The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

by Jonas Jonasson

  However, at the Sigtuna Allmänna Läroverk boarding school he failed maths and barely passed everything else. The reason was that letters and numbers were one big mess; the crown prince had dyslexia. The fact that he was the best in the class at the mouth-organ didn’t win him any extra marks, except with the girls.

  Thanks to his mother Sibylla’s care, he still had a number of friends out there in the real world, even if none of them happened to belong to the radical Left that almost everyone else professed to be an adherent of in 1960s Sweden. Letting one’s hair grow, living in collectives and enjoying free love was not for the future king, even if he himself didn’t think the last of those sounded so bad.

  His grandfather, Gustav Adolf, had ‘duty above all’ as his motto. Perhaps that was why he kept himself alive until he was ninety. He didn’t pass away until September 1973, when the royal house was saved; his grandson was old enough to take over.

  Since square knots and all-synchromesh gearboxes are not the first topics that come to mind when conversing with the Queen of England, the young Carl Gustaf didn’t always feel at home in the smartest drawing rooms. But things got better as the years went by, mostly because he dared more and more to be himself. After more than three decades on the throne, a gala banquet at the palace in honour of Hu Jintao was a bore he could both handle and tolerate. But he would have preferred to dispense with it.

  The current alternative, being kidnapped in a potato truck, wasn’t exactly worth his time either, but the king thought it would probably work out somehow.

  If only the prime minister would chill out a little.

  And listen to what the kidnappers had to say.

  * * *

  Prime Minister Reinfeldt had no intention of sitting down on any of the dirty potato boxes. Furthermore, there was dust everywhere. And dirt on the floor. But he could listen, all the same.

  ‘By all means,’ he said, turning to Holger Two. ‘Would you be so kind as to tell us what’s going on?’

  His words were polite, his tone commanding, his irritation with the king intact.

  Two had rehearsed his conversation with the prime minister for nearly twenty years. He had prepared an almost infinite number of scenarios. None of them included the possibility that he and the prime minister might find themselves locked in a potato truck. Along with the bomb. And the king. With Two’s king-hating brother behind the wheel. On their way to destinations unknown.

  While Holger Two was at a loss for words and thoughts, his brother was in the cab, thinking aloud about what would happen next. His father had clearly said, ‘Drive, my son, drive,’ but that was it. But wasn’t the simplest thing to let the king decide – either climb down from his throne and make sure that no one climbed up in his place, or climb up on the bomb so One and Celestine could blow king, parts of the kingdom and themselves sky-high?

  ‘My brave, brave darling,’ Celestine said in response to Holger’s ponderings.

  This was the mother of all protests. Plus, it was a nice day to die, should it prove necessary.

  In the back of the truck, Holger Two finally found his tongue again.

  ‘I think we should start at the beginning of the story,’ he said.

  So he told them about his father, Ingmar, about himself and his brother, about how one of them had decided to continue fighting their father’s battle, while the other was now, unfortunately, sitting where he was sitting and saying what he was saying.

  When he had finished and Nombeko had added her own life story, including the explanation of how the bomb that didn’t really exist had ended up on the loose, the prime minister thought that this could not possibly be happening, but that to be on the safe side it was best to act according to the frightening prospect that it was happening despite that. Meanwhile the king, for his part, was thinking that he was starting to get hungry.

  * * *

  Fredrik Reinfeldt tried to take in the scene. To assess it. He thought about the alarm that would be sounded at any minute, if it hadn’t been already, and about how there would be a nationwide panic with the National Task Force and helicopters in the air, surrounding both potato truck and bomb. Nervous youths with automatic weapons would be hanging out of the helicopters, and they might accidentally fire shots that went through the sides of the truck and on through the layers of protective metal around all the megatons and petajoules. Alternatively they might just provoke the nut behind the wheel into doing something rash. Like driving off the road, for example.

  This was all on one side of the balance.

  On the other were the stories the man and the woman before him had just told. And President Hu, who had vouched for the latter.

  Given the circumstances, shouldn’t he and the king now do everything they could to make sure that things didn’t run completely amok, so that the catastrophe they were threatened with would not be self-fulfilling?

  Fredrik Reinfeldt had finished pondering, and he said to his king, ‘I have been thinking.’

  ‘Great,’ said the king. ‘That’s the sort of thing we have prime ministers for, if you ask me.’

  Reinfeldt rhetorically asked His Majesty if they really wanted the National Task Force fluttering around above them. Didn’t a three-megaton nuclear weapon demand more respect than that?

  The king commended the prime minister for having chosen the description ‘three megatons’ over ‘twelve thousand petajoules’. But as the king understood it, the damage would still be considerable. Furthermore, he was old enough to remember the reports from the last time – it was in Gnesta, if the king remembered correctly – the National Task Force’s first and thus far only task. Why, they had burned down a number of buildings while the suspected terrorists walked away.

  Nombeko said that she had read something about that, too.

  That settled it. The prime minister took out his phone and called the on-duty head of security to say that a matter of national interest had come up, that both he and the king were doing well, that the banquet dinner should be held as planned, and that this matter was to be blamed for the heads of both state and government having become indisposed. Beyond that, the head of security was to do nothing except await further orders.

  The head of security on duty was sweating with anxiety. Fortunately his boss, the director of Säpo, the security service, was also invited to the banquet and was currently standing beside his subordinate, ready to take over. He was just as nervous, as it happened.

  Maybe that was why the director of Säpo led off with a check question he himself didn’t know the answer to. His muddled reasoning was that there was a risk that the prime minister had said what he said under threat.

  ‘What is the name of the prime minister’s dog?’ he began.

  The prime minister replied that he didn’t have a dog, but that he promised to get a big one with sharp teeth and set it on the director of Säpo if he didn’t have the good sense to listen carefully.

  The situation was exactly as the prime minister had just said. The director of Säpo could check with President Hu if he had any doubts; they were with the president’s friend, after all. Alternatively, he could try ignoring the prime minister’s instructions, ask for the name of his pet fish (for he did have one of those), declare them missing, turn the country upside down – and look for a new job starting tomorrow.

  The director of Säpo liked his job. The title was nice, and so was the salary. And he was getting close to retirement. In short, he really didn’t want to search for a new job. Instead he decided that the prime minister’s pet fish could be called whatever it liked.

  Furthermore, Her Majesty the Queen was now standing next to him, and she wanted to say something.

  Fredrik Reinfeldt handed the phone to his king.

  ‘Hi, darling. No, darling, I’m not out partying . . .’

  The threat of a task force attack from above had been averted. As the journey continued, Holger Two explained their problems in greater detail. The fact was, his twin brother behind the
wheel had – just like their long-dead father – got it into his head that Sweden ought to be a republic, not a monarchy. The woman on his right was his angry and equally confused girlfriend. Unfortunately she shared his brother’s views when it came to forms of government.

  ‘For the sake of order, I would like to state that I am of a differing opinion,’ said the king.

  The potato truck drove on. The group in the back of the truck had jointly decided to wait and see. Mostly they were waiting, of course: they couldn’t see anything at all from where they sat, since Celestine had drawn the curtains of the window between them and the cab.

  Suddenly their journey seemed to be over. The potato truck stopped; the engine was turned off.

  Nombeko asked Two which of them should kill his brother first, but Two’s thoughts lay more along the lines of where they might be. For his part, the king said that he hoped there would be food. Meanwhile, the prime minister started examining the doors. They should be able to be opened from the inside, too, right? It wouldn’t have been a good idea to try this while the truck was still moving, but now Fredrik Reinfeldt couldn’t see any reason to stay in this dirty place. He was the only one who had chosen to remain standing the whole time.

  While this was going on, Holger One had run into the barn at Sjölida and up to the hayloft, where he lifted up a bucket, under which Agent A’s pistol had lain hidden for nearly thirteen years. One was back before the prime minister succeeded in figuring out how the door mechanism worked from the inside.

  ‘Now don’t do anything stupid,’ he said. ‘Just climb down, nice and slowly.’

  The king’s many medals jangled as he took a leap from the truck to the ground. The sound and the image of the baubles gave One renewed strength. He raised his weapon to show who was in control.

  ‘You have a pistol?’ said Nombeko, deciding to put off both killing him and twisting his nose.

  ‘What is going on over there?’

  It was Gertrud, who had seen through the window that the group had grown larger, and she was coming out to greet them with – as always when she wasn’t sure of the situation – her father Tapio’s moose-hunting rifle in hand.

  ‘This just keeps getting better and better,’ said Nombeko.

  * * *

  Gertrud was not happy that Celestine and the others had dragged a politician home, because she didn’t like such people. The king, however, was fine. And how! Since the 1970s, Gertrud had kept a picture of him and the queen in the outhouse, and they had been good company with warming smiles as she sat there in zero-degree temperatures to do her business. At first it hadn’t felt quite right to wipe one’s backside in front of one’s king, but the pros had won, and after a while she had grown used to it. To be honest, ever since Sjölida had acquired an indoor toilet in 1993, she had missed those times spent with Their Majesties.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ she said, shaking her king’s hand. ‘Is all as it should be with the queen?’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine,’ said the king, adding that the queen was well, while he wondered to himself where he might have met this lady before.

  Holger One herded everyone into Gertrud’s kitchen, with the intention of holding an interrogation with His Majesty and giving him an ultimatum. Gertrud asked if they’d remembered to buy food, especially now that they had guests. And the king, besides. And that other man.

  ‘I am Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt,’ said Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, extending his hand. ‘Pleasure.’

  ‘Answer the question,’ said Gertrud. ‘Did you buy any food?’

  ‘No, Gertrud,’ said Nombeko. ‘Other things got in the way.’

  ‘Then we’ll all just have to starve.’

  ‘Couldn’t we call for a pizza?’ the king wondered, thinking that at the gala banquet they had probably left the sautéed scallops with lemon balm pesto behind and were up to the poached halibut with pine nuts and asparagus.

  ‘Phones don’t work out here. It’s the politicians’ fault. I don’t like politicians,’ Gertrud said again.

  Fredrik Reinfeldt thought for the second time that this wasn’t happening. He had just heard his king suggest takeaway pizza for himself and his kidnappers.

  ‘If you kill some of the chickens, I can scrape up a casserole,’ Gertrud realized. ‘Unfortunately I sold off my five hundred acres of potato fields, but farmer Engström probably won’t notice if we swipe fifteen of his fifteen million potatoes.’

  Amid all this, Holger One was standing there with pistol in hand. Takeaway pizza? Chicken casserole? What was going on? The king was supposed to be abdicating or else going up in atoms.

  One whispered to Celestine that it was time for them to put their feet down. She nodded and decided to start by explaining the situation to her grandmother. And so she did, very briefly. The fact was, the king had been kidnapped, and the prime minister was part of the bargain. And now she and Holger were going to force him to abdicate.

  ‘The prime minister?’

  ‘No, the king.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Gertrud, adding that no one should have to abdicate on an empty stomach. Were they going to make chicken casserole, or what?

  The king thought homemade chicken casserole sounded both hearty and good. And if he was ever going to get anything in his stomach, it was clear that he himself would have to get moving.

  He’d been on a few pheasant hunts over the years, and from the start, when the king was just a crown prince, people hadn’t lined up to dress his haul for him. The young man had had to be toughened up, and now he thought that if he had been able to shoot and pluck a pheasant thirty-five years earlier, he should be able to behead and pluck a hen today.

  ‘If the prime minister will get the potatoes, I can deal with the chickens,’ he said.

  Since by that point Fredrik Reinfeldt was almost certain that what was happening really wasn’t, he walked out to the potato field, pitchfork in hand, dressed in patent-leather shoes and an Italian tailcoat from Corneliani. In any case, it was better than the alternative – getting chicken blood on his shirt and God only knew where else.

  The king was quick on his feet for a man of his age. Within five minutes he had caught three young cocks, and with the help of the axe managed to separate heads from bodies. Before doing so he had hung his uniform jacket on the outer wall of the henhouse, where the Order of the Seraphim, Gustaf V’s Royal Jubilee medal, Gustav VI Adolf’s memorial medal, the Order of the Sword and the Order of the Polar Star glittered in the evening sunlight. The Order of the Vasa, on a chain, was hanging on a nearby rusty pitchfork.

  Just as the prime minister had suspected, the white dress shirt was soon dotted with red.

  ‘I have another one at home,’ the king said to Nombeko, who was helping with the plucking.

  ‘I thought you might,’ said Nombeko.

  When she stepped into the kitchen a moment later, with three plucked chickens in her hands, Gertrud clucked happily that it was casserole time! Holger One and Celestine sat at the kitchen table, more confused than usual. Even more so when the prime minister came in, with muddy feet and a bucket of potatoes. And then the king, in a dress shirt covered in chicken blood. He had forgotten his uniform jacket and the Order of the Vasa on its chain back at the henhouse and on the pitchfork.

  Gertrud took the potatoes without a word and then commended the king on his skill with an axe.

  Holger One was displeased that Gertrud was fraternizing with His damned Majesty. The same went for Celestine. If she had been seventeen, she would have left immediately, but now they had a task to accomplish, and she didn’t want to have to be separated from her grandmother out of anger once again. Unless they were forced to blow both people and chickens sky-high, but that was another matter.

  One still had his pistol in hand, and it bothered him that no one seemed to care. Nombeko thought that what he deserved more than anything was a twisted nose (she was no longer angry enough to be able to kill him), but she also wa
nted to enjoy Gertrud’s chicken casserole before, in the worst case, life on earth was over for all of them. And after all, the biggest threat to that wasn’t the bomb, but that scatterbrain waving the weapon.

  So she decided to help her boyfriend’s brother with some logic. She explained that the pistol was unnecessary if the king didn’t run away, and if the king did run away, Holger still had thirty-eight miles to set off the bomb instead. Not even a king could run that far in under three hours, even if he had taken off all those heavy medals.

  All Holger had to do was hide the key to the potato truck. Once that was done, he would have created a balance of terror at Sjölida. No one would need to keep their eyes on anyone else. Instead, they could eat their food in peace and quiet.

  One nodded thoughtfully. What Nombeko had said sounded reasonable. Plus, he had already stuffed the key to the potato truck in one sock without realizing how clever this was. After another few seconds’ worth of thinking, he put the pistol in the inner pocket of his jacket.

  Without putting the safety on first.

  While Nombeko was talking reason into One, Celestine had received orders from her grandmother to help cut up the chicken into casserole-size chunks. Meanwhile, Holger Two was instructed to mix drinks exactly according to her instructions: a splash of Gordon’s gin, two splashes of Noilly Prat, and the rest equal amounts of schnapps and Skåne akvavit. Two didn’t really know what she meant by a ‘splash’, but once he’d decided on an amount he thought that two splashes was probably double as much. He sneaked a taste of the finished concoction and was so happy with the results that he tasted it once again.

  At last, everyone was sitting at the table except for Gertrud, who was putting the finishing touches to the casserole. The king looked at the two Holgers and was struck by how similar they were.

  ‘How can anyone tell you apart, if you also have the same name?’