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

Sweden

Investee Kenneth Engvall perished suddenly in connection with a spontaneous political manifestation.

It began when the brothers arrived at a shopping centre in Bromma, not far from Stockholm’s domestic airport. Little brother was behind the wheel, looking for parking. Big brother beside him caught sight of a beggar at one of the entrances to the shopping centre. He was monumentally displeased and made a snap decision.

‘Wait here with the engine running. We’ll go shopping somewhere else. I’ve just got to… make a point.’

Johnny understood more or less what Kenneth was getting at and agreed with his analysis: that, as a result, it would be best to find a different place to shop.

Big brother left the car and approached the Romanian who was sitting by the entrance in the hope that passers-by would give him a krona or two, since the Roma minority’s life back home in Romania was far beyond hopeless (even as those in Sweden preferred to discuss the legality of being a beggar rather than that EU member-state Romania ought to shape up).

‘Hi,’ said the Romanian, when he caught sight of Kenneth Engvall.

‘Hi yourself, you fucking Gypsy!’ Kenneth said, as he pulled his cap down on his forehead and walked faster, intending to give the needy man a powerful kick in the throat with a boot, as if that was the primary need of the needy man.

Except it so happened that someone had tossed a circular, advertising sale-priced minced beef, on the ground into a puddle. Kenneth planted his foot on the meat (organic, country-of-origin Sweden, 109 kronor per kilo), slipped, lost his footing on the other leg, spun ninety degrees above the ground, missed the beggar, landed on his back, and hit the concrete base of the waste-bin the beggar was huddled behind to keep out of the wind. Kenneth Engvall cracked open his temple, was struck by a massive brain bleed, and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Sweden’s perhaps most dangerous person was no more. In one blow, the Aryan Alliance had lost half its members. All that remained for the other half to do was plan a funeral.

Johnny had just returned home from such an event. The interred was an acquaintance as well as a courier of hard drugs. He was an underling of one of the eight in the cocaine cartel that was on Kenneth and Johnny’s secret kill list. Phase one in the takeover, according to Kenneth, was to infiltrate. He hadn’t had time to say what phase two would be.

But now, in any case, the underling no longer had to worry about getting smoked when the day came, for smoked he already was. It happened when he turned his back on a desperate junkie, a tiny woman, light as a feather, incapable of harming a fly.

Or not.

The courier had just informed her that there would be no replenishment of drugs unless the woman coughed up some money. Since he was sure she would be unable to cough up anything, except maybe blood, he walked off. And was extremely surprised to feel a stabbing pain in his back. The featherweight woman had had the nerve to stick him with a knife. Well, she was about to fucking…

That was as far as he got. You can’t get much further when you’ve just had your sub-clavian artery severed. Loss of consciousness occurs after five seconds, and soon thereafter permanent cardiac arrest.

Johnny’s acquaintance was buried two weeks later and consigned to the annals of eternity. The remarkable thing about the funeral wasn’t that the courier had been killed by a junkie – that sort of thing happened on occasion. No, it was the coffin. It was a shiny black-lacquered Harley Davidson coffin with the words ‘Highway to Hell’ on both sides. Johnny had never before seen anything so tasteful and dignified in a church.

Johnny Engvall was not as strategic a thinker as his older brother Kenneth, but he had a reputation almost as authentic. There’d been at least three murders over the years. A fag, a wog and a policeman who was a wog besides. The last one happened after a Nazi demonstration in downtown Stockholm. One of the uniforms came a little too close, grabbed Johnny by the arm, and started to say something.

‘Don’t touch me, you fucking pig!’ said Johnny.

‘Take it easy, dammit,’ said the cop. ‘I just want to…’

But Johnny had already taken his 1984 Colt Trooper from his inner pocket. With it, he shot the police officer in the throat from a distance of a few decimetres.

Johnny was later able to admit to himself that he had acted rashly. But no one is perfect. There was quite a hullabaloo, of course. And the cop didn’t even have an old lady or any brats at home to cry in the newspapers. He was probably a fag.

The advantage to things turning out the way they did was that ever since Johnny had enjoyed great respect in the right circles for so much more than being his brother’s brother. The disadvantage was that he would never ever find out what that blatte-fag actually wanted.

The police killing was never cleared up. None of those who could testify about what had happened wanted to risk becoming a victim of the same thing. The police investigators didn’t even get as far as an unofficial finger-pointing behind closed doors.

To shoot a cop in the throat in public, and get away with it, was something special. But little brother remained little brother: nothing could beat having done time for sawing a man in half with a chainsaw. Furthermore, Johnny hadn’t spent as much time in the United States as Kenneth had in his day. The US really built up your image.