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

While he waited, he would have to try to relish the thought that it would soon be time for revenge. Everyone said Merkel was the obvious victor in the German election, that the Social Democrat candidate was too weak. No one wanted to see what Gennady saw: the Social Democrats would refuse seats in Merkel’s government if they did poorly in the election, for anything else would be political suicide. The Russian tactic was to further weaken what was already weak, combined with genuine but secret party support to the right-wing nationalist party, AfD. This way they were attacking Merkel on two fronts without actually touching her. So she would win the election, but she wouldn’t be able to build a coalition government. When this dawned on her, she would finally give up. The last thing Russia needed was that hopelessly strong bitch in Berlin.

‘The Social Democrats lost three more percentage points in the latest poll,’ Gennady Aksakov told his president. ‘Two of them landed with our friends in AfD.’

‘You’re a genius, Gena,’ said President Putin. ‘Have I mentioned that before?’

‘Many times, Mr President.’ His best friend smiled. ‘So many times that I’m starting to believe you.’

Sabine sat quietly behind the wheel as they crossed the bridge and drove through the tunnel on their way to Copenhagen’s international airport. She thought through her decision to emigrate one more time.

Olekorinko in Tanzania had been in her thoughts so long that she had just about exalted it to a truth that he was the solution to everything. The country in and of itself also brought many advantages. For example, Tanzanian Nazism had not yet been invented. There probably weren’t many snakes to speak of either, up at that high altitude. Snakes, in general, were among the few things Sabine disliked more than Nazis. She disliked snakes, Nazis, wars and deadly illnesses. In that order. With Karlsson a close fifth. War and violence were not on the list of things the country had to offer. That left deadly illnesses, but it seemed likely they’d have cures for such things down there. Not least with Olekorinko’s help, if everything her mother had told her about him was to be believed, which of course it was not.

Sabine had done her homework. There were further sources of inspiration to be found nearby. The Kenyan side of the border was the domain of a businesswoman named Hannah. She called herself the Queen and spent Monday through Friday curing clients’ ailments, breaking curses and giving life advice based on what could be read in the coals left by a fire. For extra money she also took on the more serious cases of cancer and AIDS. She spent Saturdays resting and on Sundays she went to church, to be on the safe side.

Hannah was happy to show off her luxury home and her fifteen cars to anyone who wanted to see them. ‘I’m a witch and I’m good at it,’ was her standing refrain among the cars. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

Hannah was impressive in many ways. But, still, Sabine didn’t find her sufficiently attention-grabbing. Sabine already knew how to scrape through glowing coals.

The retired evangelical pastor Olekorinko and his concept were wildly different from what the Queen practised. The pastor had built up a tent city on the savannah in the Serengeti. He kept a laboratory in an annexe to the main tent, and there he created his miracle medicine, according to a precise and partially secret recipe.

He took only very limited payments, focusing instead on the masses. For the medicine only worked there, in the tent city, and only in the moment when it was blessed by the pastor.

Sabine wanted to know more about his process. Mass meetings would be something new in modern European clairvoyance. Her mother had understood this. And it was the way forward for Sabine, her beloved assistant and the hundred-and-one-year-old who came with them, whether they wanted him or not.

Johnny Engvall woke up when someone placed a five-kronor coin in the white cup he was apparently holding. Where was he? Why was he freezing? Who had just given him a coin, and why?

He was suffering the side effects of a table lamp to the head and an overdose of sleeping pills. He didn’t remember the former; he could only guess at the latter.

He realized he was sitting on a park bench somewhere, but he didn’t have time to grasp where before someone bent over him.

‘What’s the matter, my dear?’

A woman. Her face was only a few decimetres from his own. Who was she? What was going on?

His vision returned, along with his personality. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘What business is that of yours? Plus, you’re ugly.’

The woman had taken pity on the beggar sleeping on the park bench, found a coin in her purse, and seen that the sleeping man was waking up. He looked dreadful, the poor thing.

‘Well, good heavens,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason to be angry with me, is there? Walk with me for a bit and maybe we can find somewhere for me to treat you to a bowl of hot soup.’

Soup? repeated Johnny’s muddled mind. He tried to stand up. The woman helped him.

‘Move it, you goddamn dispensable woman,’ he said, shoving the good Samaritan so hard she almost fell over.

Johnny’s vocabulary had returned. He informed the woman of what he and his knife wished to do to her. She backed away in horror, first one step, then another. But she was braver than most. ‘I’m moving, as you can see. But where do we stand on the soup?’

Johnny took out his American Army knife with its well-polished thirty-centimetre blade, and aimed it at her throat. ‘Say “soup” one more time,’ he said.

But the woman didn’t. She didn’t say anything. Johnny left without harming her. He had too bad a headache for anything else.

A few blocks away, the still-dizzy Nazi found a café where he could order a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and collect himself.

Until just now, his struggle to kill those who had so seriously degraded his brother on the day of his burial had been plagued by something quite akin to tunnel vision.

But just as he was about to fulfil his self-assigned task, a bolt of lightning had struck him out of the blue. He couldn’t just let it go. Or could he? He had four million euros and a cause to advance in Kenneth’s memory.

Johnny’s brainpower was not so limited that he didn’t understand he had been vanquished by an old woman and a minister for foreign affairs. There was no brushing it aside. It couldn’t even be dropped down the priority list. The four million and what could be accomplished with it would have to wait. The minister might be allowed to live if she didn’t cross paths with Johnny again, but that bitch and her crew? Never.

All he had to do was find them. It might take days, weeks or months, but so be it, thought Johnny, even as his phone flashed with an important news item.

Another suspected terrorist attack! This time at Kastrup, Copenhagen’s international airport.

Coffee and sandwiches could wait.

For the second time in a short period, Sabine had to admit that Allan had made himself useful. She was behind the wheel and had instructed him to search on his tablet to find out how soon they could hop onto a flight to Dar es Salaam. What Allan found first was very soon. It would be a little circuitous, with stopovers in Frankfurt and Addis Ababa, but it would work. If only they made it to the airport in time. Sabine speeded up a little more and decided to park as creatively as possible once they arrived.

She found a suitable spot on the pavement immediately outside the correct terminal at Copenhagen’s international airport. It took some slaloming between double no-parking signs and traffic cones, but she made it. Even Julius, who’d never had a soft spot for the legal, was impressed.