The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! (11 page)

She kept a good lookout so that nobody skipped anything, but she could hear from their heavy breathing that the others were beginning to tire. Just a little bit more, a little more effort. She
thought about Anders and Emma, and was grateful that they had helped her with the gym. They had realized that she was cooking up some new robbery plans and they understood how stupid it would be if
somebody was to fall and fracture their thigh right in front of the police. Suddenly the music stopped.

‘Oh dear, the music system evidently isn’t entirely synchronized yet,’ said Martha and she went up to the apparatus. The others relaxed and started to gather their things
together. ‘Hold it there, we must go on. With a bit of gymnastics we will all be a lot fitter . . .’

‘ . . . to carry out new bank robberies,’ Brains finished the sentence for her.

‘I didn’t know you needed wall bars, rowing machines and treadmills to commit crimes,’ Rake muttered.

‘Exercise strengthens your arms and legs, and it will be helpful if we have to carry cases full of banknotes,’ Martha went on, panting while she checked the cables. But the music
system had conked out. It had been tampered with and didn’t seem to want to play CDs. So instead they tried to connect to the vinyl gramophone – which pleased Anna-Greta.

‘It can be a bit tricky connecting a vinyl gramophone to this music machine,’ said Brains and he went and stood next to Martha. ‘Let me have a look.’

He fiddled around with the cables and before long the music started up again. Martha gave him an appreciative look and went back to her place.

‘Ready? Up, stretch, switch and up again, twist and bend down! That’s the way! And one more time!’ she called out.

‘Stuff this, I’ve had enough,’ said Rake stopping in the middle of a move.

‘But, my dear, you who are so fond of women. And they like a nice body to look at, don’t they? Not everybody is in as good a shape as you,’ said Martha.

Rake changed his mind and returned to his place. But before long Brains, too, protested.

‘I think we’ve done enough gymnastics now,’ Brains panted, and pointed at his sodden T-shirt.

Martha lowered her arms. Perhaps she was too demanding. But if you were going to rob a bank then you couldn’t just fall over and end up lying on the floor with bundles of banknotes around
you. However, if the others were tired, then she would have to adapt to that.

‘OK, we’ll say that’s enough for today,’ said Martha. ‘After a shower we can get together and have a drink. It’s time to go through our plan.’

‘
Your
plan,’ Rake pointed out, and he picked up a towel and went on his way. Christina watched him a long time.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with Rake. He’s become so sensitive lately.’

‘It’s probably my fault,’ Martha sighed. ‘I decide too much. Men don’t like that.’

‘No, it isn’t that. He’s been so difficult recently, it’s as though we’re not on the same wavelength. It feels like he doesn’t care about me any
more.’

‘But, Christina, you know he is very fond of you. You are his best friend.’

‘Friend – but that’s just it. We have been more than that, but now it feels as if he just isn’t here, so to speak.’

‘Men live in their own world, and women in ours. Now and then they collide, but that can’t happen all the time,’ Martha consoled her. ‘And here I am bossing and ordering
people about all the time. That’s a sensitive issue, I can tell you.’

‘Don’t worry about it, because if you hadn’t organized us we would never have achieved anything at all,’ said Christina.

Then Martha, warm and sweaty though she was, went right up to her friend and gave her a big hug.

‘You know what?’ Martha said in a warm voice. ‘I think it will all sort itself out, the love bit as well as the money. It always seems to work out in the end.’

‘Like hell it does!’ said Rake who happened to pass by them just then.

A few hours later when they had all had a drink and were relaxing in the billiard room down in the cellar, they suddenly heard the sound of motorbikes. The sound came nearer
and a happy expression spread across Brains’s face.

‘Harley-Davidsons. And more than one of them!’

‘A whole biker gang. What if they’re coming for us?’ Christina shrieked and turned pale. Martha rolled up the blueprints of the Handelsbanken premises, and got up. She quickly
went across to a white plastic pipe which hung among the other PVC pipes up by the ceiling. She unscrewed the lid and put the blueprints inside. Then Martha closed the pipe again and had a quick
look through the window.

‘The gang must be on their way to the Bandangels. Come and have a look! They’ve got some weird wings on their backs – you know, ones with skulls. Perhaps it’s best we go
to bed,’ Martha suggested, and she moved towards the stairs. The others gathered their things together and followed her. They had hardly got upstairs to their rooms and combed their hair
before the doorbell rang. They came out and stared at each other, then took some hesitant steps down the stairs again. They stopped in the kitchen, but then were uncertain as to what to do. In the
end, Christina couldn’t keep quiet.

‘Shall we open the door?’ she wondered out loud, in a pathetic voice.

‘I’ll do it,’ Rake exclaimed heroically and strode up to the front door. He glanced quickly in the mirror and then stood in front of the door handle for quite a while and
expanded his chest. Then he pushed the handle down as hard as he could.

‘Hello, I’m Lillemor. Neighbour. I’m the person who lives in the brick house on the other side of the road,’ said a deep woman’s voice.

‘Oh, yes, right,’ said Rake.

Martha went to the porch to have a look.

‘Thought I’d see if I could come and get acquainted.’ The woman had bushy eyebrows, jet-black hair and bright-red lips. Without waiting for an answer, she stepped right in.

‘Yes, why not,’ came a mumbled response from Rake. ‘We’re sitting in the kitchen.’ Like a gentleman he helped her off with her coat and showed her in. Martha and
the others cautiously said hello, while Rake straightened his cravat and felt in his pocket for his comb.

‘What about a cup of tea?’ Rake offered.

‘A quick cup,’ Martha added, and thought about the meeting that they still hadn’t finished. She had just been about to describe how they could get into the bank vault, and she
wanted some feedback from the others. Now, however, Rake’s thoughts were very far from bank robberies. On his way to fetch the teapot, he brushed past Martha.

‘Didn’t you say that we should be on good terms with our neighbours?’

Martha thought about a doormat that Anna-Greta had made. It had the slogan: ‘If you’re beautiful, rich and unmarried, then I’m at home’. And this raven-haired woman
didn’t have a ring on her finger and looked very unmarried. As if she could devour a man in one big gulp. There was nothing wrong with her self-confidence either, she had already sat down at
the kitchen table and dipped her long fingers into the bowl with chocolate wafers. With an elegant movement she fished up a wafer between her red-painted nails and popped it into her mouth. She
looked around her in the kitchen with curiosity and even peered into the library as if she wanted to memorize every little detail. When she had finished the wafer and got a cup of tea from Rake,
she pulled out a pack of cards.

‘I can tell your fortunes, if you like,’ Lillemor said with a dazzling white smile.

‘Our fortunes?’ Rake raised his eyebrows.

‘Yes, I work with Tarot cards. I can foretell the future.’

Before Martha could stop her, she had laid out two rows of Tarot cards in a cross. She turned towards Rake and said in a veiled voice: ‘Tell me your personal identity number!’

Rake tugged at his cravat. ‘Well, now, that isn’t the sort of thing you hand out indiscriminately,’ he said and looked as if there was nothing he would like better than to
reveal the exact date of his birth. Down to the hour and minute.

‘I must have those numbers to be able to judge your potentials in life. Let us begin by looking at the challenges waiting for you this year.’

‘Challenges? Yes, we men are always facing difficult tasks,’ said Rake, his cheeks beginning to redden slightly.

The fortune-teller lowered her eyelids and nodded.

‘When I sailed out on the oceans, there were often storms and once—’ Rake went on.

‘What about the Arcana?’ the fortune-teller cut in and put her hand over his. ‘Your date of birth!’

Rake looked at the others, embarrassed, then leaned forward and whispered something. The special personal identity number that Anna-Greta had arranged for them when they returned to Sweden would
hardly do. He must use his own, or at least one pretty close to it. He decided on the same year but a date earlier than his own birthday.

‘Well, if you need it for your prophesies . . . ’

‘The Arcana, yes. You see, I add up the year, the month and the days, and that gives me a number. Then I see a pattern. But I don’t think we will bother about the Minor Arcana which
deal with the small events in life, because I can see something big here. Let us go directly to the Major Arcana.’

‘That will probably be for the best.’ Rake nodded.

Lillemor turned the top card over. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s just as I thought,’ and she looked up with an overflowing smile. ‘You are enlightenment, warmth,
riches, success, joy and harmony . . .’

‘Yes, perhaps I am,’ said Rake, now with his cheeks glowing bright red.

‘But, of course, you are not a high priest.’

‘Oh no, that’s Martha,’ Rake let slip rather too quickly.

Lillemor picked up a new card.

‘Here I can see a lot of exciting things that are going to happen to you during the coming year.’

Rake gave a start. What could she actually see in the cards? Surely she couldn’t predict bank robberies, could she?

‘Life is waiting for you. I can see a new relationship. Yes, I see—’

‘A new woman?’ Rake asked.

‘If you are ready. Love is the strongest force in the universe. We Tarot interpreters have signed an oath of confidentiality so you can tell us everything,’ she went on, and she
angled her head to one side and leaned forward so that the cleavage in her neckline was visible. At that point Martha got up.

‘I realize you have interesting things to talk about, but you’ll have to do that later. We were going to have a meeting.’

Martha felt a hard kick to her shins and Rake looked daggers at her.

‘Now I haven’t had time to tell you
your
fortune, but we can do that another time,’ Lillemor proposed and then gathered together the cards without taking her eyes off
the stylish man with the cravat. ‘I live in the brick-built house, below the boys in Bandangels.’

‘Ah, I see. But perhaps we can do that fortune-telling another time?’ Martha decided and gestured to Rake to show their neighbour into the porch. Not until the front door had shut
again did Christina open her mouth.

‘Fortune-tellers are not experts on robbing banks, so we don’t have any use for her. The best thing to do is to return to our meeting!’

She sounded so decisive that nobody thought of saying otherwise out of pure surprise. But Rake had gone up to the window and was looking down towards the brick house.

Martha sat in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea with lemon in it. The day for the great bank robbery was approaching. There was no going back. The League of Pensioners must get
hold of some more money.

‘Now things are warming up it is best to be prepared,’ mumbled Martha, reaching out to pick up the brochure she had got hold of at the security seminar the previous week. You can
learn a lot at Stockholm University, she thought, and couldn’t help but smile. She had gone out to Frescati, the modern campus on the edge of the city, and then found the right lecture
theatre and sat down right at the back. Then she had listened to the experts’ advice about security and how to react in the event of a robbery. For Martha, it was a question of ‘know
your enemy’. In this case, the enemy was the general public, who would try to sound the alarm and stop presumptive bank robbers. The instructions were clear:

In other words, it shouldn’t be so very difficult to rob a bank. Pleased with what she read, Martha closed the brochure and glanced towards the library. The dry needles from the Christmas
tree had formed a soft, brown carpet under the spiny branches, and they had long since finished the mulled wine and the ginger biscuits of the festive season. The robbery was to take place after
Twelfth Night when the workers were busy building Citybanan, the new underground line. In Stockholm they had decided to make a six-kilometre-long tunnel under the city centre to improve
communications. They would be detonating charges for the new train tunnel and, what was even better, the city council advertised the exact times of the explosions.

Martha got up from the kitchen table, rolled up the blueprints and put them back into the hiding place in the pipe in the cellar. As she passed the Christmas tree again, she was reminded of the
times she had celebrated Christmas with her son. Her baby’s father had left her when the little boy was only two years old. She had grown very close to her only son. Today he would have been
forty years old if he had been able to grow up. She felt a sudden pain in her chest. Even though it was so long ago, she still mourned him. Losing a child was a loss that never really healed.
Perhaps it was the greatest sorrow there was. That was why she must always keep herself occupied – so that she wouldn’t remember; indeed, quite simply so that she wouldn’t have
time to remember. Her son had drowned when he was only five years old, when his life had hardly begun. How could anyone else ever be able to understand how much it hurt and that the sorrow never
seemed to leave her? Martha pulled out her hanky and blew her nose. Then she sat in silence for a long time and stared out through the window before she went down into the porch. She put on her
boots and winter coat, picked up her bag, and went outside. Although she had been in other relationships, she had never married. There didn’t seem to be much point when she was too old to
have children.