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, Bj?rkman,’ 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 Bj?rkman 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. It 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.
The Holgers and Nombeko pushed from behind while the angry young woman took care of steering up front.
Their journey progressed slowly along a small, paved road straight into the S?rmland countryside. Half a mile away from the besieged Fredsgatan. One mile. And so on.
It was, at times, hard work for everyone but Celestine. But after one and a half miles, as soon as they had pushed the cart over an invisible crest, it was easier. And with that, for the first time, they were on a slight downhill slant. One, Two and Nombeko got some well-deserved rest.
For a few seconds.
Nombeko was the first to realize what was about to happen. She ordered the Holgers to push from the other side instead. One of them understood and obeyed her immediately; the other eventually understood, too, but he had just stopped and lagged behind to scratch his behind.
One’s temporary departure did not make any difference, however. It was too late as soon as the 1700 pounds started rolling on its own.
The last to give up was Celestine. She ran ahead of the bomb and tried to guide it along the right path until it was moving too quickly even for her. Then she locked the handle and jumped aside. With that, there was nothing more to do other than watch three megatons of weapon of mass destruction roll down the increasingly steep hill of the narrow country road. On one side of the crate: a lashed-down backpack containing 19.6 million kronor.
‘Anyone have any idea how to get thirty-eight miles away from here in ten seconds?’ said Nombeko as her gaze followed the runaway bomb.
‘Ideas aren’t my strong suit,’ said Holger One.
‘No, but you’re good at scratching your arse,’ said his brother, thinking that these were peculiar last words.
Two hundred yards on, the road made a slight jog to the left. Unlike the wheel-borne atomic bomb, which kept going straight ahead.
* * *
Mr and Mrs Blomgren had found in each other a person who felt that thrift was the finest virtue of them all. For forty-nine years, Margareta had been holding tight to her Harry, who held even tighter to all the couple’s money. They considered themselves responsible. Any outside observer would more likely have called them stingy.
Harry had been a scrap dealer all of his working life. He had inherited the business from his father when he was only twenty-five. The last thing his father did before a Chrysler New Yorker fell on top of him was to hire a young girl to handle the company’s bookkeeping. Heir Harry thought that this was an unfathomable waste of money until the girl, Margareta, invented something she called invoice fees and overdue interest. Then, instead, he fell madly in love, proposed and got a yes. The wedding was held at the scrapyard, and the three other employees were invited via a notice on the bulletin board in the hall. To a pot luck.
‘These hooligans will be our financial undoing,’ Margareta Blomgren said to her husband.
Harry Blomgren nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we don’t do something before it’s too late.’
Nombeko, Celestine and the Holgers went to bed. Meanwhile, the National Task Force was preparing to break into Fredsgatan 5 a mile and a half away. The woman who’d called the police was Swedish, and a Swedish-speaking man had been spotted behind a curtain on the fourth floor – the man who later jumped. A post mortem would be performed on the corpse, of course, which for now was being kept in an ambulance down the street. A preliminary examination showed the dead man to be white and in his fifties.
So there had been at least two occupiers. The police who had witnessed the incident suspected that there had been more people behind the curtains, but they weren’t sure.
The operation began at 11.32 p.m. on Thursday, 18 August 1994. The task force started to break in from three different directions with gas, a bulldozer and a helicopter. There was a lot of tension among the young men on the force. None of them had experienced a real-life operation before, so it was no wonder that a few shots had been fired in the muddle. At least one of them caused the pillow-storage area to catch fire, and the resulting smoke made it nearly impossible to operate in.
The next morning, in Mr and Mrs Blomgren’s kitchen, the former inhabitants of Fredsgatan were able to hear how the drama ended on the news.
According to the correspondent from Sveriges Radio, there had been a bit of a struggle. At least one of the task force members had been shot in the leg; three others were poisoned by gas. The force’s twelve-million-krona helicopter had crash-landed behind an abandoned pottery because it had become disoriented in the thick smoke. The bulldozer had burned, along with the building, the warehouse, four police cars and the ambulance in which the body of the man who had committed suicide was being kept while waiting for a post-mortem.
On the whole, however, the operation had been a success. All of the terrorists had been defeated. It remained to be seen how many of them there were, because their bodies had been burned.
‘Good Lord,’ said Holger Two. ‘The National Task Force, at war with itself.’
‘Well, at least they won. That suggests a certain amount of competence,’ said Nombeko.
Not once during breakfast did the Blomgrens mention that they would demand payment for the same. Instead, they said nothing. They were reticent. Almost ashamed, it seemed. This put Nombeko on her guard, because she had never met two more shameless people, and that was saying something.
Her millions were gone, but Holger Two had eighty thousand kronor in the bank (in his brother’s name). In addition, there was almost four hundred thousand in the business account. The next step would be to buy themselves free from these horrible people, hire a car with a trailer and move the bomb from one trailer to the other. And then leave. They had yet to figure out where to go; it just had to be far away from Gnesta and the Blomgrens.
‘We saw you peeing in the garden last night,’ Mrs Blomgren said suddenly.
Damn you, Holger One, thought Nombeko.
‘I didn’t know about that,’ she said. ‘I apologize, and I suggest that we add ten kronor to the bill, which I thought we could discuss now.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Harry Blomgren. ‘Since you can’t be trusted, we have already made sure to compensate ourselves.’
‘How so?’ said Nombeko.
‘“Flammable material”. Bullshit! I’ve worked with scrap metal my whole life. Scrap metal doesn’t burn, damn it,’ Harry Blomgren continued.
‘Did you open the crate?’ said Nombeko, who was starting to fear the worst.
‘I’m going to tear open their throats with my teeth,’ said the angry young woman, who had to be restrained by Holger Two.
The situation was far too difficult to follow for Holger One, who walked off. Besides, he needed to visit the same lilac bush as he had the night before. This he did as Harry Blomgren backed away from the angry young woman. A profoundly unpleasant person, he thought.
And then he went on saying what he had to say. The words poured forth, because he had rehearsed them during the night.
‘You chose to abuse our hospitality, you withheld payment from us, you urinated in our garden; you are thus untrustworthy. We had no choice but to secure the compensation you had surely been planning to evade. Consequently your bomb scrap has been forfeited.’
‘Forfeited?’ said Holger Two, getting a mental image of a detonated atomic bomb.
‘Forfeited,’ Harry Blomgren repeated. ‘We took that old bomb to a scrap dealer during the night. And we received half a krona per pound. Which was quite stingy, but still. It should just cover the costs of the damage you have caused. And that’s not including the rent for staying in the guesthouse. And don’t think I’m going to tell you where the scrapyard is. You’ve done enough as it is.’
As Holger Two continued to keep the angry young woman from committing a double murder, it became clear to both him and Nombeko that the old man and woman apparently didn’t realize that what they called scrap and an old bomb was actually a rather new – and fully functional – one.
Harry Blomgren said that there was a surplus from the transaction, however limited, and consequently the matters of the water, the broken fence and the urinating in the garden could be settled. Provided the guests urinated in the toilet and nowhere else from now until their imminent departure, of course. And didn’t cause any more damage.
At this point, Holger Two was forced to carry the angry young woman out. In the garden, he got her to calm down a little bit. She said there must have been something about the sight of the old man and woman that she couldn’t tolerate. Plus everything they did and said.
This rage was not something Harry and Margareta Blomgren had reckoned on during the previous night’s trip to and from the scrapyard they had formerly owned, and which was now owned and run by their former colleague Rune Runesson. The deranged woman operated beyond the realm of logic. In short, both of them were scared. Meanwhile, Nombeko, who never became truly angry, was now truly angry. Just a few days earlier, she and Two had found a way to move forward. For the first time there was hope; there was 19.6 million kronor. All that was left now was . . . Mr and Mrs Blomgren.
‘My dear Mr Blomgren,’ she said. ‘May I suggest an agreement?’
‘An agreement?’ said Harry Blomgren.
‘Yes, my scrap is very dear to me, Mr Blomgren. Now I intend that you, Mr Blomgren, will tell me within ten seconds where you took it. If you tell me, I promise in return to keep the woman in the garden from biting you and your wife in the throat.’
The pale Harry Blomgren said nothing. Nombeko went on:
‘After that, if you let us borrow your car for an undetermined period of time, you have my word that we might give it back some day, and in addition we will not immediately smash your coin box and burn down your house.’
Margareta Blomgren attempted to answer, but her husband stopped her.
‘Quiet, Margareta, I’ll handle this.’
‘Up to this point, my suggestions have been veiled in politeness,’ Nombeko continued. ‘Would you like us to switch to a firmer tone, Mr Blomgren?’
Harry Blomgren continued to deal with events by not answering. His Margareta made another attempt to speak. But Nombeko beat her to it.
‘By the way, Mrs Blomgren, are you the one who made this tablecloth?’
Margareta was surprised by the change of topic.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘It’s very nice,’ said Nombeko. ‘How would you like it stuffed down your throat, Mrs Blomgren?’
Holger Two and the angry young woman heard this exchange from the yard.
‘My girlfriend,’ said Holger Two.
When things go wrong, they really go wrong. Naturally, the bomb had been taken to the only scrapyard on Mother Earth it shouldn’t have been taken to – the one at Fredsgatan 9 in Gnesta. Harry Blomgren was now convinced that survival, above all else, was the most important goal. So he explained that he and his wife had gone there in the middle of the night, with the bomb in tow. They had thought that Rune Runesson would be there to receive it, but instead they were met by chaos. Two buildings only fifty yards away from the scrapyard were on fire. Parts of the road were blocked off; they couldn’t get into Runesson’s yard.
Runesson himself had got up and set off for the yard in order to accept the night-time delivery, but as things stood, the trailer and its scrap would have to stay on the street beyond the barricades for the time being. Runesson promised to call and tell them when they had been removed. They couldn’t complete the transaction until that happened.
‘Good,’ said Nombeko when Harry Blomgren had told her all there was to tell. ‘Now please go to Hell, both of you.’
And then she left the Blomgrens’ kitchen, gathered the group, and placed the angry young woman behind the wheel of Harry Blomgren’s car, Holger One in the passenger seat, and herself and Two in the back to talk strategy.
‘Let’s go,’ said Nombeko, and the angry young woman drove away.
She went by way of the part of the Blomgrens’ fence that wasn’t yet in pieces.