The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (18 page)

Once their father was gone, Two thought about going to the authorities to let them know he existed, so that he might be able to apply to a school of higher education. And find a girl to love. And make love with. Wonder what that would feel like?

But when Two thought about it, he realized it wasn’t quite that simple. Could he even make use of the good grades he’d got in upper secondary school? Didn’t they belong to his brother? By definition, Holger Two hadn’t even finished his basic schooling.

Besides this, there were more immediate issues to deal with. Such as how the Holgers could afford enough food to eat. Holger One existed for real: he had a passport and a driver’s licence, and he ought to be able to look for a job.

‘A job?’ said One when the matter came up.

‘Yes, as in employment. It’s not unusual for people who are twenty-six years old to pursue such a thing.’

Holger One suggested that Two could have a go at that instead, in One’s name. Pretty much like the way they had done it during all those years of school. But Two said that now the king had killed their father, it was time to leave their youth behind. Two had no intention of running his brother’s errands – and definitely not his father’s.

‘It wasn’t the king, it was Lenin,’ Holger One said sulkily.

Two said that the person who had fallen on top of Ingmar could be anyone One wanted it to be, including Mahatma Gandhi. That was history. Now it was time to build a future. He would prefer to do so with his dear brother, but only if One promised to drop all of his ideas involving a change of government. One mumbled that he didn’t have any ideas anyway.

Holger Two was content with that answer and spent the next few days thinking about what their next step in life should be.

The most pressing issue was putting food on the table.

The solution would have to be to sell the table in question. The whole house, in fact.

The family plot outside Södertälje changed ownership, and the brothers moved into the back of the Volvo F406 truck.

But they had sold a cottage, not a castle, and it had, to all intents and purposes, not been maintained since Ingmar had started losing his mind forty years earlier. Holger One, the formal owner, received only 150,000 kronor for his parental home. The money would soon be gone again if the Holgers didn’t do something about it.

One wondered what Two thought the top quarter of Dad’s statue might be worth. To make sure that One never brought it up again, Two took out a chisel and a hammer and hacked it to pieces. When he was done, he promised that he would also burn the 498 remaining copies of
The Communist Manifesto
in Russian, but first he was going to take a walk because he needed some time to himself.

‘Please don’t think too much while I’m gone.’

* * *

Holger & Holger Incorporated? Would that work? A transport service? They did have a truck, after all. That was all they had. A truck.

Holger Two placed an ad in the paper for a
SMALL TRANSPORT SERVICE SEEKING JOBS
and was immediately contacted by a pillow entrepreneur in Gnesta who needed help because the distributor he’d been using until now had forgotten to complete not only every fifth transport but also every other tax payment, so he’d been forced to move into the Arnö Prison for rehabilitation. The state believed it would take the distributor eighteen months to be rehabilitated. The pillow entrepreneur, who knew the true nature of the distributor, thought that it might take longer than that. In any case, the distributor was where he was and the entrepreneur needed an immediate substitute.

Gnesta Down & Featherbed Inc. had made pillows for the hotel industry as well as various county councils and authorities for ages and ages. At first things had gone well for the company, then less well, and finally things didn’t go at all. Then the entrepreneur had fired his four employees and started importing pillows from China instead. This made his life more tolerable, but it was hard work, and he was starting to feel old. The overworked man was tired of everything, and he only kept going because he had long since forgotten that life could consist of anything else.

Holgers One and Two met the entrepreneur at his industrial building on the outskirts of Gnesta. It looked like a miserable area, with a warehouse and a condemned building facing a yard, and on the other side of the street there was a pottery factory that had been abandoned many years ago. The closest neighbour was a scrapyard; other than that, the area was deserted.

Because Holger Two could speak for himself and because Holger One remained silent on Two’s orders, the entrepreneur felt that he could trust this potential new distribution solution. The apartments in the condemned building weren’t the world’s greatest, but if the brothers wanted to move into one of them, or two of them, that would be fine. The entrepreneur himself lived in the centre of the small town.

Everything seemed to be working out for the best, but then the pension board sent a letter saying that the entrepreneur was about to turn sixty-five and thus had the right to start drawing a pension. He hadn’t thought of that. What luck! Now it was time to enjoy the life of a pensioner. Doing nothing full-time – that was something the entrepreneur was looking forward to. And maybe even some boogie-woogie? He hadn’t tried to kick up his heels since the late summer of ’67 when he went to Stockholm to visit Nalen, only to find that the famous dance hall had closed and become a Free Church.

The information about his upcoming pension was nice for the entrepreneur. For Holger and Holger it was more problematic.

Oh well, the brothers had nothing to lose, so Two decided to move forward aggressively. He suggested that Holger & Holger AB take over the entrepreneur’s entire business, including the warehouse, the condemned building and the pottery. In return, the entrepreneur would receive 35,000 kronor per month from the brothers for as long as he lived.

‘As an extra pension,’ Holger Two said. ‘We don’t exactly have any cash to buy you out with right now, Mr Entrepreneur.’

The newly minted pensioner thought this through. And he thought some more. And then he said, ‘Done! But let’s say thirty thousand rather than thirty-five thousand. And on one condition!’

‘Condition?’ said Holger Two.

‘Well, the thing is . . .’ the entrepreneur began.

The lowered price took into account the fact that Holger and Holger promised to take over responsibility for the American engineer whom the entrepreneur had found hiding in the pottery fourteen years earlier. The American had built military tunnels during the Vietnam War; he had been under constant attack by the Viet Cong and ended up seriously injured. He had received care at a hospital in Japan, become healthy again, dug his way out of his hospital room through the floor, fled to Hokkaido, hitched a ride to the Soviet border on a fishing trawler, switched to a Soviet coast-guard vessel, ended up in Moscow and then in Helsinki, and had made his way to Sweden and Stockholm. There he was granted political asylum.

But the Vietnam deserter thought he saw the CIA everywhere in Stockholm; he was a nervous wreck, and he was sure that they would find him and take him back to the war. So he went wandering around the countryside, ended up in Gnesta, happened to see an abandoned pottery, sneaked in and lay down to sleep under a tarp. It was a little more than just coincidence that he ended up where he did, because a potter was what the American was deep down in his heart. He had become an engineer and a military man on his father’s orders.

The pillow entrepreneur didn’t have much in the way of pots in his pottery; instead that was where he kept the parts of the pillow firm’s bookkeeping that didn’t do well in the light of day. For that reason he had to go there several times a week. One day, a terrified face popped up among the binders – it was the American – and the entrepreneur took pity on him. He was allowed to stay, but only if he moved into one of the apartments in the condemned house at Fredsgatan 5. If the American wanted to revive the pottery factory, that was fine, but the door to the windowless room over there must be kept closed.

With a certain amount of alarm, the American had accepted the offer, at which point he immediately, and without permission, started building a tunnel from his apartment on the ground floor of Fredsgatan 5 all the way to the pottery on the other side of the road. When the entrepreneur caught him at it, he said that he had to have an escape route when the CIA came knocking at his door. It took him several years to finish digging the tunnel. By the time it was ready, the Vietnam War had been over for a long time.

‘He’s not quite right, he certainly isn’t, but he’s part of the deal,’ said the overworked entrepreneur. ‘But he doesn’t bother anyone, and as far as I know he lives on the pottery he can throw and sell at the markets in the area. Crazy, but he won’t harm anyone except himself.’

Holger Two was hesitant. He felt that he didn’t need to surround himself with any more craziness. His brother and what he’d inherited from his father were enough. On the other hand, this arrangement would allow the brothers to move into the condemned building just as the American had done. A real house, instead of a mattress in the back of the truck.

He decided to agree to take responsibility for the nervous wreck of an American potter, so everything the former entrepreneur owned and had was signed over to One’s newly incorporated business.

Finally, the overworked man could relax! He travelled to Stockholm the next day in order to enjoy himself and bathe at the classic Sturebadet spa and bathhouse; after that he would have pickled herring and schnapps at Sturehof!

But he forgot that the country had switched to driving on the right since the last time he visited the bustling capital. He had never even noticed that the same went for Gnesta. And so he was looking in the wrong direction as he stepped out into Birger Jarlsgatan.

‘Life, here I come!’ he said.

And was immediately and fatally run over by a bus.

‘That’s really sad,’ said Holger One when the brothers learned what had happened.

‘Yes. And cheap,’ said Holger Two.

Holger and Holger went to visit the American potter to tell him about the very tragic fate of the pillow entrepreneur and to say that he was allowed to continue living there, because it was part of the agreement with the now-dead man, and agreements were meant to be kept.

Holger Two knocked on the door.

It was quiet in there.

Holger One knocked, too.

‘Are you from the CIA?’ they heard a voice say.

‘No, from Södertälje,’ said Holger Two.

After that it was quiet for a few more seconds. Then the door was cautiously opened.

The meeting between the men went well. It started off a bit hesitantly, but things went better after Holger and Holger insinuated that at least one of them had a somewhat complicated relationship with society as well. It was true that the American had been granted asylum, but since then he had not been in contact with the Swedish authorities, so he didn’t dare guess how much his asylum was worth today.

The potter could tolerate the new ownership of the condemned building; he decided to stay put, telling himself that there really weren’t enough indications to suggest that Holger and Holger were doing errands for the American intelligence agency. Actually, there were almost no indications because, no matter how crafty the CIA was, they would never think of sending two identical agents with the same name.

The American even considered Holger Two’s offer of jumping in now and then to take care of pillow deliveries. But in that case he demanded that the truck be given fake licence plates so that the CIA couldn’t locate him in the event that he should be captured in a picture taken by one of the organization’s thousands of hidden cameras, which were all over the country.

Holger Two shook his head, but he sent One out on a nighttime assignment to steal a set of licence plates. But when the potter further demanded that the truck be painted black so that he could more easily shake off the American intelligence agency along some dark forested road on the day they managed to catch up with him, Two had had enough.

‘We’ll deliver our pillows ourselves, come to think of it. But thanks anyway.’

The potter gazed after him for a long time. Why had he changed his mind so quickly?

* * *

Holger Two felt that, on the whole, life had turned out to be relatively miserable, despite the arrangement with the pillow company and the condemned house. Furthermore, he was forced to note jealously that One had acquired a girlfriend. She was crazy, too, in Two’s opinion, but then birds of a feather tend to flock together. She was a young girl of perhaps seventeen, and she seemed to be angry with everything, with the possible exception of Holger One. The two of them had met in central Gnesta, where the angry young woman had arranged a one-person demonstration against the corrupt banking system. As a self-designated representative of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, she had applied for a loan of half a million kronor, but the manager of the bank – who happened, incidentally, to be the angry young woman’s father – had said that loans couldn’t be granted via a delegate, and that President Ortega would have to come to Gnesta himself, show identification, and argue for his own creditworthiness.

Creditworthiness? How worthy was the bank manager himself, turning his back on his own daughter like this?

Thus the demonstration. Which had limited impact, because the audience consisted only of the girl’s father, who was standing at the door of the bank, two scruffy men on a bench, who were waiting for the clock to strike ten so the Systembolaget off-licence would open – and Holger One, who was in town on an errand to buy bandages and antiseptic because he had hammered his thumb early that morning when he set about fixing a hole in the floor in his and his brother’s apartment.

It was easy to see what the girl’s father was thinking. The two scruffy men were mostly imagining what one could buy in Systembolaget for half a million kronor (the bolder one guessed one hundred bottles of Explorer vodka), while Holger One was completely blinded by the girl. She was fighting for a
president
who was, in turn, fighting an uphill battle, to say the least, in that he was an enemy of the United States and most of the rest of the world.