it’s warm. Come along, sweetheart. Here’s the door.’
The priest and the receptionist didn’t speak as they strolled away from their visit to the count. They were each gathering their thoughts from different directions.
The receptionist suspected that misfortune was headed their way. And so was money. And even more misfortune. And money. He was used to the misfortune part. Surely he would hardly notice more of the same. But he had never laid eyes on considerable amounts of money, other than in his nightmares about Grandfather. And yet he had to consult with the priest … Having people beaten up to order?
Johanna Kjellander appeared to be searching for a good answer, but the best she could come up with was that those who fear the Lord will be taught how they should choose.
‘Psalm Twenty-five,’ she added, without conviction.
The receptionist said that was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard and suggested she start using her head instead of reciting quotes from the Bible as if they were in her very marrow. Especially considering that the marrow in question belonged to someone who believed in neither God nor the Bible. Not to mention that, in Per Persson’s opinion, neither of the last two quotes had hit their mark. By the last one, had she meant that she and he had been dispatched by God to guide those with questionable morals to the correct path via Hitman Anders? In which case, why had God chosen a priest who didn’t believe in him to lead the project? Along with a receptionist who had never even considered cracking open a Bible.
Slightly wounded, the priest replied that it wasn’t always so gosh-damned easy to navigate through life. From her birth until about a week ago, she had been locked into a family tradition. She now found herself in a new role, in upper management over an assassin, but she couldn’t say for sure whether that was the correct way to take revenge upon the God who didn’t exist. She would have to feel her way forward, and maybe she’d come across a krona or two in proceeds during this trial period. Speaking of which, she wanted to thank Per Jansson or Persson for his resourceful intervention when her Biblical autopilot happened to reel off that bit about a limb for a limb in front of the count at the worst possible moment.
‘By all means,’ said the receptionist, not without pride.
He didn’t comment on the rest. But it seemed likely that the priest and the receptionist had a few things in common.
They were back at the hotel. Per Persson handed over the key to room eight and said that he and the priest could discuss the room rate another time. Quite a bit had happened for just one Sunday, and he was hoping to turn in early.
The priest thanked him in as worldly a fashion as she could manage. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thanks for a nice day. I expect I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night to you, Per. Good night.’
* * *
On the night following the day he had met, first, a priest, then a count, and subsequently become a consultant to the hitman he already knew far too well, Per Persson lay on his mattress in the room behind the reception desk and stared up at the ceiling. A broken arm here and there probably wouldn’t be the end of the world, especially when they were dealing with people who deserved nothing better, and when it also enriched both the executor and his management.
The priest was one of the strangest people he had ever encountered. The receptionist was able to say this, even though he had encountered a lot of strange things in his years at the Sea Point Hotel – the hotel God had forgotten.
But she moved things forward, and she did so in a financially ingenious manner (even if she might have prepared her prayer on the park bench a little better – she had lost herself twenty kronor back there).
‘I think I’ll hitch my wagon to your train for a while, Johanna Kjellander,’ Per Persson said to himself. ‘I think I just will. You smell like money. And money smells nice.’
He turned off the bare lightbulb next to his mattress and was asleep in only a few minutes.
And he slept better than he had in a very long time.
A company specializing in the field of assault and battery has more to deal with than you might expect. The allocation of income, of course, was originally set at eighty per cent to Hitman Anders and twenty per cent for the receptionist and the priest to divide between them. But one had to consider the cost of doing business as well. For example, Hitman Anders would need new work clothes when the old ones had become too bloody to salvage. There was no controversy there. But he also argued that the cost of the beer he consumed before each shift ought to be divided between the parties. He claimed he was unable to beat anyone to a pulp while sober.
The receptionist and the priest responded that, with a little practice, it would certainly be possible to commit assault while sober; it was just that Hitman Anders had never tried. They maintained their position that he ought instead to decrease his consumption of alcohol on days he was supposed to work.
Hitman Anders lost the beer negotiation. He did, however, convince the group that it was unreasonable to expect him to take public transport to work, or to make use of a stolen bicycle with a baseball bat on the luggage rack. It was unanimously decided that the firm would cover the cost of a taxi. The receptionist negotiated a fixed price with Taxi Torsten, a former regular at Club Amore. The girls had called him the Taxi Trick, which was the only reason the receptionist even remembered him. Per Persson looked up the former purchaser of sex and got straight to the point. ‘What would it cost for you to act as a private chauffeur in the Greater Stockholm area for one or two hours on one or two afternoons a week?’
‘Six thousand kronor per fare,’ said Taxi Torsten.
‘I’ll give you nine hundred.’
‘Done!’
‘And you have to keep your mouth shut about anything you see or hear.’
‘Done, I said.’
The group felt their way forward, with follow-up meetings every Monday. The original price list was constantly adjusted, based on Hitman Anders’s stories of how troublesome various types of task had been to execute. The prices also varied based on the combinations ordered. A broken right leg cost five thousand kronor, for example, same as a broken right arm. But the combination right leg/left arm cost forty thousand rather than thirty. That had come to be after Hitman Anders had given a vivid description of how a person who had just had his right leg smashed to bits with the baseball bat flailed around on the ground, which meant it was a hell of a job to get at his left arm. Especially for the perpetrator in question, who had a hard time telling right from left (as well as right from wrong).
They were also particular with the ethical guidelines. The first and most important one was that children must never come to harm, either directly or indirectly, by being forced to watch as Mommy or (for the most part) Daddy got a kicking.
The second rule was that any injuries that arose should, as far as possible, be of the sort that healed with time: one who had paid for his crime shouldn’t have to limp his way through the rest of his life. This involved, to name one example, being judicious about a broken kneecap because it was well-nigh impossible to put back together again. One lopped-off finger, however, was acceptable. So were two. Per hand. But no more.
The most common order was for plain old broken arms and legs, with the help of the baseball bat. But sometimes the client wanted it to be clear, when looking at a person’s face, that he hadn’t minded his Ps and Qs, and then it was time for fists and brass knuckles, which led to just the right amount of fractured jawbones, nasal bones and zygomatic bones, preferably accompanied by a black eye and a split eyebrow (the last, incidentally, usually appeared all on its own).
Per Persson and Johanna Kjellander convinced one another that anyone who got a