The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (30 page)

‘Could I exchange this for ten-krona coins?’ said the full-bladdered Holger One, handing a one-hundred-krona note to Mrs Blomgren.

‘I dare you to say “exchange fee”,’ said the angry young woman.

Since Margareta Blomgren didn’t dare to say ‘exchange fee’, no exchange took place. So One did his business in a lilac bush as soon as it was too dark for anyone to notice. It was just that of
course
someone noticed, because Mr and Mrs Blomgren were sitting in their kitchen with their binoculars at that very moment.

It had clearly been negligent of the intruders to propel a cart through the couple’s fence, but they had hardly done it on purpose. To then bully the couple into wasting water so that their belongings wouldn’t burn was remarkable – a criminal act – but if worst came to worst it could be excused by the desperation one could imagine they had felt at the time.

But wilfully, and contrary to clear instructions, to stand by a lilac bush and urinate in the couple’s garden – this was so outrageous that Harry and Margareta were beside themselves. It was theft; it was disorderly conduct; it was perhaps the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

‘These hooligans will be our financial undoing,’ Margareta Blomgren said to her husband.

Harry Blomgren nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do something before it’s too late.’

Nombeko, Celestine and the Holgers went to bed. Meanwhile, the National Task Force was preparing to break into Fredsgatan 5 a mile and a half away. The woman who’d called the police was Swedish, and a Swedish-speaking man had been spotted behind a curtain on the fourth floor – the man who later jumped. A post mortem would be performed on the corpse, of course, which for now was being kept in an ambulance down the street. A preliminary examination showed the dead man to be white and in his fifties.

So there had been at least two occupiers. The police who had witnessed the incident suspected that there had been more people behind the curtains, but they weren’t sure.

The operation began at 11.32 p.m. on Thursday, 18 August 1994. The task force started to break in from three different directions with gas, a bulldozer and a helicopter. There was a lot of tension among the young men on the force. None of them had experienced a real-life operation before, so it was no wonder that a few shots had been fired in the muddle. At least one of them caused the pillow-storage area to catch fire, and the resulting smoke made it nearly impossible to operate in.

The next morning, in Mr and Mrs Blomgren’s kitchen, the former inhabitants of Fredsgatan were able to hear how the drama ended on the news.

According to the correspondent from Sveriges Radio, there had been a bit of a struggle. At least one of the task force members had been shot in the leg; three others were poisoned by gas. The force’s twelve-million-krona helicopter had crash-landed behind an abandoned pottery because it had become disoriented in the thick smoke. The bulldozer had burned, along with the building, the warehouse, four police cars and the ambulance in which the body of the man who had committed suicide was being kept while waiting for a post-mortem.

On the whole, however, the operation had been a success. All of the terrorists had been defeated. It remained to be seen how many of them there were, because their bodies had been burned.

‘Good Lord,’ said Holger Two. ‘The National Task Force, at war with itself.’

‘Well, at least they won. That suggests a certain amount of competence,’ said Nombeko.

Not once during breakfast did the Blomgrens mention that they would demand payment for the same. Instead, they said nothing. They were reticent. Almost ashamed, it seemed. This put Nombeko on her guard, because she had never met two more shameless people, and that was saying something.

Her millions were gone, but Holger Two had eighty thousand kronor in the bank (in his brother’s name). In addition, there was almost four hundred thousand in the business account. The next step would be to buy themselves free from these horrible people, hire a car with a trailer and move the bomb from one trailer to the other. And then leave. They had yet to figure out where to go; it just had to be far away from Gnesta and the Blomgrens.

‘We saw you peeing in the garden last night,’ Mrs Blomgren said suddenly.

Damn you, Holger One, thought Nombeko.

‘I didn’t know about that,’ she said. ‘I apologize, and I suggest that we add ten kronor to the bill, which I thought we could discuss now.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Harry Blomgren. ‘Since you can’t be trusted, we have already made sure to compensate ourselves.’

‘How so?’ said Nombeko.

‘“Flammable material”. Bullshit! I’ve worked with scrap metal my whole life. Scrap metal doesn’t burn, damn it,’ Harry Blomgren continued.

‘Did you open the crate?’ said Nombeko, who was starting to fear the worst.

‘I’m going to tear open their throats with my teeth,’ said the angry young woman, who had to be restrained by Holger Two.

The situation was far too difficult to follow for Holger One, who walked off. Besides, he needed to visit the same lilac bush as he had the night before. This he did as Harry Blomgren backed away from the angry young woman. A profoundly unpleasant person, he thought.

And then he went on saying what he had to say. The words poured forth, because he had rehearsed them during the night.

‘You chose to abuse our hospitality, you withheld payment from us, you urinated in our garden; you are thus untrustworthy. We had no choice but to secure the compensation you had surely been planning to evade. Consequently your bomb scrap has been forfeited.’

‘Forfeited?’ said Holger Two, getting a mental image of a detonated atomic bomb.

‘Forfeited,’ Harry Blomgren repeated. ‘We took that old bomb to a scrap dealer during the night. And we received half a krona per pound. Which was quite stingy, but still. It should just cover the costs of the damage you have caused. And that’s not including the rent for staying in the guesthouse. And don’t think I’m going to tell you where the scrapyard is. You’ve done enough as it is.’

As Holger Two continued to keep the angry young woman from committing a double murder, it became clear to both him and Nombeko that the old man and woman apparently didn’t realize that what they called scrap and an old bomb was actually a rather new – and fully functional – one.

Harry Blomgren said that there was a surplus from the transaction, however limited, and consequently the matters of the water, the broken fence and the urinating in the garden could be settled. Provided the guests urinated in the toilet and nowhere else from now until their imminent departure, of course. And didn’t cause any more damage.

At this point, Holger Two was forced to carry the angry young woman out. In the garden, he got her to calm down a little bit. She said there must have been something about the sight of the old man and woman that she couldn’t tolerate. Plus everything they did and said.

This rage was not something Harry and Margareta Blomgren had reckoned on during the previous night’s trip to and from the scrapyard they had formerly owned, and which was now owned and run by their former colleague Rune Runesson. The deranged woman operated beyond the realm of logic. In short, both of them were scared. Meanwhile, Nombeko, who never became truly angry, was now truly angry. Just a few days earlier, she and Two had found a way to move forward. For the first time there was hope; there was 19.6 million kronor. All that was left now was . . . Mr and Mrs Blomgren.

‘My dear Mr Blomgren,’ she said. ‘May I suggest an agreement?’

‘An agreement?’ said Harry Blomgren.

‘Yes, my scrap is very dear to me, Mr Blomgren. Now I intend that you, Mr Blomgren, will tell me within ten seconds where you took it. If you tell me, I promise in return to keep the woman in the garden from biting you and your wife in the throat.’

The pale Harry Blomgren said nothing. Nombeko went on:

‘After that, if you let us borrow your car for an undetermined period of time, you have my word that we might give it back some day, and in addition we will not immediately smash your coin box and burn down your house.’

Margareta Blomgren attempted to answer, but her husband stopped her.

‘Quiet, Margareta, I’ll handle this.’

‘Up to this point, my suggestions have been veiled in politeness,’ Nombeko continued. ‘Would you like us to switch to a firmer tone, Mr Blomgren?’

Harry Blomgren continued to deal with events by not answering. His Margareta made another attempt to speak. But Nombeko beat her to it.

‘By the way, Mrs Blomgren, are you the one who made this tablecloth?’

Margareta was surprised by the change of topic.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘It’s very nice,’ said Nombeko. ‘How would you like it stuffed down your throat, Mrs Blomgren?’

Holger Two and the angry young woman heard this exchange from the yard.

‘My girlfriend,’ said Holger Two.

When things go wrong, they really go wrong. Naturally, the bomb had been taken to the only scrapyard on Mother Earth it shouldn’t have been taken to – the one at Fredsgatan 9 in Gnesta. Harry Blomgren was now convinced that survival, above all else, was the most important goal. So he explained that he and his wife had gone there in the middle of the night, with the bomb in tow. They had thought that Rune Runesson would be there to receive it, but instead they were met by chaos. Two buildings only fifty yards away from the scrapyard were on fire. Parts of the road were blocked off; they couldn’t get into Runesson’s yard.

Runesson himself had got up and set off for the yard in order to accept the night-time delivery, but as things stood, the trailer and its scrap would have to stay on the street beyond the barricades for the time being. Runesson promised to call and tell them when they had been removed. They couldn’t complete the transaction until that happened.

‘Good,’ said Nombeko when Harry Blomgren had told her all there was to tell. ‘Now please go to Hell, both of you.’

And then she left the Blomgrens’ kitchen, gathered the group, and placed the angry young woman behind the wheel of Harry Blomgren’s car, Holger One in the passenger seat, and herself and Two in the back to talk strategy.

‘Let’s go,’ said Nombeko, and the angry young woman drove away.

She went by way of the part of the Blomgrens’ fence that wasn’t yet in pieces.

CHAPTER 16

On a surprised agent and a potato-farming countess

Agent B had served the Mossad and Israel for almost three decades. He had been born in New York in the middle of the war, and had moved to Jerusalem with his parents as a child, in 1949, just after the country was formed.

When he was only twenty he was sent on his first foreign assignment: infiltrating the student left at Harvard in the United States. His task was to record and analyse anti-Israeli sentiments.

Since his parents had grown up in Germany, whence they had to flee for their lives in 1936, Agent B also spoke German fluently. This made him a good choice for operations in the DDR in the 1970s. He lived and worked as an East German for nearly seven years. Among other things, he had to pretend to be a fan of the football team FC Karl-Marx-Stadt.

However, B didn’t have to pretend for more than a few months. Soon he was as inveterate a fan as the thousands of objects of surveillance around him. The fact that the city and the team changed names when capitalism finally pulled down Communism’s trousers didn’t affect B’s love for the team. As a discreet and slightly childish homage to one of the team’s obscure but promising juniors, B was now operating under the neutral but euphonious name Michael Ballack. The original was two-footed, creative and had a good eye for the game. He had a bright future ahead of him. Agent B felt an affinity for his alias in all respects.

B was temporarily stationed in Copenhagen when he received his colleague A’s report about A’s breakthrough in Stockholm and its environs. When A then failed to contact B again, B got the go-ahead from Tel Aviv to take off after him.

He took a morning flight on Friday, 19 August, and hired a car at Arlanda Airport. His first stop: the address his colleague A had said he was headed for the day before. B was careful to keep below the speed limit; he didn’t want to drag the two-footed Ballack’s name through the mud.

Once in Gnesta, he cautiously turned onto Fredsgatan and encountered – a barricade? And buildings completely burned down, tons of police, TV vans and hordes of rubberneckers.

And what was that, over there on a trailer? Was it . . .? It couldn’t be. It was quite simply not possible. And yet, wasn’t it . . .?

Suddenly she was just standing there, next to B.

‘Hi there, Agent,’ said Nombeko. ‘Everything all right?’

She hadn’t even been surprised when she caught sight of him just outside the barricades, looking at the trailer with the bomb she had come to fetch. Because why
wouldn’t
the agent be standing there just then, when everything else that couldn’t possibly be happening was?

Agent B released his gaze from the bomb, turned his head, and instead caught sight of – the cleaning woman! First the stolen crate on a trailer and now its thief. What was going on?

Nombeko felt remarkably calm. She realized that the agent was both at a loss and without a chance. There were at least fifty police officers in the immediate vicinity, and surely two hundred other people, including half of the Swedish media.

‘Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’ she said, nodding at the scorched crate.

B didn’t answer.

Holger Two came up beside Nombeko. ‘Holger,’ he said, extending his hand on a sudden impulse.

B looked at it but didn’t take it. Instead he turned to Nombeko.

‘Where is my colleague?’ he said. ‘In the wreckage in there?’

‘No. Last I heard he was on his way to Tallinn. But I don’t know if he arrived.’

‘Tallinn?’

‘If he arrived,’ said Nombeko, signalling to the angry young woman to back up the car.

While Holger Two hooked up the trailer to the car, Nombeko excused herself to the agent. She had some things to do, and now she had to leave with her friends. They could talk more next time they met. If they should have the misfortune to run into each other again.