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

‘Overdose,’ said Allan. ‘Heroin. Terrible stuff.’

The woman didn’t respond. Perhaps she was a foreigner.

‘Heroinski,’ Allan clarified.

Allan, Julius and Sabine crowded into the front seat of the hearse, since the Nazi was hogging the back.

Ten minutes later they had managed to divorce themselves from their unconscious problem. Johnny Engvall was now sitting on a bench in a decently empty park not far from downtown. While Julius and Sabine did the grunt work, Allan found a white plastic cup between the front seats in the car. He placed it in the Nazi’s hands, instantly transforming him into a presumed beggar who had fallen asleep on the job.

‘Don’t sit here too long, Mr Johnny, or you’ll catch a cold,’ was Allan’s farewell.

The situation remained intensely complicated. The Nazi problem was, of course, far from over. But with all the carrying-around and the fresh air, Sabine had her brain function back.

Now was the time to use it to think new thoughts. Or, at least, big ones. Best-case scenario, also good ones.

Sabine made up her mind.

Julius noticed that she seemed to know where she was going. He didn’t say anything, for he thought the next move should be hers.

They left Malmö, ended up on a highway, and soon found themselves approaching the bridge to Denmark. Sabine slowed and prepared to pay the bridge toll.

‘In light of what has happened, it’s best if we switch countries,’ she said.

‘Denmark,’ said Julius.

‘I love Denmark,’ said Allan, who had returned to his coffin and made himself comfortable. ‘I think. I’ve never been there. Or have I?’

‘Denmark won’t be far enough, if we’re going to keep away from everyone who wants to kill us,’ said Sabine. ‘And assuming we want money to put food on the table, our current business model will never do.’

She continued by saying that she had, in tandem with other topics, put a great deal of thought towards their future. It had all come to a head when the Nazi turned up to get a table lamp to the head.

‘That lamp knew where to land,’ Allan said. ‘If I’m alive next year I’ll be danged if I don’t vote Social Democrat.’

‘You vote?’ Julius asked.

‘Not that I know of.’

Sabine asked the old men to keep quiet for a bit and went on: ‘Anyway, I had time to do some thinking. We can’t drive around in the hearse any more. It will be recognized by the Nazi who, we know with all certainty, is angrier with us than ever.’

Allan was on the verge of gauging the Nazi’s presumed rage in comparison with that of Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump but realized he had been asked to keep quiet.

‘So, no more hearse,’ Sabine reiterated. ‘And no Sweden.’

Allan sat up in the coffin. This conversation looked promising. He couldn’t keep not saying anything. ‘It sounds to me as if young Miss Sabine has an idea.’

‘Agreed,’ said Julius.

She did. If their séance operation was to blossom, and they were to survive for more than a week, they had to think internationally. The Nazi and his gang would have a much harder time finding them out in the big, wide world. On the other hand, the competition in the spiritual branch would be much tougher than it was in their homeland. It wouldn’t be enough to hawk ghosts and the chance to speak with those who had already spoken their last.

‘So what do we need?’ Julius wondered.

‘Product development,’ said Sabine.

‘And where on our good green earth can we best develop our product, do you think?’

‘Are you sitting down?’ Sabine asked.

‘I am sitting, as you can see,’ said Julius.

‘I just lay down again, but by all means,’ said Allan, and sat up.

‘Good. Right now we’re driving to Kastrup, where we’ll permanently park the car and buy three plane tickets to Dar es Salaam.’

‘Dar es what?’ said Julius.

After a series of setbacks of a varied nature, Gennady Aksakov could smell the scent of victory once more. And a sensational one at that. He appeared to be the only one who realized that Merkel, in Germany, was on her way to defeat. After all, a victory was no victory if it wasn’t possible to rule after winning.

Gennady administered grotesquely large sums of money for himself and his best friend. The capital was safely held abroad, made even safer in that it was protected by Gennady’s Finnish passport. No matter what sorts of sanctions the world decided to slap on Russia and its citizens, no one could freeze the Finnish Aksakov’s assets. He was financially secure, and so was the president.

Lately they’d had varying levels of success. With the help of 116,000 Twitter accounts, Aksakov and his army of internet soldiers had worked on the voters of Britain before the Brexit referendum. Only an amateur would allow all the accounts to be automated bots: people would notice that. The secret was a perfectly balanced mixture of fully automated, half-automated, and one hundred per cent human accounts. The message, however, was relatively uniform – namely, that the Brits should turn their backs on Europe.

Volodya cackled with joy and thumped Gena on the back when the results turned out to be 52–48 ‘leave’. Gena responded humbly that, even without his help, it might easily have been 51–49.

Not long after Brexit there was the American presidential election, which had gone so frightfully well that by now it was just frightful.

The parliamentary elections in the Netherlands and France, though, showed that Gena and Volodya weren’t invincible after all. Despite massive support from Moscow, the numbers of the Dutch PVV didn’t increase enough to bring about political chaos. It took over two hundred days for the centre right to put together a coalition government, but in the end they succeeded.

In France, the Russians nearly lost in a walkover. The plan was to take sides on both right and left and polemize to the extent that Marine Le Pen would dash past all but one competitor, at which point the Russians would sink said competitor. But when that bastard made a complete fool of himself before Moscow was ready to sink him, a new middle-of-the-road candidate popped up out of nowhere. Gena had no time to reposition, and France ended up with an EU-friendly president. The trolls’ disinformation about Macron’s secret life as a homosexual only fired up Macron and his voters. If there was anything you were allowed to devote yourself to in France, it was diverse alternative romantic encounters.

Up next after that blunder was the fiasco in Sweden: the four million euros in support of the neo-Nazi whose thanks for the financial aid involved getting himself killed. The neo-Nazi’s brother had, according to unanimous intelligence reports, been the one subsequently to shoot a funeral parlour to hell. What was absolutely inconceivable about this story was that the brother (who was just as much a Nazi) had tried to take the life of Allan Karlsson of all people! The hundred-and-one-year-old who had caused such a kerfuffle in Pyongyang had been promoted to diplomat, at which point he had evidently entered the funerary trade and, for the second time in a brief period, acted in direct opposition to Russian state interest. All of these conclusions had been drawn from an intercepted conversation between an individual police inspector and the Swedish minister for foreign affairs, who had, carelessly enough, used a non-secure phone within her department. Perhaps Kim Jong-un was right: they should have tracked down that old man and slit his throat. But now, in any case, he had disappeared again.

Gennady decided to wait a week or two, then get in touch, once again, with the dead neo-Nazi’s living brother to repeat the terms and conditions, or, alternatively, remove him from the equation.