Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All
A madcap new novel from the one-of-a-kind author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and The Girl Who Saved the King of SwedenIT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START AGAIN. AND AGAIN.It’s always awkward when five thousand kronor goes missing. When it happens at a certain grotty hotel in south Stockholm, it’s particularly awkward because the money belongs to the hitman currently staying in room seven. Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business, and preferably not get murdered. Johanna Kjellander, temporarily resident in room eight, is a priest without a vocation, and, as of last week, without a parish. But right now she has two things at her disposal: an envelope containing five thousand kronor, and an excellent idea . . .Featuring one violent killer, two shrewd business brains and many crates of Moldovan red wine, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is an outrageously zany story with as many laughs as Jonasson’s multimillion-copy bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.
Читать Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All онлайн беплатно
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
Originally published in Sweden as Mördar-Anders och hans vänner
(samt en och annan ovän) by Piratförlaget in 2015
Copyright © Jonas Jonasson 2015
Translation copyright © Rachel Wilson-Broyles 2016
Jonas Jonasson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘I rörelse’ by Karin Boye, translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles
Apart from the exceptions noted below, scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
The scripture quotation ‘No longer drink only water, but take a little wine for the sake of your stomach’ is from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), published by HarperCollins © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The scripture quotation ‘Drink thou also, and let thy foreskin be uncovered. The cup of the Lord’s right hand shall be turned unto thee’ is from the authorised King James Version.
Cover design by Jonathan Pelham
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Source ISBN 9780008152079
Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780008152086
Version: 2018-06-18
CONTENTS
An unusual business strategy
Daydreaming in the reception area of one of Sweden’s most wretched hotels stood a man whose life would soon come to be filled with death and bodily harm, thieves and bandits.
The only grandchild of horse-dealer Henrik Bergman was, as always, channelling his paternal grandfather’s shortcomings. The old man had been foremost in his field in southern Sweden; he never sold fewer than seven thousand animals per year, and each was first-class.
But from 1955, the traitorous farmers began to exchange Grandfather’s cold- and warmbloods for tractors at a rate that Grandfather refused to comprehend. Seven thousand transactions became seven hundred, which became seventy, which became seven. Within five years, the family’s multi-million-krona fortune had gone up in a cloud of diesel smoke. In 1960, the as-yet-unborn grandson’s dad tried to save what he could by travelling around to all the farmers in the region and preaching on the curse of mechanization. After all, there were so many rumours flying about. Such as how diesel fuel would cause cancer if it got on your skin and, of course, get on your skin it did.
And then Dad added that studies showed diesel could cause sterility in men. But he really shouldn’t have mentioned that. For one thing, it wasn’t true, and for another, it sounded perfectly lovely to breadwinning but continuously horny farmers with three to eight children each. It was embarrassing to try to get your hands on condoms, not so for a Massey Ferguson or John Deere.
His grandfather had died not only destitute but kicked to death by his last horse. His grieving, horseless son took up the reins, completed some sort of course, and was soon employed by Facit AB, one of the world’s leading companies in the production of typewriters and mechanical calculators. Thus he succeeded in being trampled by the future not once but twice in his lifetime, because suddenly the electronic calculator popped up on the market. As if to poke fun at Facit’s brick of a product, the Japanese version fitted the inner pocket of a jacket.
