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‘What is going on here?’ she demanded. ‘Can’t a person hang herself in peace?’
Johan was so bewildered by the experience that he couldn’t even manage to drive poorly. The journey away from Malte’s place was nice and smooth; it almost appeared legal.
‘He was hardly ever home. Except for when Mum got buried, and she only did that once.’
Johan wondered if they could hijack the ferry. Petra said this wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had.
The setting: a parish in the southern-Swedish province of Småland, a settlement so small that God probably would have forgotten it if not for its double churches.
‘A rusty scythe. My dead husband thought it was a good idea to keep it. He got it for cheap. And then the Grim Reaper got him.’
Johan thought so hard he nearly got a headache.
If it were possible to convene and reason oneself to death, there wouldn’t be a single Swede left.
His father’s childhood friend Misha, meanwhile, joined the ranks of the anti-Stalinists even above ground, without rats. This was made possible now that Stalin had had the good sense to die.
‘Widow Eklund,’ said Agnes. ‘My husband had the good sense to pass away ages ago.’ ‘Many congratulations, Widow Eklund,’ Herbert let slip. ‘I’ve long suspected that Father is immortal.’
But was young Kovalchuk telling the truth? Had he really been given a window table at a restaurant without anyone trying to lure some dough out of him in return? Yes, as he lived and breathed, it was true. ‘On the other hand, they served snails in garlic. Do you suppose, Mr General Secretary, that this might have been my punishment for failing to offer a bribe?’
The only thing that stayed the same as ever was the complete lack of respect for what the law actually stipulated.
Then he caught sight of his bicycle. The front wheel was all bent. ‘My Bianchi,’ he said in a tone that suggested the wreck at his feet was a deceased relative.
‘Gordon mentioned Eastern Europe too,’ Johan recalled. ‘Where’s that?’ ‘Just east of Western Europe,’ said Petra. Johan refrained from asking the obvious follow-up question.
Instead, Agnes was summarizing the past week from her point of view. Petra’s and Johan’s peace tour of Europe had thus far resulted in one wrecked vehicle, one head-butted security service officer, one run-over Welsh legal advisor and one knocked-out Italian in a car park. And they hadn’t even reached the man they really should be talking sense into. Agnes said that if necessary she could go along with the idea that the world would end in a few days, and if so good for it. But did they really have to dismantle it ahead of time?
She said she appreciated that none of the days had been at all uneventful since she met Petra and Johan, but that anyone who was able to formulate sixty-four-step equations would perhaps also be capable of finding the right word in the right order during their next encounter with any representative member of humanity, so that they wouldn’t all be thrown in jail before they reached their destination.
‘You’re not planning to start any fights, are you?’ she said to Petra. ‘I never fight. Besides, my flowchart is ready. Shall I read it to you?’ ‘Absolutely not.’
For far beneath every political, religious or geographical struggle for power there were always thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of regular people whose basic philosophy was as simple as feeling that it would be nice to be able to have breakfast on the table in the morning when you woke up after doing an honest day’s work the day before. And also that you wouldn’t be showered with grenades at lunch.
On the schedule instead were the global financial crises (which hit the least responsible continent the hardest);
The only rule the country seemed to want to stick to, when it came to international financial transactions, was that rules were bad.
Finland’s second secretary misread the situation and thought that his Swedish colleague was feeling lonely so decided on a rescue mission. The Swede was Swedish, of course, and the Finn Finnish, so they could always talk ice hockey.
Then he remembered who big brother truly was and had always been. Above all, he saw fear in Fredrik’s eyes. Fredrik was scared! Of his little brother! Johan was filled with a measure of self-confidence he’d never felt before. ‘We were talking about what a dive this place is. Mediocre canapés. Crappy champagne.’ ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Fredrik. Scared! ‘And also we were discussing Africa. The problems in … the American union risk becoming the downfall of the whole incontinence.’ ‘Oh my god!’ Perhaps he hadn’t quite got the right words that time, but that only made it better. Fredrik was in
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It’s better to have friends than enemies. If you absolutely must become enemies with someone, the Russian mafia is just about the worst one you could choose.
As chief advisor to Yeltsin, he had invented tax rates that should not have existed and toyed with the mafia without even being aware of it. He was tipped off about the Vory’s wrath just in the nick of time and left the country instead of life on earth.
‘What’s the point of being president if you don’t have a wine cellar?’ The president said he’d had no way of knowing that he was about to gain a son-slash-master chef, or else he certainly would have been better prepared. He snapped his fingers, at which point an otherwise invisible assistant showed up. Aleko ordered her to fetch the best wine the finest hotel had in stock. ‘White or red?’ asked the assistant. ‘All the colours you can get your hands on. As many bottles as possible. Tell them I’ll stop by to pay for it when I get the chance, if I remember to.’
‘Look here. If I assign this parameter a value of seven … the world will end in … let’s see here … 212 years.’ ‘Good. Then we all will have ended first, with plenty of time to spare.’ ‘But if I assign it the value of six instead … the world will end … last spring.’ ‘Let’s go with six so we don’t have to have this conversation.’
Aleko had an interesting opinion of what constituted justice. It didn’t matter if something was unjust, as long as everyone was equally mistreated.
‘What is the worst thing ever in the minds of at least ten of those pigs in the assembly?’ ‘AIDS?’ Aleko speculated. ‘No: free, democratic elections.’ Günther was right, of course. The progression of AIDS could be slowed with medicine, but a presidential election without any fraud would mean the end for quite a few of the representatives who most deserved to be messed with.
The dairy farmer had the gift of the gab; he promised the moon to both investors and citizens until one day he found himself the country’s president. So far so good for the currency speculator and her husband. But then the former dairy farmer kicked off his presidency by buying a private jet with state money while the people who’d voted for him were still earning the equivalent of not even one dollar per day. Turned out the moon was meant for the dairy farmer and no one else.
They posed disgustingly bold questions about all sorts of things, including Aleko’s view on human rights, as though human rights were a human right.
Thoughts sailed through his mind at a hundred kilometres per hour. Might one option be to jump the correspondent here and now and beat him to death?
‘Hello, Mr President,’ said the pilot. ‘All good?’ ‘Shut up,’ said Aleko. ‘How could you be so stupid as to let the correspondent return after he saw what he saw?’ The pilot had already had a suspicion that today would not end well. But what could he do? ‘What could I do?’ he said. ‘For starters, you could have made sure to crash into the ocean,’ said Aleko. ‘Or at least shove your passenger out at an altitude of fifteen hundred metres. Anything but this!’
His first, immediate task was to calm the general mood of unrest in the country. They absolutely did not have time for a coup in the middle of everything else.
Agnes said she was sorry about this outcome. Presumably, they’d already reached everyone in the whole world who might consider betting. The market, so to speak, was saturated. ‘But five hundred and fourteen million isn’t nothing,’ she felt. Aleko was utterly fascinated by the disappointment radiating from his violet-haired friend. ‘How much had you been expecting?’ he asked. ‘It would have been fun to hit a billion.’
‘Since we’re enemies with everyone else anyway, might as well piss off the mafia too,’ said Aleko, who was not a man to be trusted.
To be sure, this half-brother would get what was coming to him, given that he was the fall guy lurking in the depths of the von Tollian bank system, the one who would be blamed for the five-hundred-million-dollar swindle. Although he would claim he was innocent, of course. Not least because, from a purely objective standpoint, he was.
Might as well cut off these weird Maltese men who were merely wasting his valuable time. ‘In short: the concept cannot be recreated in the United States.’ ‘I was thinking maybe around a hundred million dollars for the licence,’ said ex-president Aleko. CEO Granlund had an MBA from Umeå University and was better at maths than most. ‘As I was saying: the concept can certainly be recreated in the United States or elsewhere, but it will demand attention to detail. How much did you say, for the licence?’
Malte’s point was that the reigning ‘it’s someone else’s fault’ mentality was mutating at warp speed. Black against white, bourgeois against broke, native-born against immigrant, left against right, up against down, here against there, and the rich against all the rest.
