Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All Read Online Free PDF Page A

reasonably well to explain to Hitman Anders what twenty percent of something meant. The hitman apologized, saying he had become quite a wizard at counting years while in the slammer, but all he knew about percentages was that there were about forty of them in vodkaand sometimes even more in the kind of stuff that was produced in random basements without any oversight. In some of the earlier police investigations, it had come to light that he washed down his pills with thirty-eight-percent shop-bought liquor and seventy-percent moonshine. Now, police reports were not always to be trusted, but if they were right in that instance, it’s no surprise things went the way they did—with 108-percent alcohol in his blood and the pills on top of that.
    Inspired by the merry atmosphere that would soon prevail, the priest promised that Hitman Anders’s business revenues were about to be doubled—at least!—as long as she and the receptionist were given free rein to act as his representatives.
    At the same time, cleverly enough, Per Persson took two beers from the lobby refrigerator. Hitman Anders chugged the first, started on the second, and decided that he had understood enough of what had been explained to him. “Well, hell, let’s do it, then.” The hitman terminated the second beer in a few rapid gulps, burped, excused himself and, as a kind gesture, handed over two of the five available thousand-krona bills with “Twenty percent it is!”
    He stuck the three remaining bills in the breast pocket of his shirt and announced that it was time for a combination of breakfast andlunch at his usual place around the corner, which meant he didn’t have time to discuss business further.
    â€œGood luck with the count!” he said from the doorway before he vanished.

CHAPTER 4
    T he man who was called the count could not be looked up in the book of noble families. The fact was, he couldn’t be looked up anywhere. He owed nearly seven hundred thousand kronor in unpaid taxes to the Tax Authority, but no matter how often the Authority pointed this out in letters mailed to his last known address on Mabini Street in the Philippine capital city of Manila, it never received any money in return. Or anything else. After all, how could the Tax Authority know that the address had been chosen at random, and that the notices ended up at the home of a local fishmonger, who opened them and used them to wrap tiger shrimp and octopus? Meanwhile, the count actually lived in Stockholm with his girlfriend, who was called the countess and was a high-level distributor of various narcotics. Under her name, he ran five dealerships that sold used cars in the southern suburbs of the capital city.
    He had been in the business since analog days, when it was possible to dismantle and rebuild a car with a monkey wrench rather than a degree in computer science. But he had had an easier time than most in surviving the transition to digital, which was how one single dealership had become five in the span of a few years. In the wake of this growth, there arose financial discord between the count on the one hand and the Tax Authority on the other, bringing both joy and a certain amount of irritation to an industrious fishmonger on the other side of the globe.
    The count was the sort of person who saw moments of change as opportunities rather than threats. Throughout Europe and the rest of the world, people were building cars that might cost a million kronor to buy, but only fifty to steal with the help of electronics and five-step instructions you could get on the internet. For some time, the count’s specialty had been locating the whereabouts of Swedish-registered BMW X5s: his partner in Gdansk would send two men to fetch them and bring them to Poland, supplying them with a new history, then importing them again himself.
    For a while this had brought in a net profit of a quarter-million kronor per car. But then BMW wised up