Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (21 page)

J
erry the Knife stood up cautiously from his position behind the car. He no longer had to wonder where the attack with its double shots had come from, since it had immediately been followed by an explosion in the grove on the other side of the road. He would find out later what damage the shots had wrought inside the room. His first task was to make his way to the grove and neutralize any opposition that remained.

Since Jerry had to move in a wide curve to avoid making an obvious, easy target of himself, he heard police sirens approaching before he arrived at the spot. It was impossible to figure out exactly what had happened, but miscellaneous body parts suggested that the attackers, a woman and a man, had been blasted into such small pieces that he wouldn't have been able to say for certain how many people had been involved, if not for the happy coincidence that three feet in shoes lay in a neat row among the rest of the mess. Jerry guessed the first two were a man's size ten and a half, while the third was more like a woman's six, with a high heel. As long as the attacker hadn't been three-legged and bi-gendered, with two different shoe sizes, this meant a woman had been at the man's side. The count and the countess, perhaps? Presumably. But who had blown them up? Were they in luck—might there be differing opinions, among the hoodlums, about how best to deal with Hitman Anders? Two wanted him dead, and of those two all that remained were three feet
that wouldn't be walking away, unlike Jerry the Knife, who left the scene before the police arrived.

On his way back to the church, Jerry had to repeat this theory to himself to dare even to believe it. Were things really so felicitous that some people who wanted to get rid of the people who wanted to get rid of Hitman Anders had been there to blast the count and countess to bits?

A second later, he realized that the explosion had come after the shots. The second shot had hit the truck, but what about the first? Hitman Anders, one had to presume.

All in all, this meant that the threat scenario against Pastor Anders had massively improved.

And that he was dead.

A minute or so later, Jerry the Knife found that the target he had failed to protect had been luckier than should have been possible.

“Our situation is now such,” he said before the priest, the receptionist, and the hitman with a nosebleed, “that we have a crime-scene investigation taking place hardly five hundred feet away and a corpse on the floor at our feet. Police officers will be knocking at the church door as soon as they put two and two together.”

“Four,” said Hitman Anders, with paper towel stuck in one nostril.

Jerry the Knife wondered if it would be possible to stuff the churchwarden into one of the suitcases, but the body would have to be cut in half to fit, and there was no time for that. Plus, this was in no way a pleasant thought.

The receptionist said that the bullet seemed still to be somewhere inside the skull of what used to be Börje Ekman, and that, if this was so, it was in a good place, probably somewhere in the vicinity of the screw that had been loose in there.

The priest was annoyed that the churchwarden had made such a terrible mess on the floor, though the puddle of blood could be
mopped up, of course. She volunteered, and suggested at the same time that Jerry should take the corpse under his arm and load it into the truck, after which he should make corpse and truck disappear. After all, the truck would have plenty to gossip about to any police officer, what with its broken side window.

That was all they could do. So they did it. Jerry the Knife got behind the wheel after managing to convince the driver on the floor to shift a few feet to the right so he could reach the pedals to drive. What was more, in his new position the terrified driver found the spent bullet: the last remaining evidence that a shot had been fired in a churchly direction.

Wine, grapes, cheese, and crackers had already been unloaded, so there was plenty of room for a dead churchwarden in the back. The fact was, there would have been room for an average-sized congregation to keep him company, had it been necessary.

It was not immediately obvious to the police that the hand grenade that had taken two lives had any ties to the religious building on the other side of the road. It took several hours for one inspector to make the potential connection to the Church of Anders. And the resultant visit from the police wasn't undertaken until the next day.

The priest received the officers, saying she had read in the paper about the terrible thing that had apparently happened just a stone's throw away, that they had heard a loud bang as they were receiving goods the day before, and police sirens immediately afterwards, which had felt reassuring “because we knew the authorities were on their way to deal with whatever might be going on. It's really nice to know the force is so alert. May we offer you a little church coffee? I'm guessing you don't have time for a game of Pick Up Sticks.”

Approximately ten hours earlier, Jerry the Knife had thrown a triple-bagged bundle containing 175 pounds of churchwarden and 33 pounds of rocks into the Baltic. After this he had conscientiously
set fire to the truck on a remote gravel road with the help of ten gallons of gasoline. To be on the safe side, he had done it on the other side of the Västmanland county boundary so that the investigation one had to assume would result from the fire would land on a different desk in a different district than the mysterious explosion north of Stockholm would.

T
he former churchwarden, who now lay in the Baltic Sea at a depth of sixty feet, would come back to haunt the group one last time, several days after his death.

“Sodom and Gomorrah,” Börje Ekman had said, time and again, the previous Tuesday, as he had sat in his studio apartment, oatmeal simmering on the stove. He had taken a bite of his crispbread
with margarine and tried to decide what to do. To start with. “Do I have the right idea, Lord?” said Börje Ekman, who received silence in response.

So he changed tack. “If I have the wrong idea, Lord, tell me so! You know I will not leave your side.”

The Lord still said nothing.

“Thank you, Lord,” said Börje Ekman, who had received the confirmation he needed.

Thus, on Wednesday morning, the self-appointed churchwarden of the Church of Anders took his bicycle and rode from Systembolaget outlet to Systembolaget outlet to speak to the men and women on the park benches outside. Some of them already suspected that the state-controlled liquor outlet would ban them for the day, but they were hanging out there anyway. Others were still sober enough to have a good chance of being allowed in when the doors were
unlocked at ten on the dot. Systembolaget had the complicated task of, on the one hand, selling as much alcohol as possible to the people of Sweden, thereby maximizing the amount of tax payable to the nation and, on the other, preaching to the same people that in the name of sobriety they should not drink the alcohol they had just paid for so dearly.

In their ambition to do the responsible thing, they found reason each day to send packing not only ten but up to twenty potential customers, chosen from among those who most needed their visit.

To the joy of this clientele, Börje Ekman biked around with the news that there would be free wine at the Church of Anders north of the city that coming Saturday. The generosity of the Almighty knew no bounds. It was all free, if you arrived on time. Snacks were included. No, you didn't
have
to eat; that was optional. No, no one was shown the door before it even opened; this was all arranged by the Lord, not by Systembolaget.

Börje Ekman knew that the students from Mälar Upper Secondary School began their duties at one o'clock. The boxes of wine would presumably be in place half an hour later. “Anyone who arrives before two o'clock is unlikely to come too late,” he said, then bicycled on.

And he smiled as he pedaled onward into the chilly headwind. To the next Systembolaget. And the next. And the next. Just hours before his own death.

* * *

When Saturday arrived, Churchwarden Börje Ekman lay silent at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, while the most wretched examples of humanity he had previously spurred into action took seats in the pews of his church at just after eleven that morning.

Three hours later, the church was full. Another twenty minutes
after that, everyone in the church was full. Of wine. In contrast to the boxes from Moldova.

The students had been given their instructions. An empty box must be immediately exchanged for a fresh one. The rule was in place in case an exchange or two became necessary towards the end of the service; no one expected every single box to have been replaced by another long before Hitman Anders had even changed his clothes.

The first fight broke out around four thirty. It began with an argument about who had ownership of the nearest box of wine and ended when no one could remember what they had been arguing about since there was always a refill at hand. Around the same time, visitors who were used to finding spots in the church began to arrive, their pockets full of money, but once they reached the door they turned to go home again.

At twenty minutes to five, the priest saw what was going on. The students had made an initial round with their buckets and collected twenty-two Swedish kronor and a West German Deutschmark from 1982. This averaged out to just over 2.7 öre per visitor. Plus the German mark, which was potentially worth a similar amount, but only if melted down.

At ten to five, the students' spokesperson informed her that the week's rations of wine were gone. Did that mean they should dip into next week's or switch to the trays of goodies?

Neither. It meant that the week's sermon was cancelled and that Jerry the Knife and his men had to empty the church before a real drunken brawl broke out.

“It's probably a bit late for that,” said Jerry the Knife, as he gazed out through the curtains at the congregation.

People were sitting in and standing among the pews; someone had lain down to sleep; at least four different groups were arguing with each other; a shoving match was going on; and bickering was breaking out. A filthy woman and an even filthier man had lain down under a fresco of the baby Jesus in the manger and appeared to be
trying to demonstrate how it had not gone down, according to the Bible, when the Virgin Mary became with child.

Apparently someone had called the police (Börje Ekman was, in this respect, not a suspect), because by now they could hear sirens outside. The metal detectors started beeping with each new officer that passed through them, which in turn made the two police dogs nervous. One barking dog in a church sounds like an entire kennel. Two barking dogs create chaos.

By the time the smoke cleared, forty-six people had been arrested for drunkenness, violently resisting an officer or both. Two more were taken into custody for disorderly conduct.

In addition, the priest in charge, Johanna Kjellander, was called in for questioning, under suspicion of . . . well, it wasn't quite possible to decide what.

According to the Law of Public Order, chapter three, paragraph eighteen, an individual municipality may impose further prohibitions in addition to those already in existence, for the purpose of maintaining public order.

Following the articles in the Sunday newspapers, the municipality in question passed a resolution the very next day concerning “a ban on the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the private religious gathering place known as ‘the Church of Anders,' where the aim of said consumption appears to deviate from that in the given rules and regulations.” The municipality's decision was not complicated by the Church's vague links to what was presumed to be a double homicide a few days previously, in which two members of the criminal element had been blasted to bits.

A
fter a business strategy based on the assault of people who were, in the best case, not entirely innocent, the priest and the receptionist had steered onto the new track of swindling money out of those whose hearts were full of faith, hope, love, and generosity, and whose circulatory systems, just to be safe, had been filled with wine.

If it hadn't been for a dead count and countess—as well as the final action of a self-important former, now equally dead, churchwarden—this line of business might have continued even until today. But first it turned out that the newspapers could not be trusted as free distributors of publicity. Instead, the journalists drew murky connections between the presumed double homicide of two of the underworld's central figures and the Church of Anders on the other side of the highway. A few even broached the possibility that Hitman Anders had reverted to his old self and was behind it all. It was taken for granted that the so-called count and his countess were among those whom Hitman Anders had cheated out of their money a few months previously.

“Goddamn journalists.” The receptionist summarized the situation he and the priest now found themselves in.

The priest agreed. It would have been so much simpler if the media hadn't bothered to do their jobs.

As if these articles weren't bad enough, on their heels came the
hastily approved local ordinance forbidding the Church of Anders to base its operations on
wine
(as opposed to a windmill in northwestern Värmland) as the source of all that was good, which meant that both priest and receptionist saw a never-ending uphill battle ahead of them.

The long and the short of it was that the eight hundred congregants, plus two hundred in the parking lot had decreased to seven in a matter of a few weeks.

Seven visitors.

Who generated barely a single one-hundred-krona bill, gross.

Jointly.

That hundred had to suffice for a priest, a receptionist, a team of bodyguards, and a number of upper-secondary students. Even Hitman Anders realized they were in financial trouble. But he said that the strength of his religious message remained intact. The priest and the receptionist should be patient. “We know that suffering produces endurance, endurance character, and character hope,” said Hitman Anders.

“Huh?” said the receptionist.

“Romans five,” the priest said automatically, in surprise.

Oblivious to the impression he had just made on those around him, Pastor Anders said he had first thought it was a pity that Börje Ekman had departed this life, but he had got over it in the thirty-plus seconds it had taken him to realize that the alternative would have been a hole in his own stomach and out the other side. In light of this, Hitman Anders had to agree with the receptionist that the nosebleed he had suffered was bearable.

The aforementioned nosebleed, incidentally, had ceased after around fifteen minutes, and despite the relative flop the following Saturday, the pastor was still determined to continue his work in Jesus's name. He didn't think it mattered that they could no longer serve wine to the churchgoers as long as he himself could continue to warm up with a tankard. The seven people in the pews would soon
become fourteen. And before the priest, the pastor, and the receptionist knew it, there would be fourteen hundred of them once again.

“It's a bit of an understatement to call what happened when the police and the dogs arrived a ‘relative flop,'” said the receptionist.

“Let's call it a giant flop. But faith can move mountains,” said Hitman Anders, citing Leviticus.

“Has that devil memorized the Bible?” the receptionist asked, as soon as Hitman Anders had left the room.

“Not really,” said the priest. “I think we discussed how faith moved mountains both inside the Bible and out, but not in Leviticus. In that one they sacrifice animals and some other stuff.”

The receptionist could not imagine a future in which Hitman Anders's faith would move them towards anything but trouble. The priest agreed.

The Church of Anders had been run into the ground. All they could do was liquidate the enterprise as best they could, while making sure the pastor didn't understand what was going on.

“I actually thought it was too good to be true when things were too good to be true for a brief time there,” said the priest.

The receptionist absorbed what she'd said. “I suppose that was around the same time I was thinking
things have finally turned around, after all these years
. I vow never to think that again, my darling.”