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

female priest over their male hitman by a long shot, but he couldn’t see what Paul had to do with it.
    â€œFor my part, I’d rather sleep with a bike rack than with Hitman Anders,” said the priest. “But otherwise I’m in complete agreement with you.”
    When the receptionist wondered what the Bible had to say about a sexual relationship between a woman and a bike rack, the priest reminded him that bicycles hadn’t been invented in Paul’s time. Neither, probably, had the bike rack.
    And no one had anything more to add to that. Instead, they began another summit that was just as non-hateful as the one they’d just archived.
    * * *
    For a while, everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The priest and the receptionist joyfully and contentedly shared their genuine dislike of the world, including the entirety of the Earth’s population. The burden was now only half as great, since each of them could take on three and a half billion people rather than seven billion alone. Plus (of course) a considerable number of individuals who no longer existed. Among them: the receptionist’s grandfather, the priest’s entire family tree, and—not least!—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and everyone else in the book that had persecuted (and continued to persecute) Johanna Kjellander.
    While the currently newly in-love couple had earned their seven hundred thousand kronor, Hitman Anders had, according to the contract, brought in 2.8 million. But since he could keep a whole pub going for half the night all by himself, he never had more than a few thousand-krona notes in savings. He burned through what came in at approximately the same rate it came in. If his money ever happened to grow into a pile of cash worthy of the name, it tended to be an extra lively time at the pub, such as when the jukebox had gone through the window.
    â€œCouldn’t you just have pulled the plug out of the wall?” the pub owner said, a bit cautiously, to his ashamed regular the next day.
    â€œYes,” Hitman Anders admitted. “That would have been a reasonable alternative.”
    This sort of incident actually suited the receptionist and the priest quite well, because as long as Hitman Anders didn’t do what they did—that is, fill boxes with money—he would need to dispense justice on behalf of those who could afford to have justice dispensed according to their own definition of the concept.
    What the receptionist and the priest didn’t know was that, during the past year, Hitman Anders had been experiencing an increasing sense that life was hopeless. Incidentally, he was barely aware of it. He had spent his whole life reasoning with other people via his fists. It wasn’t easy to talk to oneself in the same fashion. So he sought out alcohol earlier in the day and with greater emphasis than before.
    It had helped. But it took constant replenishing. And his situation was not improved by the way the priest and the receptionist had started walking around side by side, smiling happily. What the hell was so damn funny? That it was only a matter of time before he ended up back where he belonged?
    Perhaps it was just as well to put himself out of his misery, hasten the process, off the first prize idiot he saw, and move into the slammer for another twenty or thirty years—the exact fate he had resolved to avoid. One advantage would be that the priest and the receptionist would probably have grinned their last grins before he got out again. New love was seldom as new and loving two decades later.
    One morning, in an unfamiliar and awkward attempt to gain insight, the hitman asked himself what it was all about. What, for example, had the jukebox incident really been about?
    Of course he could have pulled the plug. And then Julio Iglesias would have gone silent while his jukebox fans went on a rampage. Four men and four women around a table: in the best case, it would have