First, the unfortunate accident in the freezer-room: when Julius realised that the temperature had been below freezing for at least ten hours during the evening and night, he had armed himself with the crowbar and opened the door. If the young man was still alive, he wouldn’t be even close to as awake and alert as he would need to be to stand up to Julius and his crowbar.
But the crowbar safety measure was unnecessary. The young man sat hunched up on his empty box, his threatening and kicking days over. He had ice crystals on his body and his eyes stared coldly out at nothing – dead as a butchered elk, in short.
Julius thought it was too bad, but also very convenient. They wouldn’t have been able to let that wild man out just like that. Julius turned the fan off and left the door open. The young man was dead, but he didn’t have to be frozen solid.
Julius lit the stove in the kitchen to keep the place warm, and checked on the money. It wasn’t the thirty-seven million that he had hurriedly estimated the evening before. It was exactly 50 million.
Allan listened to Julius’ account with interest, while he ate his breakfast with a better appetite than he’d had for as long as he could remember. He didn’t say anything until Julius reached the money part.
‘Fifty million is easier to split into two than thirty-seven. Nice and equal. Would you be so kind as to pass me the salt?’
Julius did as Allan requested, saying that he would probably have been able to divide thirty-seven into two as well if it had been necessary, but he agreed that it was easier with fifty. Then Julius became serious. He sat down at the kitchen table opposite Allan, and said that it was high time they left the disused station for good. The young man in the freezer could do no more harm, but who knows what he might have stirred up behind him on the way here? At any moment there could be ten new young men standing there shouting in the kitchen, each one just as ornery as the one who was done shouting.
Allan agreed, but reminded Julius of his advanced age and pointed out that he wasn’t as mobile as he once had been. Julius promised to see to it that there would be as little walking as possible involved. But get away they must. And it would be best if they took the young man in the freezer with them. It would do the two old men no good if people found a corpse in their wake.
Breakfast was done with, now it was time to get going. Julius and Allan lifted the dead young man out of the freezer and into the kitchen where they put him in a chair while they gathered their strength.
Allan inspected him from top to toe, and then said:
‘He has unusually small feet for someone so big. He has no use for his shoes any more, does he?’
Julius answered that although it was clearly cold outside at this time of the morning, there was a greater risk that Allan would get frostbitten toes than that the young man would. If Allan thought that his shoes would fit, then he should go ahead and take them. If the young man didn’t object, that meant he agreed.
The shoes were a bit too large for Allan, but solid and much better suited to being on the run than a pair of well-worn indoor slippers.
The next step was to shove the young man out into the hall and tip him down the steps. When they all three found themselves out on the platform, two standing and one lying down, Allan wondered what Julius had in mind now.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Julius said to Allan. ‘Not you, either,’ he said to the young man, and jumped down from the platform and headed for a shed at the end of the station’s only siding.
Shortly afterwards, Julius rolled out of the shed on an inspection trolley.
‘Vintage 1954,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard.’
Julius did the heavy pedalling at the front. Just behind him, Allan let his feet follow the movement of the pedals, and the corpse sat on the seat to the right with his head propped up on a broom handle and dark sunglasses covering his staring eyes.
It was five to eleven when the party set off. Three minutes later, a dark blue Volvo arrived at Byringe’s former railway station. Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson stepped out of the car.
Undeniably, the building seemed to be abandoned, but he decided he should probably take a closer look before he moved on to Byringe village to knock on doors.
Aronsson stepped cautiously up onto the platform, since it didn’t look entirely stable. He opened the door and called out: ‘Is anybody home?’ Not receiving an answer, he went up the stairs to the first floor. In fact, the building did seem to be inhabited. Downstairs, there were glowing embers in the kitchen stove, and an almost finished breakfast for two on the table.
On the floor stood a pair of well-worn slippers.
Never Again described itself officially as a motorcycle club, but in fact it was a small group of young men with criminal records, led by a middle-aged man with an even bigger criminal record, all of them with ongoing criminal intentions.
The leader of the group was called Per-Gunnar Gerdin, but nobody dared call him anything but ‘the Boss’ because that’s what the Boss had decided and he was almost two metres tall, weighed about 230 kilos and was apt to wave a knife about if anybody or anything crossed him.
The Boss had started his criminal career in a rather low-key way. Together with a partner, he imported fruit and vegetables to Sweden and faked the country of origin so as to deprive the state of taxes and get a higher price from consumers.
There was a problem with the Boss’s partner – his conscience wasn’t sufficiently flexible. The Boss wanted to diversify into more radical schemes such as soaking food in formaldehyde. He had heard that was how they did things in some parts of Asia and the Boss had the idea of importing Swedish meatballs from the Philippines, cheap and by sea. With the right amount of formaldehyde the meatballs would stay fresh for three months if necessary, even at 100°C.
They would be so cheap that the partners wouldn’t even have to label them as ‘Swedish’ to sell them at a profit. ‘Danish’ would suffice, thought the Boss, but his partner said no. In his opinion, formaldehyde was fine for embalming corpses, but not for giving eternal life to meatballs.
So they went their separate ways and nothing more came of the formaldehyde meatballs. Instead, the Boss discovered that he could pull a ski mask over his head and rob his most serious competitor, Stockholm Fruit Import Ltd, of their day’s takings.
With the help of a machete and an angry shout of ‘Gimme the cash or else!’ in an instant and to his own surprise he had become 41,000 crowns richer. Why slave away with imports when you could earn such nice money for almost no work at all?
And thus the course was set. Usually it went well. In almost twenty years as an entrepreneur in the robbery business, he had only had a couple of short involuntary vacations.
But after two decades, the Boss felt it was time to think bigger. He found a couple of younger henchmen. The first thing he did was to give each of them a suitably idiotic nickname (one was called Bolt, and the other Bucket) and with their help he then carried out two successful security van robberies.
A third security van robbery, however, ended with four and a half years in a maximum-security prison for all three of them. It was there that the Boss got the idea for Never Again. During stage one, the club would consist of about fifty members, divided into three operative branches: ‘robbery’, ‘narcotics’ and ‘extortion’. The name Never Again came from the Boss’s vision of creating such a professional and watertight structure for this crime that they would never again find themselves in a maximum security prison. Never Again would be the Real Madrid of organized crime (the Boss was crazy about soccer).
In the beginning, the recruitment process in prison went well. But then a letter to the Boss from his mum happened to go astray in the prison. His mum wrote, among other things, that her little Per-Gunnar should take care not to mix with bad company in the prison, that he should be careful with his delicate tonsils and that she was looking forward to playing the Treasure Island Game with him again when he got out.
After that, it didn’t help that
the Boss sliced up a couple of Yugoslavs in the lunch line and generally acted like a violent psychotic. His authority was damaged. Of the thirty recruits so far, twenty-seven dropped out. Besides Bolt and Bucket, only a Venezuelan named José Mariá Rodriguez stayed on, the latter because he was secretly in love with the Boss, which he never dared admit to anybody, even himself.
The Venezuelan was given the name Caracas, after the capital city of his home country. However much the Boss threatened and swore, no one else joined his club. And one day, he and his three henchmen were released.
At first, the Boss thought of abandoning the whole idea of Never Again, but Caracas happened to have a Colombian comrade with a flexible conscience and dubious friends, and after one thing and another, Sweden (through Never Again) became the transit country for Eastern Europe for the Colombian narcotics trade. The deals got bigger and bigger, and there was neither need nor staff to activate the branches ‘robbery’ and ‘extortion’.
The Boss convened a war council in Stockholm with Bucket and Caracas. Something had happened to Bolt, the clumsy idiot who had been entrusted with the task of carrying out the club’s largest transaction so far. The Boss had been in contact with the Russians in the morning and they swore that they had received the merchandise – and handed over the payment. If Never Again’s courier had run off with the suitcase then that wasn’t the Russians’ problem.
The Boss assumed for the time being that the Russians were telling the truth. Would Bolt voluntarily have skipped town with the money? No, he dismissed the idea; Bolt was too stupid for that. Or too wise, however you wanted to look at it.
Somebody must have known about the transaction, have waited for the right moment in Malmköping or on Bolt’s journey back to Stockholm, knocked out Bolt and grabbed the suitcase.
But who? The Boss presented the question to the war council and didn’t get an answer. The Boss wasn’t surprised; he had long ago decided that his henchmen were idiots, all three of them.
Anyhow, he ordered Bucket out into the field, because the Boss thought that the idiot Bucket was still not quite as big an idiot as the idiot Caracas. The idiot Bucket would thus have a greater chance of finding the idiot Bolt, and perhaps even the suitcase with the money.
‘Go down to Malmköping and poke around a bit, Bucket. But don’t wear your jacket; police are all over the town. A hundred-year-old guy has disappeared.’ Julius, Allan and the corpse rolled along through the forest. At Vidkärr they had the misfortune to meet a farmer. The farmer was there inspecting his crops when the trio came racing by on the inspection trolley.
‘Good morning,’ said Julius.
‘Nice day,’ said Allan.
The corpse and the farmer didn’t say anything. But the farmer stared at the trio for a long time as they went off into the distance.
The closer the trolley got to the local steel works, the more worried Julius got. He had thought they might pass a lake on the way and that they’d be able to dump the corpse in it. But they didn’t. And before Julius had time to worry any further, the trolley rolled into the foundry yard. Julius applied the brakes just in time. The corpse fell forwards and hit his forehead on an iron handle.
‘That would have been really painful if the circumstances had been a little different,’ said Allan.
‘There are undoubtedly advantages to being dead,’ said Julius.
Julius climbed down from the trolley and positioned himself behind a birch tree to survey the area. The enormous doors into the factory halls were open, but the yard seemed deserted. Julius looked at his watch. It was ten past twelve. Lunchtime, he realised as he spotted a large container. Julius announced that he intended to go off and do a bit of reconnaissance. Allan wished Julius the best of luck and asked him not to get lost.
There wasn’t much risk of that, because Julius was only going to walk the thirty metres to the container. He climbed in and was out of Allan’s sight for just over a minute. Once back at the trolley, Julius announced that he now knew what to do with the corpse.
The container had been packed half-full of steel cylinders of some sort, each one of them in a protective wooden box with a lid. Allan was totally exhausted once the heavy corpse was finally in place inside one of the two innermost cylinders. But when he closed the wooden lid and saw the address label, he livened up.
Addis Ababa.
‘He’s going to see the world if he keeps his peepers open,’ said Allan.
‘Hurry up,’ Julius said. ‘We can’t stay here.’
The operation went well, and the two men were back under the birch trees well before the lunch break was over. They sat down on the trolley to rest, and soon things started to liven up in the factory yard. A truck driver filled the container with a few more cylinders. Then he closed and locked it, brought over a new container and continued the loading.
Allan wondered what they actually manufactured there. Julius knew it was a works with a history; as far back as the seventeenth century they had cast and supplied cannons to everybody in the Thirty Years’ War who wanted to do their killing more efficiently.
Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs. Then he announced that the break was now over and that it was time to make themselves scarce. Julius’s simple plan was that the two friends would walk the short distance into the more central parts of Åker and once there decide on their next move.
Chief Inspector Aronsson went through the old station building in Byringe without finding anything of interest except a pair of slippers that might have belonged to the centenarian. He would take them with him to show the staff at the Old People’s Home.
There were pools of water here and there on the kitchen floor, leading to an open walk-in freezer, which was switched off. But that was unlikely to be of any significance.
Aronsson continued into Byringe village to knock on doors. There were people at home in three of the houses, and from all three families he learned that a Julius Jonsson lived on the ground floor of the station building, that Julius Jonsson was a thief and a conman whom nobody wanted to have anything to do with, and that nobody had heard or seen anything strange since the previous evening. But they all took it for granted that Julius Jonsson was up to no good.
‘Put him behind bars,’ one of the angriest neighbours demanded.
‘For what reason?’ the chief inspector wondered in a tired voice.
‘Because he steals my eggs from the chicken coop at night, because he stole my newly purchased sled last winter and painted it and called it his own, because he orders books in my name, goes through my mailbox when they arrive and lets me pay the bill, because he tries to sell privately distilled vodka to my fourteen-year-old son, because he –’
‘OK, OK, fine. I’ll put him behind bars,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I just have to find him first.’
Aronsson turned back towards Malmköping and was about halfway there when his telephone rang. A farmer had just phoned in with an interesting tip. An hour or so earlier, a known petty criminal from the district had passed his fields on an inspection trolley on the disused railway line between Byringe and Åker Foundry. On the trolley he saw an old man, a big suitcase and a young man with sunglasses. The young man seemed to be in charge, according to the farmer. Even though he wasn’t wearing any shoes…
‘I don’t get it,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson and turned his car around at such a speed that the slippers on the passenger seat fell onto the floor.
After a couple of hundred metres, Allan’s already glacial walking pace slowed. He didn’t complain, but Julius could see that the old man’s knees were causing problems. In the distance stood a hot-dog stand. Julius promised Allan that if he made it to the hot-dog stand, then Julius would treat him – he could afford it – and then he would find a solution to the transport problem. Allan replied that neve
r in his life had he complained over a bit of discomfort, and that he wasn’t going to start now, but that a hot-dog would hit the spot.
Julius increased his pace; Allan stumbled after him. When he arrived, Julius had already eaten half of his hot-dog. A fancy grilled one. And that wasn’t all.
‘Allan,’ he said, ‘come and say hello to Benny. He’s our new private chauffeur.’
Benny, the owner of the hot-dog stand, was about fifty, and still in possession of all his hair including a pony tail at the back. In about two minutes, Julius had managed to buy a hot-dog, an orange soft drink and Benny’s silver 1988 Mercedes, along with Benny himself as chauffeur, all for 100,000 crowns.
Allan looked at the owner of the hot-dog stand.
‘Have we bought you too, or just hired you?’ he asked finally.
‘The car has been bought, the chauffeur has been hired,’ Benny answered. ‘A hot-dog is included in the price. Can I tempt you with a Viennese wurst?’
No, he couldn’t. Allan just wanted an ordinary boiled sausage if that was all right. And besides, said Allan, 100,000 for such an old car was an extremely high price even if it included a driver, so now it was only fair that he throw in a bottle of chocolate milk too.
Benny agreed instantly. He would be leaving his kiosk behind and a chocolate milk more or less made no difference. His business was losing money anyway; running a hot-dog stand in a small village had turned out to be just as bad an idea as it had seemed at the beginning.
In fact, Benny informed them, even before the two gentlemen had so conveniently turned up, he had been toying with plans to do something different with his life. But private chauffeur, well he hadn’t pictured that.
In light of what the hot-dog-stand manager had just told them, Allan suggested that Benny load an entire carton of chocolate milk into the boot of the car. And Julius, for his part, promised that Benny would get his own private chauffeur’s cap at the first opportunity, if only he would take off his hot-dog-stand chef’s hat and leave the stand because it was time for them to be on their way.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 5