Chapter 16
On a surprised agent and a potato-farming countess
Agent B had served the Mossad and Israel for almost three decades. He had been born in New York in the middle of the war, and had moved to Jerusalem with his parents as a child, in 1949, just after the country was formed.
When he was only twenty he was sent on his first foreign assignment: infiltrating the student left at Harvard in the United States. His task was to record and analyse anti-Israeli sentiments.
Since his parents had grown up in Germany, whence they had to flee for their lives in 1936, Agent B also spoke German fluently. This made him a good choice for operations in the DDR in the 1970s. He lived and worked as an East German for nearly seven years. Among other things, he had to pretend to be a fan of the football team FC Karl-Marx-Stadt.
However, B didn’t have to pretend for more than a few months. Soon he was as inveterate a fan as the thousands of objects of surveillance around him. The fact that the city and the team changed names when capitalism finally pulled down Communism’s trousers didn’t affect B’s love for the team. As a discreet and slightly childish homage to one of the team’s obscure but promising juniors, B was now operating under the neutral but euphonious name Michael Ballack. The original was two-footed, creative and had a good eye for the game. He had a bright future ahead of him. Agent B felt an affinity for his alias in all respects.
B was temporarily stationed in Copenhagen when he received his colleague A’s report about A’s breakthrough in Stockholm and its environs. When A then failed to contact B again, B got the go-ahead from Tel Aviv to take off after him.
He took a morning flight on Friday, 19 August, and hired a car at Arlanda Airport. His first stop: the address his colleague A had said he was headed for the day before. B was careful to keep below the speed limit; he didn’t want to drag the two-footed Ballack’s name through the mud.
Once in Gnesta, he cautiously turned onto Fredsgatan and encountered – a barricade? And buildings completely burned down, tons of police, TV vans and hordes of rubberneckers.
And what was that, over there on a trailer? Was it . . .? It couldn’t be. It was quite simply not possible. And yet, wasn’t it . . .?
Suddenly she was just standing there, next to B.
‘Hi there, Agent,’ said Nombeko. ‘Everything all right?’
She hadn’t even been surprised when she caught sight of him just outside the barricades, looking at the trailer with the bomb she had come to fetch. Because why wouldn’t the agent be standing there just then, when everything else that couldn’t possibly be happening was?
Agent B released his gaze from the bomb, turned his head, and instead caught sight of – the cleaning woman! First the stolen crate on a trailer and now its thief. What was going on?
Nombeko felt remarkably calm. She realized that the agent was both at a loss and without a chance. There were at least fifty police officers in the immediate vicinity, and surely two hundred other people, including half of the Swedish media.
‘Beautiful sight, isn’t it?’ she said, nodding at the scorched crate.
B didn’t answer.
Holger Two came up beside Nombeko. ‘Holger,’ he said, extending his hand on a sudden impulse.
B looked at it but didn’t take it. Instead he turned to Nombeko.
‘Where is my colleague?’ he said. ‘In the wreckage in there?’
‘No. Last I heard he was on his way to Tallinn. But I don’t know if he arrived.’
‘Tallinn?’
‘If he arrived,’ said Nombeko, signalling to the angry young woman to back up the car.
While Holger Two hooked up the trailer to the car, Nombeko excused herself to the agent. She had some things to do, and now she had to leave with her friends. They could talk more next time they met. If they should have the misfortune to run into each other again.
‘Goodbye, Agent,’ said Nombeko, getting into the back seat next to her Two.
Agent B didn’t answer, but he did think. What he thought while the car and trailer rolled away was: Tallinn?
* * *
B stood there on Fredsgatan, thinking about what had happened, while Celestine drove north out of Gnesta, with One next to her and Two and Nombeko in continual discussions in the back. They were about to run out of petrol. The angry young woman complained that the stingy goddamn f*cking bastard they’d stolen the car from hadn’t even filled it up first. And then she turned off at the first service station.
After refuelling, One took Celestine’s place behind the wheel; there were, after all, no more fences to break through in a rage. Nombeko had encouraged the change of driver, because it was bad enough that they were driving around with an atomic bomb on an overloaded trailer pulled by a stolen car. They might as well have a licensed driver.
Holger One continued driving north.
‘Where are you going, dear?’ said the angry young woman.
‘I don’t know,’ said Holger One. ‘I’ve never known.’
Celestine thought. Should they maybe . . . despite all the . . .?
‘Norrt?lje?’ she said.
Nombeko interrupted the conversation from the back seat. She had heard something in Celestine’s voice that indicated Norrt?lje was something more than just one town among many.
‘Why Norrt?lje?’
Celestine explained that her grandmother lived there. A class traitor, difficult to tolerate. But with things the way they were . . . The angry young woman could probably manage a night in her grandmother’s company, if the others could. Incidentally, she grew potatoes, and the least she could do was dig up a few tubers and offer them some food.
Nombeko asked Celestine to tell her more about this lady, and she was surprised by the long and relatively clear answer.
The fact was, Celestine hadn’t seen her grandmother in more than seven years. And in that time, they hadn’t spoken to each other even once. But she had spent her childhood summers at her grandmother’s farm, which was called Sj?lida, and they’d had a . . . good . . . time together there (that ‘good’ was hard to get out, because Celestine’s general attitude was that nothing was good).
She went on, saying that she had become politically active in her teens. She considered herself to be living in a mercenary society where the rich just got richer, while she herself just got poorer because her father withheld her allowance as long as she refused to do what he and her mother said (such as stop calling them capitalist pigs at breakfast every morning, for instance).
At fifteen, she had joined the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (The Revolutionaries), partly because of the bit in parentheses; she was drawn to this even if she didn’t know what kind of revolution she wanted, from what to what. But she also joined because being a Marxist-Leninist was starting to be so hopelessly out. The Left of the 1960s had been replaced by a 1980s right wing that had gone so far as to invent their own May Day, even if those cowards had picked the fourth of October instead.
Being both out of style and a rebel was what Celestine liked best, and furthermore, it was a combination that represented the opposite of everything her father stood for. He was a bank manager, and thus a Fascist. Celestine daydreamed of how she and her friends would shove their way into her father’s bank with their red flags, demanding not only Celestine’s allowance but also retroactive allowances with interest, going back to when it had first been withheld.
But when she happened to suggest that MLCP(R)’s local chapter ought to go to the Gnesta branch of Handelsbanken for the aforementioned reasons, she was first booed, then harassed and finally kicked out. The party was too busy giving support to Comrade Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Independence had now been won there. All that was left was to fight the one-party state. With this in mind, they were not currently interested in robbing Swedish banks of members’ weekly allowances. Celestine was called a dyke by the chairperson of the local chapter and was shown the door (at the time, homosexuality was the next-worst thing there was, according to the Marxist-Leninists).
All that the kicked-out and extremely angry young Celestine could do was concentrate on graduating from school with the worst possible grades in every subject, for this was what she was actively working on in protest against her parents. For instance, she wrote her short English essay in German and claimed in a history exam that the Bronze Age began on 14 February 1972.
Right after her last day of school, she placed her final grades on her father’s desk, whereupon she said farewell and moved in with her grandmother in Roslagen. Her mother and father let it happen, thinking that she would probably come back and it didn’t matter if it took a month or two. After all, her absolute rock-bottom grades from school weren’t enough for the more advanced lines of study at gymnasium. Or any gymnasium line at all.
Her grandmother had just turned sixty and worked hard on the potato farm she had inherited from her parents. The girl helped as much as she could; she liked the old woman as much as she had during her childhood summers. Until the old woman dropped a bombshell (if Nombeko could forgive the expression). One evening, before the fire, Grandma said that she was actually a countess. Celestine had had no idea. So deceitful!
‘How so?’ Nombeko was genuinely curious.
‘Surely you don’t think I sit around fraternizing with the oppressors?’ Celestine said, once again in the spirit Nombeko knew so well.
‘But she was your grandma! And still is, as far as I understand it.’
Celestine replied that Nombeko just didn’t understand, and that this was all she had to say on the matter. Anyway, she had packed her bags the next day and left. She had had nowhere to go and spent a few nights sleeping in a boiler room. She went to her father’s bank to demonstrate. Met Holger One, a republican and the son of a junior postal clerk who had been driven by passion and died for his cause. Things couldn’t have turned out better. It was love at first sight.
‘And yet you’re prepared to go back to your grandma?’ said Nombeko.
‘Well, shit, why don’t you think of a better idea? We’re towing a f*cking bomb. I would personally much rather go to Drottningholm and set this f*cker off outside the palace. At least I’d die with a little dignity.’
Nombeko pointed out that they didn’t need to go to the king’s palace twenty-five miles away to wipe out the monarchy and everything else besides; they could do it from a distance. But she didn’t recommend it. Rather, she praised Celestine for her idea about her grandmother.
‘To Norrt?lje,’ she said, returning to her conversation with Holger Two.
Two and Nombeko were trying to clean up after the group to make it hard for Agent B to find them again, although who had found whom this last time round?
One must immediately quit his job in Bromma. And he could never go back to his listed address in Blackeberg. Quite simply, he would follow his brother’s example and make sure to exist as little as possible.
The part about ceasing to exist ought to go for Celestine, too, but she refused. There was another parliamentary election coming up in the autumn, and a vote on EU membership after that. Without her own address, no ballots, and with no ballots she could not practise the civil duty of voting for the ‘Tear All This Shit Down’ Party. And when it came to EU membership, she was going to vote yes. Because she was expecting the whole thing to go to hell, and in that case Sweden should be part of it.
Nombeko reflected that she had moved from a country where most of the people didn’t have the right to vote to one where some people ought not to be allowed to. Their decision, in any case, was that the angry young woman would get a PO box with an address somewhere in the Stockholm area, and that she would make sure she wasn’t being watched every time she opened it. This measure might have been overkill, but up to that point everything that could have gone wrong had.
With that, there wasn’t much more they could do about past trails. All that was left was to contact the police in the very near future to ask for a meeting about the fact that a group of terrorists had burned down Holger & Holger’s pillow company. Prevention would be better than cure when it came to that matter. But that would come later.
Nombeko closed her eyes for a moment of rest.
* * *
In Norrt?lje, the group stopped to buy food with which to bribe Celestine’s grandmother. Nombeko thought it was unnecessary to send their intended hostess out into the potato fields.
Then they continued their journey towards V?t? and onto a gravel road just north of Nys?ttra.
The grandmother lived a few hundred yards beyond the end of the road, and for many years she had been unused to having company. So when she heard and saw a strange car with a trailer drive onto her property one evening, she played it safe and grabbed her dead father’s moose-hunting rifle before she went out to the porch.
Nombeko, Celestine and the Holgers stepped out of the car and were met by an old woman who notified them, with a raised rifle, that there was nothing here for thieves and bandits. Nombeko, who was already pretty tired, grew even more tired:
‘If you feel that you absolutely must shoot, ma’am, shoot at the people first, not the trailer.’
‘Hi, Grandma!’ said the angry young woman (rather happily, in fact).
When the old woman caught sight of her granddaughter, she put down her weapon and gave Celestine a big hug. Then she introduced herself as Gertrud and wondered who Celestine’s friends might be.
‘I don’t know about “friends”,’ said Celestine.
‘My name is Nombeko,’ said Nombeko. ‘Things have been piling up a bit for us, and we would be grateful if you might let us offer you some food in return for allowing us to sleep here for the night.’
The old woman on the stairs thought for a moment.
‘Now, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But if I find out what kind of devils the lot of you are, and what kind of food you’re offering, perhaps we can talk.’
And then she caught sight of the two Holgers.
‘Who are those two, who look so identical?’
‘My name is Holger,’ said Holger One.
‘Mine, too,’ said Holger Two.
‘Chicken casserole,’ said Nombeko. ‘How does that sound?’
‘Chicken casserole’ was the password to Sj?lida. Gertrud occasionally beheaded her own chickens to that very end, but to be served the casserole without all the trouble was certainly preferable.
As Nombeko went to prepare the food, the rest of them sat down around the kitchen table. Gertrud poured home-brewed beer for everyone, including the cook. This livened Nombeko up again.
Celestine began by explaining the difference between Holger and Holger. One was her wonderful boyfriend, while the other was a complete waste of time. With her back to the angry young woman, Nombeko said she was glad Celestine saw it that way, because then there would never be any reason to swap.
But things became trickier when they got to how they had ended up at Sj?lida, how long they planned to stay and why they were driving around with a crate on a trailer. Gertrud’s tone grew sharper, and she said that if they were up to something fishy they could do it somewhere else. Celestine was always welcome, but if this were the case the others were not.
‘Let’s talk about it during dinner,’ Nombeko suggested.
Two glasses of beer later, the casserole was ready to be served. The old woman had warmed to them; even more so after she took her first bite. But now it was time for her to hear how things stood.
‘Don’t let the good food stop us talking,’ said Gertrud.
Nombeko thought about potential strategies. The easiest thing to do, of course, would be to fill the old woman with lies and then try to keep those lies alive as long as possible.
But with Holger One and the angry young woman in the way . . . how long would it take before one of their tongues slipped? A week? A day? Fifteen minutes? And the old woman, who might resemble her granddaughter in all imaginable irascible ways, what would she do then? With or without a moose-hunting rifle?
Holger Two looked nervously at his Nombeko. She wasn’t planning to tell her, was she?
Nombeko smiled back. This would all work itself out. From a purely statistical angle, the chances of it working out were good – given everything that had happened so far, maybe they were out of the woods now. Despite the fact that they were sitting in the midst of them.
‘Well?’ said Gertrud.
Nombeko asked if their hostess might be open to a little business deal.
‘I will tell you the whole story, from beginning to end. As a result, I’m pretty sure you’ll throw us out, even if we would really like to stay for a while. But to thank me for my honesty, you let us stay overnight. What do you say? Have some more casserole, by the way. Shall I refill your glass?’
Gertrud nodded and said that she would consider agreeing to this arrangement, provided that they stuck to the truth. She didn’t want to hear any lies.
‘No lies,’ Nombeko promised. ‘Let’s get going.’
So she did.
She gave the short version of the whole story from Pelindaba on. Plus the story of how Holger and Holger had become Holger & Holger. And the atomic bomb, which had originally been meant to protect South Africa from all the world’s evil Communists and had later been on its way to Jerusalem as protection against all the equally evil Arabs, and which had ended up in Sweden instead, as protection against absolutely nothing (Norwegians, Danes and Finns weren’t generally considered sufficiently evil), and had gone to a warehouse in Gnesta that had unfortunately burned down.
And now, the very unfortunate fact was that the bomb was on the trailer and the group needed somewhere to stay while waiting for the country’s prime minister to have enough sense to answer their calls. They were not wanted by the police, although there were reasons why they should have been. On the other hand, they’d happened to annoy a foreign nation’s security service along the way.
When Nombeko was finished, everyone waited for their hostess’s judgement.
‘Well,’ she said when she had finished thinking, ‘you can’t leave the bomb right outside the door like that. Make sure to move it to the back of the potato truck behind the house and then put the whole thing in the barn so none of us will be harmed if it should go off.’
‘But that probably won’t help—’ Holger One had time to say before Nombeko cut him off.
‘You have been admirably quiet ever since we got here. Please keep it up.’
Gertrud didn’t know what a security service was, but it sounded safe. And since the police weren’t on their heels, she thought they could stay for a while or two, in return for a chicken casserole now and again. Or a roast rabbit.
Nombeko promised Gertrud both casserole and rabbit at least once a week if she didn’t make them go. Holger Two, who, unlike One, wasn’t forbidden to speak, thought he should guide the conversation away from bombs and Israelis before the old woman had time to change her mind.
‘What is your story, ma’am, if I may ask?’ he said.
‘My story?’ said Gertrud. ‘Oh, goodness me.’
* * *
Gertrud started by telling them that she really was a countess, plus a grandchild of the Finnish baron, marshal and national hero Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim.
‘Ugh,’ said Holger One.
‘As you’ve been told, your most important job this evening is to keep your mouth shut,’ said his brother. ‘Please go on, Gertrud.’
Well, Gustaf Mannerheim went to Russia early in his career, and there he swore eternal allegiance to the Russian tsar. This was a promise he kept for the most part, until it became irrelevant once the Bolsheviks killed the tsar and his entire family in July 1918.
‘Good,’ said Holger One.
‘I said be quiet!’ said his brother. ‘Please go on, Gertrud.’
Well, to cut a long story short, Gustaf had made himself an exceptional military career. And more besides. He rode to China and back as the tsar’s spy, he felled tigers whose jaws could swallow a man whole, he met the Dalai Lama, and he became the commander of an entire regiment.
But his love life wasn’t as grand as his career. Yes, he had married a beautiful Russian-Serbian woman of high birth, and they had one daughter and then another. They also had a son just before the turn of the century, but the official word was that the boy was stillborn. Then, when Gustaf’s wife converted to Catholicism and left to become a nun in England, their chances of having more children together decreased dramatically.
Gustaf became depressed and got his mind off things by taking part in the Russo-Japanese war where, of course, he became a hero and was awarded the Cross of St George for extraordinary bravery on the battlefield.
But the thing was, Gertrud knew that the stillborn boy hadn’t been stillborn at all. This was just something the nun-to-be had told her constantly absent husband. Instead the little boy was sent to Helsinki and placed in a Finnish foster home with a name tag around his wrist.
‘?edomir?’ the baby’s new father had said. ‘No chance. His name will be Tapio.’
Tapio Mannerheim-alias-Virtanen didn’t inherit much of his biological father’s heroism. Instead his foster father taught him everything he knew. That is, how to counterfeit banknotes. At only seventeen, the young Tapio had nearly mastered this art form, but a few years later, after father and foster son had fooled half of Helsinki with their art, they realized that the surname Virtanen was so sullied that it was no longer functional in their chosen branch.
By that time, Tapio knew all about his noble background, and he himself was the one who came up with the idea of becoming a Mannerheim again for business purposes. Their business took off like never before until the day Gustaf Mannerheim came home from a trip to Asia where he had been hunting wild animals with the King of Nepal. One of the first things that Gustaf heard when he came back was that a fake Mannerheim had fooled the bank of which he himself was the chairman.
When all was said and done, Tapio’s foster father had been seized and arrested, while Tapio managed to escape to Swedish Roslagen via ?land. In Sweden he started calling himself Virtanen again, except when it came to his work with Swedish banknotes, where Mannerheim had a better ring to it.
Tapio wedded four women in a short amount of time; the first three married a count and divorced a rascal, while the fourth knew Tapio Virtanen’s true nature from the start. She was also the one who got him to quit the banknote business before things went as they had in Finland.
Mr and Mrs Virtanen bought a small farm, Sj?lida, north of Norrt?lje and invested their criminally procured family resources in three hectares of potato fields, two cows and forty hens. Whereupon Mrs Virtanen got pregnant and had her daughter Gertrud in 1927.
The years went by, and there was war in the world once again. As usual, Gustaf Mannerheim succeeded in all that he did (except that bit about love), becoming a national war hero once again, and eventually also the marshal of Finland and the president of the country. And a stamp in the United States. All while the son he didn’t know he had pottered about a Swedish potato farm with a moderate amount of dignity.
Gertrud grew up to have about the same luck in love as her grandfather had had, in that when she was eighteen she went to a party in Norrt?lje where she was courted by a petrol-pump attendant bearing vodka and Loranga orange soda. Just like that, she got pregnant behind a rhododendron bush. Their romance was over in less than two minutes.
Afterwards the attendant brushed the dirt off his knees, said he had to hurry to catch the last bus home, and departed with a ‘See you when I see you.’
They did not, however, see each other again. But nine months later, Gertrud gave birth to an illegitimate daughter while her own mother withered away from cancer. Those left behind at Sj?lida were Gertrud, her father Tapio and newborn Kristina. The former two continued to toil in their potato fields while the girl grew up. When she was about to start upper secondary school in Norrt?lje, her mother took the opportunity to warn her about rotten men, whereupon Kristina met Gunnar, who seemed to be anything but rotten. They became a couple, got married, and had little Celestine. And would you believe it? Gunnar ended up as a bank manager.
‘Yeah, damn him,’ said the angry young woman.
‘You shut up, too,’ said Holger Two, but in a milder voice so as not to disturb Gertrud.
‘I suppose life hasn’t always been terribly fun,’ Gertrud said in summary, and she drained the last of her beer. ‘But at least I have Celestine. It’s so wonderful that you’re back, dear girl.’
Nombeko, who had spent the last seven years reading her way through an entire library, knew enough about the history of Finland and Marshal Mannerheim to point out that Gertrud’s story had some weak points. She didn’t think it was necessarily the case that the daughter of a man who had made up the fact that he was the son of a baron would herself be a countess. So she said, ‘Well, good heavens! We’re having dinner with a countess!’
Countess Virtanen blushed and went to the pantry to get more to drink. Holger Two saw that One was about to protest at Gertrud’s story. So Two beat him to it and said that he ought to shut up right now more than ever. This wasn’t a matter of genealogy but of accommodation.
* * *
Gertrud’s potato fields had lain fallow since her retirement a few years earlier. She had a small truck, her potato truck. Until now she had taken it to Norrt?lje for provisions once a month, and it sat where it sat behind the house for the rest of the time. Now they turned it into a transitional nuclear storage facility and rolled it into the barn 150 yards away. Nombeko took command of the keys for safety’s sake. The grocery shopping could be done with the help of the Toyota the Blomgrens had been so kind as to lend them for an unspecified amount of time. Gertrud no longer needed to leave Sj?lida at all, and this suited her just fine.
There was plenty of room in the house. Holger One and Celestine got their own room next to Gertrud’s, one floor up, while Two and Nombeko were quartered in the room next to the kitchen on the first floor.
Early on, the latter two had a serious talk with One and Celestine. No more demonstrations, no ideas about moving the crate. In short, no nonsense. It would risk all of their lives, including Gertrud’s.
In the end, Two got his brother to promise not to devote himself to any society-overthrowing activities and not to try to get at the bomb. But One added that Two ought to think about what he would say to their dad on the day they met again in Heaven.
‘How about “Thanks for ruining my life”?’ said Holger Two.
* * *
On the next Tuesday it was time to meet the police in Stockholm. Two had asked for the meeting himself. He suspected that he would be questioned about possible tenants in the condemned building, as part of the hunt for the terrorists who had never existed, much less died in a fire.
The solution was to cook up a believable story and let the angry young woman come along. There were risks involved, but Nombeko explained to her again and again the sort of trouble she would bring upon the group if she didn’t stick to what they had decided. Celestine promised that she would not call the f*cking pigs that during their conversation.
Holger Two introduced himself as his brother, and he also introduced Holger & Holger’s sole employee, young Celestine here.
‘Hello, Celestine,’ said the police officer, extending his hand.
Celestine took it and replied something like ‘Grmpf’ because it’s impossible to speak and bite one’s tongue at the same time.
The officer began by offering his sympathies that the entire company had burned down, warehouse and all. It was a matter for the insurance companies at this point, as Mr Qvist surely understood. He was also sorry if this incident had left Miss Celestine unemployed.
The investigation was still in its infancy; they couldn’t yet say, for example, who the terrorists had been. At first they had expected to find them in the charred remains of the building, but all they had found so far was a hidden tunnel through which the terrorists might have fled. It was all very unclear, because the National Task Force’s helicopter had happened to crash-land right where the tunnel came out.
However, a municipal official had given a statement saying that there seemed to have been people living in the condemned building. What did Mr Qvist have to say about that?
Holger Two looked alarmed, because he decidedly was. Holger & Holger AB had had a single employee; that was, of course, Celestine here, and she took care of the warehouse, administration and other things, while Holger himself was in charge of the distribution in his free time. The rest of the time, as Mr Officer perhaps already knew, he worked at Helicopter Taxi Inc. in Bromma, although he would no longer be working there due to an unfortunate incident. Holger couldn’t imagine that anyone had lived in that dilapidated shack.
At this point, in accordance with their plan, the angry young woman started to cry.
‘Dear Celestine,’ said Holger. ‘Do you have something to say?’
Through her sniffles she managed to say that she’d had a fight with her mum and dad (which was, of course, true) so she had stayed in one of the awful apartments for a while without asking Holger for permission (also true, after a fashion).
‘And now I’m going to jail.’ She sniffled.
Holger Two comforted the girl and said that she had done a stupid thing, and now Holger had been sitting there lying to the officer without knowing any better, but that it probably wouldn’t come to prison – just steep fines. Or what did Mr Officer think?
The officer cleared his throat and said that temporarily living in an industrial area was certainly not allowed, but that it had very little – though not nothing – to do with the ongoing terrorist investigation. In short, Miss Celestine could stop crying; no one need be any the wiser about this. Here was a tissue for the young lady should she want one.
The angry young woman blew her nose, thinking that on top of everything the cop in front of her was corrupt – crimes ought to be prosecuted no matter what they were, right? But she didn’t say this.
Holger Two added that the pillow company was now out of business for good, so there would be no question of any more unofficial tenants. Perhaps that brought this investigation to an end?
Yes. The police officer had no further questions. He thanked Mr Qvist and young Miss Celestine for taking the trouble to come in.
Holger thanked him back, and Celestine grmpfed once more.
* * *
After murdering a newly deceased man, escaping from the police, preventing an atomic bomb from burning, and Holger One’s being assaulted on Sergels Torg then jumping without a parachute from two thousand feet, the new guests at Sj?lida were in need of peace and quiet. Meanwhile, Agent B, at his end, was striving for the opposite.
Several days earlier, he had allowed Nombeko and her crew to roll off with the bomb, down Fredsgatan in Gnesta. Not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. An Israeli intelligence agent fighting over an atomic bomb on a public street in Sweden with fifty police officers as witnesses – no, that was not the best way to serve one’s nation.
But that didn’t mean his situation was hopeless. B now knew that the bomb and Nombeko Mayeki were still together. In Sweden. It was as clear as it was inconceivable. What had she been doing for the last seven years? Where was she now? And why?
B had checked into a hotel in Stockholm under Michael Ballack’s name to analyse the situation.
On the previous Thursday, he had received an encrypted message from his colleague Agent A. It said that one Holger Qvist (as seen on TV) had been located and was about to take him to Nombeko Mayeki, the blasted cleaning woman who had fooled them not once but twice.
He had not heard from A since. And now A wasn’t responding to B’s messages. He had no choice but to assume A was dead. Before his death, however, A had left an impressive number of trails for B to follow. Such as the geographical coordinates of the place where the cleaning woman and the bomb supposedly were. And the address of Holger Qvist’s presumed apartment in something called Blackeberg. And his workplace in Bromma. Nothing seemed to be a secret in the Swedish system, and this was a dream for any secret agent.
B had started by looking up Fredsgatan 5, which no longer existed. It had burned to the ground the night before.
Apparently someone had rescued the bomb from the flames just in time, because it was sitting on a trailer just beyond the barricades, its crate scorched. It was a surreal sight. It became even more surreal when the cleaning woman slid up beside the agent, greeted him cheerfully, took the bomb and left.
Agent B soon did the same. He bought and stumbled his way through several Swedish newspapers. A person who knows German and English can understand a word of Swedish here and there, and guess at the occasional situation. In addition, there were a number of articles available in English at the Royal Library.
Apparently the fire had broken out during a terrorist incident. But the chief terrorist, Nombeko, had just stood there calmly outside the barricades. Why didn’t they arrest her? Surely the Swedish police couldn’t be so incompetent as to pull a 1700-pound crate out of the flames and then forget to see what was in it before they let people roll it away. Right?
And his colleague A? Left behind in the flames at Fredsgatan 5, of course. There was no other explanation. If he wasn’t in Tallinn. What would he be doing there, anyway? And what did the cleaning woman know about it? The man next to her had introduced himself as Holger. That is, the man whom A had had under control just the day before. Had Holger managed to overpower B’s colleague? Had he sent him to Tallinn?
No, A was dead; he must be. The cleaning woman had fooled them three times now. It was too bad that she could die only once in return.
Agent B had a lot to go on. Some were the clues that A had given him, and some were his own, like the licence plate number of the trailer the bomb had rolled away on. It belonged to a Harry Blomgren, not far from Gnesta. The agent decided to pay a visit.
Harry and Margareta Blomgren were very bad at English and hardly better at German. But as far as the agent could understand, they were trying to get him to compensate them for a fence someone had driven through, plus a stolen car and trailer. They thought he represented the cleaning woman somehow.
In the end, the agent had been forced to take out his pistol to get control of the interrogation.
Apparently the cleaning woman and her crew had driven right through the fence and forced the Blomgrens to provide overnight lodging. The agent couldn’t work out what had happened after that. The couple’s linguistic proficiency was so poor that it sounded like someone had tried to bite them in the throat.
Anyway, there was nothing to suggest that the Blomgrens were guilty of anything except getting in the way of the cleaning woman. The main reason for shooting them both in the forehead anyway was that he didn’t like them. But B had never taken joy in killing on such flimsy grounds. So instead he shot Mrs Blomgren’s two porcelain pigs on the hearth and explained to the couple that the same thing would happen to them if they didn’t immediately forget that he had ever been there. The pigs had cost forty kronor apiece; it was painful for the couple to see them go to pieces. But the thought of dying and therefore being permanently separated from the nearly three million kronor they had managed to save up over the years was even worse. So they nodded and made an honest promise never, ever to speak of this experience.
The agent kept working. Holger Qvist turned out to be the sole proprietor of a Holger & Holger Inc., which was listed at Fredsgatan 5. A company that had burned to the ground. Terrorists? Nah. It was clearly that blasted cleaning woman, who had hoodwinked not only the Mossad but also the National Task Force. An exceedingly irritating woman. And a worthy opponent.
Furthermore, Qvist was listed as living at an address in Blackeberg. The agent settled down to observe the apartment for three whole days. No lights were turned on or off. Through the letterbox he could see an undisturbed pile of advertising flyers. Qvist wasn’t there; he hadn’t been there since the day something had happened.
Despite the risk that he might kick up some dust, B made his way to Helicopter Taxi Inc., introduced himself as Michael Ballack, a journalist from the German magazine Stern, and asked if Mr Holger Qvist was available for an interview.
No, Qvist had quit as a result of having been rather badly assaulted a few days earlier. Surely Mr Ballack had heard of the incident?
Where was he now? Well, it was impossible to say. Perhaps he was in the Gnesta area – he did own a pillow-import company; he wasn’t in active employment there, but as far as the owner of Helicopter Taxi Inc. knew he still went down there regularly on business. And incidentally, didn’t his girlfriend still live there, too?
‘Girlfriend? Do you know what her name is, Mr Manager?’
No, the manager couldn’t say. Celestine, maybe? It was something unusual, anyway.
There turned out to be twenty-four Celestines registered in Sweden. But only one, Celestine Hedlund, had been listed at Fredsgatan 5 in Gnesta until a few days earlier.
I wonder if you were recently out driving a red Toyota Corolla with a trailer, Celestine, the agent said to himself. With Nombeko Mayeki and Holger Qvist in the back seat. And a man I don’t know by your side.
The Celestine trail soon split in four directions. She was now listed at a PO box in Stockholm. Before that, on Fredsgatan. Before that, at the home of a Gertrud Virtanen outside Norrt?lje. Before that, at what was presumably her parents’ home in Gnesta. It was reasonable to assume that she would end up at one of these four addresses sooner or later.
The least interesting from a surveillance perspective was, of course, the one that had been turned into a pile of ashes. The most interesting was the PO box. And then, in descending order: her parents’ home and Gertrud Virtanen.
* * *
On questioning Celestine, Nombeko had learned that the girl had been listed as living at Sj?lida for a short time. This was distressing. On the other hand, it was unlikely that the agent chasing them knew of her existence.
The South African unofficial refugee had thus far not been excessively lucky in life, from the day she was run over by a drunken engineer in Johannesburg and on. And she would never know about the lucky hand she was about to be dealt.
Because what happened was that Agent B started by watching the PO box in Stockholm for a week, and then he staked out Celestine’s parents’ house for the same amount of time. Neither was of any use.
But just as he was about to take on the least likely place, the one outside Norrt?lje, the agent’s boss in Tel Aviv grew weary. His boss said it seemed to him that this had turned into a personal vendetta, and that the Mossad must have other, more intellectually motivated, criteria for their activities. Surely a professional atomic-bomb thief wouldn’t sit around in a Swedish forest, lying low with the bomb and everything. The agent must come home. Now. No, not very soon. Now.