now it was likely out for a stroll, all on its own.
And she was right about that. Hitman Anders could not for the life of him remember what it was he was supposed to hate. Plus, that last beer had really hit the spot. He was very close to just sitting there and loving the whole world instead. But, of course, he couldn’t say so. All he could do was improvise.
‘Yes, I hate … poverty. And terrible diseases. They always get the good people in a society.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes, the good people get cancer and stuff. Not the bad people. I hate that. And I hate people who exploit ordinary folk.’
‘Who are you thinking of?’
Yes: who was Hitman Anders thinking of? What was he thinking? Why was it so terribly difficult for him to recall what he was supposed to say? Just take that part about killing. Was he supposed to claim that he didn’t kill people any more, or was it the other way around?
‘I don’t kill people any more,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Or maybe I do. Everyone on my hate-list should probably watch out.’
Hate-list? he asked himself. What hate-list? Oh, please, don’t let the reporter ask a follow-up question about …
‘Hate-list?’ said the reporter. ‘Who’s on it?’
Dammit! Hitman Anders’s brain was spinning fast and slow all at once. Have to gather my thoughts … What was it again? He was supposed to appear … insane and dangerous. What else?
The priest and the receptionist did not pray to any higher power for their hitman to find his way: they considered themselves to have far too poor a relationship with the power in question. They did, however, stand there hoping. Hoping that Hitman Anders would land on his feet somehow.
Over the shoulder of the Express’s reporter and through the window, Hitman Anders could make out the neon logo of the Swedish Property Agency on a building a hundred yards down and across the street. Next to it was a small suburban branch of Handelsbanken. He could hardly see it from where he sat, but he knew it was there, because how many times had he stood there smoking in the bus shelter outside, waiting for the bus that would take him to the nearest den of iniquity?
In the absence of sufficient order inside his head, Hitman Anders allowed himself to be inspired by what he saw before his eyes.
Estate agent, bank, bus stop, smoker …
He had never owned a rifle, or a revolver, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t shoot from the hip. ‘Who’s on my hate-list? Are you sure you want to know?’ he said, lowering his voice, speaking a little more slowly.
The reporter nodded, his expression grave.
‘I don’t like estate agents,’ said Hitman Anders. ‘Or bank people. People who smoke. Commuters …’
With that, he had included everything he’d seen and remembered across the street.
‘Commuters?’ the reporter said in surprise.
‘Yes – do you feel the same?’
‘No. I mean, how can you hate commuters?’
Hitman Anders seemed to settle into playing the role of himself, and he made the most of what he’d happened to say. He lowered his voice a bit more and spoke even more slowly: ‘Are you a commuter-lover?’
By now, the reporter from The Express was truly scared. He assured the man that he did not love commuters: he and his girlfriend both biked to and from work and, beyond that, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to what sort of attitude he ought to have towards commuters.
‘I don’t like cyclists either,’ said Hitman Anders. ‘But commuters are worse. And hospital workers. And gardeners.’
Hitman Anders was on a roll. The priest thought it best to break in before the reporter and his photographer realized he was messing with them, or that he had no idea what he was saying, or a little of both.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us, but Hitman Anders, I mean Johan here, needs his afternoon rest, with one yellow and one orange pill. It’s important to make sure that nothing goes wrong later this evening.’
The interview hadn’t gone as planned, but with a little luck they could still make it work in their favour. The priest was just sorry that the most important part hadn’t been said, the part she had repeated twenty times to her hitman. The advertisement, so to speak.
And then a miracle happened. He remembered! The photographer was already sitting behind the wheel in the Express car and the reporter had one foot in the car, but Hitman Anders hailed them: ‘You know where to find me if you need a kneecap broken! I’m not expensive. But I’m good.’
The Express reporter’s eyes widened. He thanked him for the information, pulled his other leg into the car, rubbed his right hand across his uninjured kneecap, closed the door, and said to his photographer: ‘Let’s go.’
* * *
The Express’s posters the next day read:
Sweden’s most dangerous man?
HITMAN
ANDERS
In an exclusive interview:
‘I WANT
TO KILL AGAIN’
The quote was not an exact reproduction, but when people couldn’t express themselves in a manner that worked on a poster, the paper had no choice but to write what the interviewee had probably meant instead of what he or she had actually said. That’s called creative journalism.
In the four-page spread, the newspaper’s readers discovered what a horrid person Hitman Anders was. All the atrocities he had confessed to in the story but, above all, his potentially psychopathic tendencies: the way he hated everyone from estate agents to hospital workers to … commuters.
The hatred Hitman Anders harbours for large parts of humanity seems to know no bounds. In the end, it turns out that no one, absolutely no one, is safe. For Hitman Anders’s services are for sale. He offers to break a kneecap, any kneecap at all, on behalf of The Express’s reporter, for a reasonable fee.
Besides the main article about the meeting between the brave reporter and the hitman in question, the newspaper included a supplementary interview with a psychiatrist who devoted half of the discussion to emphasizing that he could speak only in general terms, and the other half to explaining that it was not possible to lock Hitman Anders up because, from a medical perspective, he was not documented to be a danger to himself or others. Certainly he had committed crimes but, from a legal perspective, he had atoned for them. It was not enough just to talk about the further atrocities one could imagine committing in the hypothetical future.
From the psychiatrist’s argument, the newspaper inferred that society’s hands were tied until Hitman Anders struck again. And it was probably just a matter of time.
By way of conclusion, there was an emotional column by one of the paper’s best-known faces. She began: ‘I am a mother. I am a commuter. And I am scared.’
After the attention from The Express, requests for interviews streamed in from all imaginable quarters of Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe. The receptionist accepted a handful of international papers (Bild Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, the Daily Telegraph, El Periódico and Le Monde) but nothing more. The questions were posed in English, Spanish or French, and went through the linguistically gifted priest, who didn’t bother to respond with what Hitman Anders had said but with what he ought to have said. Letting him loose in front of a TV camera or a journalist who understood what he was saying was out of the question. The trio would never be able to recreate the luck they had had with The Express. Instead, by allowing other Scandinavian media outlets to reproduce quotes from Le Monde, for example (formulated by the hitman, distorted and refined