Юнас Юнассон - The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

He was not prepared to sacrifice all of this to go down in history as the person who had started the Third World War.

‘Please excuse my accidental use of a swear word, Madame Minister. But I think I will refrain from any further investigation. At least for now. I do, however, have a possible address for Mr Jonsson if you would be interested. It’s an apartment in Malmö.’

Margot Wallström mostly wanted to forget about Allan Karlsson and his asparagus-farming friend. But perhaps that would seem suspicious. ‘Extremely interested,’ she said. ‘It’s possible that Theresa May will want something from Jonsson moving forwards, so it would be nice to have an address.’

The British prime minister? What was this? No, Viktor Bäckman didn’t want to know. He. Didn’t. Want. To. Know. Instead he gave Minister for Foreign Affairs Wallström the address and hurriedly bade her farewell before hurrying off to football practice. He arrived at the sports facility forty minutes before anyone else.

Margot Wallström felt a bit guilty about the part with Theresa May. But she hadn’t lied, even if the odds that May would want something from Julius Jonsson were small. Partly because she had no idea he existed, partly because she was extremely busy dismantling her country.

The extensive Facebook campaign in Swedish and Danish brought seven hits in the first week, which in turn led to four appointments. One from Denmark and three from Sweden.

The offer involved two options: contact with the other side or help with troublesome spirits. The séances were held in the medium’s apartment in Rosengård and priced at three thousand kronor per session. Driving out spirits and the like was, of course, best performed where the spirit actually was; in such cases there were additional charges for travel and lodging for Esmeralda and her assistant.

Of the first four bookings, all concerned wishes to establish a dialogue between the customer and a deceased loved one. All four came to Rosengård. Three of the séances went well. The fourth case involved a recently drowned fisherman. His despairing girlfriend wanted one last conversation with her beloved. Esmeralda established contact with him, but at that very moment so did the girlfriend. The drowned man had not drowned at all, but had floated to shore on Bornholm with a broken-down boat engine. The first thing he did when he was rescued, of course, was call his sweetheart, who cried with joy, before demanding her money back.

Johnny was sitting at a café on Gustav Adolfs Torg in Malmö, having his morning cup of coffee. With it he ate a salad, which he’d asked to have rinsed an extra time, since he belonged to the group of neo-Nazis who accepted the research that said the rampant levels of homosexuality in society were caused by toxins in food.

Perhaps Gustav Adolfs Torg was not the best place to take one’s meals, but you can’t get hung up on every detail. Gustav IV Adolf had been generally useless as king. He’d picked a fight with Napoleon, suffered a resounding defeat, and by the time it was all over he had lost both Finland and his own royal title. He was dethroned, exiled, and died a few years later penniless and alcohol-soaked, at a pub somewhere in Switzerland. He began as a king, was demoted to count, lived for a few years as Colonel Gustavsson, and ended up a drunk. Not exactly an illustrious career.

After his salad, it was time to take out his city map again, as he’d done every morning for the past few days. Johnny had already worked his way through downtown, the harbour area, and Arlöv and its environs. Next up were the western and southern neighbourhoods. His task was to drive up one street and down the next until he found the hearse, either parked or on the move.

But it wasn’t easy to concentrate. Johnny kept thinking about his brother. And he couldn’t drop his musings about the pension bitch outside Eskilstuna. Had she really spoken with her dead husband?

Sabine Jonsson was, after all, chairperson of the board of something called Other Side AB, specialists in clairvoyance. She’d obviously moved from that to the coffin trade, but she had demonstrably returned to the clairvoyant at the pension.

One idea might be to force her to contact Kenneth while holding a knife to her throat. But could he trust her? What if big brother said, during the séance, that little brother ought to let the medium live? In that case, who would be speaking? Kenneth or Sabine Jonsson?

No, the woman who must die was not an option as a point of contact between the brothers. But there had to be others, right? On the one hand, it was impossible to believe in all this. On the other, Johnny felt that Kenneth was still around, always by his side. That must mean he was out there somewhere, in another dimension. It had to mean it.

Johnny searched online and got hits all over the country. When he limited the search to southern Skåne, only about two dozen remained. Most could be ruled out because they didn’t offer what Johnny was after. As he sifted through them, it struck him that Sabine Jonsson might show up in an ad. She was already dumb enough to drive around in her hearse, but that extra step of actually informing the person who was searching for her of her whereabouts? No, no one was that stupid.

At last he had four names left: Bogdan, Angelique, Harriet and Esmeralda.

Bogdan went out of the window straight away. Harriet didn’t sound enough like a medium. Angelique? That name gave Johnny porn-star vibes. And obviously the porn industry was run by Jews.

That left Esmeralda. Might be a wog, but he could always find out.

Nine thousand kronor in, minus half that in start-up costs. It wouldn’t cover the payments to Facebook by a long shot, and since the results of the ad had quickly died down it was obvious that this business idea was not viable in the long term.

A few days later, though, they received three new enquiries. The first two led nowhere; the third was a request for a séance, a man who wanted to contact his brother, who had died in a tragic accident. As always, background information from the customer was the key to a séance’s success. Esmeralda sat down in the kitchen and called the man via the computer. Her face was white when she joined the old men in the living room. Julius was in the easy chair; Allan had his tablet and was on his back in his white coffin with red roses.

‘What’s going on?’ Julius asked.

Sabine didn’t respond. But Allan did.

The new president of France had used ugly language when he thought no one was listening. And the German chancellor had given Putin in Moscow a talking to on the topic of various LGBTQ issues. Allan didn’t know what LGBTQ was. It sounded like a North Korean news bureau, but he assumed that couldn’t be right.

Julius snapped at his friend: he hadn’t been talking to him. Couldn’t Allan see that Sabine was completely distraught?

No, Allan said, he couldn’t. The lid of the coffin impeded his view. But if Sabine wished to clarify it would be to everyone’s advantage. Was he correct in thinking that her primary concern lay somewhere other than with this LGBTQ question? If so, she had Allan’s full support, especially if she told him what it meant.

Sabine tuned Allan out: she’d learned to do so when necessary. Instead she said she had just booked a séance for one Johnny, who wished to contact his brother Kenneth.

‘Great,’ said Julius. ‘What do we know about Kenneth?’

‘Too much,’ said Sabine. ‘He’s the one who was supposed to be in the Nazi coffin we made.’

‘The one who shot at us later?’ Allan asked.

‘No, he didn’t do much shooting. That was his brother. He’s coming here tomorrow. At one o’clock.’