Tweety needed surprisingly little sleep. It puzzled him; it must have been because he could escape every now and then, doze off for thirty seconds at a time throughout the day, though nobody ever noticed.
Just as he did now: he was sitting on his stool behind the counter waiting for customers, looking at the people moving in a mass of clothed flesh on the other side of the window, listening to the wail of the vacuum as Weckman got rid of the dust beneath his goggles. And all the while… In front of him was a chair made of glass, every bit of it, right down to the seat and the delicate ribs of its back, and if there were any screws, they too were made of glass – that’s why he couldn’t see them – and behind the chair was a dark-red velvet curtain, and from the folds of the curtain there suddenly appeared a naked woman, the spitting image of Annie Lennox. She sat down on the chair, winked at him and smiled seductively, urging him to get down on all fours and crawl under the chair to marvel at the splendour of her pussy. He dearly wanted to comply, but he was terrified – what if it was a trap? What if the chair suddenly shattered and the shards rained down on him tearing open his veins?
‘Have you finished those Eccos yet?’
‘Yes… But you need to tell her not to leave them to dry in warm places. She’s got them wet somewhere.’
‘They’ll never learn,’ Weckman muttered. The vacuum wailed again and Tweety jumped: stepping out of the curtain was Reino. He was fully clothed, at least, and had Lasse with him. Tweety rubbed his eyes and brow. Reino and Lasse were standing outside the shop window. They were trying to look in without Weckman noticing and Reino was gesticulating as if to say he was coming into the shop and that he had something important to say. Tweety sat there motionless. They’d never come to his workplace before and they were both clearly worked up. Reino was moving his hands anxiously and Lasse kept looking behind them. Lasse’s jumper bulged beneath the left arm: he was carrying his Smith & Wesson.
‘Hey, Weckman,’ said Tweety, his mouth dry, and didn’t quite know how to continue. But Reino had more power over him than Weckman. Their father had been able to get him to do anything just by looking at him. ‘Is it all right if I take last week’s overtime now?’
‘What, all of it? Don’t be daft.’
‘Well, an hour then… It’s a bit of an emergency. My mum is… I mean, I’ve got to run a few errands for her.’
‘Running errands for your mum,’ said Weckman and stared at him weighing up the situation and prolonging the silence. Tweety tried to think why Reino and Lasse had suddenly turned up at the shop and he had a nagging suspicion that they’d come to warn him of something. Maybe the police were on to him after what had happened that night and come round the house asking for him, causing Mother Gold to have a heart attack – she’d said that something terrible was about to happen. Maybe Reino wanted to hide him – or kill him; he’d said as much. Tweety could feel the edge of his mouth twitching. Lasse had even brought his gun.
‘On you go.’
‘Thanks…’
Tweety walked around the counter; Reino and Lasse noticed and started sauntering towards the post office. Common sense told Tweety they hadn’t come to bump him off – without him they wouldn’t be able to see the Chancellor through. He snuck out into the street but didn’t feel any sense of relief. The air was tinged with blue, foreboding and poisonous; even the sound of the traffic seemed abnormally piercing, as though that very afternoon a horrific accident might occur.
They were waiting for him at the corner. He hadn’t been mistaken, Lasse was more agitated than usual, constantly peering around and checking beneath his arm, and there was something twitching at the edge of his eye, like a little mouse wagging its tail.
‘Let’s walk that way like we’re minding our own business,’ said Reino and nodded somewhere in front of them, then whispered to Tweety so that Lasse couldn’t hear. ‘He thought he saw Lampinen again this morning, at the shopping centre in Malmi. I didn’t notice anything. I think he’s losing it.’
‘But what if they’re on to something?’
‘They’re not… don’t you start,’ Reino snapped, and the fact that he snapped meant that he could have been thinking anything. ‘The point is we’ve got to switch the alarms tonight.’
‘We’ve just been there,’ Lasse butted in, the way people do when all they have is bad news. ‘Pretended we were customers. There was a van from a security firm parked outside and one of their guys in the building, walking around talking to some manager bloke. They were talking about updating the security system…’
‘They were probably talking about the cameras,’ said Reino trying to sound certain. ‘But it made me think they might decide to change the alarms too, they’re that old. But we’re not waiting for that to happen. We’re going to get the Chancellor on the road and we can start by switching the alarms tonight. So don’t go sneaking off anywhere this evening.’
Tweety didn’t dare look at Reino. His voice was so firm and every bit as domineering as their father’s. He didn’t want them to go that evening; the air was such a strange colour and he’d been plagued with bad luck many times in a row.
‘I won’t… though we agreed we’d do it at the weekend.’
‘And now we’re agreeing to do it tonight. A week night might be better, there won’t be as many police cars on patrol.’
They crossed the street and passed Poste Restante. Reino’s car was parked behind the railway station and they walked towards it, each of them lost in thought. Switching the alarms was probably the most uncertain and most dangerous phase of the whole operation because they had to deliberately set off the alarm and they would have no way of knowing how close a police car might be at the moment the alarm was registered. It was annoying not being able to listen in to the police radio any longer; you needed a computer nowadays and Lasse’s attempts at building one had been hopeless.
‘We could try and put them off the scent,’ Lasse suggested, his voice dry as sandpaper; he too was scared to death.
‘How?’
‘By making a few phone calls… We could say there’s a man running about with a rifle shooting people, or a bomb’s going to go off somewhere. Then they’ll send all their cars elsewhere.’
‘Like hell they will. They’ll soon see there’s no man with a rifle, then they’ll be even more on the lookout. There’s nothing else for it, at the end of the day it’s all down to luck. With bad luck there’ll be a squad car just round the corner taking a couple of drunks down to the nick, and you can be sure the drunks will have to wait nicely in the car if the bank’s security alarm goes off.’
‘What if we put someone on watch outside?’ Lasse persisted – perhaps Ritu had put the wind up him. ‘We could borrow those mobiles from Nordberg.’
‘Look, for fuck’s sake… It’s no use putting anyone on watch or working out intricate warning systems. It all comes down to speed.’
Reino stopped and looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and struggled to sound cheerful and convincing.
‘Think about it. The police get a call about an alarm going off. A light flashes and a buzzer starts beeping somewhere, but they haven’t got a location on it yet. The bloke sitting at the call desk pulls out his reference book and starts looking for the address. You can bet that’ll take at least thirty seconds, and if he’s in the middle of something else it could be two minutes. Then he feeds the information into his computer or wherever it is he has to log it in and starts asking around for a free squad car. That’s four minutes already. How long did it take when we practised?’
‘Two minutes to do the switch, then another minute when we imagined getting out of the building.’
‘There, you see? And remember, when the police car accepts the job, one of them might be queuing for a hotdog. He’s been standing there for a while and he’s just about to be served. They won’t get going right away, and when they do they’ll go to the street address first. And what’ll they do when they get there? They’ll look through the window into an empty bank and wait for a member of staff to come and unlock the door. And all that time we’ve been one floor further down and we leave through the back. We’ll be home before they even get inside. They won’t find anything and they’ll think it was just a false alarm…’
Reino managed a laugh – maybe it was a genuine laugh, maybe he was so relieved at finally starting to believe in the whole thing – and it had the desired effect: Lasse’s face relaxed and he gave a small chuckle.
They stood there looking at one another. The matter was settled and there was no need for them to get into Reino’s car. Even in the car Lasse was afraid to talk as he thought Lampinen might have planted a microphone somewhere; maybe he’d been reading up on his electronics a bit too much.
‘And remember, Asko,’ said Reino abruptly and poked him in the chest. ‘Tonight’s the night.’
‘I won’t forget,’ said Tweety – there was nothing else he could say. He could never say no to Reino, just like he’d never been able to say no to his father, and yet now he felt all the more strongly that this was the wrong day. He could have explained why, too, but Reino wouldn’t have believed him. In fact, he would have believed him even less; he was born that way, he just didn’t understand. He couldn’t possibly understand what it meant when, his knuckles white with exertion, the watchman elf on the upper deck of Tweety’s mind started banging his warning drum.