He’s a clever bastard, that one,” the countess muttered, tossing aside the following day’s issue of Expressen.
“No. I’ve known him for almost forty years,” said the count, “and clever is the last thing he is. He has someone doing his thinking for him.”
“The priest?” said the countess.
“Yes. Johanna Kjellander, according to the paper. And that car thief at her side. Per Jansson, if I remember correctly. I ought to have cut off his dick after all. Although it’s not too late yet.”
The count and the countess had more authority than anyone else in the darker circles of Greater Stockholm. If anyone were to call for a joint initiative among the more important hoodlums in the capital, it would be the two “nobles” who did the inviting. And that was just what they did.
* * *
Sweden’s first and largest general meeting of the criminal element was held in the count and countess’s half-empty car dealership, the one in Haninge.
They’d had an extra good sales week at that location. Any illegally imported, collision-damaged vehicle can be made to look new with a few tricks of the trade. The count and countess did not feel obliged to report what any given vehicle had experienced earlier in its life, or how it was feeling deep down inside. And, after all, cars can’t talk, except in the movies.
Ten units of this illegal sort had rolled out of the showroom in the past few days, all for just under sticker price. On none did the airbags work as advertised, but that didn’t matter as long as their new owners had the good sense to stick to the road.
A good week, on the whole, if it hadn’t been for the reason behind the general meeting they were about to hold.
Incidentally, putting together a relevant list of participants had also taken a few tricks of the trade. After all, there wasn’t a master list of who had contracted to have his nearest and dearest maimed or murdered. The notice had to go out by word of mouth via four carefully chosen pubs.
The result was that seventeen men came to the car showroom at the prescribed time, in addition to the count and the countess, who were standing on a podium at the very front.
The podium was actually meant for the finest car in the showroom, but that car had just been sold to the tune of two pounds of top-shelf methamphetamine. It had left behind an excellent stage for the couple, who liked to emphasize that they were a bit above all the others.
The count was second angriest; the countess was angriest. The latter called the meeting to order. “As I see it, the question is not ‘Will Hitman Anders be allowed to live?’ it’s ‘How will we see to it that he dies?’ The count and I have a few ideas.”
A number of the seventeen men at the foot of the podium squirmed. It was just that the contracts that had been made would become public knowledge if the killer who refused to kill got the treatment he deserved. One of the seventeen even dared to argue along those lines (as it happened, he had paid dearly to be rid of both the count and the countess). He took the floor and said that the elimination of Hitman Anders might lead to an out-and-out bloodbath in the capital city, and it would be better if they just kept to business as usual without too much infighting.
The count objected, saying it was not in his nature to allow himself to be blackmailed. What he didn’t say was that he and the countess had succeeded—all on their own—in doing away with the two business competitors whom Hitman Anders and his sidekicks had not offed but had taken payment from, in the form of both money and camper van.
But then another of the seventeen dared to agree with the first man. He hadn’t been able to afford to off both the count and the countess; he’d settled for the countess, who in his opinion was the more destructive and unpredictable of the two. He, too, out of sheer survival instinct, had reason to wish Hitman Anders a long life.
A third had paid to have a cousin of the count fall victim to aggravated assault, and that was bad enough. Several other members of the group had taken out contracts of varying degrees against at least eight others in the same group. If any one of them could be called innocent, in a limited sense, it was only because he didn’t have enough money to make himself guiltier than he was.
The count and the countess were feared by all. But seventeen strong men at the foot of the podium found the courage, at last, to resist. All of them insisted that it would be best for business to forget about it. Revenge stood in direct opposition to the current working environment. And the working environment was more important.
The countess swore at the seventeen men, calling them spineless insects and other unpleasant things, and making some of them long to be able to pay Hitman Anders once more, as long as he would finish the job this time.
One of the seventeen, however, was pondering whether it wasn’t the case that all insects are de facto without spines, but he had enough sense not to bring up the matter just then.
The meeting was over in less than twenty minutes. All the big- and small-time scoundrels involved had had a representative on site. The only one who was missing was the man who’d paid 800,000 kronor to have his neighbor put to death because said neighbor had made a face at his wife. The vengeful and soon destitute man had taken his own life after his wife had left him for the far-too-alive neighbor, with whom she even traveled to the Canary Islands, for the dubious face-making had in fact been a sophisticated form of flirtation.
End result: Hitman Anders would be allowed to remain alive, according to seventeen out of nineteen still-living defrauded defrauders. And he would die, preferably along with Johanna Kjellander and Per Jansson, or maybe Persson, according to the two others.