LITMIR.BIZ

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say much until after Dad drank himself to death. Oh dear, oh dear.’

      The priest was in possession of a few suggestions for how a family can resolve its conflicts without knocking out each other’s teeth, but there is a time and place for everything. At that moment she wanted to focus on summarizing the information Hitman Anders had given them, to see if she had understood it correctly. So, his most recent employer had demanded a fifty per cent rebate, invoking the fact that Hitman Anders had broken one and the same arm twice rather than two different arms once each?

      Hitman Anders nodded. Yes, if by fifty per cent she meant half price.

      Yes, that was what she’d meant. And she added that the count seemed to be a finicky sort. Nevertheless, both priest and receptionist were ready to help.

      Since the receptionist was unwilling to contradict her, the priest continued: ‘For a twenty per cent commission, we will seek out the count in question with the intention of changing his mind. But that’s a minor detail. Our cooperation will not become truly interesting until phase two!’

      Hitman Anders tried to digest what the priest had just said. There had been a lot of words, and a strange percentage. But before he got to his question about what ‘phase two’ might be, the priest was a step ahead of him:

      The second phase involved further developing Hitman Anders’s little operation under the guidance of the receptionist and the priest. A discreet PR job to broaden his customer base, a price list to avoid wasting time on people who couldn’t pay, and a clear-cut ethics policy.

      The priest noticed that the receptionist’s face had gone as white as the refrigerator beside the wall he was pressing himself against, and that Hitman Anders had lost track of what was going on. She decided to stop talking so that the former could take in fresh oxygen and so the latter wouldn’t get the bright idea of starting to fight instead of trying to understand.

      ‘Incidentally, I must say I admire Hitman Anders for his good heart,’ she said. ‘Just think, that baby got away without a scratch! The kingdom of Heaven belongs to the children. We find testimony of this even back in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter nineteen.’

      ‘It does? We do?’ said Hitman Anders, forgetting that just thirty seconds before he had decided to give a good slap at least to the guy who wasn’t saying anything.

      The priest nodded piously and refrained from adding that, only a few lines later, the very same Gospel happened to say that you shall not murder, that you shall love your neighbour as yourself, and – apropos of the knocked-out teeth – you shall honour your mother, and, for that matter, your father.

      The rising rage in Hitman Anders’s face subsided. This was not lost on Per Persson, who finally dared to believe in a life after this (that is, he believed that both he and the priest would survive their current conversation with the guest in room seven). Not only did the receptionist start breathing again, he also regained the ability to speak and was able to contribute to the overall situation by managing reasonably well to explain to Hitman Anders what twenty per cent of something meant. The hitman apologized, saying he had become quite a wizard at counting years while in the slammer, but all he knew about percentages was that there were about forty of them in vodka and sometimes even more in the kind of stuff that was produced in random basements without any oversight. In some of the earlier police investigations, it had come to light that he washed down his pills with 38 per cent shop-bought hooch and 70 per cent home-brew. Now, police reports were not always to be trusted, but if they were right in that instance it’s no surprise things went the way they did – with 108 per cent alcohol in his blood and the pills on top of that.

      Inspired by the merry atmosphere that would soon prevail, the priest promised that Hitman Anders’s business revenues were about to be doubled – at least! – as long as she and the receptionist were given free rein to act as his representatives.

      At the same time, cleverly enough, Per Persson took two beers from the lobby refrigerator. Hitman Anders swallowed the first, started on the second, and decided that he had understood enough of what had been explained to him. ‘Well, hell, let’s do it, then.’ The hitman terminated the second beer in a few rapid gulps, burped, excused himself and, as a kind gesture, handed over two of the five available thousand-krona notes with ‘Twenty per cent it is!’

      He stuck the three remaining notes in the breast pocket of his shirt and announced that it was time for a combination of breakfast and lunch at his usual place around the corner, which meant he didn’t have time to discuss business further.

      ‘Good luck with the count!’ he said from the doorway before he vanished.

CHAPTER 4

      The man who was called the count could not be looked up in the book of noble families. The fact was, he couldn’t be looked up anywhere. He owed nearly seven hundred thousand kronor in unpaid taxes to the Tax Authority, but no matter how often the Authority pointed this out in letters mailed to his last known address on Mabini Street in the Philippines capital city of Manila, it never received any money in return. Or anything else. After all, how could the Tax Authority know that the address had been chosen at random, and that the notices ended up at the home of a local fishmonger, who opened them and used them to wrap tiger prawns and octopus? Meanwhile, the count actually lived in Stockholm with his girlfriend, who was called the countess and was a high-level distributor of various narcotics. Under her name, he ran five dealerships that sold used cars in the southern suburbs of the capital city.

      He had been in the business since analogue days, when it was possible to dismantle and rebuild a car with a monkey wrench rather than a degree in computer science. But he had had an easier time than most in surviving the transition to digital, which was how one single dealership had become five in the span of a few years. In the wake of this growth there arose financial discord between the count on the one hand and the Tax Authority on the other, bringing both joy and a certain amount of irritation to an industrious fishmonger on the other side of the globe.

      The count was the sort of person who saw moments of change as opportunities rather than threats. Throughout Europe and the rest of the world, people were building cars that might cost a million kronor to buy, but only fifty to steal with the help of electronics and five-step instructions you could get on the internet. For some time, the count’s speciality had been locating the whereabouts of Swedish-registered BMW X5s: his partner in Gdansk would send two men to fetch them and bring them to Poland, supplying them with a new history, then importing them again himself.

      For a while this had brought in a net profit of a quarter-million kronor per car. But then BMW wised up and installed GPS trackers in every new vehicle, and the nicer used ones. They had no sense of fair play: they didn’t even inform the car thieves in advance. Suddenly the police were standing in a middleman’s warehouse in Ängelholm, gathering up both cars and Poles.

      The count, however, made it through. Not because he was listed as living with a fishmonger in Manila, but because the seized Poles were far too enamoured of life to squeal.

      Incidentally, the count had received his nickname many years earlier from his elegant manner of threatening customers who didn’t pay up. He might use words such as ‘I would truly appreciate it if Mr Hansson were to settle up his pecuniary accounts with me within twenty-four hours, after which I promise not to chop him into bits.’ Hansson, or whatever the customer’s name might have been, always found it preferable to pay. No one wanted to be chopped into bits, no matter how many. Two would be bad enough.

      As the years passed, the count (with the help of the countess) developed a more vulgar style. This was the one that befell the receptionist, but the name had already stuck.

      Per Persson and Johanna Kjellander set off to see the count to demand five thousand kronor on behalf of Hitman Anders. If they were to succeed, the murderer in room seven would be a future potential source of income for them. If they failed … No, they must not fail.

      The priest’s suggestion of how they should handle the count was to fight fire with fire. Humility

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