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

Sweden

Business was booming. The order phone even rang at weekends. Like now, a Saturday afternoon.

‘Die with Pride, but perhaps not immediately,’ said Allan, who happened to have the business phone on a small table beside the sofa he so seldom left.

Beatrice Bergh from the morgue in a neighbouring town introduced herself in a panicked tone. She and Allan didn’t know each other. But he knew Sabine had delivered coffins there a few times, most recently the day before.

‘Why, hello and good day, Madame Morgue Manager. Calling on a Saturday? Is someone in a hurry to get underground?’

Beatrice Bergh didn’t respond. She said something, but it was hard to get a grip on exactly what it might have been. The woman seemed thoroughly out of balance. Her words came all in a jumble. At last she gave up and began to cry. ‘Forgive me,’ she sobbed. ‘Forgive me!’

Allan had sat up on his sofa. This didn’t seem to be just another typical call. ‘I’m sure I’ll forgive you, Mrs Bergh,’ he said. ‘But that will be easier to do if I know what I have to forgive. Is it calling on a Saturday? In that case, just hang up and we’ll let bygones be bygones.’

He let her cry a little longer, figuring that she needed to get it out. But at last he grew weary of her. ‘I think it’s about time for you to pull yourself together, Mrs Bergh. Otherwise I may have to reconsider the forgiveness. Tell me what’s going on.’

‘Thank you, okay, well… Oh dear,’ said Beatrice Bergh.

And did, in fact, manage to tell the tale.

It was easy to work alone on the Saturday shift at the morgue. Still, on that particular day there were two deceased to distribute for burial, which was two more than usual. One was a young girl: the family had chosen Saturday so her classmates could come. The other… something entirely dreadful.

‘Well, I’m sure you know which coffins I’m thinking of, sir, since your colleague Sabine Jonsson painted them both.’

Allan didn’t know the details of Julius and Sabine’s doings, but he did recall the twelve-year-old girl’s coffin: it was lovely. Allan had thought, when he saw it, that he would have been happy to donate some of his hundred-and-one years to the twelve-year-old if only it were possible, which of course it wasn’t. What the morgue manager was referring to by a dreadful coffin, he didn’t know.

‘Was it Elvis?’ he said.

‘No!’ said Beatrice Bergh. ‘It was one with swastikas and white power and God knows what. I’ve worked here for eighteen years. Eighteen years. There’s never a mistake!’

‘Until now?’ Allan guessed.

‘Until now.’ Beatrice Bergh was on the verge of crying again. But she did manage to report that transport one had received number two’s coffin while transport two had received number one’s.

‘That’s all?’ Allan said. ‘Can’t they just be redirected?’

No. What’s done was done, and it was too late to fix it.

She had received two phone calls within a few minutes of each other. The first was from an outraged pastor, who had stopped the twelve-year-old girl’s funeral before her family could see the most horrid coffin imaginable. And a minute later one from… Beatrice Bergh dropped off mid-sentence.

‘From?’ said Allan.

‘From a man who said he was on his way over to kill me! He was calling to find out where I was.’

And she sobbed again.

But Allan had no intention of suffering through another round of tears. ‘There, there, Mrs Bergh. If someone is on his way to kill you – which is not to be believed – then isn’t it better to leave, instead of sitting there making phone calls without quite getting to the point?’

‘I’m not the one who has to leave,’ cried Mrs Bergh. ‘You are!’

Allan summoned the lovebirds Jonsson and Jonsson from upstairs. Because he was standing up, instead of lying on the sofa when they came down, they surmised it was important.

‘Apparently we made a coffin with swastikas and Hitler and that sort of thing?’ he said.

Sabine and Julius nodded.

‘Not Hitler himself, but in that spirit,’ said Sabine.

‘I was just speaking with the morgue. The swastika coffin went astray and was replaced by the lovely one you made, Sabine, with doves and clouds and all that. The purchaser of the swastikas is now upset, as I understand it. He called the morgue some time ago and wanted to kill the woman behind the mix-up.’

‘And?’ Julius asked, worried.

‘And… Well, she saved her own skin by blaming us. Complete with the address. It seems we have an angry Nazi on the way. As I recall from history, one must watch out for angry Nazis. Or Nazis in general.’

‘What the hell?’ said Julius. ‘Couldn’t you have led with that? We have to get out of here! Now!’

‘That sounds like an accurate analysis,’ said Allan. ‘I suppose we should gather up—’

He was about to say ‘the essentials’, by which he meant the black tablet he already held. But he didn’t have time to finish his sentence before all hell broke loose. The three shop windows shattered, one after the next. A loud rat-a-tat suggested that someone was out on the street, shooting straight into the shop with an automatic weapon. Allan, Julius and Sabine survived the first salvo and managed to crawl through the door to the courtyard, all in a line. After a brief interlude, the shooting on the other side of the building resumed.

Julius helped Allan into the back of the hearse as Sabine got behind the wheel. A few seconds later, Julius settled into the passenger seat.

‘Go!’ he said, a second after Sabine had set off.

‘It’s crowded back here,’ said Allan. ‘Is someone in the coffin, or can I climb in?’

The hearse raced away from Märsta, heading south on the E4 highway. Allan moved into the white coffin painted with red roses that would never be delivered the following Monday. With a few minor adjustments, it would be truly comfortable. If they could only arrange for sufficient oxygen intake, he might close the lid and keep it that way each time the lovebirds got cosy with each other. But it would be best to hold off on suggestions of that sort. The man in the front seat seemed thoroughly shaken by the hail of bullets that had rained over them. That must have been Julius’s first time. Allan recalled Guadalajara in 1937 as if it were yesterday, where you’d had to keep your head down if you wanted it to stick around. Those were the days. Franco had taken quite a pasting. And then what happened had happened, until it was over. That was life.

While Allan let his mind wander eighty years back in time, Julius sat next to Sabine in silence, his heart pounding, his mind a total blank.

Sabine speeded up a bit. Allan wrestled his way out of his jacket and placed it under his head. Then he took out his black tablet – what luck that it had escaped without a scratch.

‘Shots fired in Märsta!’ he reported, after some time.

‘Really?’ said Sabine.

Allan had his tablet; Sabine had the wheel. Julius had nothing more than a slowly recovering brain. He forced himself to recount the trio’s situation, as self-therapy.

‘Here’s where we stand,’ he said to the others, and took a breath.

Die with Pride AB was now a business without operations and couldn’t expect any further income. The firm had perhaps a hundred thousand untaxed kronor in the bank, and there they were welcome to remain. Untaxed. Further, the three representatives of the company were on the run from a Nazi who evidently wanted nothing but to kill them. Their escape was being undertaken in a vehicle recognizable from many hundred metres away. The Nazi was probably after them on the same road.

‘We’re not switching cars, are we?’ Allan said nervously. ‘I’m comfortable here.’

‘Let’s start by switching roads,’ Sabine said, exiting the E4 in Upplands Väsby, without seeking approval from the others.