Irma Stern was about to march decisively into Jenny and Kevin’s lives, long after her death. They had no idea that this was the case as they left the café, which had just taken almost half of their joint assets, just by demanding honest payment for two cups of coffee and one bun.
In the office across the street sat the CEO of Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd. He too had no idea what awaited: that the German-South African artist was about to fundamentally change their lives. With plenty of help from a medicine man-slash-Maasai warrior.
The CEO in question was called Hugo Hamlin. He was born and raised on Lidingö, a wealthy island suburb of Stockholm. He was the younger son of physician couple Harry and Margareta Hamlin, and the little brother of Malte.
The only thing more important than Saturday dinner at the Hamlins’ was Sunday dinner. From the time he could sit by himself on a chair without falling off, he partook of appetizer, main course and dessert in what was nearly a ritual form. His mother handled the food; his father was in charge of conversation and wine. He preferred to sample the latter starting in the early morning, to make sure it was correct.
Their topics of conversation were always of a scientific nature. When the children were small they heard all about the Polish girl who grew up to win the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry. And how she discovered elements so dangerous that they became the death of her. Big brother Malte wanted to know more about her discoveries; Father and Mother told him. Little brother Hugo was more interested in how much money and renown a Nobel Prize would bring you.
Their conversations grew more advanced as the children matured. Their parents made no bones about their desire for their sons’ sons to follow in their footsteps. And preferably surpass them. If Marie Curie could win double Nobel Prizes, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that their double sons might scrape together one between them.
Malte was on the same page. At the tender age of fourteen he said he was considering becoming an ophthalmologist. He chose the speciality that was hardest to pronounce in order to tease his little brother.
‘Do you know what ophthalmology is, Hugo?’ he asked.
‘All I know is, it sounds boring.’
Their father Harry warded off a fight about nothing. He said that ophthalmology was the same thing as an eye doctor, but in doing so he made the mistake of mentioning how many years of study it took to land at a somewhat reasonable salary level.
‘Twelve?’ said Hugo, who was just that. ‘Not on your life.’
The brothers were only eighteen months apart in age, and they liked each other a lot, but deep down inside they were different. Big brother was a scientist like his parents; little brother was … well, no one knew what he was.
Harry and Margareta had met during their specialist training in geriatrics, and they worked side by side on age-related illnesses and disorders up until they began to feel the effects of the same themselves.
Then they quit and moved permanently to their summer home in Vaxholm, where she took a part-time position at the local clinic and he sat on the veranda to drink red wine full-time. The parents gave the Lidingö house to their younger son and transferred the equivalent amount of money into an account for their older son’s twelve-year medical education.
While Malte headed off to Uppsala to immerse himself in neurobiology, homeostasis and intervention, the eighteen-year-old homeowner Hugo stayed put and delved inside himself to see what talents he might possibly have. Something, anything at all, that would bring him financial success in some life-affirming way.
He had shown promise in drawing early on but was never really encouraged in that direction by his parents. Especially not after the time he secretly drew his father in the shower, enhanced certain elements, and showed the result to his evangelical high school art teacher.
Drawing might be fun, but it brought him no advantage – only lambasting from two directions. Still, he didn’t drop the idea entirely. In his general searching he occasionally ended up at the local book café, where Lidingö’s most prominent starving artists regularly gathered to convince each other how torturous life was and how little they cared about financial success. That never stopped each of them trying to get someone else to pay for their coffee. Hugo felt left out. What he wanted from his artistic tendencies was – first of all, last of all, and all the alls in between – to have a good time. A prerequisite of which was, in his view, that he earn money.
Hugo and Malte spoke over the phone now and then. The tone of their conversations was loving and just brutal enough.
‘How’s the homeostasis going?’ Hugo might ask, without even knowing what that was.
‘It went fine, thanks. We’re doing clinical anatomy now.’
‘Do you have time for any rectified spirits between lessons, or do you all just sit around with your noses in your books?’
Malte explained that rectified spirits weren’t handed out freely to medical students, but he understood what his little brother meant. He’d enjoyed the occasional glass of wine in the cheerful company of medical students of an evening, but they did have to get up at six each morning so he had to be careful.
‘And you intend to live like this for twelve years?’
‘Just ten and a half to go now.’
‘Idiot.’
‘I love you too.’
With that, it was Hugo’s turn to report on his current situation. He said that he had left the depressed paupers at the book café behind, but that there was still hope. He had just discovered and been dazzled by a French-American artist who placed a bicycle wheel on a pedestal and in doing so became both rich and famous.
Malte smiled at his little brother’s ambition to find shortcuts in all things. But by all means.
‘Mum’s bicycle is still in the garage, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Idiot,’ said Hugo.
‘Your words.’
Hugo knew no more than was necessary about the artist in question, but anyone who could make money on bicycle wheels, urinals and snow shovels was worthy of both admiration and attention. That didn’t mean, of course, that someone else could find success in the very same way. But, something along those lines?
Thus encouraged by his big brother, Hugo reconsidered. When he was ready he spray-painted a potato peeler gold, called his creation Laid Bare, and set the price at five thousand kronor. The used peeler had cost him two kronor, and he’d found the gold paint on a shelf in his very own garage.
With that, he dressed in black, practised the art of looking complicated in front of a mirror, and went all the way to downtown Stockholm to hawk the work outside the Royal Dramatic Theatre, immediately following a performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
The result was that all but three members of the audience looked away as they passed the artist. Two stopped to scoff at him and express hateful conjecture about his social standing. One, who had been forced to attend the theatre by his wife and had understood nothing about the play he’d just seen, realized that the youth with the potato peeler possessed something different, perhaps even something special.
‘Do you want a job?’ he asked.
‘Peeling potatoes?’
‘No, I work in advertising and PR and all that. I think you’ve got that special something.’
Never, during the endless weekend dinners of his upbringing, had Hugo been told he might have anything but a lack of manners.
Advertising, PR, and all that? Didn’t sound so bad.
‘How much does it pay?’
Eighteen years later, big brother Malte had long been an established and popular specialist at one of Europe’s leading eye clinics, which was located in Stockholm. Little brother Hugo, thanks to the potato peeler outside the theatre, had been hired as an assistant at what would one day be one of Scandinavia’s leading advertising firms. After three months he was given a permanent position, after six months he was a project manager, and for a decade and a half now he had been the brightest star at Great & Even Greater Communications.
His commute was no longer undertaken by bus from suburb to city. These days he travelled to Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Spain and Italy at least once a year, to the United Kingdom more often than that, and to the United States so often he’d lost count. In this context, ‘the United States’ meant New York and Los Angeles. That was where it all happened.
Hugo devoted the time between his trips and coming up with all his ideas to counting the money that poured in. Mostly it was a result of his creative genius, but also no adman was better than he was at expense accounts (which was, itself, a form of creativity).
He had long planned to start his own business, but he earned what he deserved and, for at least the first fifteen years, it was a lot of fun. To be sure, he hadn’t won a prize in three years; the younger generation was hot on his heels. Perhaps it was time to set his sights elsewhere before they started to lap him?
Hugo and Malte were as much friends as they were brothers. They had lived in close proximity for years, ever since Malte sold his flat in Vasastan in order to move in with his girlfriend in her Lidingö villa. She was a doctor too, of course. Rather wooden of manner, Hugo thought. But Malte was happy with her, and that was the important thing.
The adman himself was careful never to become too emotionally involved. The risk of a girlfriend was that kids would follow, and Hugo had a hard time seeing the joy in that. Changing the smelly nappies of someone who would keep him up all night as thanks – in what way did this stimulate creativity?
He was different from the rest of the advertising crowd in that he neither lived in nor dreamt of a penthouse in downtown Stockholm. And he seldom drank to excess with other advertisers while they showered each other with affirmation. After a day’s work, he got in his Volvo (a Volvo?!) and drove back out to his residential neighbourhood, where he acted as if he were a perfectly average person.
The house was larger than he needed, but the neighbourhood itself was only mildly impressive. The neighbours thought he was one of the masses. What they didn’t know was that he secretly studied them, figured out their thought patterns, what they liked, what they disliked, and why. He often plucked one of them from his memory when it was time to birth a fresh idea. How would he get Mrs Levander to buy chicken an extra day each week? What could convince Runesson’s teenage boys to switch data plans?
Perhaps the only one of his neighbours who functioned neither as a neighbour nor as an object of study was the occupant of the corner plot adjacent to Hugo’s place. He was grumpy, curt, and generally suspicious. Never satisfied with anything, except for when he was crawling around on all fours in his carrot patch and talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to the carrots.
Hugo wondered how to package advertising messages to a man who conducted the better portion of his intellectual exchanges with a carrot. He arrived at the conclusion that it wasn’t possible.
Thus the international adman had the full palette of consumers on his street, including the one who fit in for the sole reason that he didn’t.
If only it hadn’t been for the rubbish-bin incident.
The grumpy man’s name was Birger Broman, and he was a widower, a government workplace safety inspector, and impossible to reason with. Broman had begun placing his rubbish bin on the wrong side of his driveway for pickup every other Thursday. It was overfull and the rubbish bags were improperly tied. It smelled bad, attracted flies, and was generally unpleasant to look at.
He could just as well place the bins on the other side of the driveway. It wouldn’t cause him any extra trouble, create any extra work for the binmen, or make any difference to the flies.
But it would be better for Hugo.
The adman spoke with him, but Workplace Safety Inspector Broman stood his ground. The road did not belong to Hugo Hamlin, in contrast to the postbox thirty centimetres away.
‘The property line runs here,’ Broman said, pointing with his crooked index finger. ‘If you want that to change, you’ll have to talk to the municipality.’
Hugo responded that he had no desire to move the property line, he just wanted to be spared the stench and the swarms of flies when he got his post.
‘So instead you want me to have the stench and swarms of flies when I get my post?’ said Broman.
Here one should bear in mind that Broman’s house was on the corner; his postbox was safely around the other side, far away.
‘Well, that would be more fitting, considering that this is your rubbish, your bin is the one that’s too full, and you never tie your bags properly. But your postbox isn’t even there.’
‘Are you trying to tell me where to put my postbox?’
Hugo talked to his brother about the neighbour and asked whether Malte wanted to lend a hand by giving Broman a nice kick in the arse, or, even better, beat him to death.
‘Primum, non nocere,’ Malte replied.
‘Huh?’
‘From the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors are meant to keep people alive, not the opposite.’
Hugo had the sense that from that day forward, the bin got a little bit fuller and the bags were tied even more sloppily. But he wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew for sure was that Broman hadn’t changed his mind.
It went so far that one day Hugo himself moved Broman’s bin to the correct side of the driveway. He pulled it with one hand and held his nose with the other.
At which point, Broman called the police.
‘Criminal conversion!’ he said to the two unfortunate police inspectors, who felt that there were better ways than this to serve the public. Instead of issuing a caution, they asked Hugo to grow up.
‘I’m the one who needs to grow up? This is the idiot who puts his bin right next to my postbox out of sheer cussedness!’
‘Illegal defamation!’ said Broman.
‘There’s no such offence in the criminal code,’ said one of the inspectors. ‘Now, here’s what we’re going to do: you there, stop moving your neighbour’s rubbish bin, and you, don’t even think about calling the police again. Okay?’
Workplace Safety Inspector Broman was on the verge of asserting his legal rights, but the officer looked so stern that he didn’t dare.
Once the long arm of the law was gone, Hugo tried one last time.
‘Please, Broman, can’t you just …’
‘Call the municipality and share your opinions there. And you heard what the police said: Once more and they’ll lock you up!’
As his neighbour again suggested he turn to the municipality, Hugo felt the urge to strangle him. Or shove him into the bin. Or force him to eat up his own rubbish.
Fortunately, he never did any of this. He resigned himself to the fact that he had one of the worst neighbours in Sweden. That is: he resigned himself in action. Not in thought.
During the weeks and months that followed, as Hugo drank his morning coffee and looked out at his neighbour, his yard, his rubbish bin and the driveway, his mind turned somersaults about the rubbish-bin conflict.
About how best to get revenge.
His first idea – strangling in a public place – wouldn’t work. It would come with ten years to life and that wasn’t worth the trouble. Assault and force-feeding were even more out of the question, because they would land Hugo in prison and once he came out, the workplace safety inspector would exist just as much as he ever had. He couldn’t stand the thought of the smirk that would grace Broman’s lips.
A simple solution might be to give him a taste of his own medicine and then some. There were no rules about how many rubbish bins you could order from the municipality to be emptied every other Thursday. What’s more, small households could request a pickup just once every four weeks.
Five bins in a row along the property line he shared with Broman? All equally stuffed? Improperly tied bags – no, untied bags – with a pickup once a month?
This would be delightfully frustrating for the workplace safety inspector. But at the same time, it would be even worse for Hugo and – worst of all – Broman would know it. Revenge that bounces back is no revenge at all.
Hugo entered a new mindset, the mindset of an adman. His latest stroke of genius at work was the rebranding of a formerly leading orange marmalade that had lost ground. It had long been in decline, languishing on store shelves, but now it took up half the prime shelf space in those same shops. Thanks to Hugo, all of Europe was now munching on marmalade made of well-pulped, half-rotten, unpeeled oranges. It was the same marmalade as always. The only difference was that the Swedish adman had made it indispensable on the kitchen table by changing the flavour from ‘orange’ to ‘orange-umami’.
‘But it doesn’t have any umami in it,’ said the sales director of the marmalade company.
‘So?’ Hugo replied.
‘We can add it, of course. I’ll talk to the product division. What is umami, exactly?’
A man who could make anyone at all experience something fresh about old marmalade certainly ought to be able to take down a crummy old workplace safety inspector. All he had to do was find the inspector’s weak spot and hit him there.
Inspector Broman loved his garden with a passion. He puttered in it from early spring until the first snow fell. It would have been a pleasure, in Hugo’s eyes, to see his neighbour’s garden destroyed. Killer slugs? Where could he buy a few hundred of those? And how could he instruct them to torment the neighbour, but not the neighbour’s closest neighbour, that was, Hugo himself? There was nothing in the pest-control literature to indicate that slugs could demonstrate loyalty towards their owner. Talking sense to a killer slug would be no easier than doing so with Broman.
Where might that bastard keep his bottles of fertilizer? If he could just get his hands on those, he could exchange their contents for glycol, chlorine, or something else just as ruinous. And then take a front-row seat on his veranda to watch the inspector walking around, humming and slowly killing his own rhododendrons.
Or perhaps he should become a beekeeper. Ten thousand bees might not be enough. Twenty thousand? There had to be a limit to what his neighbour would stand for. Although the same probably went for worker bees as for killer slugs: tough to reason with. ‘Okay, ladies, same thing again today: Everyone to Broman’s! Okay?’
Rabbit husbandry, however, sounded more doable. Fifty rabbits who were never given any food would quickly find their way to Broman’s carrots, right?
For a while, Hugo was counting on planting a juniper hedge as close to Broman’s property as possible. The downside was that his rubbish-bin revenge would go on for a decade or two before the junipers really took off. The upside was that the hedge would be thick and, when fully grown, up to twenty metres high. It would also block the sun for the neighbour and his garden plots for at least five hundred years. Junipers were long-lived little rascals.
Considerably more so than Inspector Broman, it turned out. For one day he dropped dead, his nose in the topsoil, at the age of sixty-five – and Hugo never had to lift a finger. After a while, a young couple moved into Broman’s place. They put the rubbish bin where it belonged and were generally pleasant folks.
Faced with all these changes, Hugo felt empty. It was as if Broman had won the battle by forfeiting before the revenge caught up with him.
There was no such thing as perfect satisfaction.
Peace and quiet settled upon Hugo Hamlin’s neighbourhood. No one argued with anyone else. The annual Midsummer party in Hugo’s garden was evidence. There was herring and aquavit and dancing around the Midsummer pole. As the evening drew on the little kids were sent to bed while the older ones were bribed with iPads. Then it was time for grilling. The men handled the grill and drank red wine; the women sipped white and cheered them on. Sweden could be awfully predictable at times.
As the entrecotes and corn on the cob changed colour, the neighbour across from Hugo said he thought it was a pity that Broman had gone and died in his carrot patch, but at the same time it was nice to have these friendly new neighbours. At which point he raised his glass to the newcomers, who blushed. The neighbour next to the neighbour across from Hugo added that if they were being honest, Broman had in fact been the street’s number one killjoy. Additional neighbours nodded in agreement.
The mood was so cheerful and the opinions on poor Broman’s many shortcomings so unanimous that the host of the Midsummer festivities found himself telling the story of the rubbish bin and his many childish thoughts of revenge.
‘In some ways it’s lucky he died. Otherwise I’d probably be sitting at my kitchen table and muttering to myself still today.’
This was met by general merriment and became the start of a lively discussion Hugo hadn’t expected. It began when the neighbour next to the neighbour across from him chuckled and said that the juniper hedge plan had been a good one. A solution slow in coming, yes, but it had a certain charm. For long before the junipers cast their shadow over Broman’s garden, he would be tormented by the thought of what was to come.
The new neighbours, Alicia and André, had never met Broman; they’d bought the house from his estate. This didn’t stop them from coming up with ideas of their own. André was a Volkswagen dealer and had a number of suggestions for what would have been best to pour into the fuel tank of Broman’s car to make it feel as ill as possible. Alicia worked at a psychiatric clinic and knew which kinds of medicine one could powder and put into Broman’s coffee, and the effects one could expect to see. Some of them were quite amusing.
Hugo’s older brother Malte and his Karolin lived close by and were there too. The physician couple successfully resisted the urge to warn Alicia about the dosages she’d just suggested; after all, this was all in good fun.
The rest of the evening continued in similar spirits. Bookseller Runesson was happy to provide literary connections. He began with The Count of Monte Cristo but soon shifted gears up to Hamlet: revenge upon revenge until half a royal family kicked the bucket. This prompted a conversation about the poetic differences between a king, on the one hand, and a workplace safety inspector on the other. Everyone but the bookseller was in agreement that a poisoned chalice of wine was not sufficiently creative; that you should take revenge with finesse if you were going to take revenge at all. The bookseller rather preferred to get straight to the point. After all, in the Icelandic sagas, they didn’t just prance around pondering what they could plant in the earth on the off chance that they might, a few decades later, wangle some revenge. No, heads rolled on the spot!
This was the moment one of the guests turned to Gunilla Levander from number eight, the parish priest.
‘What does the Bible say about revenge? Is God behind us at least as far as spiking Broman’s coffee with Rohypnol?’
Gunilla Levander, when sober, was plucky, cheerful, and uncomplicated, but when full of wine, beer, herring and aquavit she took on a different personality. She launched into a lecture, saying that some evidence indicated that Jesus would have voted no to Rohypnol and everything else, but that this theory was primarily based upon Matthew’s testimony that one must turn the other cheek if someone slapped you on the right cheek. She made special note of the bit about the right cheek. This could be interpreted to mean that we should be forgiving only of those who are left-handed, and that was practically nobody. It was, after all, difficult to deal a blow to someone’s right cheek with one’s own right hand.
‘I’m left-handed,’ said bookseller Runesson, raising his glass.
‘You seem to drink just fine with your right hand too,’ said Pontus Bladh from number ten.
‘I’ve never liked Matthew,’ said Gunilla Levander. ‘And the Old Testament is totally on our side when it comes to Broman. Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth and all that.’
‘Not an eye for an eye!’ said the ophthalmologist.
Thereafter, with God’s blessing, each idea trumped the next. The winner was announced during the late-night snack at two in the morning (hot dogs and beer). Housewife Jakobsson was awarded double hot dogs with extra mustard for her detailed plan of how they could have convinced the chairman of the Hells Angels of northern Stockholm that Inspector Broman both rode a Kawasaki and had hit on his girlfriend. Everyone thought it was a pity that Broman was already dead.
Hugo Hamlin was, out of choice, single and childfree. He and his headache lingered in bed after the extraordinarily pleasant Midsummer party, facing no responsibilities of any sort. It reminded him of his work hours in general; he came and went as he pleased. As long as he delivered. And he had been delivering for a long time. His latest idea, the one about the umami, had become an ad that played on TVs all over Europe. A humorous twist on why this particular orange marmalade was an absolute breakfast necessity for anyone who agonized over the looming day ahead. The thinking behind this message was that we live in a time when almost everyone has reason to agonize at the thought of every new day.
Although the worst aftereffects from the night before hadn’t yet relinquished their hold on him, he got up, went to the kitchen in only his underpants, drank half a litre of milk straight from the carton, and forced down two sandwiches with free marmalade. It didn’t make the day seem any less of a threat, but at least he wasn’t hungry anymore. Like most Swedish men in residential suburbs on the day after Midsummer, he was hung-over.
When his miserable breakfast finally settled, just before lunch, he began to catch up with himself. Hadn’t all of his neighbours sat around from late afternoon until early morning, desiring revenge? Regardless of the event. Regardless of anything but the sweet taste of revenge itself.
His condition notwithstanding, the adman got to work.
Revenge as a concept.
Revenge as a business idea.
Hugo was a wizard at packaging marmalade, crisps and lottery tickets better than they deserved. If you could pitch nonsense, you could probably do the same with revenge.
Under his own management.
He had just about one million kronor in the bank but was enamoured of the thought of another million. At the same time, it was getting more and more difficult to muster excitement in his work with the firm. Perhaps he could switch gears while he was still on top?
He wasn’t out to get revenge on anyone for his own sake; after all, Broman was dead. But weren’t there any number of Bromans out there, still breathing and spreading their poison? Who knew what kind of profit they could generate!
Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd.
That’s what his company would be called. Hugo worked on polishing the pitch.
‘Do you need to get revenge for an injustice without breaking the law? We’re on it! Twelve hundred kronor per hour. Thousands of satisfied customers around the world could have attested to our good quality if only our discretion weren’t a point of honour.’
The part about thousands of customers wasn’t true, of course. Not yet. But it could be.
All that was left was to quit his job. And get a business plan.
‘Are you totally sure about this?’ said big brother Malte while they were out drinking at their traditional Midsummer afterparty.
He was. In Hugo’s mind, subsidiaries were already popping up all over the place. Like La Venganza es Dulce, Rache ist Süß GmbH, La Vengeance est Douce SA, and a handful of others. The company’s formal headquarters could be in Stockholm, but the marketing should be local and regional.
Robin at Great & Even Greater Communications had always known that the day would come when Hugo no longer wanted to be part of the firm. Their good luck had lasted for almost twenty years. How many awards had he brought them? Cannes, Berlin, Stockholm, of course … and they had come so close to tiny Swedish Great & Even Greater getting the chance to produce an ad for the Superbowl. All thanks to Hugo. To this day, Robin had no idea why they’d fallen short of the mark. Hugo thought it was because of the price tag. Too cheap and the Americans would never get fired up.
The firm’s founder had known that there were gears turning in Hugo’s mind ever since that moment outside the theatre in Stockholm years ago. Great & Even Greater had been a start-up at the time; Robin himself was young and hungry and saw potential in just about everyone and everything. Such as in the kid standing at the bottom of the stairs at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, expounding upon the artistic greatness of a potato peeler. He had painted it gold. He had numbered it. He provided a certificate of authenticity. He referred to Marcel Duchamp. He did all the right things to pitch the unpitchable. Okay, he wasn’t successful, but he would be if he were supplied with better tools, thought Robin, as he walked over to offer the kid a job.
The rest was history. The very next day was Hugo’s first on the job. After three weeks he was helming his first solo project. After seven months he won his first award in the company’s name. And so it went. Until now, and in under a year, the multimillion-kronor contract with the big electronics chain would be up for renewal. And for the first time, Hugo wouldn’t be at the table during negotiations.
He didn’t want to say what he was going to do, but he promised it wouldn’t involve becoming the competition. Robin trusted him, but to be on the safe side he let him go that very day. With a big hug and three months’ pay as a thank you.
Hugo Hamlin spent his first day of unemployment in his own kitchen at home in Lidingö. He sat at the table with his laptop, sketching out his marketing plan. At the outset it would take extensive advertising. Preferably along electronic channels, for the social networks seldom left space for understanding, forgiveness, reflection, and other things that stood in direct opposition to his business idea.
The most effective channel would be Facebook. One whole department within Great & Even Greater Communications was devoted to working on Facebook and its sister networks. They cast a wide net for famous and half-famous individuals in the interest of convincing them to have the opinions the advertising firm and its clients wanted them to have. Hugo actually had nothing to do with that department, but in recent days they had been making a lot of noise after an author hardly anyone had heard of flipped out when asked if he would consider liking a specific brand of ice cream across his social platforms. In return he would receive twenty thousand kronor and as much ice cream as he could eat. The problem was that the author was 1) lactose intolerant and 2) intolerant in general. Now he was raising hell on the theme of how democracy was under threat if we no longer knew who thought what and why.
Hugo thought the intolerant author had summarized the problem of Facebook quite tidily and hoped that a popular uprising might be just around the corner. But since he himself was not a revolutionary but an entrepreneur, he decided that he might as well buy eighty thousand kronor worth of targeted Sweet Sweet Revenge ads all over Europe in the meantime. Hate Facebook. Yay, Facebook!
The next expense item was an office. Hugo needed somewhere to think all his big thoughts in peace and quiet.
He found what he was looking for in the well-to-do neighbourhood of Östermalm. A former boutique, seventy square metres plus a kitchenette and bathroom. For four generations the boutique had sold fancy wooden toys to children whose parents suffered no financial hardships. But there was no fifth generation to speak of. What child, regardless of social class, wanted a hand-painted farm with all the farmer’s creatures when there were iPads?
Hugo met the former tenant at the contract signing; she was a sad old woman in her seventies. When she saw the name of Hugo’s company she expressed interest in becoming his first customer.
‘That’s fine,’ said Hugo. ‘What is it you’re looking for, ma’am?’
She didn’t quite know. But perhaps her revenge could consist of turning off all the internets that had destroyed both her own life and those of all the poor little children?
This was not the sort of first customer Hugo had hoped for.
‘How were you thinking that might work, ma’am?’
The old woman snorted. Surely that was up to Hamlin to figure out. Why else would she hire him? But this was an honest question. She would give him five thousand kronor in cash if he completed the job to her liking.
Hugo was far too focused on the future to let a five-thousand-kronor old woman stand in his way. He elected to close that door immediately.
‘For that amount, I suppose I can come up with a way to turn off your internet, ma’am, should you have any, but no one else’s.’
As he waited for the old woman to clear out her toy store and hand over the keys, Hugo went on a tax-deductible business trip to Miami Beach. He sat under a parasol on the shore and ordered umbrella drinks and hors d’oeuvres for himself and his imaginary business contacts. Running a business demanded expenses and revenues. Hugo ate his hors d’oeuvres and was pleased. Now all that was left were the revenues.
When he took possession of the premises he was both tanned and well-rested. Before the first day was over, he had furnished his new office. Nothing fancy: a desk, three chairs, a whiteboard on the wall, a coffeemaker in the kitchen and milk in the fridge. He also discovered a few canned goods in the pantry, possibly ones as old as the woman who had left them behind.
All he needed now was an assistant. Skilled labour not required; all they would have to do was answer the phone and keep potential clients away from the creative mind while simultaneously keeping said clients interested enough for Hugo to get them on the hook at a later date, as time allowed. But that expense item would have to wait until the enterprise got on its feet. Life in Florida had not been cheap.
With that, all the preparations were completed. Still, Hugo held off on the launch. He wanted it to be well into autumn, at least in northern Europe. It had not been lost on him what good spirits he’d been in thanks to the Florida sun and heat. Bitter thoughts of revenge took root more easily in dark days and chilly winds.
Which is just the sort of thing Stockholm is extra good at in November and December. Hugo clicked the Facebook button and launched his campaign when it was three degrees above freezing, with sleet in the air and a fierce north wind that, according to the meteorologists, would make it all the way down to Milan.
Everything started so well! In the days right after his first marketing wave, Hugo received calls and emails from twelve different countries and eighty different people. Most of the messages were sheer madness, of course. Three people wanted their mother-in-law snuffed, one wanted help conquering Albania, and one was stuck on the idea of getting revenge on their own demons.
Seven potential customers would require further effort: they wanted to know more about what the company had to offer and whether results could be guaranteed. Some tried to haggle about the price. Hugo made sure to keep them on the hook.
An eighth interested party, however – Herr Arvid Rössler from the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany – seemed prepared to come to an immediate agreement.
Herr Rössler was a retired high school teacher and had spent his entire working life keeping teenagers under control. He prided himself on his competence as an old-school sort of teacher. On occasion, over the years, this had meant a wallop or two on the ear of an unruly student, exclusively boys.
Anyway, after his retirement he relocated permanently to his summer cottage, not far from the French border. There in the countryside, with a view of the Rhine, he’d intended to live a quiet and pleasant life in the company of his eight Bielefelder hens and his proud Bielefelder rooster. And so it would remain until the day the Lord called him home.
‘It isn’t the Lord himself that’s the problem, I hope?’ said Hugo.
Battling God would likely be almost as futile as battling the internet.
‘No, no,’ said Herr Rössler. ‘It’s the next-door neighbour.’
‘Imagine that,’ said Hugo. ‘Next-door neighbours are my personal speciality. Please, tell me more.’
The neighbour in question happened to be one of those many hundreds of students Rössler had taught over the years. Sometimes it was a smaller world than one might have wished. This particular specimen was already in his forties. Just as Arvid Rössler had always suspected, he had never amounted to anything. He dragged his feet just as he had in his teenage years, accompanied by his overweight German shepherd. Lived in a caravan. The question was, what did he live on? There were rumours at the village grocery that he had some lottery winnings, but Rössler thought welfare was a more likely story.
Now, it so happened that the possible welfare recipient had a memory as sharp as Arvid Rössler’s. The teacher recognized the student – but what’s worse, the student recognized the teacher.
‘Well, that’s a surprise,’ Rössler muttered. ‘That lout was hardly ever in school.’
Hugo listened with interest, curious where this story would end. But he had to interrupt with a query.
‘Is it perhaps the case that this … lout … as you call him, was one of those who received a wallop now and then, back in school, in the name of education?’
‘Yes, he was,’ Rössler admitted. In fact, there had been occasion for a number of wallops during the three years student and teacher were forced to associate with one another.
‘And now he’s getting you back?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you want to get back at him for that?’
‘He started it.’
Hugo shifted his focus; he didn’t want to lay the blame on his presumptive client. He said he wanted to know what the neighbour had thought up.
Well, it had to do with the dog, which always ran onto Rössler’s property and scared both hens and rooster. Not just because he was a dog, but because the lout encouraged it. A fence likely could have solved everything, but that would ruin the amazing view of the Rhine from Rössler’s veranda.
‘Have you by any chance spoken with your neighbour about the issue, Herr Rössler?’
Herr Hamlin could bet he had. Again and again. But the lout merely sneered at him, threatened him, said things like ‘Perhaps Teacher would prefer I give him back one of his hundred and fifty wallops?’
Arvid Rössler had even called in one of the regional environmental inspectors to come take a look, but the bastard had made sure to keep his dog locked up in the caravan that day.
Hugo took notes as he listened. It was important to get all the facts straight.
Herr Rössler went on to say that it had carried on in this fashion until the other day, when the dog went too far. He caught one of the hens and bit it to death!
‘Murder!’ Arvid Rössler declared.
Hugo said that a court of law might possibly call it something different.
‘But your rage is understandable.’
There was no solving this matter over the phone, and it wouldn’t be in Hugo’s best interest anyway. After all, pay came in relation to hours spent. Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd needed to investigate the circumstances on site. Hugo explained that the company did indeed have operations in Europe with plans to expand into the United States and Asia, but that feuds with neighbours were the particular speciality of the Stockholm office – that is, Hugo Hamlin’s home office. If Herr Rössler wished to send six thousand kronor as an advance payment, Hugo could arrive at the scene of the crime before the week was out, via a flight to Zurich or Basel.
Herr Rössler did not hesitate to accept and agreed that Hugo could work on a running tab plus expenses.
Whether the lout was indeed a lout could not be determined merely by looking at him. A prejudiced party might, however, see indications in that direction: he had long, stringy hair and wore a faded denim jacket and dirty jeans. He was rather more overweight than his dog.
Hugo had no intention of negotiating or even speaking with him or his German shepherd. He merely studied them from a distance. After keeping watch from Arvid Rössler’s kitchen window for six hours, he became witness to how the lout set his dog on the chickens, who fled in every direction.
The evidence confirmed, Hugo walked the property from west to east and north to south, and made a sketch, marking the henhouse in relation to the cottage and veranda. Then he made a careful study of the slope down to the Rhine River and took note of the way the roads and paths ran in the immediate vicinity. With that, he was done for the day.
‘I shall now retire to my hotel in Freiburg,’ he said. ‘I promise to be in touch within forty-eight hours. Do you find my plan acceptable, Herr Rössler?’
Arvid Rössler hoped it would be.
Hugo first pondered whether he might, with some sort of dam, be able to flood the lout’s entire property (speaking of how best to turn off the entire internet). His property was slightly lower than the teacher’s, but the topography leading down to the river was, in general, not particularly favourable to this plan.
Once he had dropped the idea of changing sections of the Rhine’s course he turned to the main characters, that is, the lout and his dog. Up to this point, Hugo had been thinking along the lines of how best to retaliate against the lout, but what if he went straight for the dog? A full-grown German shepherd wasn’t the sort of thing you just treated however you liked. Unless, you were, for instance, a wolf?
One flaw in the wolf idea was that wolves are not generally available for purchase. And even if they were, it would have been crucial to find one that could repress its natural instincts to eat up the seven hens and the rooster the moment it had frightened off the dog.
So, not a wolf. What else? Something or someone that could be mean to the lout’s dog, but nice to the chickens.
Hugo’s brother Malte had a summer home of his own, not outside Freiburg but rather on the Swedish island of Gotland smack dab in the Baltic Sea. He and Malte had spent quite some time hanging around there during summers. His big brother wanted him around all the time, but Hugo mostly took the opportunity to visit when clumsy Karolin was otherwise occupied.
The island was known for a lot of things – among others, for its large number of sheep farmers. Gotland lamb was world-famous throughout Sweden. And few sheepskins were softer than that of the Gotland sheep.
If there was anything Gotland sheep farmers disliked it was tourists in general and the clever fox in particular. The tourists littered and got in the way, while the fox snuck into the sheep pen at night and grabbed a lamb or two to serve its family for dinner. Night after night.
One of the farmers had obtained a couple of llama-like creatures from Peru; they lived in the pasture and grazed side by side with the sheep. It was hard to find any creature more peaceful than the llama – as long as the fox stayed away. When it showed up, the llama lost its mind and started trying to spit the intruder away, and – if that didn’t work – it would kick him clear across the island. Hugo recalled all of this from a newspaper article he’d read the previous summer.
One phone call was all it took, and Hugo had the name and number for this farmer. Who answered on the first ring.
His name was Björk and he was very accommodating. And talkative. He began by saying that he had bought a new phone last spring, one of those mobile ones, with no cord attaching it to the wall. Only to discover that no one ever called. Until this point he had been able to imagine that all his friends tried to reach him while he was out with the animals. Now he knew he didn’t have any friends.
‘This new technology is nothing but crap,’ said Björk.
Hugo agreed. And steered the conversation towards llamas.
‘Guanacos,’ said the farmer.
This was too difficult for Hugo to repeat.
‘Is it true that they protect your sheep from the fox?’
They sure did. Björk had himself read about a big farm on the mainland that was having trouble with wolves and bought three guanacos to help. Once one of them had landed a glob of spit between the eyes of one wolf and kicked another black and blue, the wolves never returned. Björk supposed that what worked on a wolf ought to work on a fox, since they weighed so much less.
And what worked on Swedish wolves and foxes ought to work just as well on a German shepherd, Hugo thought. But how did it work, in greater detail?
Farmer Björk responded by telling a story about a fling he’d had as a youth, with a lass from Hemse who had never been able to get used to the sheep smell. Since then he had been to a few community dances over the years, but it seemed like too much trouble with all the showering and cologning and how his clothes had to be washed, or at least brushed off, so he stopped going. He lived alone and it was probably just as well.
Hugo agreed and repeated the question.
This time went better. Lonely Farmer Björk told him that the llama creatures had a flocking instinct; their natural behaviour was to adopt the sheep.
‘Or the lambs, as we say here on the island, but of course I can hear that I’m speaking with a mainlander, might as well say it in a way that will be understood.’
What Hugo understood more than anything else was that it took patience to talk to Farmer Björk.
‘A flocking instinct?’ he said.
Yes, the guanaco would take charge of the flock and protect it with its life.
‘No matter the flock?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Well, if one was to exchange the sheep for … chickens, for instance? What would happen then?’
Farmer Björk considered the question for a moment and said that chicken wire might be one option, but sure, why not, it ought to work.
Hugo thought that the conversation had gone on long enough.
‘May I ask what you paid for the animals, Mr Björk?’
‘Ten thousand kronor each,’ said Farmer Björk.
‘May I purchase one of them for double that?’
Nine days later, one of Farmer Björk’s llama creatures had arrived outside Freiburg. From Peru, by way of Sweden, to Germany. The castrated male was really getting to see the world. Björk had explained that it was castrated because otherwise it tended to want to mate with the females in the flock.
Hugo pictured a Peruvian llama creature trying to mate with a German Bielefelder hen but quickly shooed the image from his mind. It was too terrible.
While the Swedish adman pounded a pole into the perfect spot in Arvid Rössler’s garden, the teacher wondered what the llama creature’s name was. Hugo replied that he’d forgotten to ask the Swedish farmer that particular question. Rössler had named each of his seven hens and his rooster, so it wouldn’t do for their guardian to walk around without a name of his own. The Peruvian llama would have to be Mario (after his country’s great writer Vargas Llosa, of course). The rooster’s name was Pavarotti; he had crowed beautifully when he was young but got a little croakier with age.
A rope was tied around Mario’s neck and he was solemnly informed that he was now the boss of seven Bielefelder hens and Pavarotti. Mario tossed his head, and someone so inclined could see in this a nod of confirmation.
The rope was just the right length to allow Mario to walk freely all over Herr Rössler’s property but not a step further. Since the hens never left the lot, this limitation didn’t bother Mario in the least. For two days, perfect harmony reigned. The lout sat in the caravan along with his dog and wondered what was going on. Had the old man bought a camel? Why?
On day three, he grew tired of not quarrelling with his old teacher. Camel or no, the German shepherd was let out with the usual command: ‘To Teacher!’
The dog was more than ready to do its business; it planned to mess with the birds for a while and round off its sojourn by relieving itself in front of the neighbour’s veranda. This typically resulted in extra treats upon returning home. He had no idea what that giant, grazing bird was doing in the garden, but why not scare it out of its wits too?
So thought the dog. To the extent that he thought at all. In any case, this was the last thing that went through his head before he got it crushed by a well-aimed Super Mario kick in the temple. The dog was killed instantly, but Mario gave him another kick that sent the dead animal flying all the way back to his owner’s property.
The lout was crying rivers on the other side of the property line, while Herr Rössler was as gleeful as a child. He hummed ‘The Winner Takes It All’ while Hugo wrote out the final invoice at the kitchen table.
Two round trips to Zurich, two round trips from Stockholm to Gotland, animal transport, rental car, purchase of llama creature, rope, sledgehammer, per diem, and forty hours of consulting at 120 euro per hour. In total: 12,800 euro.
‘Cheap,’ said Herr Rössler.
Sweet Sweet Revenge Ltd’s second job was simpler than the first. A sixteen-year-old Swedish girl was flirting with an exciting sixteen-year-old French boy on Tinder. Unfortunately, she had gone to the United States to visit a friend (and to tell her about the Frenchman) when he messaged her that he had sent ‘a surprise’ by post. Since the Swedish postal service was no longer what it once was (which was the fault of the Danes, but that’s a different story), the girl had to pick up the surprise at one of the postal service’s designated service centres, in this case a corner shop in the neighbourhood where the girl had her legal residence. The corner store sent her a text saying that a package had arrived and had to be picked up within ten days.
But the girl would be in the United States for another eleven. She called the manager of the corner shop, who said that this was out of his control but also that a third party could pick up the package if they brought along a form of ID for the girl, for instance a driver’s licence. The girl explained that she was on the other side of the Atlantic along with the only form of ID she owned: her passport. Swedish sixteen-year-olds do not have driver’s licences.
The manager of the corner store did not feel this was his problem either.
The girl tried suggesting that she could email a photocopy of her passport to her mother, who could then pick up the package, with the aid of her own ID and the copy of the girl’s passport.
The manager of the corner store said it didn’t work that way.
How about this? The girl had a tracking number; with this the manager of the corner store could locate the package and put it aside one extra day, instead of sending it back to France the day before the recipient made it home. Just one extra day!
The manager of the corner store asked, rhetorically, what would happen if he made such an exception for every package.
The girl pointed out it wasn’t as if everyone demanded this of the manager of the corner store; in fact, she was the only one, wasn’t she? To this the manager of the corner store replied that he didn’t have time to continue talking to her. The milk refrigerator required his attention.
‘And that’s where we stand now,’ said the girl.
‘What do you want from me?’ Hugo asked.
‘For you to kill him, is that too much?’
Hugo felt that it was, but he sympathized with her. What was her budget, and how was she planning to pay?
The answer was music to his ears.
The form of payment was her father’s credit card and the budget was essentially unlimited.
Each day, millions of packages are posted this way and that across the globe. Few items take up more space per kilo than the kind of material that is specifically meant to take up a lot of space per kilo for the purpose of filling empty gaps in packages and protecting susceptible products from impact.
If you were by chance to order a package that contained nothing but the kind of material that’s meant to take up space while weighing hardly anything – it could potentially turn out to be a very large package that weighs almost nothing and costs very little to ship.
This truth was the starting point of what ensued and demanded one day of Hugo’s time. He began by locating fifty private addresses in the immediate neighbourhood around the shop he was getting paid to torment. After that he placed the same amount of orders of extremely bulky packing materials from ten different parts of the world. With each order he gave a different fake phone number so none of the recipients could be notified.
He also made an on-site visit so he could see with his own eyes that the total space the corner shop had for packages was limited to two cubic metres behind the single cash register. It would only take the arrival of four of the fifty orders to bring the system to its knees. After eight, the manager would no longer know what to do with himself; after twelve, sixteen, and twenty his will to live would fade more and more. And thirty packages would still be on their way.
This was how Hugo sold the girl on sweet revenge, and for his trouble he wanted forty thousand kronor plus expenses, all by way of her father’s credit card.
But she had been looking for more bang for her buck and launched into negotiations. After all, it would be difficult to provide evidence for the loss of will to live Hugo had promised. But a crushed kneecap, for instance, was easier to measure.
Violence was not on the firm’s menu, but how about if Hugo also made sure to send one thing and the next directly to the home of the corner store manager and his wife?
Not good enough, according to the girl.
The deal was slipping through Hugo’s fingers. But she was far from home and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Hugo wasn’t prepared to enact violence of any sort, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t pretend. He asked for an hour’s time to consider.
During that hour he found a suitable video clip online. Someone had set a luxury car on fire while it sat in a parking spot. It was impossible to tell where on earth this car had burned; it could have been Argentina, the Czech Republic – or perhaps Sweden.
Hugo made the video his own and called the girl back to suggest that on top of everything else he would consider setting the corner shop manager’s car on fire.
‘It’s a blue Lamborghini.’
The girl did not stop to reflect on the likelihood that a Swedish corner shop manager was driving around in a car worth more than his entire shop. She accepted the arrangement, on the condition that the contracted party would send photographic evidence of the burning car.
Three mornings later, four cubic metres of packages arrived with the post. The manager of the corner shop worked overtime all evening and half the night to make space for the enormous quantities. At one thirty in the morning he was finished. And reasonably satisfied with himself – after all, creativity was the mother of necessity. Or was it that necessity was the inventors’ … something? In any case, he had filled the large shop freezer with marked-down French fries, which left space in the storeroom freezer for a pallet of paper towels, which meant that the last of the packages could go in the spot where the paper towels had been stored. Then he biked home (a bike was the closest he would ever get to a Lamborghini). He planned to sleep until he woke up on his own the next morning. Elsa could deal with the register.
But poor Elsa called and woke him up at seven o’clock, two hours before the store opened. Where was she supposed to put the thirty new packages from the postal service that had just arrived by lorry?
‘Thirty?’ said the bleary corner shop manager. ‘Just leave them on the loading dock for now, I’ll be right there.’
‘It’s raining,’ said Elsa.
His third job was a bit more demanding. The father of a Spanish boy contacted him to say that his son had been suspended from his football team for chewing gum during practice. For this, his coach deserved a severe punishment.
Hugo wasn’t entirely satisfied with this development. His last client had wished for the manager of a corner store to be snuffed. This current one thought it would be sufficient for his son’s tormentor to suffer as much as possible. Insofar as violence was concerned this was a move in the right direction, but it was still several steps past setting rabbits on a spiteful neighbour’s carrot patch.
Oh well, perhaps the football coach deserved what he was about to get. And the money was good. Hugo promised he would come up with something that meant plenty of pain.
It took two days of preparations in a suburb of Madrid. Background knowledge was everything!
Thus it happened that the coach in question left his home in Leganés with the aim of getting into his car for the impending Wednesday football practice. On the pavement outside Hugo had placed a round, thirty-kilo chunk of concrete and painted it black and white, making it look remarkably like a football.
At just the right moment, he called out from a distance of sixty metres, uttering a Spanish phrase he’d practised and practised.
‘Oiga! Señor! Could you please send that ball back to me?’
The coach took his mark and aimed perfectly with his right ankle.
Hugo had never heard someone roar so vociferously in pain. In any language.
Five thousand euros in the bank, plus expenses.