The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (29 page)

‘Light it up, Björkman,’ said the commanding officer.

At that instant, they caught sight of a person behind the curtain in one of the broken windows in the attic of the condemned building. He could hardly be seen, but he could be heard:

‘You’ll never get us! If you break in we’ll jump one by one! Do you hear me?’ said Holger Two in as fierce and desperate a voice as he could manage.

The commanding officer stopped Björkman and his welding unit. Who was that, yelling up there? What was he up to?

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ the officer asked through his megaphone.

‘You’ll never get us!’ said the voice behind the curtain again.

And then a man stepped up; he seemed to wriggle over the edge, it looked like someone was helping him . . . right? Was he going to jump? Was he going to jump to his death just because . . .

Shit!

The man let go. And sailed down to the asphalt. It was as if he wasn’t anxious at all, as if he had decided to do what he was doing. He didn’t make a sound as he fell. He didn’t try to protect himself with his hands.

He landed on his head. A crack and a thud. Lots of blood. Not a chance he’d survived.

The break-in was immediately halted.

‘Oh, shit,’ said the policeman with the welding unit, starting to feel ill from what he’d seen.

‘What do we do now, boss?’ said his colleague, who was feeling no better.

‘We stop everything,’ said the commanding officer, who perhaps felt worst of the three. ‘And then we call the National Task Force in Stockholm.’

* * *

The American potter was only fifty-two years old, and it was true that he had been pursued all his life by his memories of the Vietnam War, and pursued by imaginary pursuers as well. But since Nombeko and the Chinese girls had become part of his life, things seemed to be going in the right direction. He was almost rid of his paranoid anxiety, he no longer had such high levels of adrenalin, and his body had got used to handling the new levels. So when what he assumed was the CIA suddenly knocked on the door for real, everything happened so fast that his adrenalin levels didn’t have time to take up their former defensive positions. Instead, the potter was afflicted with ventricular fibrillation. His pupils dilated and his heart stopped.

When this happens, you
look
dead at first, and then you die for real. And then, if you are thrown headfirst from a fourth-floor window – you die again, if you hadn’t done so already.

Holger Two ordered them to return to the warehouse, where he held a thirty-second moment of silence for the man who was no longer with them, thanking him for his crucial help during their current difficult situation.

After that, Two handed the command back to Nombeko. She thanked him for his trust and began by saying that she had had time to find and visually inspect the tunnel the potter had dug. It appeared that he would be helping the group not just once after his death, but twice.

‘He didn’t just build a four-hundred-and-fifty-foot tunnel to the pottery on the other side of the street; he supplied it with electricity and added kerosene lamps for backup. There’s a cupboard of food that would last several months, and bottles of water . . . In short, he was really, really crazy.’

‘May he rest in peace,’ said Holger One.

‘How big is the tunnel?’ said Holger Two.

‘The crate will fit,’ said Nombeko. ‘Not by a wide margin, but a small one.’

So Nombeko delegated tasks. Celestine was assigned to go through the apartments, remove anything that could lead to the various inhabitants and leave the rest.

‘Except one thing,’ Nombeko added. ‘In my room there’s a backpack that I want to bring along. It contains things that will be important in the future.’

Nineteen point six million important things, she thought.

Holger One was assigned to go through the tunnel to get the hand cart that stood in the pottery, while Two was kindly ordered to transform the bomb’s container from a cosy corner back to a regular old crate.

‘Regular?’ said Holger Two.

‘Please get going, my dear.’

The division of labour was over; everyone attended to his or her own task.

The tunnel was a dazzling example of paranoid engineering. Its ceiling was high, and it had straight walls and an apparently stable system of joists that locked into each other and kept it from collapsing.

It led all the way to the cellar of the pottery, and it had an exit at the back of the property, out of sight of the steadily increasing crowd of people outside Fredsgatan 5.

It is as difficult as it sounds to handle 1700 pounds of atomic bomb on a four-wheeled hand cart. And yet, in under an hour, the bomb was on a street off Fredsgatan, only two hundred yards from the hive of activity outside the condemned building, where the National Task Force had just arrived.

‘I think it’s time to roll out of here,’ said Nombeko.

The Holgers and Nombeko pushed from behind while the angry young woman took care of steering up front.

Their journey progressed slowly along a small, paved road straight into the Sörmland countryside. Half a mile away from the besieged Fredsgatan. One mile. And so on.

It was, at times, hard work for everyone but Celestine. But after one and a half miles, as soon as they had pushed the cart over an invisible crest, it was easier. And with that, for the first time, they were on a slight downhill slant. One, Two and Nombeko got some well-deserved rest.

For a few seconds.

Nombeko was the first to realize what was about to happen. She ordered the Holgers to push from the other side instead. One of them understood and obeyed her immediately; the other eventually understood, too, but he had just stopped and lagged behind to scratch his behind.

One’s temporary departure did not make any difference, however. It was too late as soon as the 1700 pounds started rolling on its own.

The last to give up was Celestine. She ran ahead of the bomb and tried to guide it along the right path until it was moving too quickly even for her. Then she locked the handle and jumped aside. With that, there was nothing more to do other than watch three megatons of weapon of mass destruction roll down the increasingly steep hill of the narrow country road. On one side of the crate: a lashed-down backpack containing 19.6 million kronor.

‘Anyone have any idea how to get thirty-eight miles away from here in ten seconds?’ said Nombeko as her gaze followed the runaway bomb.

‘Ideas aren’t my strong suit,’ said Holger One.

‘No, but you’re good at scratching your arse,’ said his brother, thinking that these were peculiar last words.

Two hundred yards on, the road made a slight jog to the left. Unlike the wheel-borne atomic bomb, which kept going straight ahead.

* * *

Mr and Mrs Blomgren had found in each other a person who felt that thrift was the finest virtue of them all. For forty-nine years, Margareta had been holding tight to her Harry, who held even tighter to all the couple’s money. They considered themselves responsible. Any outside observer would more likely have called them stingy.

Harry had been a scrap dealer all of his working life. He had inherited the business from his father when he was only twenty-five. The last thing his father did before a Chrysler New Yorker fell on top of him was to hire a young girl to handle the company’s bookkeeping. Heir Harry thought that this was an unfathomable waste of money until the girl, Margareta, invented something she called invoice fees and overdue interest. Then, instead, he fell madly in love, proposed and got a yes. The wedding was held at the scrapyard, and the three other employees were invited via a notice on the bulletin board in the hall. To a pot luck.

They never had any children. That was a cost Henry and Margareta calculated continuously until they no longer had any reason to calculate it.

On the other hand, their living situation worked itself out. For the first twenty years they lived with Margareta’s mother in her house, Ekbacka, until the old woman died – what luck. She was sensitive to cold and had spent all those years complaining that Harry and Margareta refused to keep the house warm enough in the winter to keep frost from forming on the insides of the windows. She was in a better place now, lying there at a frost-free depth in the cemetery in Herrljunga. Neither Harry nor Margareta saw the point in wasting money on flowers for her grave.

As a nice hobby, Margareta’s mother kept three ewes, which grazed in a small pasture along the road. But before the woman was even cold, even though she had been rather cold from the start, Harry and Margareta slaughtered the animals and ate them. A leaky sheep shed remained; they let it rot.

Then the couple retired, sold the scrapyard, and made it past both seventy and seventy-five years of age before they decided one day to actually do something about that ramshackle shed in the pasture. Harry tore it down and Margareta piled up the boards. Then they set the whole thing on fire, and it burned vigorously as Harry Blomgren watched over it with a hose in case the fire got out of hand. At his side, as always, was his wife, Margareta.

At that instant, there was a sudden crash as the 1700-pound atomic bomb in a crate on wheels shot straight through the fence into the Blomgrens’ former sheep pasture and didn’t stop until it was in the middle of the fire.

‘What on earth?’ said Mrs Blomgren.

‘The fence!’ said Mr Blomgren.

Then they stopped talking and looked up at the group of four people who were following the trail of the cart and crate.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Nombeko. ‘Would you be so kind, sir, as to spray water on that fire so that it goes out? Without delay, please.’

Harry Blomgren didn’t answer. He did nothing.

‘Without delay, as I said,’ said Nombeko. ‘That is to say,
now
!’

But the old man kept standing where he stood, with a turned-off hose in hand. The wooden parts of the cart were starting to react to the heat. The backpack was already blazing.

Then Harry Blomgren opened his mouth after all.

‘Water isn’t free,’ he said.

Then there was a bang.

With the first explosion, Nombeko, Celestine, Holger and Holger were struck by something similar to the cardiac arrest that had ended the potter’s life an hour or so earlier. But unlike him, the others recovered when they realized that it was a tyre that had blown up, not an entire region.

The second, third and fourth ones followed suit. Harry Blomgren continued to refuse to spray water on the box and the backpack. First he wanted to know who intended to compensate him for the fence. And the cost of water.

‘I don’t think you quite understand the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in,’ said Nombeko. ‘The crate contains . . . flammable material. If it gets too hot, things will end poorly. Frightfully poorly. Believe me!’

She had already given up hope for the backpack. The 19.6 million were no more.

‘Why should I believe a total stranger and her accomplices? Tell me who will replace the fence instead!’

Nombeko realized that she wouldn’t get any further with this man. So she asked Celestine to take over.

The angry young woman was happy to. To avoid prolonging the conversation more than was necessary, she said, ‘Put out the fire, or I’ll kill you!’

Harry Blomgren thought he could see in the girl’s eyes that she meant what she said, whereupon he immediately set about doing as she said.

‘Good work, Celestine,’ said Nombeko.

‘My girlfriend,’ said Holger One with pride.

Holger Two chose to remain silent, but he thought it was typical that when the angry young woman finally said and did something that was of use to the group, it was in the form of a death threat.

The cart was burned half away, the crate was scorched at the edges, and the backpack was gone. But the fire was out. The world as they knew it endured. Harry Blomgren cheered up.

‘So can we finally discuss the question of compensation?’

Nombeko and Holger Two were the only ones who knew that the man who wanted to discuss compensation had just burned up 19.6 million kronor because he wanted to save water. From his own well.

‘The question is, who ought to compensate whom,’ Nombeko mumbled.

When the day began, she and her Holger had a concrete vision of the future. A few hours later things were the other way around and their very existence had been threatened – twice. Now they found themselves somewhere between the two extremes. To say that life is a bed of roses, Nombeko thought, would be an exaggeration.

* * *

Harry and Margareta Blomgren didn’t want to let their uninvited guests go until they had made things right. But it was starting to get late, and Harry listened to the group’s arguments: there was no cash to be had; there certainly had been some in the backpack that had just been burned, but now they couldn’t do anything until the bank opened the next day. Then they would put their cart in order and roll on with their crate.

‘Yes, the crate,’ said Harry Blomgren. ‘What’s in it?’

‘None of your damn business, you old bastard,’ said the angry young woman.

‘My personal belongings,’ Nombeko clarified.

The group worked together to move the scorched crate from what was left of the cart it had been on to Harry and Margareta Blomgren’s car trailer. Then, after a lot of nagging and a little help from Celestine, Nombeko managed to get Harry Blomgren to let the trailer replace his car in the farm’s only garage. Otherwise, of course, the crate would be visible from the road, and the thought of that would keep Nombeko from a good night’s sleep.

At Ekbacka there was a guesthouse that Mr and Mrs Blomgren had previously rented to German tourists until they were blacklisted by the rental agency for trying to get extra money out of their guests for practically everything. They’d even installed a coin-operated toilet.

Since then, the guesthouse had stood empty, coin-operated toilet and all (one ten-krona coin per visit). But now the intruders could be quartered there.

Holger One and Celestine took the living room, while Two and Nombeko laid claim to the bedroom. Margareta Blomgren showed them, with a certain amount of delight, how the coin-operated toilet worked and added that she wouldn’t stand for any peeing in the garden.