The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (24 page)

An idea began to germinate.

‘Meeting this afternoon at three,’ she said while the potter was still going through his phone-tapping argument.

‘About what?’ said the potter.

‘At three,’ Nombeko replied.

At exactly the appointed time, she knocked once again on the door of the nervous American. With her she had three South African Chinese girls.

‘Who’s there?’ the potter said through the door.

‘The Mossad,’ said Nombeko.

The potter had no sense of humour, but he recognized her voice and opened the door.

The American and the Chinese girls had hardly even met each other, because for reasons of safety the former preferred his own preserves to the girls’ delicious lunches and dinners. In order to get them to hit it off, Nombeko convinced the potter that the girls belonged to a minority group from Cao Bằng in North Vietnam, where they had devoted themselves to the peaceful cultivation of opium before the horrible Americans hounded them out of there.

‘I am truly sorry,’ said the potter, apparently buying that the girls were not who they were.

Nombeko turned things over to the big sister, who explained how good they had once been at making two-thousand-year-old pottery. But now they no longer had access to a work area, and their mother the designer was back in South Africa.

‘South Africa?’ said the potter.

‘Vietnam.’

The big sister rushed to continue. If Mr Potter might consider giving the girls access to his pottery factory and being the one who created the planned Han dynasty pieces, the girls promised to help by giving him advice about how the pieces should look. In addition, they knew all about the final stage of the process: treating the clay surface so that what one ended up with really was a genuine Han dynasty goose. Or half genuine.

Yes. The potter was with them up to this point. Their subsequent conversation on pricing, however, was a rough one. The potter thought that thirty-nine kronor would be a good price, while the girls were thinking more like thirty-nine thousand. Dollars.

Nombeko didn’t really want to get involved. But at last she said, ‘Perhaps you could meet halfway?’

The collaboration actually ended up working. The American was quick to learn how the geese should look, and in addition he got so good at making Han dynasty horses that they had to knock one ear off each horse to make it more authentic.

Every finished goose and horse was then buried in the dirt behind the pottery, and the girls tossed hen droppings and urine on top of the pieces so that they would age two thousand years in three weeks. When it came to pricing, the group eventually agreed on two different categories. One was the thirty-nine-krona category; those pieces would be sold at marketplaces all over Sweden. The other, the thirty-nine-thousand-dollar category, would be supplied with certificates of authenticity created by the big sister, who had learned how to make them from her mother, who in turn had learned from her brother, the master of all masters: Cheng Tao.

Everyone thought this was a good compromise. And their first sales went superbly. In their first month, the girls and the potter together found buyers for nineteen pieces. Eighteen of them were sold at the Kivik market, and the nineteenth was sold at Bukowskis auction house.

But putting the pieces up for sale at the fine old firm in Stockholm wasn’t without complications, not if one didn’t want to be locked up – and Nombeko and the girls had already tried that once. So they made sure to locate a retired gardener via the Chinese Society in Stockholm. He was about to move home to Shenzhen after thirty years in Sweden, and he received a 10 per cent commission to act as the seller to the auction firm. Even if the big sister’s certificate of authenticity was a good one, there was always the risk that the truth would come out after a year or two. If this happened, the long arm of the law would have a hard time reaching all the way to Shenzhen. Furthermore, eleven million people lived there, so it was a dream for any Chinese person who had reason not to be found by the Swedish police.

Nombeko was the one who took care of the bookkeeping. She was also on the unofficial company’s even more unofficial board.

‘In summation, we have taken in seven hundred and two kronor in market sales and two hundred and seventy-three minus commission at auction during our first month of accounting,’ she said. ‘The costs were kept down to six hundred and fifty kronor for travel to Kivik market, there and back.’

The potter’s financial contribution to the endeavour in that first month was thus a net profit of fifty-two kronor. Even he realized that one branch of sales was more profitable than the other. On the other hand, they couldn’t use Bukowskis too often. The auction firm would soon grow suspicious if a new Han dynasty goose were to show up as soon as the last one had come under the hammer, no matter the quality of the certificate of authenticity. Once a year would have to do. And only if they could obtain another homeward-bound decoy.

The Chinese girls and the American bought a decent second-hand Volkswagen bus with their first month’s profits, and then they adjusted the market selling price to ninety-nine kronor; they couldn’t get the potter to agree to go any higher. He did, however, add his napalm-yellow Saigon collection to the joint venture, and all in all the girls and the potter took in about ten thousand kronor per month through their business, while waiting for Bukowskis to be ready again. This was more than enough money for all of them. They did live cheaply, after all.

CHAPTER 13

On a happy reunion and the man who became his name

It would still be a while before it was time for one of the tenants at Fredsgatan 5 to die.

Holger One was happy at Helicopter Taxi Inc. He managed answering the telephone and brewing coffee splendidly. In addition, he was allowed a practice flight now and then in one of the three helicopters, and each time he imagined that it was bringing him one step closer to kidnapping the king.

At the same time, his young and angry girlfriend was travelling around Sweden in a truck with stolen plates, and she kept herself in good spirits by way of her hope that she would one day be caught in a routine traffic stop.

The three Chinese girls and the American went from market to market, selling antique items for ninety-nine kronor apiece. At first Nombeko went along to keep an eye on everything, but when it turned out that it went well, she stayed at home more and more often. As a supplement to the market sales, Bukowskis was subjected to a new Han dynasty goose about once a year, and it was sold just as easily each time.

The Chinese girls’ plan was to fill the VW bus with pottery and take off to see their uncle in Switzerland once they had saved up a little money. Or a lot. They were no longer in any rush. After all, they found life to be both lucrative and rather pleasant in this country (whatever it was called).

The potter worked alongside the girls, suffering only from a few exaggerated neuroses, and only now and again. For example, once a month he went through the pottery studio looking for hidden microphones. He didn’t find any. Not a single one. Not ever. Strange.

In the parliamentary election of 1991, the ‘Tear All This Shit Down’ Party received another invalid vote. But many more went to the Moderate Party. Sweden got a new prime minister, and Holger Two had reason to make another call to offer him something he surely didn’t want but ought to accept just the same. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Bildt never got the chance to say yes or no, because his assistant had the same idea as her predecessor about which calls could be put through and which couldn’t. And when Holger tried to contact the same king as four years earlier, the same court secretary said the same thing she had last time. And she may have said it a bit more snootily.

Nombeko understood Two’s demand that the bomb should be handed over to the prime minister or no one at all. The only exception being if the king happened to get in their way.

But after nearly four years and a change of government, she realized that one had to
be
someone in order to get close enough to the Swedish prime minister without causing alarms to go off. It would be best to be a president of another country or at least the CEO of a company with thirty or forty thousand employees.

Or an artist. Earlier that year, a girl named Carola had sung about being ‘captured by a storm wind’ and won a song competition because of it, and it had been shown all over the world. Nombeko didn’t know whether she had met the prime minister afterwards, but he had at least sent her a telegram.

Or a sports star. That Björn Borg probably could have been granted an audience whenever he wanted in his glory days. Maybe he still could. You had to
be
someone. That is, you had to be exactly what Holger Two was not, while she herself was illegal.

On the other hand, she hadn’t been locked up behind an electric fence for four years now. And she very much wanted to keep it that way in the future. So Nombeko was able to reconcile herself to the fact that the bomb remained where it was for a little longer, if it absolutely had to stay there, while she browsed through a new shelf each week at the local library.

Meanwhile, Holger Two grew his import business to include hand towels and hotel soaps.

Pillows, hand towels and soaps were not what he had had in mind when, in his youth, he dreamed of getting away from his father, Ingmar, but they would have to do.

* * *

In early 1993, contentment spread throughout both the White House and the Kremlin. The United States and Russia had just taken another step in their joint efforts on mutual control of the two superpowers’ nuclear weapons arsenals. Moreover, with the new START II treaty, they had agreed to further arms reductions.

Both George Bush and Boris Yeltsin thought that the world had become a safer place to live.

Neither of them had ever been to Gnesta.

That same summer, the Chinese girls’ chances of continued lucrative employment in Sweden grew dimmer. It all started when an art dealer in Södertälje discovered that authentic Han dynasty geese were being sold at markets around the country. He bought twelve of them and took them to Bukowskis in Stockholm. He wanted 225,000 kronor for each, but instead he found himself in handcuffs and jail. No one could believe in twelve Han dynasty geese in addition to the five the firm had sold in as many years.

The attempted fraud was reported in the papers, where Nombeko noticed it and immediately told the girls what had happened and said that they must absolutely not approach Bukowskis again, with or without a decoy.

‘Why not?’ wondered the little sister, who lacked the ability to see the danger in anything.

Nombeko told her it was probably impossible to explain that to anyone who didn’t already understand, but that they must still do as she said.

At this point, the girls felt they’d had enough of their ongoing adventure. They had already collected a decent amount of money, and they wouldn’t get much more if they were reduced to accepting the American potter’s pricing.

Instead they filled the VW bus with 260 newly made pieces of pottery from the time before Christ, hugged Nombeko goodbye, and took off for Switzerland, their uncle Cheng Tao and his antiques store. They would sell the pieces they took with them for $49,000 per goose or $79,000 per horse; they also had a handful of other things that were so unfortunate they could be considered more than unique and had therefore received price tags between $160,000 and $300,000. Meanwhile, the American potter resumed his trips from market to market, selling his own copies of the same items for thirty-nine kronor, pleased that he no longer had to compromise on the price.

In her goodbye, Nombeko had said that the price level the girls had chosen was undoubtedly fair, considering how old and lovely the pieces were – especially to an untrained eye. But just in case the Swiss weren’t as easily fooled as the Swedes, she wanted to send them off with the advice not to be careless with the certificates of authenticity.

To this the big sister replied that Nombeko shouldn’t worry. Their uncle had his weak points like anyone else, but when it came to the art of creating fake certificates of authenticity, he was a match for anyone. Yes, he had spent four years in prison in England once, but the fault for that lay squarely with that bungler in London who had drawn up such a slipshod authentic certificate of authenticity that their uncle’s fake one looked too good in comparison. That bungler had even been locked up for three months before Scotland Yard figured out how things really stood: that is, that the fake, unlike the original, wasn’t a fake.

Since then, Cheng Tao had learned his lesson. These days he made sure not to make his work too perfect. Kind of like when the girls knocked off one ear on the Han dynasty horses in order to up the price. Things would go well, they promised.

‘England?’ Nombeko wondered, mostly because she wasn’t sure the girls understood the difference between Great Britain and Switzerland.

No, that was history. During his time in prison, their uncle had shared a cell with a Swiss ‘sweetheart swindler’ who had done his job so damned well that he was in for twice as many years as their uncle. As a result, the Swiss man didn’t need his identity for a while, so he had lent it to their uncle, possibly without being asked first. Their uncle didn’t always ask before he borrowed things. On the day he was released, the police stood waiting outside the gates. They had planned to deport him to Liberia, because that was the last place he had been. But then it turned out that the Chinese man wasn’t African but Swiss, so they sent him to Basel instead. Or maybe it was Bern. Or Bonn. Possibly Berlin. In any case, as she’d said, it was Switzerland.

‘Goodbye, dear Nombeko,’ said the girls in the little Xhosa they still remembered, and then they left.

‘祝你好运,’ Nombeko called after the VW bus. ‘Good luck!’

As she watched the girls disappear, she spent a few seconds calculating the statistical probability that three illegal Chinese refugees who couldn’t tell Basel from Berlin would make it through Europe in an uninsured VW bus, find Switzerland, get into the country and then run into their uncle. Without being discovered.