Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All (17 page)

T
he grand opening had brought in 425,000 kronor after the wages paid to the teenagers from Mälar Upper Secondary School. In other words: 21,250 kronor each to the security team, Hitman Anders, the general expenses fund, and charitable purposes. The remaining 340,000 kronor was placed in the priest and the receptionist's yellow suitcase in the eighteenth-century cabinet in the sacristy. They didn't need the red one yet (the suitcases were probably not the safest deposit boxes in the world, but the receptionist insisted that all their assets should be kept there so that, in an emergency, it would take less than thirty seconds to flee).

That evening, as a reward for a job well done, Hitman Anders received an extra bottle of red and the promise that he wouldn't have to wait longer than about twenty weeks before he could hand out his next half-million to the recipient of his choice.

“Fantastic,” he said. “But I would like a bite to eat. Can I borrow five hundred for some food?”

The receptionist realized they'd forgotten to inform the hitman that he would actually be drawing a salary, and since he wasn't asking for one, they could just as well leave that matter as it was. Forgotten.

“Of course you may borrow five hundred,” he said. “Heck, you can have it! But don't waste it all at once, please. And take Jerry the Knife with you if you're going anywhere.”

Unlike Hitman Anders, Jerry the Knife could count: 21,250 kronor would not cover the costs for him and his staff.

“Then let's double it,” said the receptionist.

The guards received what the hitman didn't understand he should have had, so no budgetary harm was done.

But before Hitman Anders was able to leave with Jerry the Knife, yet another person entered the scene. “What a wonderful evening in the service of the Lord,” lied the man who had been delegated the heavenly task of putting everything to rights.

“Who are you?” asked the priest.

“I'm Börje Ekman, churchwarden of this congregation for the past thirty years. Or thirty-one. Or twenty-nine, depending on how you count. The church lay fallow for some time.”

“Churchwarden?” said the receptionist.

Trouble
, thought the priest.

“Dammit! That's right. I forgot to tell you about him,” said Jerry the Knife, who in his rush had also forgotten to watch his language.

“Welcome home,” said Hitman Anders, who was feeling blissful because he had received praise from two different sources in the span of one minute. He gave Börje Ekman a hug on his way out. “Come on, Jerry, let's go. I'm thirsty. I mean hungry.”

B
örje Ekman didn't manage to get to a single one of the fourteen opinions he had jotted down about the evening's service. Instead, he was led away by the receptionist and the priest, with the promise that they would talk more in the time to come. To this he responded that there wasn't much they needed to discuss, aside from a few important details about message, tone, service times, and a few other things: he knew how to build up the ideal congregation and had already established some contacts among the visitors.

“How much money did we bring in tonight, by the way?”

“We haven't counted yet, but definitely over five thousand,” the receptionist said quickly, hoping that he hadn't under-exaggerated by too much.

“Oh!” said Börje Ekman. “A congregational record! Just imagine how much we can bring in once I've fixed up all the organization and contents and a little of most of the rest of it. Why, I'd bet a pretty penny that we'll break ten thousand kronor one day.”

Trouble, trouble, trouble,
thought the priest.

With “I'll be back on Monday to rake the path all nice and neat again. Maybe I'll see you then,” Börje Ekman finally left the room.

“Why can't I just be happy for once?” said the receptionist.

The priest felt the same, but they would have to wait until the next week to fire the man who had never been offered a job in the first
place. Right now it was time to celebrate by eating a seven-course dinner and checking into a hotel. And, above all, it was time to discuss concept development, based on their experiences that evening.

* * *

Immediately following their first toast with a 2005 South African Anwilka, the priest presented her new idea.

“Communion,” she said.

“Ugh, right,” said the receptionist.

“No, not ugh!”

By communion she meant not what kept Hitman Anders going, or communion in the proper sense of the word, but communion in a new, free, Church-of-Anders sense.

“Please tell me more,” said the receptionist, taking another exquisite sip of the South African wine for which they would soon pay more than two thousand kronor, given that they hadn't ordered a second bottle.

Well, they had discovered the link between happy visitors and increased generosity. Hitman Anders made people happy (at least, he made everyone happy except the two of them and possibly that miserable churchwarden): therefore he made them generous. Add wine, and people would be even happier,
ergo
even more generous! It was simple mathematics.

The priest concluded that if they managed to get anything from one glass to half a bottle down the hatch of each visitor, depending on said visitor's thirst and body size, they could very well double the Saturday proceeds. Not from five thousand to ten thousand, as the man with the rake had suggested, but from half a million to a whole.

“Unlimited amounts of communion for everyone?” said the receptionist.

“I think we should stop calling it communion, at least internally. ‘Financial stimulant' sounds better.”

“What about a liquor license?”

“I don't think we need one. In this wonderful country, so full of prohibitions and regulations, you can more or less uncork whatever you like, as long as you keep it within the four walls of the church. But to be on the safe side, I'll check first thing on Monday. Cheers, my darling. This is a good wine. Far too good for our church.”

T
he following Monday, at 9:01 a.m., the priest made a call from the sacristy to the regional alcohol and tobacco authority, introduced herself as the assistant pastor of a newly formed congregation, and wondered if there was any situation in which a liquor license was required to serve communion during a service.

No, the straight-laced representative of the authority informed her. Communion could be freely served.

At this, the priest asked—to be on the safe side—if there was any limit on how much wine each member of the congregation was allowed to toss back.

The strait-laced man seemed to lace himself even straiter as he sensed something untoward about the question. As a result he chose to supplement his formal answer with a personal reflection. “While the amount of communion wine served is not the sort of thing the licensing authority has any opinion on, becoming intoxicated is not, in the eyes of the law, the main purpose of communion. One might wonder, for example, if the religious message will get across if too much wine is served.”

The priest was about to say that, in this case, it would probably be just as well if the message fell by the wayside, at least parts of it, but she thanked him briskly and hung up. “Green light!” she said to the receptionist. And then she turned to Jerry the Knife, who was present
in the same sacristy. “I want at least two hundred gallons of red wine delivered on Saturday. Can you make that happen?”

“Sure,” said Jerry the Knife, who had plenty of contacts and then some. “Two hundred one-gallon boxes of Merlot from Moldova, at one hundred kronor a box, will that do? It doesn't taste all that—”

“Bad,” was what he was about to say, but he was interrupted.

“Alcohol content?” said the priest.

“Enough,” said Jerry the Knife.

“Then let's do it. Wait, just get four hundred boxes all at once. There'll be more Saturdays after this next one.”

B
örje Ekman was raking his gravel path. It was truly his, and no one else's. Hitman Anders happened by with Jerry the Knife trailing him silently. The pastor admired the quality of the raking and received kind words about his debut sermon in return.

“Not much to complain about there,” said Börje Ekman, both smiling and lying.

This white lie was his intended beginning of his three-step plan to, in Phase A:

        
1. have opinions about the contents of the sermons

        
2. proceed to inform the pastor of the main points he must stick to, so that the churchwarden could

        
3. write the Sunday sermons himself, just like in the good old days.

And to think that they had chosen to hold Sunday services on an early Saturday evening. He would work on that in Phase B. Or C, depending on how difficult the priest, the pastor, and that other fellow might end up being.

The hitman's constant companion, Jerry the Knife, had enough sense to tell the priest and the receptionist about the incipient familiarity between the pastor and the self-designated churchwarden.

“Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble,” said the priest.

The receptionist nodded. That Börje Ekman called himself the churchwarden without having been designated as such was a small problem in and of itself. But he seemed to be married to the very church and the area surrounding it, and he would keep coming back, no matter how far Jerry the Knife and his crew chased him off. He would come back and he would discover what he had missed the last time, namely what large amounts of money they were actually dealing with. What was more, there was a risk that he would twist the already twisted mind of the pastor and make a huge mess of everything.

“Next time you and Hitman Anders catch sight of Börje Ekman, try to lead that scatterbrain in the other direction,” said the receptionist.

“Which one? The hitman or the guy with the rake?” asked Jerry the Knife.

T
he debut had gone better than one might have expected in the present circumstances. The newspapers had been there and delivered further free advertising in the form of reports on Pastor Anders's success, as well as speculation about who might receive the next half-million from the newly saved, altruistic former hitman. None of the journalists was overly impressed by the sermon itself, but there had certainly been nothing wrong with the pastor's and the congregation's enthusiasm.

A few days later, the matter was discussed again in the papers. According to an anonymous source, the free coffee would be replaced next Saturday by free wine. They had been notified that communion was a crucial part of the Anderssonian liturgy. High mass would take place each Saturday evening at five on the dot, year round, according to what the papers had learned. When Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday, the wine would be temporarily replaced by equally alcoholic
glögg
, but otherwise everything would remain the same.

“Thank the good Lord for tip lines,” said the receptionist, when he read the free publicity in the nationwide tabloids.

“Where in the Bible does it say that God created tip lines?” said the priest.

* * *

Then it was Saturday again, and once more tons of people came streaming in, but this time the place wasn't quite as crammed. The priest and the receptionist had been aware that this might happen; many people had already got their autograph or photo, and had no desire to pay for the same thing twice. But, still, there were two hundred more visitors than could fit into the church.

Last weekend, one carafe of coffee had been allowed for every twenty seats. This time, there was a wine glass at each seat and a Moldovan box of wine on the floor every sixteen feet.

No one dared to touch the wine before the pastor made his entrance, which he did as the clock struck five.

Standing in the same out-of-the-way corner of the building as the week before: Börje Ekman.

Already deeply bewildered.

“Hallelujah and Hosanna,” Pastor Anders began, before, for strictly personal reasons, he got straight to the point: “Jesus—my friends—took the suffering of all humanity upon himself. Let us begin with a toast to that!”

He filled his glass from the communion vessel as the rows of pews descended into half a riot. After all, there are few things as embarrassing as returning a toast without anything in your glass.

However badly the pastor wanted to knock back what he held, he waited until a sufficient number of the congregation appeared ready. “To Jesus!” he said at last, emptying the contents of his cup in one giant gulp. At least seven hundred of the eight hundred people in the building followed their pastor's lead. Even this was more than fifty of them could handle.

After an inappropriate “That hits the spot,” Pastor Anders launched into his sermon by explaining that he was a simple servant of the Lord, who had formerly not understood that the path to Heaven was found by way of the blood and body of Christ. But he had seen the light. Above all, he was able to reveal to the congregation where the whole idea of communion had come from in the
first place. It was best not to get into details, but the short version was that Jesus had felt hungry before he was crucified and invited his friends to one last hullabaloo. It was him and the apostles, but recent research, conducted by Pastor Anders himself, suggested that they had put away a great deal more wine than had previously been known. And the crucifixion had been delayed for some time, so there is a chance Jesus was dangling there on Calvary with a hangover on top of everything else. That might explain his anguished “My God, my God, why have you done this to me?”

Hullabaloo? A hungover Jesus on the cross? Had Börje Ekman heard correctly?

Pastor Anders had prepared another Post-it, so he was able to elegantly cite the most recent quotation as Mark 15:34. After that he made an unplanned digression into the curse of the hangover before he turned back to Jesus and the cross. For, according to Pastor Anders, the truly interesting thing Jesus said before sailing into eternity was “I am thirsty” (John 19:28).

That was the blood of Christ. When it came to his body . . . No, wait, first it was time for yet another toast in the name of the Lord: no one must stand or sit there becoming hungover himself, and the answer was to keep drinking.

It wasn't long before almost the entire congregation was tipsy. The pastor fitted in three toasts around his cobbled-together declaration of communion before arriving at the next planned item on the agenda.

“It is said that they also broke bread with their wine, but, hello, dry white bread with red wine, is that how we're supposed to honor the Lord and his son?”

Here and there, a few weak cries of “No!”

“I can't hear you!” Hitman Anders said, in a louder voice. “Is that how we're supposed to honor them?”

“No!” many more cried this time.

“Once more!” said Hitman Anders.

“No!” shouted the entire church and half the parking lot outside.

“Now I can hear you!” said Hitman Anders. “And I take your word as law.”

At a prearranged signal, the classes from Mälar Upper Secondary School times four began their task. Each student carried, in one hand, a bucket to fill with bills and, in the worst case, a coin or two. In the other hand was a tray with various sorts of crackers, seedless grapes, butter, and cheese. The trays passed from visitor to visitor, and when one was about to empty, the students immediately refilled it.

The pastor, at the front of the room, had his own plate. He nibbled at what was offered and chewed with relish.

“Fit for a bishop,” he said.

After having subsisted on the blood of Christ alone for several weeks, plus the occasional hamburger or cinnamon roll, Hitman Anders had seen fit to read up a little on what communion actually was (a
little
, mind, not a lot). In this he was cheered on by the priest: if only foolishness came out of Hitman Anders's trap week after week, the consequence would be a pastor who couldn't arouse enough enthusiasm for the masses to give enough money to get closer to Heaven. And this would soon turn out to be as profitable as running a business in the assault trade without having any assault to offer.

But there was another way, besides communion, to stimulate the flat-out boozing that was now taking place within and immediately outside God's house. This time the priest had inspected Hitman Anders's Post-it ahead of time and added an item or two she thought might influence the mood and thus the generosity.

That was why the pastor was currently telling the story of Noah, the man who built the world's first vineyard, and as a result was the first to get raging drunk. Afterwards he passed out naked in his tent, all according to Genesis 9:21, but then he came to again, scolded one
of his sons while hungover (“That bloody hangover again!”) and lived another three hundred and fifty years on top of the six hundred he already had behind him.

“Now let's raise our glasses one last time,” Pastor Anders concluded. “We drink of the blood of Christ. The wine gave Noah nine hundred and fifty years of life. Without the wine he would have been dead long before that.”

The receptionist was thinking that Noah had probably already been dead long enough, but the pastor seemed able to get away with just about anything.

“Cheers and welcome back on Saturday!” said Pastor Anders, draining his vessel, not bothering with a glass.

The receptionist snapped his fingers to tell the students to make another collection, which brought in another ten thousand or so kronor in addition to what had already been given, along with the unfortunate offering of an older woman, with a feather boa around her neck, who had the poor taste to throw up into one of the buckets.

As people staggered out of the church, full of bliss and wine, the priest and the receptionist summed up the evening's developments. A very rough estimate indicated that they had made over a million kronor this time, which meant that their investment in the Moldovan wine and the snacks had paid for itself many times over.

* * *

The suitcases of money were already closed when Churchwarden Börje Ekman entered the sacristy from which the business was run. He was red in the face; he didn't look happy.

“For one thing!” he began.

“For one thing, you should probably learn to say ‘hello' politely,” the receptionist snapped.

“Hello there, Börje,” said the oblivious hitman. “What did you think about this evening's sermon? As good as last time?”

Börje Ekman had lost his train of thought so he started again. “Good evening to all of you,” he said. “I have a few things to say. For one thing, it is total chaos outside the church. At least four cars have backed into each other, people are dragging their feet as they walk down the gravel path, which will make it twice as hard to rake on Monday . . .”

“Maybe it would be best to pave it, then, so it will match the car park better,” said the receptionist, who was in a fighting mood.

Pave the gravel path? To Börje Ekman, this was tantamount to swearing in church. As he tried to recover from what he'd just heard, Hitman Anders, who was more intoxicated than his body actually needed to be, said, “Hey, listen, tell me what you thought of my goddamn sermon.”

Swearing in church was definitely tantamount to swearing in church, according to Börje Ekman.

“What on earth is going on here?” he said, looking down into the only bucket that hadn't yet been emptied and hidden in the closest suitcase. It was the one that contained vomit, on top of what had to be several thousand kronor. “The sermon?” he went on. “That was a booze-fest!”

“Speaking of which,” said Hitman Anders, “wouldn't you like a few drops yourself? I can't guarantee it'll make you live to nine hundred and fifty, but I'm sure it'll put you in a better mood than you seem to be right now.”

“A booze-fest!” Börje Ekman repeated. “In God's house! Have you no shame?”

Somewhere around that point, the priest had had enough. Mr. Blasted Ekman was the one who had no shame. Here they were, fighting to bring in a few measly kronor for the poorest people on our Earth, all while Ekman was grumbling about a gravel path. How much had
he
put in the collection plate, hmm?

The self-designated churchwarden had not put in a single krona, which troubled him for a second or two before he collected himself. “You are twisting the word of God, you are turning the service and mass into a circus, you, you . . . How much money have you brought in? And where did it all go?”

“That's none of your business,” the receptionist said angrily. “And, anyway, isn't the important thing that each krona goes to the needy?”

On the topic of “needy,” the priest and the receptionist had, a week before, exchanged the camper for the Riddarholm Suite at the Hilton, and that wasn't exactly free.

But instead of saying so to the self-designated churchwarden, the priest suggested that “Mr. Jerry here” could show him the way out if, perchance, he was unable to find it himself. She also suggested, in a milder tone, that they meet again once emotions had settled a bit. Like this coming Monday, for example, might that work?

By taking action, she intended to do away with the unrest in the room but without spurring him to run to the police or do something equally horrid.

“I can find it myself,” said Churchwarden Börje Ekman. “But I'll be back on Monday to rake the path, clear up the pieces of glass from all the collisions and, I'm sure, wipe up a patch of vomit or two that I haven't found yet. And for next Saturday I demand more order than we had today. Do you understand? We will meet to discuss it at two o'clock!”

“Two thirty,” said the priest, because she didn't want to let Börje Ekman decide.