PART FOUR
Life need not be easy, provided only that it is not empty.
Lise Meitner
CHAPTER 14
On an unwelcome visitor and a sudden death
In the spring of 1994, South Africa became the first and, up to then, the only country in the world to develop its own nuclear weapons and then relinquish them. It voluntarily allowed its nuclear programme to be dismantled just before the white minority was forced to hand over power to the blacks. The process took several years and was carried out under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, when everything was officially finished, confirmed that South Africa’s six atomic bombs no longer existed.
The seventh, however, the one that had never existed – that one still existed. Furthermore, it would soon be on the move.
It all started when the angry young woman grew tired of never being apprehended by the police. What the hell were they thinking? She drove too fast, she crossed solid lines, she honked at old ladies as they crossed the street. Yet year after year went by in which not a single officer showed any interest in her. There were thousands of police officers in this country, all of whom ought to go to hell, and Celestine hadn’t had a chance to inform a single one of them of this fact.
The thought that she might get to sing ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ was still too pleasing for her to stop doing her job, but something really must happen soon, before she woke up to find herself part of the establishment. Just think of what Holger Two had suggested a few days earlier: that she should get an actual driving licence. That would ruin everything!
In frustration, she went up to see Holger One in Bromma and told him they had to make their mark now.
‘Our mark?’ said Holger One.
‘Yes. Stir things up.’
‘Well, what are you thinking?’
The angry young woman couldn’t say, exactly. But she went to the nearest store and bought a copy of the shitty bourgeois newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which was only there to be the tool of the powers that be. Damn them!
And then she paged through it. And paged through it some more. She found a lot of things that made her even angrier than her base level of anger, but above all it was a short article on page seventeen that really got her going.
‘Here!’ she said. ‘We just cannot accept this!’
The article said that the relatively newly formed party the Sweden Democrats was planning a demonstration at Sergels Torg in Stockholm the next day. Almost three years earlier, the party had received 0.09 per cent of the votes in the Swedish parliamentary election and, according to the angry young woman, that was too f*cking many votes. She explained to her boyfriend that the party consisted of secret racists and was led by an ex-Nazi, and that they were all crazy about the royal family!
The angry young woman felt that what the Sweden Democrats’ demonstration needed more than anything else was . . . a counter-demonstration!
The part about the party’s views on the status of the king and queen caused Holger’s anger to flare up, too. It would be so wonderful to influence opinions in the spirit of his father, Ingmar, after all these years.
‘Well, I do have the day off tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go home to Gnesta and get ready!’
Nombeko came across Holger One and the angry young woman as they were making signs for the next day’s protest. The signs read SWEDEN DEMOCRATS OUT OF SWEDEN, NO MORE ROYAL FAMILY, SEND THE KING TO THE MOON and SWEDEN DEMOCRATS ARE STUPID.
Nombeko had read a bit about that party, and she nodded in recognition. Being a former Nazi was, of course, not an impediment to having a political career. Almost all the prime ministers of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century had had that very same background. It was true that the Sweden Democrats had only received a tenth of a per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary election, but their rhetoric was based on fear, and Nombeko believed that fear had a bright future ahead of it; it always had.
So the part about SWEDEN DEMOCRATS ARE STUPID was not something Nombeko could really agree with. It was actually quite clever, as a Nazi, to stop referring to oneself as such.
Upon hearing this, the angry young woman gave a speech, the theme of which was that she suspected Nombeko of being a Nazi herself.
Nombeko left the sign manufacturers and went to find Two to tell him that they might be facing a problem, in that Two’s disaster of a brother and his girlfriend were on their way to Stockholm to make trouble.
‘Ah well, show me a peace that lasts,’ said Holger Two, without knowing the extent of the misery that awaited.
* * *
The main speaker at the Sweden Democrats’ demonstration was the party leader himself. He stood on a homemade podium, microphone in hand, and talked about what Swedish values were, and about the threats thereto. He demanded, among other things, an end to immigration and the reintroduction of the death penalty, which had not been practised in Sweden since November 1910.
Before him stood about fifty like-minded people, who applauded. And just behind them were the angry young woman and her boyfriend, whose signs were still under wraps. The plan was to break in with a counter-demonstration just as the party leader finished speaking, so there was no risk of being drowned out.
As the speech went on, however, it turned out that Celestine was not only angry and young but also in need of a toilet. She whispered in Holger’s ear that she needed to sneak into Kulturhuset next to the square, but that she would soon be back.
‘And then we’ll give them more than they can handle,’ she said, giving her Holger a kiss on the cheek.
Unfortunately, the speaker was soon finished with what he had to say. The audience started drifting in various directions. Holger One felt that he had to act alone, and he tore the protective paper off the first sign to reveal SWEDEN DEMOCRATS ARE STUPID. He really would have preferred SEND THE KING TO THE MOON, but he would have to make do. Plus, this one was Celestine’s favourite.
The sign had not been exposed for more than a few seconds before two young Sweden Democrats caught sight of it. They were not pleased.
Even though both of them were on disability benefits, they ran up to Holger, tore the sign from his hands and tried to rip it to pieces. When this didn’t work, one of them started to bite the sign, thus suggesting that the wording on the sign had some basis in reality.
When even this did not attain the desired result, the other one began to hit Holger over the head with the aforementioned sign until it broke in half. After that they jumped on him in their black boots until they grew tired. The thoroughly jumped-upon Holger remained on the ground, but he had enough strength to whimper ‘Vive la République’ at the men, who immediately felt provoked again. Not that they understood what Holger had said, but he’d said something, and for that he deserved another beating.
When they had finished assault number two, they decided to get rid of the wreckage. They dragged Holger by the hair and one arm all the way across the square and into the subway system. There they tossed him on the ground before the turnstile guard and started on assault number three, which consisted of even more kicking, along with the suggestion that Holger, who could no longer move, ought to crawl down into the subway and never again show his ugly mug above ground.
‘Vive la République,’ the beaten but valiant Holger repeated as the men walked away mumbling, ‘F*cking foreigners.’
Holger lay where he was, but then he was helped to his feet by a reporter from Swedish Television, who was there with a cameraman to do a segment on marginal extreme-right parties with wind in their sails.
The reporter asked who Holger was and which organization he represented. The completely ruined and confused victim said that he was Holger Qvist from Blackeberg and that he represented all the citizens of this country who suffered under the yoke of the monarchy.
‘So you’re a republican?’ said the reporter.
‘Vive la République,’ said Holger for the third time in four minutes.
The angry young woman had done her business and come back out of Kulturhuset, but she didn’t find her Holger until she had followed the mass of people into the subway. She pushed her way through, shoved the TV reporter aside, and pulled her boyfriend down into the underworld for the commuter train journey to Gnesta.
The story might have ended there if it weren’t for the cameraman, who had managed to capture the entire assault, beginning with the very first attack on Holger, including the fruitless sign-biting. What’s more, he had managed to zoom in on Holger’s tortured face at the very moment he had lain on the ground and whispered ‘Vive . . . la . . . République’ after the two Sweden Democrats, who were both fit as fiddles and on disability benefits.
In its edited version, the assault was thirty-two seconds long and was broadcast along with the short interview on the news programme Rapport that same evening. The dramaturgy of those thirty-two seconds was so exceptional that the TV channel managed to sell broadcast rights to thirty-three countries within twenty-six hours. Soon, more than a billion people all over the world had seen Holger One get beaten up.
* * *
The next morning, Holger was awakened by the pain throughout his body. But nothing appeared to be broken, and he decided to go to work after all. Two of the three helicopters had missions that morning, and that meant a lot of paperwork.
He arrived ten minutes after the actual start of his working hours, and he was immediately ordered by his boss, who was also one of the pilots, to go home again.
‘I saw you on TV last night. How can you even stand up after that beating? Go home and rest – hell, go on holiday,’ said his boss, taking off in one of the Robinson R66s, destination Karlstad.
‘You f*cking nut, you’re just going to scare people, looking like that,’ said the other pilot, taking off in turn in the other Robinson R66, destination Gothenburg.
The lonely Holger was left behind, along with the remaining pilotless Sikorsky S-76.
Holger couldn’t bring himself to go home. Instead he limped into the kitchen, poured some morning coffee and returned to his desk. He didn’t really know how he should feel. On the one hand, he was totally beaten to a pulp. On the other hand, Rapport’s video had been an enormous success! Maybe it would lead to a republican movement all over Europe!
Holger had realized that there was hardly a single television station worth its salt that hadn’t broadcast the clip of him being beaten up. He had received a sound thrashing. And it was good TV. Holger couldn’t help but feel proud of himself.
At that moment, a man stepped into the office. Unannounced.
The customer looked at Holger, who immediately felt that this was a man and a situation he wanted to avoid. But there was no way past the man, and his gaze was so determined that Holger remained seated.
‘How may I help you?’ he asked nervously.
‘Let me introduce myself,’ the man said in English. ‘My name is something that is none of your business, and I am a representative of an intelligence agency whose name doesn’t concern you. When people steal things from me, I get angry. If the stolen object is an atomic bomb, I get even angrier. And incidentally, my rage has been building up for a long time. In short, I am very angry.’
Holger Qvist had no idea what was going on. This feeling was not unusual for him, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with it. The man with the determined gaze (who had an equally determined voice) took two enlarged photographs from his briefcase and placed them on the desk in front of him. The first clearly showed Holger Two in a loading bay, and the other showed Two and another man loading a large crate into a truck with the help of a forklift. The crate. The photographs were dated 17 November 1987.
‘That’s you,’ said the agent, pointing at Holger’s brother. ‘And that is mine,’ he said, pointing at the crate.
* * *
Mossad Agent A had spent seven years suffering on account of the missing nuclear weapon. He had spent just as long being determined to locate it. He had started by working along two parallel tracks. One was to find the thief and hope that both thief and stolen property were still in the same place. The other was to keep his ear to the ground, listening carefully in case an atomic bomb in western Europe or elsewhere in the world were to be offered up for sale. If he couldn’t get to the bomb via the thief, it might work to go through the fence.
First A travelled from Johannesburg to Stockholm and began by going through the tapes from the security cameras at the Israeli embassy. From the camera at the gate it was easy to see that it was in fact Nombeko Mayeki who had signed for her package in front of the gatekeeper.
Was it possible that it was just a mix-up? No, because why would she have come to the embassy in a truck? Twenty pounds of antelope meat could just about fit in a bike basket, after all.
If it had been a mistake, she would probably have come back when she discovered the mix-up, because in her defence it had to be said that according to the tapes she hadn’t been there when the crate was transferred to the back of the truck. At that point she was still with the gatekeeper round the corner, signing the document.
No, there could be no doubt. The secret agent from the Mossad, who had been decorated many times over, had been tricked for the second time in his career. By a cleaning woman. The same cleaning woman who had tricked him the first time.
Oh well, he was a patient man. One day, sooner or later, they would meet again.
‘And then, my dear Nombeko Mayeki, you will wish that you were someone else. Somewhere else.’
The camera at the embassy gates had also captured the licence plate of the red truck that had been used in the weapons heist. Another camera, the one in the embassy’s loading bay, had several clear images of the white man of about Nombeko’s age who had helped her. Agent A had printed out and copied several versions.
After that, he had set off at full speed. Further investigation revealed that Nombeko Mayeki had absconded from the refugee camp in Upplands V?sby on the same day she had taken the bomb from the embassy. Since then she had been missing.
The numbers on the licence plate led to an Agnes Salomonsson in Alings?s. There it turned out that the car was still red, but that it was no longer a truck but a Fiat Ritmo. So the plates were stolen. The cleaning woman was acting like a professional through and through.
All that was left for Agent A to do in the very first phase of his work was to share the recent picture of the truck driver with Interpol. This didn’t lead anywhere, either. The person was not a known member of any illegal weapons ring. And yet he was driving around with an atomic bomb.
Agent A drew the logical but incorrect conclusion that he had been tricked by someone who knew what she was doing in all respects, that the atomic bomb had already left Swedish territory, and that his focus ought to be on investigating all of the murky international trails he had.
The fact that the South African bomb was joined, throughout the years, by other nuclear weapons that were on the loose made Agent A’s job that much harder. In conjunction with the dissolution of the Soviet union , atomic bombs popped up here and there – both imaginary ones and real ones. Intelligence reports mentioned a missing nuclear weapon in Azerbaijan as early as 1991. The thieves had chosen between two available missiles and taken the one that weighed the least. For this reason, all they ended up with was the shell. At the same time, they proved that nuclear weapons thieves didn’t necessarily have an advantage over the general public when it came to brains.
In 1992, Agent A was on the trail of the Uzbek Shavkat Abdoujaparov, a former colonel in the Soviet Army who had left a wife and children in Tashkent, disappeared and then shown up three months later in Shanghai, where he claimed to have a bomb to sell for fifteen million dollars. The price suggested something that could do considerable damage, but before Agent A even made it there, Colonel Abdoujaparov was found in a wet dock in the harbour with a screwdriver sticking out of his neck. His bomb was nowhere to be found, and it hadn’t shown up since.
Agent A was stationed in Tel Aviv from 1994 on, and not by choice; it wasn’t an unimportant post, but it was much lower than would have been the case if the South African bomb incident hadn’t happened. The agent never gave up; he followed various trails from his home base, and he always carried a mental image of Nombeko and the unknown man with the truck.
And then suddenly the night before, during a temporary and far too uninspiring assignment in Amsterdam, after seven years! On the television news. Images from a political disturbance on a square in Stockholm. Members of the xenophobic party the Sweden Democrats carrying away a counter-demonstrator. Dragging him into the subway. Kicking him with their boots. And there! A close-up of the victim.
It’s HIM!
The man with the red truck!
According to the news: Holger Qvist, Blackeberg, Sweden.
* * *
‘Excuse me,’ said Holger, ‘but what is this atomic bomb you’re talking about?’
‘Didn’t you get enough of a beating yesterday?’ said Agent A. ‘Finish your coffee if you like, but do it now because in five seconds you and I will be on our way to see Nombeko Mayeki, wherever she is.’
Holger One thought so hard that his already very sore head hurt even more. So the man on the other side of the table was working for another country’s intelligence service. And he thought Holger One was Holger Two. And he was looking for Nombeko. Who had stolen an . . . atomic bomb from the man.
‘The crate!’ Holger One said suddenly.
‘Yes, where is it?’ said Agent A. ‘Tell me where the crate with the bomb is!’ Holger absorbed the truth that was now dawning on him. The mother of all revolutionary dreams had been in their warehouse on Fredsgatan for seven years without him knowing it. For seven years he had had access to perhaps the only thing that could get the king to abdicate.
‘May you burn in Hell,’ Holger One murmured, in English out of sheer momentum.
‘Excuse me?’ said Agent A.
‘Oh, not you, sir,’ Holger apologized. ‘Miss Nombeko.’
‘I’m with you there,’ said the agent, ‘but I don’t plan to rely on faith that it will just happen. That’s why you must take me to her now. Where is she? Answer me!’
Agent A had confidence in his firm voice. Furthermore, he now had a pistol in his hand.
Holger was reminded of his childhood. Of his father’s battle. Of how he himself had become a part of it. And of his inability to carry it on.
And now, the realization that the solution had been there all along.
His main concern wasn’t that there was an agent from an unknown intelligence agency standing there, ready to shoot him if he didn’t take him to Nombeko and her crate. Rather, it was that he had been fooled by his brother’s South African girlfriend. And that it was all too late now. For seven years, he had had the opportunity on a daily basis to fulfil his father’s mission in life. Without knowing it.
‘Perhaps you didn’t hear my question,’ said the agent. ‘Would a bullet in the knee help you listen better?’
A bullet in the knee, not between the eyes. For the time being, One was useful. But what would happen later? If he brought the agent to Fredsgatan, would the man with the pistol simply take the crate, which might weigh a ton, under his arm and wave goodbye?
No, he wouldn’t. On the contrary, he would kill them all. But not before they helped him load the bomb into the back of the red truck.
He would kill them all unless Holger did what he suddenly realized he had to do. Because the only thing he could do was fight for his brother’s and Celestine’s lives.
‘I’ll take you to Nombeko, Agent,’ Holger One said at last. ‘But it will have to be by helicopter if you don’t want to miss her. She and the bomb are about to leave.’
This lie about the urgency of the situation had come out of nowhere. One might even say that it was an idea. If so, it was the first of its kind, Holger thought. And the last, because now he was finally going to do something useful with his life.
He was going to die.
Agent A had no intention of letting himself be tricked a third time by the cleaning woman and her crew. What was the catch here?
Had Nombeko realized that Holger Qvist’s appearance on TV was a risk? Was that why she was in the process of packing up her things to leave? The agent could tell a Han dynasty goose from junk, and a rough diamond from cheap glass. And a lot of other things besides.
But he could not fly a helicopter. He would have to rely on the pilot – that is, the man across from him. There would be two people in the cabin: one at the controls, and the other with a weapon in his hand.
A decided to go with the helicopter, but he also decided to let B know first, in case anything were to go wrong.
‘Give me the exact coordinates of the place where the cleaning woman is,’ he said.
‘The cleaning woman?’ said Holger One.
‘Miss Nombeko.’
Holger did as he was asked. Using the office’s PC and mapping program, it took only a few seconds.
‘Good. Now sit still while I send a message to the outside world. Then we’ll take off.’
Agent A had something as modern as an advanced mobile phone, from which he sent an encrypted message to his colleague B with a complete update on where he was, who he was with, where he was going, and why.
‘Departure,’ he said afterwards.
Over the years, Holger One had racked up at least ninety practice hours with his pilot colleagues at Helicopter Taxi Inc. in Bromma. But this was the first time he would fly the machine by himself. His life was over now; he knew that. He would have loved to take that damned Nombeko with him into death – had the agent called her a cleaning woman? – but not his brother. And not the wonderful Celestine.
As soon as he reached uncontrolled airspace, he levelled out at two thousand feet, at 120 knots. The trip would take just under twenty minutes.
When One and the agent were almost at Gnesta, Holger did not prepare for landing. Instead, he turned on the autopilot, setting it to go due east and to maintain an altitude of two thousand feet and a speed of 120 knots. And then, as he was used to doing, he unbuckled his seatbelt, hung up his headphones, and crawled to the rear of the cabin.
‘What are you doing?’ the agent said to Holger, who didn’t bother to answer.
As One unlocked the back door of the helicopter and shoved it to the side, the agent remained in the forward seat; he couldn’t really turn round to see what Holger was up to without first loosening his own four-point seatbelt. But how did it work? It was difficult and there wasn’t much time, but he tried anyway. He twisted his body; the belt tightened, and the agent threatened Holger:
‘If you jump I’ll shoot!’
Holger One, who was normally anything but quick-witted, surprised himself:
‘So I’ll definitely be dead before I hit the ground? How do you think that will improve your situation, Mr Agent?’
A was frustrated. He was about to be left alone in midair in an aircraft he couldn’t pilot himself. Being talked down by the pilot, who was about to take his own life into the bargain. He was about to swear for the second time in his life. He twisted his strapped-down body a little more, tried to move his weapon from his right to his left hand, and – dropped it!
The pistol landed on the floor behind the rear seat and slid all the way over to Holger, who was standing there in the buffeting winds, ready to jump out.
One picked up the pistol in surprise and stuck it in his inner pocket. Then he said that he wished the agent good luck learning how an S-76 helicopter works.
‘What bad luck that we left the instruction book back in the office.’
Holger had nothing more to say. So he jumped. And for a second he felt a certain inner peace. But only for a second.
Then he realized that he could have used the pistol on the agent instead.
Typical, thought Holger One about himself. Usually thinking wrong, and always a little too slowly.
His body accelerated to 150 miles per hour during his two-thousand-foot journey down to rock-hard Mother Earth.
‘Farewell, cruel world. I’m coming, Dad,’ said Holger, without even hearing his own voice in the rushing wind.
Agent A was left behind in a helicopter on autopilot, headed due east straight out above the Baltic Sea at 120 knots, with no idea how to cancel autopilot or what to do if he managed to cancel it. With fuel for about 80 nautical miles. And with 160 nautical miles left to go to the border of Estonia. In between: sea.
Agent A looked at the mess of buttons, lights and instruments before him. Then he turned round. The sliding door was still open. There was no one left to steer the aircraft. That idiot had pocketed the pistol and jumped. The ground under the helicopter was disappearing. It was being replaced by water. And even more water.
The agent had been in tight corners before in his long career. He was trained to keep his cool. So he assessed his situation slowly and analytically. And then he said to himself, ‘Mummy.’
* * *
The condemned building at Fredsgatan 5 in Gnesta had been a condemned building for nearly twenty years before reality caught up with it. It started when the director of the environment department was out walking her dog. She was in a bad mood after having kicked out her live-in boyfriend the night before, for good reason. And things only got worse when the dog ran away after a stray bitch showed up. Apparently all men were the same, whether they had two legs or four.
So she ended up on a substantial detour on that morning’s walk, and before she had caught her horny dog again, the director of the environment department had managed to discover that there seemed to be people living in the condemned building at Fredsgatan 5 – in the same building where that ad from several years ago said a restaurant had opened.
Had the environment director been deceived? There were two things she hated more than anything else: her ex-boyfriend and being deceived. The combination of being deceived by her ex-boyfriend was the worst, of course. But this was bad enough.
The area had been set aside by the city as industrial zone since 1992, when Gnesta broke away from the Municipality of Nyk?ping and set out on its own. The municipality had planned to do something with the area, but other things had got in the way. But that didn’t mean people could just live wherever they wanted. Furthermore, there seemed to be an unlicensed business in the old pottery factory on the other side of the street. Why else would the dustbin outside the door be full of empty bags of throwing clay?
The director of the environment department was the sort of person who considered unlicensed businesses to be one step away from anarchy.
First she took out her frustrations on her dog, and then she went home, poured bits of meat into a bowl in the kitchen, and said goodbye to Achilles, who, like any man, was asleep after having satisfied his sexual urges. His master went off to work to join her colleagues in putting a stop to the Wild West activities on Fredsgatan.
A few months later, when the official and political mills had finished grinding over the matter, the owner of the property, Holger & Holger Inc., was notified that Fredsgatan 5 was to be seized, emptied and demolished in accordance with chapter two, paragraph fifteen of the constitution. The municipality’s obligations were fulfilled as soon as this notice was published in Post och Inrikes Tidningar, the government newspaper. But as a humane gesture, the director with the horny dog made sure that a letter was sent to anyone who might be living on the property.
The letter arrived on the morning of Thursday, 18 August 1994. Along with references to various paragraphs of the law, it said that all tenants, if any, must vacate the premises by 1 December at the latest.
The first to read the letter was the often so angry Celestine. That same morning, she had waved goodbye to her black-and-blue boyfriend, who had insisted on going back up to Bromma to work despite the previous day’s battering.
She became angry again and rushed to find Nombeko, waving the horrid letter. Callous authorities throwing average, honest people into the street!
‘Well, we’re not really average or honest,’ said Nombeko. ‘Come with Holger and me to the cosy corner in the warehouse instead of standing there and being angry about every little thing. We’re just about to have our morning tea; if you like, you can have coffee for political reasons. It’ll be good to talk this through in peace and quiet.’
Peace and quiet? When there was finally – finally – a protest to see to? Nombeko and Holger could drink their damned tea in their f*cking cosy corner, but she was going to protest! Damn the man!
The angry young woman crumpled the letter from the municipality and then, in a fury (what else?), she went down to the yard, unscrewed the stolen licence plates from Holger and Holger’s red truck, got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, backed up and blocked the entrance that connected the warehouse to the street, and which led into their common yard. Upon doing this, she yanked the handbrake, wiggled her way out through the window, threw the keys into a well, and carefully slashed all four tyres so the truck was sure to stay where it was, effectively blocking any attempt to enter or exit.
After this preliminary act of war against society, she took the licence plates under her arm and went to find Holger and Nombeko to tell them that there would be no more tea in the cosy corner (or coffee, for that matter), because now it was time to occupy their building! On the way she grabbed the potter; she wanted to gather as many people as possible. It was just too bad that her darling Holger was at work. Well, it couldn’t be helped. They must fight the fight whenever it happened.
Holger Two and Nombeko were sitting close together on top of the bomb when Celestine stumbled in with the clueless potter in tow.
‘There’s a war going on!’ said Celestine.
‘There is?’ said Nombeko.
‘CIA?’ said the potter.
‘Why do you have the licence plates to my truck under your arm?’ said Holger Two.
‘Well, they’re stolen property,’ said the angry young woman. ‘I was thinking that—’
At that instant, there was a sudden cracking sound above their heads. It was Holger One, who, having fallen at over 120 miles per hour for more than 2,000 feet, came straight through the leaky warehouse roof – and landed on the 50,640 pillows that happened to be in there at the time.
‘Why, hello, darling!’ The angry young woman lit up. ‘I thought you were in Bromma.’
‘Am I alive?’ said Holger One, touching his shoulder, which was the only part of his body that didn’t hurt after his assault, and which had now taken the brunt as he hit the roof, which immediately collapsed under his weight and speed.
‘So it seems,’ said Nombeko. ‘But why did you come through the roof?’
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 S?rmland, and finally to S?dermanland News. At DN she was met with a yawn. From a Stockholm perspective, Gnesta is practically the other side of the world. At Radio S?rmland in Eskilstuna, they transferred her call to Nyk?ping, where they asked Celestine to call again after lunch. S?dermanland 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.’