The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

by Jonas Jonasson

  Holger One kissed his Celestine on the cheek. Then he asked his brother to serve him a double whisky. No, a triple. He needed to throw it back, make sure that none of his internal organs had switched places, gather his thoughts and be left alone for a while. He promised to explain after that.

  Holger Two did as One asked, and then he departed with the others, leaving his brother alone with the whisky, the pillows and the crate.

  The angry young woman took the opportunity to check if there was any sort of fuss under way out on the street as a result of the occupation. There was not. And that wasn’t so strange. For one thing, they lived on a road that saw little traffic at the edge of an industrial area, with only a scrapyard for a neighbour. For another, just because there was a truck with slashed tyres sitting in a driveway, that didn’t mean it wasn’t clear to everyone that there was an occupation going on.

  An occupation that no one cared about was, of course, not worthy of the name. The angry young woman decided to give things a shove in the right direction.

  She made some calls.

  First to Dagens Nyheter, then to Radio Sörmland, and finally to Södermanland News. At DN she was met with a yawn. From a Stockholm perspective, Gnesta is practically the other side of the world. At Radio Sörmland in Eskilstuna, they transferred her call to Nyköping, where they asked Celestine to call again after lunch. Södermanland News appeared the most interested. Until they realized that the action wasn’t a police matter.

  ‘Can one even define your occupation as an occupation, if no one on the outside considers anything to be occupied?’ said the philosophically inclined (and possibly lazy) editor of the paper.

  The angry young woman told all three, in turn, to go to hell. Whereupon she called the police. A poor operator at an exchange in Sundsvall answered:

  ‘Police, how may I be of service?’

  ‘Hello, you cop bastard,’ said the angry young woman. ‘We’re going to crush the mercenary capitalist society. The power will return to the people!’

  ‘What is this in reference to?’ wondered the frightened operator, who was in no way a police officer.

  ‘That’s what I’m about to tell you, you old bitch. We have occupied half of Gnesta. And if our demands are not met . . .’

  At this point, the angry young woman lost her train of thought. Where had she got ‘half of Gnesta’ from? And what were their demands? And what were they going to do if their demands weren’t met?

  ‘Half of Gnesta?’ said the operator. ‘Let me transfer—’

  ‘Fredsgatan 5,’ said the angry young woman. ‘Are you deaf?’

  ‘Why are you occupying . . . Who are you, by the way?’

  ‘The hell with that. If our demands aren’t met we will jump from the roof one by one until our blood is flowing through the whole town.’

  The question is which one of them was more surprised by what Celestine had just said: the operator or Celestine herself?

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ said the operator. ‘Stay on the line and I’ll transfer you to—’

  This was as far as she got before the angry young woman hung up. It seemed likely that her message to the police had got through. Furthermore, her words hadn’t come out exactly as the angry young woman had intended, or to the extent she had intended.

  Oh well, now the occupation was for real, and it felt good.

  At that moment, Nombeko knocked on Celestine’s door. Holger One had drained his double or triple whisky and collected himself. Now he had something to say. Celestine was welcome to come to the warehouse, and she could feel free to grab the potter on the way.

  ‘I know what’s in the crate,’ Holger One began.

  Nombeko, who understood most things, could not understand this.

  ‘How could you know that?’ she said. ‘You fall in through the roof and suddenly you say you know something you didn’t know for seven years. Did you go to Heaven and come back? And if you did, who did you talk to?’

  ‘Shut up, you goddamned cleaning woman,’ Holger One said, whereupon Nombeko immediately realized that One had been in direct contact with the Mossad, or else he had run into the engineer on his trip to Heaven. The only thing that suggested it wasn’t the latter was that the engineer was probably spending his time somewhere else.

  Holger One continued his story, explaining that he had been sitting all by himself at the office even though he had been ordered to go home, when a man from a foreign intelligence agency had stepped through the door and demanded to be taken to Nombeko.

  ‘Or the cleaning woman?’ said Nombeko.

  With a pistol, the man had forced Holger into the only free helicopter and ordered him to fly it to Gnesta.

  ‘Does this mean that an angry agent from a foreign intelligence agency might fall through the roof at any moment?’ Holger Two wondered.

  No, it didn’t. The agent in question was on his way out across the open sea and would crash into that sea as soon as the helicopter ran out of fuel. Holger himself had jumped out of the helicopter with the intent of saving the lives of his brother and Celestine.

  ‘And of me,’ said Nombeko. ‘As a side effect.’

  Holger One glared at her and said that he would rather have landed right on Nombeko’s head than on the pillows, but he never did have any luck.

  ‘It seems to me you had a little luck just now,’ said Holger Two, who was completely floored by the way things had unfolded.

  Celestine hopped into her hero’s arms, hugged and kissed him, and said that she didn’t want to wait any longer.

  ‘Tell me what’s in the crate. Tell me, tell me, tell me!’

  ‘An atomic bomb,’ said Holger One.

  Celestine let go of her rescuer and beloved. And then she thought for a moment before she summed up the situation with an ‘Oh, wow.’

  Nombeko turned to Celestine, the potter and Holger One and said that in the light of what they had just learned it was important that they all made sure not to draw attention to Fredsgatan. If people started running around in the warehouse, there could be an accident involving the bomb. And it wouldn’t be just any accident.

  ‘An atomic bomb?’ said the potter, who had heard but not really understood.

  ‘Considering what I know now, it is possible I have taken some measures that we could have done without,’ said Celestine.

  ‘How so?’ said Nombeko.

  Then, from out on the street, they heard a voice come over a megaphone.

  ‘This is the police! If there is anyone inside, please identify yourselves!’

  ‘As I was saying,’ said the angry young woman.

  ‘CIA!’ said the potter.

  ‘Why would the CIA come just because the police did?’ said Holger One.

  ‘CIA!’ said the potter again, and he immediately said it again.

  ‘I think he’s got stuck,’ said Nombeko. ‘I once met an interpreter who did the same thing when he was stung in the toe by a scorpion.’

  The potter repeated himself a few more times, and then he grew silent. He just sat on his chair in the warehouse, staring straight ahead with his mouth half open.

  ‘I thought he was cured,’ said Holger Two.

  The megaphone voice returned.

  ‘This is the police speaking! If there is anyone inside, make yourselves known! The entrance is blocked; we are planning to force our way in. We are taking the phone call we received extremely seriously!’

  The angry young woman explained to the group what she had done; that is, started an occupation, a war against society in the name of democracy; she had used the truck, among other things, as a weapon. For informational purposes, she had also called the police. And she had stirred things up quite nicely, even if she did say so herself.

  ‘What did you say you did with my truck?’ said Holger Two.

  ‘Your truck?’ said Holger One.

  The angry young woman said that Two mustn’t get hung up on the details. This was a matter of defending important democratic principles
, and in this context a tiny little tyre-slashing was nothing. And how was she supposed to know that her neighbours were keeping atomic bombs in the storeroom?

  ‘Atomic bomb. Singular,’ said Holger Two.

  ‘Three megatons,’ said Nombeko, to balance out Holger’s minimization of the problem.

  The potter hissed something no one could hear, probably the name of the intelligence service whose bad side he was on.

  ‘I don’t think “cured” is quite the right word,’ said Nombeko.

  Holger Two didn’t want to prolong the discussion of the truck, because what’s done was done, but he wondered to himself which democratic principle Celestine had in mind. Also, they were talking about four tyre-slashings, not one, but he didn’t say anything about that either. Anyway, this was a problematic situation.

  ‘It probably can’t get much worse than this,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Nombeko. ‘Look at the potter. I think he’s dead.’

  CHAPTER 15

  On the murder of a dead man and on two frugal people

  Everyone looked first at the potter and then at Nombeko, except for the potter himself, who was looking straight ahead.

  Nombeko realized that, at best, a real life with Two would be postponed once again and, more likely, permanently suspended. But now it was time to take immediate action. The mourning of that which had never been would have to wait for the future, if any.

  She told the group that they now had at least two reasons to delay the police. One was the obvious risk that they might choose to break in via the south wall of the warehouse, where they would drill or weld their way into a three-megaton bomb.

  ‘Think how surprised they’d be,’ said Holger Two.

  ‘No, just dead,’ said Nombeko. ‘Our other problem is that we have a corpse sitting on a chair.’

  ‘Speaking of the potter,’ said Holger Two. ‘Didn’t he build a tunnel he could use to escape if the CIA came?’

  ‘Then why didn’t he do that instead of sitting down and dying?’ said Holger One.

  Nombeko praised Two for thinking of the tunnel and told One that he would probably understand any day now. And then she assigned herself the task of finding the tunnel, if it existed, seeing where it led, if anywhere, and – not least – if it was big enough for an atomic bomb to fit through. And she had to be quick, because who knew when the people out there would get themselves in gear.

  ‘In five minutes we will start to break in!’ the police said into the megaphone.

  Five minutes was, of course, an impossibly short amount of time to:

  find a homemade tunnel

  find out where it led

  get skids, ropes, and their imaginations in order so that that bomb could come along on the escape.

  If it would even fit.

  The angry young woman would probably have felt something like shame if she’d had that basic capability. Her words had come out rather of their own accord when she spoke to the police on the phone.

  But then she realized that this could work in their favour.

  ‘I think I know how we can buy some time,’ she said.

  Nombeko suggested that Celestine tell them as quickly as possible, since the police might start drilling into the bomb in four and a half minutes.

  Well, the fact was, said Celestine, that she had raised her voice a bit in her conversation with the cops, even if they were the ones who had started it by saying ‘Police’ when they answered the phone. In a very provocative tone.

  Nombeko asked Celestine to get to the point.

  Yes, the point. The point was that if the group lived up to the threats Celestine happened to have made, it would stop the pigs out there in their tracks. Almost definitely. And quite thoroughly, besides. Of course, it would be . . . what was it called? . . . unethical, but surely the potter had nothing against it.

  The angry young woman presented her idea. What did the others think?

  ‘Four minutes left,’ said Nombeko. ‘Holger, you get the legs, and you get the head, Holger. I’ll help with the middle.’

  Just as One and Two had taken hold of their respective ends of the two hundred pounds of former potter, there was a ring from the mobile phone Holger One used on behalf of the helicopter taxi service. It was his boss, who delivered the unfortunate news that one of the helicopters had been stolen. Typically enough, it had happened just after Holger had gone home to heal; otherwise, of course, he could have stopped the theft. Might he be available to arrange the police reports and all the insurance contacts? No? Helping a friend move? Well, just don’t lift anything too heavy.

  * * *

  The commanding officer on the scene had decided that they would use a torch to cut a new entrance into the property through the sheet-metal southern wall of the warehouse. The threat had been dramatic, and it was impossible to know who might be running riot in there. The easiest way to get in would, of course, have been to use a tractor to tow away the truck blocking the entrance. But the truck might be rigged somehow, as might all the windows on the property, for that matter. Thus the decision to go through the wall.

  ‘Light it up, Björkman,’ said the commanding officer.

  At that instant, they caught sight of a person behind the curtain in one of the broken windows in the attic of the condemned building. He could hardly be seen, but he could be heard:

  ‘You’ll never get us! If you break in we’ll jump one by one! Do you hear me?’ said Holger Two in as fierce and desperate a voice as he could manage.

  The commanding officer stopped Björkman and his welding unit. Who was that, yelling up there? What was he up to?

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ the officer asked through his megaphone.

  ‘You’ll never get us!’ said the voice behind the curtain again.

  And then a man stepped up; he seemed to wriggle over the edge, it looked like someone was helping him . . . right? Was he going to jump? Was he going to jump to his death just because . . .

  Shit!

  The man let go. And sailed down to the asphalt. It was as if he wasn’t anxious at all, as if he had decided to do what he was doing. He didn’t make a sound as he fell. He didn’t try to protect himself with his hands.

  He landed on his head. A crack and a thud. Lots of blood. Not a chance he’d survived.

  The break-in was immediately halted.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said the policeman with the welding unit, starting to feel ill from what he’d seen.

  ‘What do we do now, boss?’ said his colleague, who was feeling no better.

  ‘We stop everything,’ said the commanding officer, who perhaps felt worst of the three. ‘And then we call the National Task Force in Stockholm.’

  * * *

  The American potter was only fifty-two years old, and it was true that he had been pursued all his life by his memories of the Vietnam War, and pursued by imaginary pursuers as well. But since Nombeko and the Chinese girls had become part of his life, things seemed to be going in the right direction. He was almost rid of his paranoid anxiety, he no longer had such high levels of adrenalin, and his body had got used to handling the new levels. So when what he assumed was the CIA suddenly knocked on the door for real, everything happened so fast that his adrenalin levels didn’t have time to take up their former defensive positions. Instead, the potter was afflicted with ventricular fibrillation. His pupils dilated and his heart stopped.

  When this happens, you look dead at first, and then you die for real. And then, if you are thrown headfirst from a fourth-floor window – you die again, if you hadn’t done so already.

  Holger Two ordered them to return to the warehouse, where he held a thirty-second moment of silence for the man who was no longer with them, thanking him for his crucial help during their current difficult situation.

  After that, Two handed the command back to Nombeko. She thanked him for his trust and began by saying that she had had time to find and visually inspect the tunnel the potter had dug. I
t appeared that he would be helping the group not just once after his death, but twice.

  ‘He didn’t just build a four-hundred-and-fifty-foot tunnel to the pottery on the other side of the street; he supplied it with electricity and added kerosene lamps for backup. There’s a cupboard of food that would last several months, and bottles of water . . . In short, he was really, really crazy.’

  ‘May he rest in peace,’ said Holger One.

  ‘How big is the tunnel?’ said Holger Two.

  ‘The crate will fit,’ said Nombeko. ‘Not by a wide margin, but a small one.’

  So Nombeko delegated tasks. Celestine was assigned to go through the apartments, remove anything that could lead to the various inhabitants and leave the rest.

  ‘Except one thing,’ Nombeko added. ‘In my room there’s a backpack that I want to bring along. It contains things that will be important in the future.’

  Nineteen point six million important things, she thought.

  Holger One was assigned to go through the tunnel to get the hand cart that stood in the pottery, while Two was kindly ordered to transform the bomb’s container from a cosy corner back to a regular old crate.

  ‘Regular?’ said Holger Two.

  ‘Please get going, my dear.’

  The division of labour was over; everyone attended to his or her own task.

  The tunnel was a dazzling example of paranoid engineering. Its ceiling was high, and it had straight walls and an apparently stable system of joists that locked into each other and kept it from collapsing.

  It led all the way to the cellar of the pottery, and it had an exit at the back of the property, out of sight of the steadily increasing crowd of people outside Fredsgatan 5.

  It is as difficult as it sounds to handle 1700 pounds of atomic bomb on a four-wheeled hand cart. And yet, in under an hour, the bomb was on a street off Fredsgatan, only two hundred yards from the hive of activity outside the condemned building, where the National Task Force had just arrived.

  ‘I think it’s time to roll out of here,’ said Nombeko.