LITMIR.BIZ

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the priest, drawing out the rest, ‘Paul uttered a lot of nonsense too. Like woman was created for man and shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, and that men shouldn’t lie with other men.’

      The receptionist skipped the part about who had been created for whom but said he could only recall a single instance, two at the most, in which it would have been best for the priest to remain silent rather than speak. Regarding who should lie with whom, he preferred the female priest over their male hitman by a long shot, but he couldn’t see what Paul had to do with it.

      ‘For my part, I’d rather sleep with a bike rack than with Hitman Anders,’ said the priest. ‘But otherwise I’m in complete agreement with you.’

      When the receptionist wondered what the Bible had to say about a sexual relationship between a woman and a bike rack, the priest reminded him that bicycles hadn’t been invented in Paul’s time. Neither, probably, had the bike rack.

      And no one had anything more to add to that. Instead they began another summit that was just as non-hateful as the one they’d just archived.

      * * *

      For a while, everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The priest and the receptionist joyfully and contentedly shared their genuine dislike of the world, including the entirety of the Earth’s population. The burden was now only half as great, since each of them could take on three and a half billion people rather than seven billion alone. Plus (of course) a considerable number of individuals who no longer existed. Among them: the receptionist’s grandfather, the priest’s entire family tree, and – not least! – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and everyone else in the book that had persecuted (and continued to persecute) Johanna Kjellander.

      While the currently newly in-love couple had earned their seven hundred thousand kronor, Hitman Anders had, according to the contract, brought in 2.8 million. But since he could keep a whole pub going for half the night all by himself, he never had more than a few thousand-krona notes in savings. He burned through what came in at approximately the same rate it came in. If his money ever happened to grow into a pile of cash worthy of the name, it tended to be an extra-lively time at the pub, such as when the jukebox had gone through the window.

      ‘Couldn’t you just have pulled the plug out of the wall?’ the pub owner said, a bit cautiously, to his ashamed regular the next day.

      ‘Yes,’ Hitman Anders admitted. ‘That would have been a reasonable alternative.’

      This sort of incident actually suited the receptionist and the priest quite well, because as long as Hitman Anders didn’t do what they did – that is, fill boxes with money – he would need to dispense justice on behalf of those who could afford to have justice dispensed according to their own definition of the concept.

      What the receptionist and the priest didn’t know was that, during the past year, Hitman Anders had been experiencing an increasing sense that life was hopeless. Incidentally, he was barely aware of it. He had spent his whole life reasoning with other people via his fists. It wasn’t easy to talk to oneself in the same fashion. So he sought out alcohol earlier in the day and with greater emphasis than before.

      It had helped. But it took constant replenishing. And his situation was not improved by the way the priest and the receptionist had started walking around side by side, smiling happily. What the hell was so damn funny? That it was only a matter of time before he ended up back where he belonged?

      Perhaps it was just as well to put himself out of his misery, hasten the process, off the first prize idiot he saw, and move into the slammer for another twenty or thirty years – the exact fate he had resolved to avoid. One advantage would be that the priest and the receptionist would probably have grinned their last grins before he got out again. New love was seldom as new and loving two decades later.

      One morning, in an unfamiliar and awkward attempt to gain insight, the hitman asked himself what it was all about. What, for example, had the jukebox incident really been about?

      Of course he could have pulled the plug. And then Julio Iglesias would have gone silent while his jukebox fans went on a rampage. Four men and four women around a table: in the best case it would have been enough to slug the mouthiest of the men; in the worst case, he would have had to bring down all eight. With even a tiny amount of bad luck, one wouldn’t have got up again, and there would have been those twenty additional years in prison just waiting for him, plus or minus ten.

      A more practical solution might have been to allow the eight fools to choose the music they liked. Unless it was an indisputable truth that a line had to be drawn at Julio Iglesias.

      For Hitman Anders, lifting the jukebox and heaving it out of the window, thus bringing the evening to an end for him and everyone else, had allowed his destructive self to take control of his extremely destructive self. It had worked. It had been expensive, but – crucially – it had allowed him to wake up in his own bed, rather than in a jail cell awaiting transport to somewhere more permanent.

      The jukebox had saved his life. Or he had saved it himself, using the jukebox as a weapon. Did this mean that the road back to prison was not as inevitable as his inner voice had started harping on about? What if there was life beyond violence, and, for that matter, life with no jukeboxes flying through the air?

      In which case – how could he find it, and where would it lead?

      He thought. And opened his first beer of the day. And soon the second. And he forgot what he’d just been thinking, but the knot in his stomach was gone, and cheers to that!

      Beer was the water of life. The third in succession was almost always the most delicious.

      Whoopty-ding!

      He thought.

CHAPTER 10

      Then came the day when it was time for the group to make good on their debt to the count. The victim this time was a customer who had test-driven a Lexus RX 450h over the weekend and managed to get it stolen.

      So he said.

      In reality, he had hidden it in Dalarna, at the home of his sister who, instead of thinking carefully, took a photograph of herself behind the wheel and posted it to Facebook. Since everyone on the site knows someone who knows someone who knows someone, it didn’t take the count many hours to learn the truth. The deceitful customer didn’t even have time to work out that he’d been exposed before his face had been ruined and every more or less accessible tooth knocked out. Thanks to the age of the car and its intended price tag (it was new and expensive), one kneecap and one shin were goners as well.

      It was one routine job among many but, according to the agreement made nineteen months earlier, the price was to include two broken arms for the guy who had played blackjack too poorly for his own good and half got away with it, thanks to a baby.

      Hitman Anders carried out this job, too, with precision (both arms were always easier than just one, since he didn’t have to pick the correct one). And that would probably have been the end of it, had it not occurred to him to consider the kind thing the priest had said the first time they met. It was something about how nice it had been for Hitman Anders to respect a small child.

      The priest had referred to the Bible, of all things. What if there was more of the same inside that book? After all, it was fatter than the devil. Stories that could make him … feel good? Become someone different? Because there was something that came and went inside his head, something he had thus far done his best to drink away.

      He would talk to the priest the very next day, and she could tell him. The next day. First the pub. It was already four thirty in the afternoon.

      Unless …

      What if he were to drop in at the hotel after all and ask the priest to explain this and that about this and that first, then drink away the eternal knot in his stomach? He wouldn’t have to say much while she talked: he could just listen. And a person could always drink at the same time.

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