Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (20 page)

T
he dejected churchwarden was not at all dejected. He was biding his time, sneaking about in and around the church to gather evidence for his theory that all was not quite as it should be. If even one thing was.

A week passed, then three. Börje Ekman had previously seen with his very own eyes approximately how many thousands of kronor had been in the bucket of puke; all he had to do was multiply that amount by the number of buckets present to estimate the quantities they were dealing with.

At this point, the fake priest and the other fellow ought to have four or even five million kronor hidden somewhere. At least!

* * *

The latest donation had not been given to a forest, with or without rain. Instead, the priest had come up with the idea of traveling to Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital along with two newspapers, a radio station, and a TV channel to let Hitman Anders unexpectedly present a backpack of 500,000 kronor with “Jesus lives” on it to the gravely ill children so that they might, as far as possible, continue to do the same.

The head of the department, also a doctor and pediatric specialist, was not on hand for the occasion but was quick to issue a press release praising the Church of Anders and its head pastor for the “enormous generosity he has shown the children and their parents, who are undergoing the most difficult of times.”

For one second, Börje Ekman wavered in his conviction that the pastor's generosity was backed merely by greed and cynicism. But when that second was over, he saw the situation with clear, sharp eyes. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with the pastor (other than that he was a murderer and unevenly gifted); the problem was that the priest and the fellow whose name was practically the same forwards and backwards were pulling his strings.

Börje Ekman sat in his studio apartment, thinking that that last half-million would have been most beneficial had he been the one to receive it. The Lord's foremost servant needed solid financial ground on which to stand if he was going to perform his duties in accordance with the Lord's will. That was why he had done such things as keeping a tenth of the weekly collection for himself for all those years, without finding it necessary to inform the congregation. It was an agreement between the churchwarden and God, and had nothing to do with anyone else.

T
he countess had dealt with all the preliminary work, and now it was the count's turn. He was on the fence about what to do. On the one hand, he might want to outfit himself with enough weapons to be prepared for any contingency; on the other, he might want to avoid being too heavily armed in case he needed to vanish rapidly after fulfilling his duty.

The latter was still the most likely scenario. According to the countess, the double side doors had been opened pretty much precisely at one o'clock on each of the five Wednesdays she'd had the church under surveillance. The last time, the guard stationed outside was replaced by the man who was otherwise never farther than two feet away from Hitman Anders; it seemed they were one man short and, for a limited time each week, the geographical distance between Hitman Anders and his bodyguard increased.

That both simplified and complicated the situation.

On the Wednesdays in question, Hitman Anders had been fully visible just inside the doors, along with Johanna Kjellander and Per Something. One might make the not unreasonable assumption that the same would apply for that day as well, the day of Operation Thank You and Good Night. If that was the case, the plan was to take out Hitman Anders first, with the jacketed bullet, then have the half-jacketed bullet ready in case the bodyguard started towards
them. That is to say, from jacketed to half-jacketed, instead of the other way around.

They could not be sure, though, that a single shot would fell the bodyguard. For one thing, there was a chance that he was reasonably professional, and would not remain standing there after report number one, waiting to depart this life. And for another, circumstances were now such that the aim would have to be adjusted more than a fraction of an inch and a few tenths of a second; with the intended victims no longer standing side by side it would take much longer.

Thus they needed a Plan B, and once that was settled, everything seemed relatively obvious. After all, they would be lying hidden in a grove of trees above a man who might potentially be stupid enough to counterattack. If the count were to toss a hand grenade at just the right moment, it would have a one hundred percent chance of causing the enemy to lose his train of thought.

“A hand grenade,” the countess commented, relishing the phrase as well as the thought of the effect it would have on the bodyguard.

The count smiled lovingly. His countess truly was the cream of the crop.

* * *

At ten to one, it was time to prepare to receive the weekly delivery of the blood of Christ, et cetera. The priest and the receptionist went to the sacristy that had become a storeroom, warehouse, office, receiving room, and more . . . only to find the self-appointed churchwarden with his nose deep in the yellow and the red suitcases, full of their millions.

“What the holy hell are you doing here?” said the receptionist, who was as surprised as he was angry.

“Hell indeed,” said the churchwarden, his voice calm but intense.
“Because that is where you two are going. Hitmen, fraudsters, embezzlers . . . what else? I'm speechless.”

“But you found our suitcases, you parasite,” said the priest, closing both receptacles. “What right do you have to look through our accounts?”

“Accounts? You should know that I have taken measures. Soon you will no longer be of any account in the eyes of the Lord. Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame, shame, shame!”!”

The priest had time to reflect that they had attracted an unusually uncommunicative parasite, if “shame on you” was his only response to their actions. But before she could counter with anything cleverer, Pastor Anders appeared. “Hi there, Börje, it's been a while. How are things?” he said, as incapable as ever of reading a situation.

A few minutes earlier, Börje Ekman had been standing, rake in hand, about to finish the gravel path, when it had struck him: the suitcases!

Of course!
That
was where they kept the profits from the devil's work they were pursuing. In the red one and the yellow one. All he had to do was gather proof, and then he could call the police, the government offices, the children's ombudsman . . . anyone who wanted to, ought to, and would listen.

It wasn't quite clear how the children's ombudsman would react, but the point was that everyone, absolutely
everyone
, ought to be made to understand. The newspapers, the National Food Administration, the Reverend Mr. Granlund, the Swedish Football Association . . .

One might, with good reason, suspect that a person who feels he must inform both the children's ombudsman and the Swedish Football Association about ongoing ecclesiastical crime is no longer thinking clearly. That was the case with Börje Ekman. In his mind, there was just one thing left to do before he made sure that the whole world found out. If he acted quickly enough, he would have time to gather up the tenth of the contents of the two suitcases that rightly belonged to him.

Perhaps it would have been preferable to cherish caution above all else, considering what was about to happen, but both churchwarden and rake soon found themselves in the very sacristy where the suitcases were kept, without giving any consideration to the time or to the present location of all criminal elements.

Thus the current situation. Börje was caught with his hand in the cookie jar as he exposed what was going on, surrounded by a certain percentage of the nearby criminals. They included the man who never strayed from the pastor's side and whose name so fitted such a blasphemous situation.

Meanwhile, the pastor's cheerful greeting had caused Börje Ekman to suspect that the hitman was no more than a useful idiot in the ungodly game. “Don't you realize they're exploiting you?” he said, as he took four steps toward the pastor, rake still in hand.

“Who? What?” Pastor Anders responded.

At that instant, there were two honks outside the double doors. The weekly delivery of financial stimulants had arrived.

Jerry the Knife made the rapid assessment that the clown beside the pastor was less of a threat than what might await them outside. He went to open the door, saying to the receptionist and the pastor, with a glance at Börje Ekman: “If you keep an eye on the pest with the rake, I'll deal with whatever's out there.”

The oh-so-meticulous head of security began by checking the driver, the same man who had appeared the week before and the weeks before that. He checked the contents of the truck, then stood at attention outside the doors, his back to the wall and his eyes sweeping left to right and back again. The priest and the receptionist had to carry the boxes of wine themselves.

The count lay where he was, next to his countess, in the grove about four hundred feet away. With his proficiency and the telescopic sight, it would be a simple matter to take out the pastor's bodyguard first,
according to the original plan. But, given the new circumstances, this would mean he risked allowing the currently fully visible Hitman Anders time to move before shot number two, thus giving him a chance of survival. No matter how much the count would like to waste the bodyguard as a bonus, the main target was still Hitman Anders.

Thus the change in plan. The count placed Jerry the Knife in second place on his kill list and focused directly on the principal victim. (Neither Johanna Kjellander nor Per Jansson had any future ahead of them, but there were limits to how much one count could accomplish in a single day.)

While the priest and the receptionist finished their carrying, and while the man whose goal was an immediate murder took aim at Hitman Anders, a dispute had arisen between the pastor and Börje Ekman.

“They're just fooling you! They're keeping all the money for themselves! Can't you see that? Or are you blind?”

But Hitman Anders remembered, of course, his very recent success at Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital. “Dear, kind Börje,” he said. “Have you been raking too long in the sun? What is the matter? Didn't you know that the Church has already given away its first half-million, before we'd even scraped it together? The priest donated the last of her own money so that we could make our first proper donation in the name of Jesus, earlier than our finances actually allowed.”

Börje Ekman tried again. The priest and the receptionist let him get on with it. So far Hitman Anders was doing well enough as their spokesman.

“How stupid can a person be?” said Börje Ekman. “Don't you have any idea how much money you bring in every Saturday?”

Hitman Anders lost his cool after the bit about how stupid one could be. Partly because he didn't know the answer, and partly
because he sensed an implicit criticism of his own personal intelligence. Thus he rebuffed Börje Ekman: “You take care of your raking, and I'll take care of bringing in money for those in need.”

At this, Börje Ekman lost
his
cool. “Fine. If you're that frightfully naïve [those were the rudest words he knew], you can just stay like that. You can tend the path yourself in your spare time,” he said, shoving the rake into the hand of his pastor. “After all, I've taken certain measures,” Börje Ekman concluded. “All I have to say is—Sodom and Gomorrah!”!” And he smiled a superior smile, just before the situation deteriorated for him.

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.