The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (33 page)
B had started by looking up Fredsgatan 5, which no longer existed. It had burned to the ground the night before.
Apparently someone had rescued the bomb from the flames just in time, because it was sitting on a trailer just beyond the barricades, its crate scorched. It was a surreal sight. It became even more surreal when the cleaning woman slid up beside the agent, greeted him cheerfully, took the bomb and left.
Agent B soon did the same. He bought and stumbled his way through several Swedish newspapers. A person who knows German and English can understand a word of Swedish here and there, and guess at the occasional situation. In addition, there were a number of articles available in English at the Royal Library.
Apparently the fire had broken out during a terrorist incident. But the chief terrorist, Nombeko, had just stood there calmly outside the barricades. Why didn’t they arrest her? Surely the Swedish police couldn’t be so incompetent as to pull a 1700-pound crate out of the flames and then forget to see what was in it before they let people roll it away. Right?
And his colleague A? Left behind in the flames at Fredsgatan 5, of course. There was no other explanation. If he wasn’t in Tallinn. What would he be doing there, anyway? And what did the cleaning woman know about it? The man next to her had introduced himself as Holger. That is, the man whom A had had under control just the day before. Had Holger managed to overpower B’s colleague? Had he sent him to Tallinn?
No, A was dead; he must be. The cleaning woman had fooled them three times now. It was too bad that she could die only once in return.
Agent B had a lot to go on. Some were the clues that A had given him, and some were his own, like the licence plate number of the trailer the bomb had rolled away on. It belonged to a Harry Blomgren, not far from Gnesta. The agent decided to pay a visit.
Harry and Margareta Blomgren were very bad at English and hardly better at German. But as far as the agent could understand, they were trying to get him to compensate them for a fence someone had driven through, plus a stolen car and trailer. They thought he represented the cleaning woman somehow.
In the end, the agent had been forced to take out his pistol to get control of the interrogation.
Apparently the cleaning woman and her crew had driven right through the fence and forced the Blomgrens to provide overnight lodging. The agent couldn’t work out what had happened after that. The couple’s linguistic proficiency was so poor that it sounded like someone had tried to bite them in the throat.
Anyway, there was nothing to suggest that the Blomgrens were guilty of anything except getting in the way of the cleaning woman. The main reason for shooting them both in the forehead anyway was that he didn’t like them. But B had never taken joy in killing on such flimsy grounds. So instead he shot Mrs Blomgren’s two porcelain pigs on the hearth and explained to the couple that the same thing would happen to them if they didn’t immediately forget that he had ever been there. The pigs had cost forty kronor apiece; it was painful for the couple to see them go to pieces. But the thought of dying and therefore being permanently separated from the nearly three million kronor they had managed to save up over the years was even worse. So they nodded and made an honest promise never, ever to speak of this experience.
The agent kept working. Holger Qvist turned out to be the sole proprietor of a Holger & Holger Inc., which was listed at Fredsgatan 5. A company that had burned to the ground. Terrorists? Nah. It was clearly that blasted cleaning woman, who had hoodwinked not only the Mossad but also the National Task Force. An exceedingly irritating woman. And a worthy opponent.
Furthermore, Qvist was listed as living at an address in Blackeberg. The agent settled down to observe the apartment for three whole days. No lights were turned on or off. Through the letterbox he could see an undisturbed pile of advertising flyers. Qvist wasn’t there; he hadn’t been there since the day something had happened.
Despite the risk that he might kick up some dust, B made his way to Helicopter Taxi Inc., introduced himself as Michael Ballack, a journalist from the German magazine
Stern
, and asked if Mr Holger Qvist was available for an interview.
No, Qvist had quit as a result of having been rather badly assaulted a few days earlier. Surely Mr Ballack had heard of the incident?
Where was he now? Well, it was impossible to say. Perhaps he was in the Gnesta area – he did own a pillow-import company; he wasn’t in active employment there, but as far as the owner of Helicopter Taxi Inc. knew he still went down there regularly on business. And incidentally, didn’t his girlfriend still live there, too?
‘Girlfriend? Do you know what her name is, Mr Manager?’
No, the manager couldn’t say. Celestine, maybe? It was something unusual, anyway.
There turned out to be twenty-four Celestines registered in Sweden. But only one, Celestine Hedlund, had been listed at Fredsgatan 5 in Gnesta until a few days earlier.
I wonder if you were recently out driving a red Toyota Corolla with a trailer, Celestine, the agent said to himself. With Nombeko Mayeki and Holger Qvist in the back seat. And a man I don’t know by your side.
The Celestine trail soon split in four directions. She was now listed at a PO box in Stockholm. Before that, on Fredsgatan. Before that, at the home of a Gertrud Virtanen outside Norrtälje. Before that, at what was presumably her parents’ home in Gnesta. It was reasonable to assume that she would end up at one of these four addresses sooner or later.
The least interesting from a surveillance perspective was, of course, the one that had been turned into a pile of ashes. The most interesting was the PO box. And then, in descending order: her parents’ home and Gertrud Virtanen.
* * *
On questioning Celestine, Nombeko had learned that the girl had been listed as living at Sjölida for a short time. This was distressing. On the other hand, it was unlikely that the agent chasing them knew of her existence.
The South African unofficial refugee had thus far not been excessively lucky in life, from the day she was run over by a drunken engineer in Johannesburg and on. And she would never know about the lucky hand she was about to be dealt.
Because what happened was that Agent B started by watching the PO box in Stockholm for a week, and then he staked out Celestine’s parents’ house for the same amount of time. Neither was of any use.
But just as he was about to take on the least likely place, the one outside Norrtälje, the agent’s boss in Tel Aviv grew weary. His boss said it seemed to him that this had turned into a personal vendetta, and that the Mossad must have other, more intellectually motivated, criteria for their activities. Surely a professional atomic-bomb thief wouldn’t sit around in a Swedish forest, lying low with the bomb and everything. The agent must come home. Now. No, not very soon. Now.
If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
Winnie-the-Pooh
On the dangers of having an exact copy of oneself
It so happened that in South Africa a man who had been deemed a terrorist was set free after twenty-seven years, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and elected president of the country.
At around the same time, much less was going on at Sjölida.
Days became weeks, which became months. Summer became autumn, which became winter and spring.
No ill-tempered agents from intelligence agencies in foreign countries showed up (one was in the Baltic Sea, at a depth of 650 feet; the other was sitting all by himself behind a desk in Tel Aviv).
Nombeko and Holger Two let themselves forget the bomb and other miseries for a while. Walks in the forest, mushroom picking, fishing in Gertrud’s rowing-boat in the bay – all of these had a restful effect.
Furthermore when warmth returned to the earth, they received permission from the old woman to revive the potato fields.
The tractor and the machinery were old-fashioned, but Nombeko had done some calculations and arrived at the conclusion that their efforts still ought to bring in a profit of 225,623 kronor per year, while at the same time making sure that One and Celestine had something to do (other than acts of stupidity). A little bit of revenue to complement the quiet life in the countryside couldn’t hurt, now that both the pillow operation and the 19.6 million gone up in flames.
It wasn’t until the first snowfall in November 1995 that Nombeko once again brought up the eternal issue of their future with her Two.
‘We have it pretty good here, don’t you think?’ she said during their slow Sunday walk together.
‘We do have it good here.’ Two nodded.
‘It’s just too bad we don’t really exist,’ Nombeko continued.
‘And that the bomb in the barn still does,’ said Two.
So they discussed the chances of permanently changing both of these situations for so long that their discussion ended up revolving instead around how many times they had discussed it before.
No matter how they looked at it, they came to the same conclusion time after time: they really couldn’t hand the bomb over to just any old Norrtälje municipal commissioner. They
had
to make direct contact at the top level of government.
‘Should I call the prime minister again?’ said Holger Two.
‘What would be the point?’ said Nombeko.
They had, after all, already tried three times with two different assistants and twice with one and the same marshal of the court – and they had received the same answer each time. The prime minister and the king would receive neither man nor beast. Although it was possible that the former would receive them, provided that their errand was first described in detail in a letter, something that Nombeko and Holger Two could not imagine doing.
Nombeko revived the old idea of Holger going to college in his brother’s name in order subsequently to get a job close to the prime minister.
This time, their alternative was not to stay in a condemned building until it collapsed on its own because, of course, that building no longer existed. Instead they would have to farm potatoes at Sjölida. And no matter how pleasant that was, it didn’t make a very good life goal.
‘But you can’t finish a degree just like that,’ said Holger. ‘At least I can’t. Maybe you could. It will take a few years. Are you prepared to wait?’
No problem. Years had already gone by, and Nombeko was used to waiting. Even henceforth she could pass the time somehow. She was nowhere near finished reading the books in Norrtälje library, for example. And besides, keeping track of the scatterbrains and the old woman was a part-time job in itself. Plus, of course, there was the potato farm, which could be demanding.
‘So economics or political science,’ said Holger Two.
‘Or both,’ said Nombeko, ‘while you’re at it. I’m happy to help. I’m pretty good with numbers.’
* * *
Two finally took his entrance exams the following spring. The combination of brains and enthusiasm brought him high marks, and by the next autumn he was enrolled in both the economic and political sciences programmes at Stockholm University. His lectures occasionally coincided with one another, but then Nombeko would sneak in and take Holger’s economics spot in order to reproduce the day’s lecture that evening, nearly verbatim, with a comment here and there about how Professor Bergman or Associate Professor Järegård had got the wrong end of the stick.
Holger One and Celestine helped with the potatoes and regularly went to Stockholm to attend meetings of the Stockholm Anarchists’ Union. This was something Two and Nombeko had agreed to, as long as they promised not to take part in any public events. Moreover, the Anarchists’ Union was anarchical enough not to have a list of members. One and Celestine could be just as anonymous as the situation warranted.
Both of them enjoyed socializing with like-minded people; the Stockholm anarchists disapproved of everything.
Capitalism must be crushed, along with most of the other -isms. Socialism. And Marxism, to the extent they could find it. Fascism and Darwinism, of course (they were considered to be the same thing). Cubism, on the other hand, could be allowed to remain, as long as it wasn’t fenced in by any rules.
Furthermore, the king must also go. Some members of the group suggested that anyone who wanted to could be king, but this brought protest, not least from Holger. Wasn’t one king bad enough?
And would you believe it? When Holger spoke, the group listened. Just as they did when Celestine told them that she had been faithful to the self-invented ‘Tear All This Shit Down’ Party for her entire adult life.
Holger and Celestine had found their way home.
* * *
Nombeko thought that as long as she was going to be a potato farmer, she might as well do it right. She and Gertrud got on well. Even though the old woman grumbled about the name of the business, she really had nothing against Nombeko’s choice to register Countess Virtanen Inc. in her name.
Together they set about buying up the land surrounding their potato fields to increase their planting. Gertrud knew exactly which former farmer was oldest and most worn-out. She biked over to see him with an apple cake and a Thermos of coffee, and the farmer’s field changed hands even before their second cup. At this, Nombeko requested an assessment of the newly purchased land, and then she drew in an imaginary house and added two zeroes on the appraisal form.
Thus Countess Virtanen Inc. was able to borrow nearly 10 million kronor against a field valued at 130 thousand. Nombeko and Gertrud used the borrowed money to purchase more land with the help of more apple cakes and Thermoses of coffee. After two years, Gertrud was the biggest producer of potatoes in the area by acreage, but her debts exceeded current sales by at least five times.
They still had to get under way with the actual harvest. Thanks to Nombeko’s loan design, the business had no monetary problems; there were problems, however, with the machinery, which was both small and outdated.
