The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

by Jonas Jonasson

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.

  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 fucking 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 . . .?

  ‘Norrtälje?’ she said.

  Nombeko interrupted the conversation from the back seat. She had heard something in Celestine’s voice that indicated Norrtälje was something more than just one town among many.

  ‘Why Norrtälje?’

  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 Sjölida, 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 fucking bomb. I would personally much rather go to Drottningholm and set this fucker 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 Norrtälje,’ 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 Norrtälje, 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 Vätö and onto a gravel road just north of Nysättra.

  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 t
he password to Sjölida. 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 Sjölida, 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.