The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (3 page)

When Julius suggested having one final snifter ‘for dessert’, Allan answered that he had always had a weakness for desserts of that kind, but that first of all he must seek out a toilet if there possibly happened to be one in the building. Julius got up, turned on the ceiling lamp since it was starting to get dark, and then pointed to the stairs saying that there was a functional lavatory on the right. He promised to have two newly poured drams ready and waiting when Allan returned.

Allan found the toilet where Julius had said it would be. He stood in position to pee, and as usual the last drops didn’t quite
make it to the bowl. Some of them landed softly on his pee slippers instead.

Halfway through the process, Allan heard a noise on the stairs. His first thought was that it was Julius, going off with his newly stolen suitcase. The noise got louder. Somebody was climbing the stairs.

Allan realised that there was a chance that the steps he heard outside the door belonged to a slightly built young man with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words
Never Again
on the back. And that, if it was him, then it probably wasn’t going to be a pleasant encounter.

The bus returning from Strängnäs arrived at Malmköping station three minutes early. The bus carried no passengers and the driver had accelerated a little bit extra after the last bus stop to have time to catch his breath before continuing the journey to Flen.

But the driver had barely lit his cigarette before a slightly built youth with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words
Never Again
on the back, arrived.

‘Are you going to Flen?’ the driver asked a little hesitantly, because there was something about the young man that didn’t feel right.

‘I’m not going to Flen. And neither are you,’ answered the young man.

Hanging around waiting for four hours for the bus to come back had been a bit too much for what little patience the youth could muster. Besides, after half that time he had realised that if instead he had immediately stolen a car, he could have caught up with the bus long before Strängnäs.

On top of it all, police cars had started to cruise around in the little town. At any time the police could stumble into the station, and start interrogating the little man behind the window in the 
ticket office as to why he looked terrified and why the door to his office was hanging at an angle on one hinge.

The young man had no idea what the cops were doing there. His boss in Never Again had chosen Malmköping as the
transaction
venue for three reasons: first, it was close to Stockholm; second, it had relatively good transport options; and third – and most important – because the long arm of the law wasn’t long enough to reach there. There were simply no cops in Malmköping.

Or, to be more precise: there shouldn’t be, and yet the place was crawling with them. The young man had seen two cars and a total of four policemen; from his perspective that was a crowd.

At first, the young man thought that the police were after him. But that would assume that the little man had squawked, and the young man could categorically discount that possibility. While waiting for the bus to come, the young man hadn’t had much to do other than keep an eye on the little man, smash his office phone to bits and patch up the office door as best he could.

When the bus eventually came and the young man noted that it had no passengers, he had immediately decided to kidnap both the driver and the bus.

It took all of twenty seconds to persuade the bus driver to turn the bus around and drive northwards again. Close to a personal record, the young man reflected as he sat down in the exact seat where the geriatric he was now chasing had been sitting earlier the same day.

The bus driver quivered with fear, but got through the worst of it with a calming cigarette. Smoking was, of course, forbidden on board the bus, but the only law the driver was subject to at that moment was sitting just diagonally behind him in the bus and was slightly built, had long, greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words
Never Again
on the back.

On the way, the young man asked where the elderly
suitcase-thief
had gone. The driver said that the old man had got off at Byringe Station and that was probably entirely random,
explaining
the backwards way the old man had gone about things,
offering
a fifty-crown note and asking how far he could get with that.

The driver didn’t know much about Byringe Station, except that it was rare for anyone to get on or off there. Supposedly there was a closed-down railway station some way in the forest, and Byringe village was somewhere in the vicinity. The geriatric couldn’t have got much further than that, the driver guessed. The man was very old and the suitcase was heavy, even though it had wheels.

The young man immediately calmed down. He had refrained from calling the boss in Stockholm, because the boss was one of the few people who could scare people more effectively than the young man himself. The young man shivered at the thought of what the boss would say about the suitcase going astray. Better to solve the problem first and tell him later. And seeing as how the old man hadn’t gone all the way to Strängnäs or even beyond, the suitcase should be back in the hands of the young man quicker than he had feared.

‘Here’s the Byringe Station bus stop…’

The driver slowly rolled to the side of the road, and prepared to die.

But it turned out that his time had not come, although his mobile phone wasn’t so lucky. It met with a rapid death under one of the young man’s boots. And a whole stream of death threats directed at the driver’s relatives spewed out of the young man’s mouth, designed to avert any possible thought of the driver contacting the police instead of turning the bus around and continuing the journey to Flen.

Then the young man got off and let the driver and the bus escape. The poor driver was so terrified that he didn’t dare turn
the bus round, but continued all the way to Strängnäs, parked in the middle of Trädgårds Street, walked in shock into the Delia Hotel where he rapidly downed four glasses of whisky. Then to the bartender’s horror, he started to cry. After a further two glasses of whisky, the bartender offered him a telephone in case he wanted to phone somebody. The bus driver started to cry again – and called his girlfriend.

The young man thought he could make out tracks in the gravel on the road, tracks of a suitcase on wheels. This would be over in no time, which was a good thing, because it was getting dark.

Off and on, the young man wished that he had done a bit more planning. It struck him that he was standing in a rapidly darkening forest, and it would soon be pitch black. what would he do then?

These troubled thoughts ended abruptly when he first caught sight of a shabby, partly boarded-up, yellow building near the bottom of the hill. And when somebody turned on a light on the upper floor, the young man mumbled:

‘Now I’ve got you, old geezer.’

Allan quickly stopped peeing. Then he carefully opened the toilet door and tried to hear what was happening in the kitchen. Soon enough his worst fear was confirmed. Allan recognised the young man’s voice, bellowing at Julius Jonsson to reveal where ‘the other old bastard’ was.

Allan snuck over to the kitchen door, silently because he was wearing bedroom slippers. The young man had grasped Julius by both ears, the same hold he had earlier practised on the little man at the station in Malmköping. while he shook poor Julius, he continued his interrogation. Allan thought the young man should have been satisfied with finding the suitcase which was standing right in the middle of the room. Julius grimaced but made no move to answer. Allan reflected that the old timber
merchant was quite a tough guy, and looked around for a suitable weapon. Amidst the junk he saw a small number of candidates: a crowbar, a plank, a container of insect spray and a packet of rat poison. Allan first settled on the rat poison but couldn’t just then figure out a way to get a spoonful or two into the young man. The crowbar, on the other hand, was a bit too heavy for the centenarian to lift, and the insect spray… No, it would have to be the plank.

So Allan took a firm hold of his weapon and with four sensationally fast steps – for his age – he was right behind his intended victim.

The young man must have sensed that Allan was there, because just as the old man took aim the youth loosened his hold on Julius Jonsson and spun around.

He received the plank slap bang in the middle of his forehead, stood still where he was and stared for a second before he fell backwards and hit his head on the edge of the kitchen table.

No blood, no groaning, nothing. He just lay there, with his eyes closed.

‘Good one,’ said Julius.

‘Thanks,’ said Allan, ‘now where’s that dessert you promised?’

Allan and Julius sat down at the kitchen table, with the long-haired youth unconscious at their feet. Julius poured the brandy, gave one glass to Allan and raised his own in a toast. Allan raised his glass.

‘So,’ said Julius when they’d emptied their glasses. ‘I’m betting that’s the owner of the suitcase?’

Allan realised that it was time for him to explain a thing or two in more detail.

Not that there was so much to explain. Most of what had happened during the day was hard for Allan himself to
understand
. But he described the events – his defection from the
home, his spontaneous seizure of the suitcase at the station in Malmköping, and the fear at the back of his mind that the young man who now lay on the floor would probably quickly catch up with him. And he sincerely apologised for the fact that Julius now sat there with red and throbbing ears. But Julius said that Allan most certainly shouldn’t be apologising for the fact that there was finally a bit of action in Julius Jonsson’s life.

Julius was back in good form. He thought it was high time that they both had a look at what was in the suitcase. When Allan pointed out that it was locked, Julius told him not to be silly.

‘Since when has a lock stopped Julius Jonsson?’ asked Julius Jonsson.

But there is a time for everything, he went on. First there was the matter of the problem on the floor. It wouldn’t do if the young man were to wake up and then carry on from where he left off when he passed out.

Allan suggested that they tie him to a tree outside the station building, but Julius objected that if the young man shouted loudly enough when he woke up he would be heard down in the village. There were only a handful of families still living there, but all had – with more or less good reason – a bit of a grudge against Julius and they would probably be on the young man’s side if they got the chance.

Julius had a better idea. Off the kitchen was an insulated freezer-room where he stored his poached and butchered elks. For the time being the room contained no elks, and the fan was turned off. Julius didn’t want to use the freezer unnecessarily because it used a hell of a lot of electricity. Julius had of course hot-wired it, and it was Gösta at Forest Cottage farm who unknowingly paid, but it was important to steal electricity in moderation if you wanted to keep taking advantage of the perk for a long time.

Allan inspected the turned-off freezer and found it to be an excellent cell, without any unnecessary amenities. The six by nine feet was perhaps more space than the youth deserved, but there was no need to make conditions unnecessarily harsh.

The old men dragged the young man into the freezer. He groaned when they put him on an upturned wooden chest in one corner and propped his body against the wall. He seemed about to wake up. Best to hurry out and lock the door properly!

No sooner said than done. Upon which Julius lifted the
suitcase
onto the kitchen table, looked at the lock, licked clean the fork he had just used for the evening’s roast elk with potatoes, and picked the lock in a few seconds. Then he beckoned Allan over for the actual opening, on the grounds that it was Allan’s booty after all.

‘Everything of mine is yours too,’ said Allan. ‘We share and share alike, but if there is a pair of shoes in my size then I bags them.’

Upon which Allan opened the lock.

‘What the hell,’ said Allan.

‘What the hell,’ said Julius.

‘Let me out!’ could be heard from the freezer-room. 

Allan Emmanuel Karlsson was born on 2nd May 1905. The day before, his mother had marched in the May Day procession in Flen and demonstrated on behalf of women’s suffrage, an
eight-hour
working day and other utopian demands. The
demonstrating
had at least one positive result: her contractions started and just after midnight her first and only son was born. She gave birth at home with the help of the neighbour’s wife who was not especially talented at midwifery but who had some status in the community because as a nine-year-old she had had the honour of curtsying before King Karl XIV Johan, who in turn was a friend (sort of) of Napoleon Bonaparte. And to be fair to the neighbour’s wife, the child she delivered did indeed reach adulthood, and by a very good margin.

Allan Karlsson’s father was both considerate and angry. He was considerate with his family; he was angry with society in general and with everybody who could be thought of as representing that society. Finer folk disapproved of him, dating back to the time he had stood on the square in Flen and advocated the use of contraceptives. For this offence he was fined ten crowns, and relieved of the need to worry about the topic any further since Allan’s mother out of pure shame decided to ban any further entry to her person. Allan was then six and old enough to ask his mother for a more detailed explanation of why his father’s bed had suddenly been moved into the
wood-shed
. He was told that he shouldn’t ask so many questions unless he wanted his ears boxed. Since Allan, like all children at all times, did not want his ears boxed, he dropped the subject.

From that day on, Allan’s father appeared less and less frequently in his own home. In the daytime he more or less
coped with his job on the railways, in the evening he discussed socialism at meetings far and wide, and where he spent his nights was never really clear to Allan.

His father did however take his financial responsibilities seriously. He handed over the greater part of his salary to his wife each week, until one day he was fired after he had turned violent with a passenger who happened to announce that he was on his way to Stockholm with thousands of others to visit the King in the royal palace and assure him of their will to defend their fatherland.

‘You can start by defending yourself against this,’ Allan’s father had said and punched the man with a hard right so that he fell to the ground.

The immediate dismissal meant that Allan’s father could no longer support his family. The reputation he had acquired as a man of violence and advocate of contraception meant that it was a waste of time for him to look for another job. All that was left was to wait for the revolution, or best of all to speed up its arrival, because every little thing nowadays went so damned slowly. Allan’s father was a man who wanted to see results. Swedish socialism needed an international model. That would light a fire under everything and make things hellishly hot for Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson and his capitalist ilk.

So Allan’s father packed his bag and went off to Russia to depose the Tsar. Allan’s mother of course missed his salary, but she was otherwise satisfied that her husband had left not only the district but also the country. After the family
breadwinner
had emigrated, it was up to Allan’s mother and the just-ten-year-old Allan himself to keep the family afloat
financially
. His mother had the fourteen fully grown birch trees they owned chopped down and then she cut them up and split them herself to sell as firewood, while Allan managed to get
a miserably paid job as an errand boy at Nitroglycerine Ltd.’s production branch.

In the regular letters she received from St Petersburg (which soon after was renamed Petrograd), Allan’s mother noted to her increasing surprise that Allan’s father had started to waver in his belief in the blessings of socialism.

In his letters Allan’s father often referred to friends and
acquaintances
from Petrograd’s political establishment. The person who was most often quoted was a man called Carl. Not an especially Russian name, Allan thought, and it didn’t get any more Russian when Allan’s father began to call him Uncle Carl or just Uncle.

According to Allan’s father, Uncle’s thesis was that people in general didn’t know what was best for them, and that they needed somebody whose hand they could hold. That was why autocracy was superior to democracy, as long as the educated and
responsible
segment of society made sure the autocrat concerned did a good job. Seven out of ten Bolsheviks can’t read, Uncle had snorted. We can’t hand over power to a load of illiterates, can we?

In his letters, Allan’s father had nevertheless defended the Bolsheviks on that particular point, because he said ‘you can’t imagine what the Russian alphabet looks like. It’s no wonder people are illiterate.’

What was worse was how the Bolsheviks behaved. They were filthy, and they drank vodka like the riff-raff back home, the ones who laid the rails criss-crossing central Sweden. Allan’s father had always wondered how the rails could be so straight
considering
the extent of the workers’ consumption of spirits, and he had felt a twinge of guilt every time Swedish rails swung to the right or left.

Be that as it may, the Bolsheviks were at least as bad as the Swedes. Uncle maintained that socialism would end with everybody trying to kill everybody else until there was only one person
left to make all the decisions. So it would be better to rely from the start on the Tsar, a good and educated man with a vision for the world.

In a way, Uncle knew what he was talking about. He had actually met the Tsar, and indeed more than once. Uncle claimed that Nicholas II had a genuinely good heart. The Tsar had had a lot of bad luck, but surely that couldn’t last. Failed harvests and revolting Bolsheviks had made a mess of things. And then the Germans started to growl just because the Tsar was mobilizing his forces. But he did that in order to keep the peace. After all it wasn’t the Tsar who had killed the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, was it?

That was evidently how Uncle (whoever he was) saw it all, and somehow he got Allan’s father to see it the same way. Besides, Allan’s father felt an affinity with the Tsar because of all the bad luck he suffered.

Sooner or later such bad luck must change, for Russian Tsars as well as for ordinary honest folk from the vicinity of Flen.

His father never sent any money from Russia, but once after a couple of years a package came with an enamel Easter egg that his father said he had won in a game of cards from a Russian comrade, who besides drinking, arguing and playing cards with Allan’s father had no other occupation than making these kinds of eggs.

His father sent the Easter egg to his ‘dear wife’, who just got angry and said that the damned layabout could at least have sent a real egg so that the family could eat. She was about to throw the present out the window, when she reconsidered. Perhaps Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson might be
interested
in it. He always tried to be special and special was exactly what Allan’s mother supposed the egg to be.

Imagine Allan’s mother’s surprise when Mr Wholesale
Merchant
Gustavsson after two days’ consideration offered her
eighteen crowns for Uncle’s egg. Not real money of course, just cancelling a debt, but even so.

After that, his mother hoped to receive more eggs, but instead she found out from the next letter that the Tsar’s generals had abandoned their autocrat who then had to leave his throne. In his letter, Allan’s father cursed his egg-producing friend, who had now fled to Switzerland. Allan’s father himself planned to stay on and do battle with the upstart clown who had taken over, a man they called Lenin.

For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased twelve square metres on which to grow Swedish strawberries. ‘The land didn’t cost more than four roubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,’ wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: ‘Now it’s war!’

And war it certainly was – all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his
errand-boy
job at Nitroglycerine Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marvelled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany.

And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Tsar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…

So ‘Now it’s war!’ was right. Soon afterwards, one of Lenin’s henchmen had the Tsar executed together with all his family. Allan noted that the Tsar’s bad luck had persisted.

A few months later, the Swedish consulate in Petrograd sent a telegram to Yxhult to inform them that Allan’s father was dead.

Apparently Allan’s father had nailed some planking around a little bit of earth, and proclaimed the area to be an
independent
republic. He called his little state The Real Russia but then two government soldiers came to pull down the fence. Allan’s father had put up his fists in his eagerness to defend his country’s borders, and it had been impossible for the two soldiers to reason with him. In the end, they could think of no better solution than to put a bullet between his eyes, so they could go about their task in peace.

‘Couldn’t you have chosen to die in a less idiotic manner?’ said Allan’s mother to the telegram from the consulate.

She hadn’t really expected her husband to come home again, but recently she had nevertheless started to hope he might, because she had troublesome lungs, and it wasn’t easy to keep up her old pace when splitting logs. Allan’s mother made a croaky sigh and that was the extent of her mourning. She told Allan philosophically that it was what it was, and that in the future whatever would be would be. Then she ruffled her son’s hair kindly before going out to split more logs.

Allan didn’t really understand what his mother meant. But he understood that his father was dead, that his mother coughed and that the war was over. As for himself, by the age of thirteen he had acquired a particular skill in making explosions by mixing nitroglycerine, cellulose nitrate, ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate, wood flour, dinitrotoluene and a few other ingredients. That ought to come in handy some day, thought Allan, and went out to help his mother with the wood.

Two years later, Allan’s mother finished coughing, and she entered that imagined heaven where his father was possibly already established. Then, on the threshold of the little house, Allan found an angry Mr Wholesale Merchant who thought that Allan’s mother should have paid her debt of nine crowns before she – without telling anyone – went and died. But Allan had no plans to give Gustavsson anything.

‘That’s something you’ll have to talk to her about yourself, Mr Wholesale Merchant. Do you want to borrow a spade?’

As wholesalers often are, the man was lightly built, compared with the fifteen-year-old Allan. The boy was on his way to
becoming
a man, and if he was half as crazy as his father then he was capable of anything, was how Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson saw it, and since he wanted to be around quite a bit longer to count his money, the subject of the debt was never raised again.

Young Allan couldn’t understand how his mother had managed to scrape together several hundred crowns in savings. But the money was there anyway, and it was enough to bury her and to start the Karlsson Dynamite Company. The boy was only fifteen years old when his mother died, but Allan had learned all he needed at Nitroglycerine Ltd.

He experimented freely in the gravel pit behind the house; once so freely that two miles away the closest neighbour’s cow had a miscarriage. But Allan never heard about that, because just like Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, the neighbour was a little bit afraid of crazy Karlsson’s possibly equally crazy boy.

Since his time as an errand boy, Allan had retained his interest in current affairs. At least once a week, he rode his bicycle to the public library in Flen to update himself on the latest news. When he was there he often met young men who were keen to debate and who all had one thing in common: they wanted
to tempt Allan into some political movement or other. But Allan’s great interest in world events did not include any interest in trying to change them.

In a political sense, Allan’s childhood had been bewildering. On the one hand, he was from the working class. You could hardly use any other description of a boy who ends his
schooling
when he is ten to get a job in industry. On the other hand, he respected the memory of his father, and his father during far too short a life had managed to hold views right across the
spectrum
. He started on the Left, went on to praise Tsar Nicholas II and rounded off his existence with a land dispute with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

His mother, in between her coughing fits, had cursed everyone from the King to the Bolsheviks and, in passing, even the leader of the Social Democrats, Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, and – not least – Allan’s father.

Allan himself was certainly no fool. True, he only spent three years in school, but that was plenty for him to have learned to read, write and count. His politically conscious fellow workers at Nitroglycerine Ltd. had also made him curious about the world.

But what finally formed young Allan’s philosophy of life were his mother’s words when they received the news of his father’s death. It took a while before the message seeped into his soul, but once there, it was there for ever: