One advantage to Victor Alderheim’s departure from life was that his son Kevin got to learn new and exciting words and phrases. Like for example death certificate, genealogy report, estate executor, estate beneficiary and estate administrator.
Kevin had the Tax Authority on his side; formally, there was no doubt. But in Sweden, everything surrounding death was highly regulated, including who bore financial responsibility for any unpaid rubbish hauling bills, in the event that the deceased hadn’t settled such debts from the other side. And up to this point it had never happened.
The long and the short of it was that Kevin had a lot to do in order to get all the formalities squared up. Jenny helped, while Hugo sat at home and pondered the meaning of life.
Given all the money that was about to rain down on Kevin, it did not seem likely that he and Jenny would elect to stick around as colleagues at Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd. Not even if their boss raised their allowance or went so far as to give them a salary. No, they would go with Ole Mbatian to Kenya. The worst part of all was that if they went, Malte would too.
Hugo devoted a few more thoughts to his financial situation. He recalled his agreement with Jenny and Kevin. Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd had taken on the case of Victor Alderheim pro bono, given that any resulting proceeds would go to the firm. For a long time it appeared that there would be nothing but costs. But now what? Hugo certainly couldn’t demand to be given the inheritance, or even part of it. Truth be told, it didn’t feel right to demand anything at all. They had killed Kevin’s biological father, and that was not the sort of action you sent an invoice for.
While Hugo spent time with his thoughts, the medicine man and the eye doctor were enjoying each other’s company more and more. They developed an afternoon tradition: sitting on Hugo’s sofa and talking about the art of healing with a bottle of Glenfiddich to keep them company.
Malte recalled from his medical training what had been said about natural remedies and what reasonable amount of respect one ought to have for them even without the benefit of scientific evidence for their capabilities. After all, plants were often full of various phytochemicals or secondary metabolites. But Malte didn’t know much about how exactly they worked, either on their own or in combination with each other.
‘I’ve been given to understand that the chemicals in medicinal plants function catalytically and synergistically to arrive at a combined effect in which one plus one is meant to equal three. Can you tell me more about that, Ole?’
‘No, I can’t.’
Ole Mbatian liked the eye doctor very much, but sometimes he was unnecessarily complicated.
After two glasses, the thing that always happened when Ole Mbatian got too close to a bottle of Glenfiddich happened. He became sentimental. For the umpteenth time, he expressed his deep sorrow that his son would not follow in his footsteps when it came to his career. Kevin had fallen from the sky too late to grow into his medicinal inheritance. It had been necessary to prioritize the Maasai warrior training; after all, without it he could not be sent to the savanna to pick herbs and roots. Not if his community wanted him to return, and they did.
His brooding intensified partway through the third glass. Here he sat with his eight daughters and the son who was anything but a medicine man. It was impossible to say exactly how old Ole Mbatian the Younger was; the information in his passport was not to be trusted – his date of birth was something he had winged along with Wilson with his stamps in the car on the way to Nairobi. But he wasn’t getting any younger. If only circumstances had allowed, he would have handed everything over to the next generation and entered retirement.
But now, instead, he would be forced to die at his post. He couldn’t stand the thought that some amateur from one of the neighbouring villages would take over his position and make a living off his good name.
Malte nodded and offered his sympathies.
Hugo was listening from the floor above. Fully sober.
Thinking. Creating.
Without really knowing it, he had begun to build his own future, and that of those around him. Bit by bit.
The deceased art dealer’s assets would have fallen to the Inheritance Fund, if not for the fact that Victor Alderheim had a son who, at the last moment, rose from the dead and in doing so switched places with his father.
It took time to finish the estate inventory, but when that was done it was Kevin’s turn to call a general meeting.
Jenny and Ole were on one side of the kitchen table; Hugo and Malte were on the other. Kevin was on one end; in contrast to the others he was standing up, and he wore an expression that none of them had ever seen before. He seemed … focused. Solemn.
‘My dear friends,’ he began.
But straight off the bat he changed his mind.
‘Let me start over. My dear Jenny. I know we’re engaged. But are you sure you want to marry me?’
Jenny smiled lovingly at her boyfriend.
‘You know I do.’
Kevin did know, but he needed to hear it again in the face of what was coming. He reached for her hand, gave it a kiss, and went back to his solemn self.
‘That’s done. The next point on our agenda is how recent developments have affected our collected assets. Because that’s how I see it – that all of us here around this table share in solidarity the costs and proceeds that have so suddenly arisen. Anyone of a different mindset?’
Hugo sensed a trap, imagining that it would be no surprise if the costs exceeded the proceeds, according to the famous Murphy’s Law. But in that case, let it be so. You didn’t kill people, even by mistake, only to cash out.
Kevin took the brief nods around the table as confirmation and launched into his financial report.
First, the property and the business. Victor managed to destroy quite a bit during his years as owner. The real estate, consisting of one place of business and one apartment, was valued at thirty-two million kronor. It was held by a limited company that was insolvent thanks to the art dealer’s ill-advised investments in nationalistic nineteenth-century art. The inventory consisted of one hundred and twenty national-romantic works with a combined value of one million two hundred thousand kronor, purchased at twenty times that. The property was mortgaged rather beyond what was actually allowed. Preliminary calculations indicated there would be approximately zero kronor left over once Kevin was done cleaning up, with Jenny’s help. The numbers would have looked a little better if only Alderheim hadn’t given himself fringe benefits in the form of a quarter of a million kronor’s worth of foot care per annum.
‘I cared for my feet in a basin at the airport in Istanbul once,’ Ole Mbatian recalled. ‘Didn’t cost more than a telling-off.’
Kevin left his father Ole’s interjection unremarked.
‘We have a few sporadic, private expenditure items as well. It seems Alderheim rented the apartment from his own company. This rendered him personally responsible for refuse-collection service, among other things.’
Twelve days had passed from the point of Alderheim’s final payment, just before his death, to the point at which Kevin became authorized to cancel any further collections in his name. This left twelve three hundred sixty fifths in outstanding fees. Given a yearly cost of two thousand four hundred kronor, the accumulated debt lay at just over eighty-eight kronor.
‘Is that all?’ said Hugo.
It wasn’t.
‘There is an additional flex fee. Each subscriber must pay one krona and seventy-five öre per kilo of rubbish; this is meant to ensure that customers won’t throw stuff away just for the hell of it. Unfortunately, Alderheim must have done that very thing, because he owed thirty-six kilos’ worth in fees.’
Hugo imagined that this was a reasonable estimate of the collected weight of sex toys with chains, bags of flour, crumpled easels, and perhaps a banana peel on top.
‘Thirty-six kilos at one and seventy-five?’ said Jenny.
Kevin nodded. That made sixty-three kronor in addition to the original eighty-eight.
‘Is that all?’ said Hugo.
‘Essentially, yes.’
‘But aren’t there a couple of newly arrived expressionist works in addition to all the national-romantic stuff?’
Yes indeed. Kevin had almost forgotten. The Irma Stern paintings, with the accompanying letters and photographs, were the property of private citizen Victor Alderheim. As recently as the day before, the involuntary son had it listed at Sotheby’s in London, with the asking price starting at eight million one hundred thirty thousand pounds sterling.
‘All in all, that’s about a hundred million Swedish kronor,’ said Kevin.
‘Minus one hundred fifty kronor for the rubbish,’ said Jenny.
‘More or less.’
Hugo, who had just declined the job in Seoul, tried to calculate how much this was in South Korean won, but there were so many zeroes that he lost count.
Kevin’s financial report, along with the suggestion that they should divide things up equally, was the jolt it took for the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place in Hugo’s mind. He thanked Kevin for the report and said that, with the permission of the others, he would take charge again, because he had just seen the light.
The group consisted of a medicine man who longed to return home, a former eye doctor who longed to get away, two new lovebird multimillionaires who didn’t need to long for anything in particular because they had each other, and an adman who until just now had been lost but suddenly knew exactly what his future held.
‘Ole, my dear friend.’
Hugo felt like this was overdoing it a bit, but there was something special in the air.
‘I want you to pack your throwing clubs, gloves, boxes of cornflakes and whatever, and go home – by way of London.’
‘London?’ said the medicine man. ‘I’ve heard good things. Where is it?’
‘The rest of us have a property to sell, and some rubbish to clean up – it might take a few weeks, but we’ll see you on the savanna as soon as possible.’
By listening with one ear as Malte and the medicine man exchanged experiences in the living room in Lidingö, Hugo had come to understand the potential value of a professionally packaged medical operation in Kenya. Apparently Ole Mbatian couldn’t explain his medical abilities in a clinical fashion, but it was perfectly clear that he’d attained better results than others. He had a stellar reputation. Or, as it was called in Hugo Hamlin-ese: a strong brand.
Now that brand was about to go to the grave. Ole wanted to retire, and there was no younger Mbatian to take over, since Kevin was medically insufficient. In Hugo Hamlin’s world, this was like owning and shuttering the Adidas brand just because the boss got a little too old.
Ole’s name and good quality meant that he dominated the market in large swathes of Maasai Mara. But according to Ole, on the other side of the border stones, in what was called the Serengeti, was a medical dunce who would not hesitate to attempt a takeover. His name was Kamanu, and he couldn’t tell a cold from a broken bone.
One man Ole Mbatian had come to respect almost as much as himself, however, was Hugo’s brother Malte. He wasn’t a medicine man in the true sense of the idea, and he was too white of skin to be pitched as an authentic Mbatian – not to mention that he spoke neither Swahili nor Maa.
But Kevin had everything Malte lacked. And Malte had everything that Kevin lacked. But there was one thing that neither of them had: a good head for business.
That belonged to Hugo.
Considering the global attention surrounding Woman with Parasol and Boy by Stream, Sotheby’s elected to sell them as a pair, along with the letters and photographs. In an unusual move, the auctioneer introduced one of the motifs in person – the boy by the stream – just before bidding began.
‘I would like to extend a warm welcome to Mr Ole Mbatian the Younger.’
Hugo had a knack for advertising. Ahead of the auction, he spent three days drilling the medicine man in the correct things to say.
The event was broadcast live online. The audience on site and all over the world got to hear about the medicine man’s meeting with Irma Stern, how he had posed by a stream for her when he was just a boy, how his mother did the same under a parasol, and the circumstances that led to the creation of the paintings in question.
So far, all was going according to Hugo’s plan. But then there was the medicine man’s preference to keep talking once he’d got started. Thus the world also learned that Ole Mbatian the Elder’s first wife, the one under the parasol, was the angriest of the three, and they also heard about the reasons behind that anger: her spouse’s many shortcomings. Additionally, Ole thought it would be fitting to explain how an escalator worked, that livestock was an unwieldy form of currency, and that time was running out for circumcision as a test of manliness. He was just about to launch into his views of a caviar called Kalle when, to Hugo’s relief, he was cut off by the auctioneer. Ole was kindly shown to a front-row seat. Ten minutes later, the auction was over.
The paintings, and their accompanying cultural treasure in the form of photographs and letters, went for a sensational twelve million and ninety thousand pounds.
One hundred fifty million Swedish kronor.
Just over fifteen million dollars.
Seventeen and a half billion South Korean won.
Fifteen thousand cows.