’d lent the truck to potato-picking youths from Norrtälje on several occasions. The countess had known since the summer of 1945 that the youth of Norrtälje were not to be trusted.
Now that Celestine Hedlund had been identified, there was no longer any reason to keep her in custody. She could expect to be fined for unlawful driving, but that was all. It was, of course, a crime to steal someone else’s licence plates, but no matter who the thief had been, the crime had happened twenty years before and was thus beyond the statute of limitations. Beyond that, it was a crime to drive around with fraudulent plates, but the police commander was so tired of listening to ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ that he chose to see it as something she had done without malicious intent. It also happened that the commander had a cabin just outside Norrtälje, and the hammock in his garden had been stolen the summer before. So the countess might have a point about the morals of Norrtälje youth.
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The question of the brand-new Volvo in the back of the potato truck remained. A preliminary call to the factory in Torslanda had brought the totally sensational news that the car belonged to Hu Jintao, the president of China. But once the executives at Volvo had contacted the president’s staff in Beijing, they called back to say that it turned out the president had given the car to a woman whom he didn’t want to name. Celestine Hedlund, one could surmise. Suddenly the bizarre matter had become one of top-level international politics. The commander in charge said to himself that he didn’t want to know any more. And the prosecutor in charge agreed. So Celestine Hedlund was released: she and her parents drove off in the Volvo.
The police commander made very sure to check which of them was behind the wheel.
PART SEVEN
Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles.
Charlie Chaplin
CHAPTER 24
On existing for real and on a twisted nose
Holger One, Celestine and Countess Virtanen, who had decided to change her name to Mannerheim, soon learned to like living in their suite at the Grand Hôtel. Thus there was no rush to find a suitable castle to move into.
One of the best things was this completely fantastic ‘room service’. Gertrud even got One and Celestine to try it out. After a few days they were quite attached.
Every Saturday, the countess threw a party in the sitting room, with Gunnar and Kristina Hedlund as guests of honour. Now and then, the king and queen turned up as well.
Nombeko let them have their way. On the one hand, the bill from the hotel was colossal, but on the other hand, there was still a considerable amount of the potato money left.
She herself had found a place for her and Two, at a safe distance from the countess and her two fans. Nombeko had been born and raised in a tin shack; Holger had grown up in a draughty cottage. Then the two of them had shared a life in a condemned building, followed by thirteen years in a room next to a rural kitchen in a house beyond the end of the road in Roslagen.
After that, a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Östermalm in Stockholm seemed no less luxurious than the countess’s potential future castle.
But in order to buy the apartment, Holger Two and Nombeko first had to deal with the fact that neither of them really existed.
For Nombeko’s part, it took only an afternoon. The prime minister called the minister for migration policy, who called the director of the Migration Board, who called his best worker, who found a record of Nombeko Mayeki from 1987, decided that Miss Mayeki had been in Sweden since then, and immediately promoted her to a citizen of the Kingdom of Sweden.
Holger Two, for his part, stepped into the Tax Agency offices in Södermalm in Stockholm and stated that he did not exist, but that he would very much like to do so. After a great deal of running around the hallways and being directed from one door to the next, he was sent to the Tax Agency offices in Karlstad, to a Per-Henrik Persson, the country’s leading expert on complicated questions of national registration.
Per-Henrik Persson might have been a bureaucrat, but he was a pragmatic sort. When Holger had finished his story, the bureaucrat reached out his hand and squeezed Holger’s arm. Then he said that it was clear to him that Holger did actually exist, and that anyone who claimed otherwise would be wrong on that count. Furthermore, said Per-Henrik Persson, there were at least two things to suggest that Holger was Swedish and nothing else. One was the story he had just given. In Per-Henrik Persson’s extensive experience, such a story would be impossible to make up (and that was despite Holger having skipped all the parts that included the bomb).
The other was not the fact that Holger both looked Swedish and sounded Swedish when he spoke, but the fact that he had asked if he should take off his shoes when he stepped into Per-Henrik Persson’s carpeted office.
For the sake of formality, though, Persson asked Holger to come up with a witness or two, a few citizens of integrity who could vouch for him and the story of his life, so to speak.
‘A witness or two?’ said Holger Two. ‘Yes, I think I can find a few. Would the prime minister and the king do?’
Per-Henrik Persson said that one of them should be enough.
* * *
While Countess Mannerheim and her two assistants decided to build a new home instead of looking for an old castle that would be impossible to find anyway, Holger Two and Nombeko set about living life. Two celebrated his newly won existence by explaining enough of his story to Professor Berner at Stockholm University for the professor to decide to give him another chance to defend his dissertation. Meanwhile, Nombeko amused herself by completing three years’ worth of mathematics courses in twelve weeks, while also working full-time as an expert on China in the government offices.
In the evenings and at weekends, Holger and Nombeko went to interesting lectures or to the theatre, to the Royal Opera sometimes, and to restaurants to spend time with new friends. They exclusively did things that, viewed objectively, could be considered normal. At home in their apartment, they were delighted every time a bill came through the letterbox. For only a person who truly exists can be sent bills.
Holger and Nombeko also started a ritual at home: just before bedtime each evening, Holger would pour a glass of port for each of them, whereupon they drank to yet another day without Holger One, Celestine and the bomb.
* * *
In May 2008, the twelve-room, Västmanland-style manor house was finished. It was surrounded by 120 acres of forest. In addition, Holger One had exceeded Nombeko’s budget by purchasing a nearby lake, on the grounds that the countess still needed somewhere to fish for pike now and then. For practical reasons, there was also a helipad complete with a helicopter, which Holger illegally flew to and from Drottningholm each time the countess went to tea or dinner with her best friends, the king and queen. Sometimes Holger and Celestine would be invited, too, especially since they had started the non-profit Preserve the Monarchy and donated two million kronor to it.
‘Two million to preserve the monarchy?’ said Holger Two as he and Nombeko stood outside the new manor house with housewarming flowers in hand.
Nombeko didn’t say anything.
‘You think it seems I’ve changed my mind about certain things?’ said Holger One as he invited his brother and his brother’s girlfriend to step inside.
‘That’s the least one could say,’ said Holger Two as Nombeko remained quiet.
No, Holger One didn’t really agree with that. His father’s battle had been sparked by a different monarch in a different time. Since then, society had evolved in all ways, and different times call for different solutions, don’t they?
Holger Two said that Holger One was currently talking more nonsense than ever before, and that his brother probably couldn’t even grasp that this was saying a lot.
‘But please go on. I’m curious about the rest of it.’
Well, things in the 2000s went so terribly fast: cars, planes, the Internet – everything! So people needed something stable, constant and secure.
‘Like a king?’
Yes, like a king, Holger One said. After all, the monarchy was a thousand-year-old tradition, while broadband had only existed for less than a decade.
‘What does broadband have to do with it?’ Holger Two wondered, but he didn’t receive an answer.
Holger One continued, saying that every country would be wise to gather around its own symbols in these times of globalization. But, he said, the republicans wanted to do the opposite – sell out our country, exchange our identity for the euro, and spit on the Swedish flag.
It was at around this point that Nombeko couldn’t help herself any longer. She went up to Holger One, took his nose between her index and middle fingers – and twisted.
‘Ow!’ yelled Holger One.
‘God, that felt good,’ said Nombeko.
Celestine was in the 860-square-foot kitchen, which was the next room. She heard Holger’s cry and came t
o his rescue.
‘What are you doing to my darling?’ she yelled.
‘Bring your nose over here and I’ll show you,’ said Nombeko.
But Celestine wasn’t that stupid. Instead she took over where Holger had been interrupted.
‘Swedish traditions are under serious threat. We can’t just sit on our fat arses and watch it happening. Given the circumstances, two million kronor is nothing – the worth of what’s at stake is enormous, don’t you get it?’
Said Celestine.
Nombeko looked intently at her nose. But Holger Two got there first. He put his arm around his girlfriend, thanked them and left.
* * *
The former Agent B was sitting on a bench in Gethsemane, searching for the peace of mind this biblical garden always brought him.
But this time it wasn’t working. The agent realized there was something he had to do. Just one thing. After that, he could leave his former life behind him.
He went home to his apartment, sat down at his computer, logged in via a server in Gibraltar – and sent an anonymous, unencrypted message straight to the Israeli government offices.
The message read, Ask Prime Minister Reinfeldt about the antelope meat.
That was all.
Prime Minister Olmert would have his suspicions about where the message had come from. But he would never be able to trace it. Besides, he would never bother to try. B hadn’t been much in anyone’s good graces during the last few years of his career. But his loyalty to the country had never been in question.
* * *
During the big conference on Iraq in Stockholm on 29 May 2008, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni took Swedish Prime Minister Reinfeldt aside and spent a few seconds looking for the right words, before she said:
‘You know how it is, in positions like ours, Prime Minister. Sometimes you know things you shouldn’t, and sometimes it’s the other way round.’