Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson Read Free Book Online Page B

sufficient order inside his head, Hitman Anders allowed himself to be inspired by what he saw before his eyes.
    Realtor, bank, bus stop, smoker . . .
    He had never owned a rifle, or a revolver, but that didn’t meanhe couldn’t shoot from the hip. “Who’s on my hate-list? Are you sure you want to know?” he said, lowering his voice, speaking a little more slowly.
    The reporter nodded, his expression grave.
    â€œI don’t like realtors,” said Hitman Anders. “Or bank people. People who smoke. Commuters . . .”
    With that, he had included everything he’d seen and remembered across the street.
    â€œCommuters?” the reporter said in surprise.
    â€œYes—do you feel the same?”
    â€œNo. I mean, how can you hate commuters?”
    Hitman Anders seemed to settle into playing the role of himself, and he made the most of what he’d happened to say. He lowered his voice a bit more and spoke even more slowly: “Are you a commuter-lover ?”
    By now, the reporter from Expressen was truly scared. He assured the man that he did not love commuters: he and his girlfriend both biked to and from work and, beyond that, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to what sort of attitude he ought to have towards commuters.
    â€œI don’t like cyclists either,” said Hitman Anders. “But commuters are worse. And hospital workers. And gardeners.”
    Hitman Anders was on a roll. The priest thought it best to break in before the reporter and his photographer realized he was messing with them, or that he had no idea what he was saying, or a little of both.
    â€œI’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us, but Hitman Anders, I mean Johan here, needs his afternoon rest, with one yellow and one orange pill. It’s important to make sure that nothing goes wrong later this evening.”
    The interview hadn’t gone as planned, but with a little luck they could still make it work in their favor. The priest was just sorry that the most important part hadn’t been said, the part she had repeated twenty times to her hitman. The advertisement, so to speak.
    And then a miracle happened. He remembered! The photographer was already sitting behind the wheel in the Expressen car and the reporter had one foot in the car, but Hitman Anders hailed them: “You know where to find me if you need a kneecap broken! I’m not expensive. But I’m good.”
    The Expressen reporter’s eyes widened. He thanked him for the information, pulled his other leg into the car, rubbed his right hand across his uninjured kneecap, closed the door, and said to his photographer: “Let’s go.”
    * * *
    Expressen ’s headlines the next day read:
    Sweden’s Most Dangerous Man?
    HITMAN
    ANDERS
    In an Exclusive Interview:
    â€œI WANT
    TO KILL AGAIN”
    The quote was not an exact reproduction, but when people couldn’t express themselves in a manner that worked in a headline, the paper had no choice but to write what the interviewee had probably meant instead of what he or she had actually said. That’s called creative journalism.
    In the four-page spread, the newspaper’s readers discovered what a horrid person Hitman Anders was. All the atrocities he had confessed to in the story but, above all, his potentially psychopathic tendencies: the way he hated everyone from realtors to hospital workers to . . . commuters.
    The hatred Hitman Anders harbors for large parts of humanity seems to know no bounds. In the end, it turns out that no one, absolutely no one, is safe. For Hitman Anders’s services are for sale. He offers to break a kneecap, any kneecap at all, on behalf of Expressen ’s reporter, for a reasonable fee.
    Besides the main article about the meeting between the brave reporter and the hitman in question, the newspaper included a supplementary interview with a psychiatrist who devoted half of the discussion to emphasizing that he