After the third Saturday it felt like things were starting to settle down a bit. For the second week in a row, the party had brought in a net sum of close to nine hundred thousand to the two needy people. The giant screen wasn’t serving much purpose anymore, but the pews were still just as loaded as the people sitting in them.
Churchwarden Ekman had returned after a few days’ absence, but he mostly seemed to slink around; thus far, he hadn’t asked for another meeting with the priest or the receptionist. He seemed like a ticking time bomb, but at the same time there was so much more to think about. Sitting down to chat with him would, at best, lead to bribing him into membership of the club (that is, peace and quiet); at worst, they would be hastening a problem that seemed to have been put on the shelf.
“I’m far from certain that no news is good news in this case, but I still think we should avoid bothering him for the time being,” said the receptionist. “As long as he’s not bothering us.”
The priest agreed, even if she felt that things were going a little too well on all fronts. After a life in which everything goes wrong, it’s easy to become suspicious when the opposite ensues.
There had, for example, been no incidents in the form of activity from the almost certainly frustrated underworld. Hitman Anders’s threat that the list of contracts taken out would become public upon his demise seemed to have done the trick.
The deliveries of wine and treats each Wednesday at one p.m. were also flowing smoothly. The receptionist realized that this sort of routine was just the type of thing that potential attackers would love, but he trusted Jerry the Knife and his army. One of Jerry’s soldiers, incidentally, had been dismissed when it was discovered that he had neglected his duties. He had been caught red-handed, snoring in the bell tower, hugging an empty box of Moldovan wine.
Since Jerry had acted so quickly, the incident inspired confidence more than anything. At the moment the group was one man short, but Jerry was holding job interviews and expected the team to be at full strength again within a month at most.
Aside from the nearly one million kronor they received each week in cash, the receptionist’s superb handling of social media brought another couple of hundred thousand straight into the congregation’s bank account. That money needed a great deal of attention from a purely administrative standpoint: in Sweden, it is automatically assumed that anyone holding more than ten thousand kronor in hand is either a criminal, a tax dodger, or both. Thus there are rules about how much one may deposit or withdraw from one’s own accounts without first meekly petitioning to do so several days in advance. But in keeping with the theme of “going like clockwork,” it just so happened that the receptionist had met and charmed a woman at the bank who doubled as one of the most devoted and thirstiest of their congregation. So, he was able to visit the woman daily and withdraw a reasonable amount, without risking a call to the financial supervisory authority for suspected money laundering. She knew that the capital was being used in the service of the Lord (plus it bankrolled her weekend ragers). Allowing the money to remain in the account was not an option the receptionist considered even for a second. After all, in case of trouble, they needed to be able to take off within half a minute; withdrawing hundreds of thousands of kronor from a Swedish bank took more like half a year.
“Now that the sun is shining down on us, it’s probably not the time to be too greedy,” he mused. “Should we let the fool loose on another half-million?”
“That might be advisable,” the priest agreed. “But this time we’ll count the money for him.”
* * *
Hitman Anders was overjoyed when he learned that the congregation had brought in 480,000 kronor in just a few weeks and that they would be able to hand out half a million once again, since the priest, in all her generosity, had donated the missing twenty thousand out of her own pocket.
“You will be given a place at the right hand of the Lord in Heaven,” he said to her.
The priest didn’t bother to tell him how unlikely that was. Furthermore, David was already sitting there, according to the Psalms, in Jesus’s lap, one had to presume, since according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus had bagged the same spot.
The pastor began to consider where the money could go. Perhaps some non-profit association. But then he happened to recall something he had overheard once: “All this talk about the rainforest, what’s that all about? It sounds lovely to save a forest and, what’s more, the forests were created by God. Or maybe it would be better to find one where it doesn’t rain so much.”
The priest was no longer startled by anything that came out of the pastor’s mouth, even if Boletus edulis—the porcini mushroom—was still hard to figure out. “I guess I was thinking along the lines of saving a few more sick or starving children,” she said.
Hitman Anders was not a pretentious man. Rainforest or starving children, it didn’t matter: it was the act of giving in Jesus’s name that was important. He did, however, allow himself to reflect that the combination of starving children in a rainforest sounded extra special. But would it be possible to find such a thing in Sweden?