The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

by Jonas Jonasson

  ‘Everyone who’s surprised, raise your hand,’ the prime minister mumbled.

  Nombeko went on. About Mr and Mrs Blomgren. About the diamond money that had gone up in flames. About the meeting with B outside the condemned building. About all the fruitless phone calls to the prime minister’s assistant throughout the years.

  ‘She was just doing her job,’ said Fredrik Reinfeldt. ‘Gertrud, do you happen to have a broom? All that’s left is the floor.’

  ‘“Countess”, please,’ said the king.

  Nombeko went on. About the potato farm. Two’s studies. The idiot’s interference in the dissertation defence.

  ‘The idiot?’ said B.

  ‘That’s probably me,’ said Holger One, feeling like there might possibly be something to that name.

  Nombeko went on. About the magazine Swedish Politics.

  ‘That was a good magazine,’ said the prime minister. ‘For one issue. Which of you wrote the editorial in the second issue? No, wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.’

  By now, Nombeko had nearly finished. By way of conclusion, she explained her connection with Hu Jintao. Her plan to attract his attention outside the palace. And how Holger One – the original idiot – then kidnapped them all.

  Agent B drained his third schnapps and felt that he was sufficiently anaesthetized for the time being. Then he added his own story, from his birth onwards. After his retirement, this matter had continued to bother him. So he had travelled here. Not at all on Prime Minister Olmert’s orders. Completely on his own initiative. And boy, did he regret it now.

  ‘What a mess!’ said the king with a laugh.

  The prime minister had to admit that His Majesty had summed things up quite well.

  * * *

  Around midnight, the director of Säpo was on the verge of not being able to take it much longer.

  The king and the prime minister were still missing. According to the president of the People’s Republic of China, they were in good hands, but wasn’t that what he thought about the people of Tibet?

  Of more significance, of course, was that the prime minister had called and said that everything was fine, and that everyone should lie low. But that had been several hours ago. Now he wasn’t answering his phone, and it was impossible to search for the phone’s signal. Furthermore, the king didn’t have a phone.

  The gala banquet was long since over, and rumours were spreading. Journalists were calling to ask why the hosts hadn’t been there. The court’s and the government’s press staffs had replied that the king and the prime minister had unfortunately and independently become indisposed, but that there was no danger to either of them.

  Unfortunately it is not in journalists’ genetic makeup to believe this sort of coincidence. The director of Säpo could sense that they were all champing at the bit. Unlike the director of Säpo himself, who was just sitting around, twiddling his thumbs. Because what on earth was he supposed to do?

  He had made a few discreet overtures, such as speaking to the director of the National Task Force. The director of Säpo didn’t say why he was calling; he just said there might be a delicate situation brewing and that there might be cause for a break-in-and-rescue type of action. Like the one in Gnesta a decade earlier. Sweden was a peaceful country. One task force action every ten or fifteen years was about what one could expect.

  The director of the National Task Force had proudly stated that Gnesta had been his first and thus far only job and that he and his group were at the ready, as always.

  The director of Säpo hadn’t been around back when parts of Gnesta had burned down. And he hadn’t read the reports about it. He had confidence in the National Task Force. Although it was concerning that the most basic prerequisite for a successful rescue of the king and the prime minister was not at hand.

  Namely, the knowledge of where the hell they were.

  * * *

  B asked for a fourth schnapps. And a fifth. The agent didn’t know much about Swedish prisons, but he was pretty sure that free drink wasn’t part of the package. Might as well help himself while he still could.

  The king expressed approval of the pace the agent was setting.

  ‘Why, you caught up with and surpassed me in forty minutes,’ he said.

  The prime minister looked up from the floor he was in the process of cleaning. You didn’t just sit around joking with a foreign nation’s intelligence service like that.

  Countess Virtanen was radiant in the king’s company. The fact that he was a king was a good start, plus he chopped chickens’ heads off like a real man, he knew who Mannerheim was, he recognized the marshal’s shot, and he had hunted moose with Urho Kekkonen. And he called her ‘the countess’. It was as if someone was finally noticing her, as if she had become a Finnish Mannerheim again after having been a potato-farming Virtanen for her entire adult life.

  No matter what happened when the Mannerheim schnapps left her body and the king had gone – Gertrud made up her mind then and there on the sofa with His Majesty and the infinitely weary agent: from now on, she would be a countess. To the fullest!

  Holger One had completely lost his footing. He realized that what had kept his convictions about a republic alive all these years was his mental image of Gustaf V with his dress uniform, medals, monocle and silver cane. This was also the picture that he, his brother and his father had thrown darts at when the boys were little. And it was the image he had sold to his beloved Celestine. And she had accepted it.

  Were they really going to blow up Gustaf V’s great-grandson, as well as themselves, the brother of one and the grandmother of the other because of it?

  Oh, if only he hadn’t cut the heads off those chickens. And hung up his uniform jacket. And rolled up the sleeves of his bloody shirt. And instructed Gertrud in how to fix a tractor. And tossed back shot after shot without batting an eyelid.

  It didn’t help that the prime minister was, at this very moment, on his hands and knees to scrub a spot off the floor, having cleared the table and washed and dried the dishes. But still, this was nothing compared to the truth that had been dashed to pieces before their very eyes.

  The one about how kings don’t cut the heads off chickens.

  What Holger needed now, more than anything else, was confirmation that the true faith still held water. If he could just have that, he would get Celestine on his side.

  The monarch of all monarchs in his father’s story had, of course, been Gustaf V; he was the one sent by the devil to poison Mother Earth above all others. Holger realized now that what he needed to hear was the current king’s reverence for this devil spawn. So he approached the king where he sat cooing away with the eighty-year-old woman. And then he said:

  ‘Listen, King.’

  The king interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence, looked up, and said, ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ Holger One said, making sure to use the informal ‘you’ with His Majesty.

  The king didn’t answer; he politely waited for Holger to continue.

  ‘It’s about Gustaf the Fifth.’

  ‘My great-grandfather,’ said the king.

  ‘That’s right, you all get passed down that way,’ said Holger, without really understanding what he meant. ‘What I want to know is what His Majesty – I mean you – think of him?’

  Nombeko had discreetly come closer to hear how the conversation between king and idiot would proceed. She whispered to herself, You’ve been perfect so far, King, now give the right answer!

  ‘Gustaf the Fifth?’ said the king, suspecting a trap.

  * * *

  The king let his thoughts run through the generations for a moment.

  Being head of state wasn’t always as easy as a commoner might think. He was thinking not least of Erik XIV, who was first called insane (though that was on a partly sound basis) and then locked up by his brother and eventually served poison-spiked soup.

  Or Gustav III, who went to a masquerade b
all to have a little fun – and was shot. That was certainly amusing. What’s more, the shooter’s aim was so bad that the poor king lived for another two weeks before he died.

  And above all, Gustaf V, whom Holger the republican seemed to have become hung up on. His great-grandfather had been a delicate child; he seemed to drag his feet, and for that reason he was treated with the new invention of electricity. People thought a few volts through the body would get the feet moving.

  Whether it was those volts or something else was impossible to say, but Gustaf V later guided the neutral Sweden through two world wars in a very upright manner. All while he had a queen from Germany on one side, and on the other a son and crown prince who had stubbornly married British not once but twice.

  Gustaf V may have gone a bit too far just before the First World War, when he demanded a stronger military so loudly that Prime Minister Staaff resigned in a rage. Staaff thought it was more important to introduce universal suffrage than to build an armoured boat or two. The fact that his great-grandfather had made this demand just before the shot in Sarajevo and had thus been right was something no one cared about: kings were expected to keep quiet. The current king himself had experienced this personally the time he happened to opine that the sultan of Brunei was a dependable fellow.

  Ah, well. His great-grandfather ruled for almost forty-three years and skilfully fended off all the political upheavals of the time. Consider the fact that the monarchy didn’t actually go under, even though every Tom, Dick and Harry suddenly got the right to vote and did it so badly that social democracy came to power. Instead of the revolution that was expected, it happened that Prime Minister Hansson sneaked up to the palace now and then to play bridge in the evenings, no matter how republican he was.

  So the truth was, his great-grandfather had been above all a saviour of the monarchy. But right now the important thing was handling a situation in the very spirit of his great-grandfather, with just enough determination and respect for reality thrown into the mix.

  The king understood that there was something important behind the question from the man he wasn’t allowed to call ‘the idiot’. But since the idiot in question could hardly have been born before the king’s great-grandfather died in 1950, they couldn’t have had anything to do with one another. This whole thing must go further back in time than that. To be quite honest, the king hadn’t been listening very closely when Nombeko gave her lecture; he had been far too busy with the countess. But back in the potato truck, the other Holger had said something about the twins’ father having been the one who had established the concept of republicanism in the family, once upon a time.

  To quite an extent, apparently.

  Had the twin brothers’ father had some conflict with Gustaf V somehow?

  Hmm.

  The king was taken by a forbidden thought.

  The fact was, back when Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother had said, ‘I do,’ in September 1881, the idea of marrying for love had not been invented in royal circles. Nevertheless, Great-grandfather had been hurt when his queen travelled to the warmth of Egypt to improve her health and to devote herself to adventures of the kinkier sort in a Bedouin tent with a simple baron from the court. And a Dane, besides.

  From that day on, it was said that the king was no longer interested in women. It was less clear how he felt about men. There had been rumours throughout the years, not to mention that extortion incident, when a charlatan demanded money from the king at a time when homosexuality was illegal and could threaten the monarchy. The court did everything it could to keep the charlatan happy and – above all – silent.

  He was given money and a little more money and a little more on top of that. He received help operating both a restaurant and a hotel. But once a charlatan, always a charlatan – the money always went down the drain and he always came back wanting more.

  Once he was stuffed full of banknotes and shipped across the Atlantic to the United States, but it is unclear whether he even made it there before he was back and making more demands. Another time – as the war was raging – he was sent to Nazi Germany with the promise of a lifelong monthly allowance from Sweden. But that devil groped little boys there, and otherwise behaved like the exact opposite of Hitler’s ideal Aryan male in all ways. He was thus immediately sent back to Sweden after having irritated the Gestapo to such an extent that he was very close to ending up in a concentration camp (which, one couldn’t deny, would have been rather advantageous for the Swedish court).

  Back in Stockholm, the charlatan wrote a book about his life. The whole world would know what had happened! No, it absolutely would not, thought the chief of police in Stockholm; he bought the entire run of books and locked them in a cell at the police station.

  Eventually it was no longer possible to hush up the unpleasant story (things probably would have been different in Brunei). Then society came to the king’s aid and sentenced the charlatan to eight years in prison for this and that. At that point, Gustaf V was already dead and the charlatan made sure he was, too, at his own hand, once he was released again.

  A sad story, that. But, of course, it’s not impossible that the charlatan was something more than just a charlatan. At least when it came to the story of his relationship with Gustaf V. And it was impossible to rule out that the king had been close to him and other boys and men in that . . . at the time . . . unlawful manner.

  What if . . .

  What if the Holgers’ dad had been abused? What if that was why he had started his crusade against the monarchy in general and Gustaf V in particular?

  What if . . .

  Because something had happened.

  * * *

  With that, the king had finished thinking. He hadn’t thought correctly in every respect, but he had thought cleverly.

  ‘What do I think about my great-grandfather Gustaf the Fifth?’ the king said again.

  ‘Come on, give me an answer!’ said Holger One.

  ‘Between you and me?’ said the king (while Countess Virtanen, Celestine, Holger Two, Nombeko, the prime minister and a now-sleeping Israeli former agent were right next to them).

  ‘By all means,’ said Holger One.

  The king asked his blessed great-grandfather in Heaven to forgive him. And then he said:

  ‘He was a real bastard.’

  Up to that point, it might have just been the case that the king was a child of nature and it was a happy accident that he and Gertrud had found one another. But when he besmirched the good name of Gustaf V, Nombeko knew that the king, too, had realized what a situation they truly found themselves in. The king had robbed his great-grandfather of honour and glory, simply because it was probably the best thing for the common good.

  One’s reaction remained to be seen.

  ‘Come on, Celestine,’ said Holger One. ‘Let’s take a walk to the dock. We need to talk.’

  One and Celestine sat down on the bench on the dock on Vätösund. It was slightly past midnight; the short Swedish summer night was dark but not particularly cold. Celestine took Holger’s hands in her own, looked him in the eye, and started by asking him if he could forgive her for being almost noble.

  Holger mumbled that he could; as far as he knew, it wasn’t her fault that her grandmother Gertrud’s father had been a baron alongside his more honourable work as a counterfeiter of banknotes. But it did hurt a bit, of course. If it was even true – the story seemed a bit wobbly in places. And, of course, there was a mitigating factor in that Grandfather Gustaf Mannerheim had thought the better of things in his later years and become president. Furthermore, he’d been a nobleman, faithful to the tsar, but then he had taken over a republic. Ugh, everything was such a mess.

  Celestine agreed. She had felt like a failure throughout her whole upbringing. Until the day when Holger stood there and turned out to be whom and what she was looking for. And who later jumped from a helicopter and fell two thousand feet to save her life. And then they had kidnapped the King of Sweden t
o get him to abdicate, or else be blown to pieces along with all his medals, and themselves, too.

  For a moment, Celestine’s life had seemed to be both comprehensible and meaningful.

  But then came the chopping off of the chickens’ heads. And the king had made himself useful fixing her grandmother’s tractor after coffee. Now he had not only blood on his shirt but motor oil, too.

  All this while Celestine had seen her grandmother come to life again. She found herself feeling ashamed at the way she had once just left, without even saying goodbye – all because Grandma happened to have the wrong grandpa.

  Shame? That was a new feeling.

  Holger said he understood that Celestine had been influenced by her grandmother’s evening, and he said that he was at a loss. It wasn’t just the king and his monarchy that must be eradicated, it was everything the monarchy represented. So it couldn’t just start to represent something different right before their eyes. The king had even sworn once. God only knows, maybe he’d even gone out to sneak a smoke with Gertrud.

  No, Celestine didn’t think he had. They had gone out together for a while, that was true, but it was probably just for the tractor.

  Holger One sighed. If only the king hadn’t turned his back on Gustaf V the way he’d just done.

  Celestine asked if they should fetch him and try to find a compromise, and she realized she’d never used that word before.

  ‘You mean set off the bomb just a little bit?’ said Holger One. ‘Or that the king should abdicate part-time?’

  But bringing him to the dock and talking through the situation in a peaceful, orderly manner couldn’t hurt. Just the king, Holger One and Celestine. Not Two, not Gertrud, not the prime minister, and absolutely not that venomous snake Nombeko or, for that matter, the sleeping agent from Israel.

  Holger didn’t know exactly where the conversation should begin and where it was meant to go, and Celestine had even less of an idea. But if they chose their words carefully, maybe there was still a chance.