The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (17 page)

‘There is no such thing as a fourth or fifth secretary,’ the third secretary attempted.

‘And what conclusions do you draw from that?’

War hero Winston Churchill had somewhat unexpectedly lost the British elections in 1945, the British people’s gratitude having run out.

But Churchill planned his revenge and marked time by
travelling
the world. The former prime minister suspected that the Labour incompetent who now governed Great Britain would introduce a planned economy at the same time as handing over the Empire to people who couldn’t administer it.

Take British India for example, which was now on its way to falling to bits. Hindus and Muslims could not get along, and in the middle sat that damned Mahatma Gandhi with his legs crossed, having stopped eating because he was dissatisfied with something. What sort of war strategy was that? How far would they have got with such a strategy against the Nazi bombing raids over England?

It was not quite as bad in British East Africa, not yet, but it was only a matter of time before the Africans also wanted to become their own masters.

Churchill understood that not everything could remain as it was, but nevertheless the Empire needed a leader who could announce what was needed, and do so with authority. They did not need a sneaky socialist like Clement Attlee.

As regards India, the battle was lost, Churchill knew that. It had been developing that way for many years, and during the war it had been necessary to send signals about future
independence
to the Indians so that in the midst of the struggle for survival the British would not also have to deal with a civil war.

But in many other places there was still plenty of time to stop the process. Churchill’s plan for the autumn was to travel to Kenya and evaluate the situation. But first he would drop in on Tehran and drink tea with the shah.

He had the misfortune to land amidst chaos. The day before, something had exploded at the department for domestic
intelligence
and security. The entire building had collapsed and burned up. The idiot of a police chief had evidently died in the explosion too, the same man who had previously been clumsy enough to use his harsh methods on innocent British Embassy staff.

The police chief was no great loss, but apparently the shah’s only bulletproof car had been consumed by the flames too, and this led to a much shorter meeting between the shah and
Churchill than had first been envisaged, and for reasons of security it took place at the airport.

Nevertheless, it was a good thing that the visit came off. According to the shah the situation was under control. The explosion at the headquarters of the secret police was
something
of a bother, and so far they couldn’t say anything about the cause. But the shah could live with the fact that the police chief had died in the explosion. The man was beginning to lose his touch.

So they had a stable political situation. They were about to appoint a new chief for the secret police. And they were seeing record results for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Oil provided fantastic wealth to both England and Iran. Mainly England, if the truth be told, but that was only fair because Iran’s sole contribution to the project was cheap labour – and of course the oil itself.

‘Mainly peace and prosperity in Iran then,’ Winston Churchill said to the Swedish military attaché who had been assigned a place in the plane on the way back to London.

‘Glad to hear that you are satisfied, Mr Churchill,’ Allan answered, adding that he thought Churchill was looking well.

Allan finally landed at Stockholm’s Bromma airport, after a stopover in London, and stood on Swedish soil for the first time in eleven years. It was late in December 1947, and the weather was the usual for that time of year.

In the arrivals hall, a young man was waiting for Allan. He said he was Prime Minister Erlander’s assistant and that the PM wished to meet Allan as soon as possible, if that could be arranged.

Allan thought it could, and he willingly followed the
assistant
, who proudly invited Allan to sit in the brand new
government
car, a black, shiny Volvo PV 444.

‘Have you ever seen anything so swanky, Mr Karlsson?’ asked the assistant, who was interested in cars. ‘Forty-four horsepower!’

‘I saw a really nice wine-red DeSoto last week,’ Allan answered. ‘But your car is in better condition.’

The drive took Allan to the centre of Stockholm and he looked around him with interest. To his shame, he had never been in the capital before. It was a beautiful city indeed, with water and bridges everywhere, and none of them had been blown up.

The prime minister welcomed Allan with a ‘Mr Karlsson! I have heard so much about you!’ Upon which he pushed the assistant out of the room and closed the door.

Allan didn’t say so, but he realised that he himself had heard nothing whatsoever about Tage Erlander. Allan didn’t even know if the prime minister was Left or Right. He must certainly be one of them, because if there was one thing life had taught Allan, it was that people insisted on being one or the other.

Anyway, the prime minister could be whichever he liked. Now it was a question of hearing what he had to say.

The prime minister had, it transpired, called President Truman back and had a longer conversation about Allan. So now he knew all about…

But then the prime minister stopped talking. He had been in the job less than a year and there was a lot left to learn. He did, however, already know one thing; in certain situations it was best not to know or at least best not to leave any way of proving that you knew what you knew.

So the prime minister never finished his sentence. What President Truman had told him about Allan Karlsson would be forever a secret between them. Instead the prime minister came straight to the point:

‘I understand that you don’t have anything to come back to here in Sweden, so I have arranged a cash payment for services
rendered to the nation… in a manner of speaking… Here are ten thousand crowns for you.’

And the prime minister handed over a thick envelope full of banknotes and asked Allan to sign a receipt. Everything had to be by the book.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Prime Minister. It occurs to me that with this fine and generous contribution I will be able to afford new clothes and clean sheets at a hotel tonight. Perhaps I’ll even be able to brush my teeth for the first time since August 1945…’

The prime minister interrupted Allan just as he was about to describe the condition of his underpants, and informed him that the money was of course without any conditions, but that since some activities connected to nuclear fission were being carried out in Sweden at this time, the prime minister would like Mr Karlsson to have a look.

The truth was that Prime Minister Erlander had inherited a number of important issues when his predecessor’s heart had stopped the previous autumn, and he had no idea what to do about them. For example: what stance should Sweden take with regard to something called an atom bomb. The commander-
in-chief
had been telling him about how the country must defend itself against communism, since they only had little Finland between Sweden and Stalin.

There were two sides to the question. On the one hand, the commander-in-chief happened to have married into a rich upper class family and it was generally known that he sometimes drank a bit of the hard stuff with the old Swedish King. But Social Democrat Erlander couldn’t bear the idea that Gustav V might imagine that he could influence Swedish defence policy.

On the other hand, Erlander could not exclude the possibility that the C-in-C might be right. You couldn’t trust Stalin and the communists, and if they should get it into their heads to widen
their sphere of interest westwards then Sweden was
unpleasantly
close.

Sweden’s military research department had just moved its few nuclear energy specialists to the newly created Atomic Energy PLC. Now these experts were trying to figure out exactly what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, their mission in more general terms was to ‘analyse the nuclear future from a Swedish perspective’. It was never spelled out, but Prime Minister Erlander had understood that the vaguely formulated task – had it been put in plain language – would have read:

How the hell do we build our own atom bomb, if necessary?

And now the answer was sitting right across from the prime minister. Tage Erlander knew that, but above all he knew that he didn’t want anybody else to know he knew. Politics was about watching where you put your feet.

So the previous day, Prime Minister Erlander had contacted the head of research at Atomic Energy PLC, Dr Sigvard Eklund, and asked him to invite Allan Karlsson for a job interview at which he could thoroughly question him as to whether he could be of use in Atomic Energy PLC’s activities – assuming that Mr Karlsson was interested.

Dr Eklund was not at all pleased with the prime minister involving himself in the atom project. He even suspected that Allan Karlsson might be a Social Democratic spy. But he promised to interview Karlsson, even though, oddly, the prime minister would not say anything about the man’s qualifications. Erlander had just emphasized the word ‘thoroughly’ when he said that Dr Eklund ought to
thoroughly
question Mr Karlsson about his background.

Allan, for his part, said that he had nothing against meeting Dr Eklund or any other doctor, if that would please the prime minister.

Ten thousand crowns was an almost excessive amount of money, Allan thought, and checked in at the most expensive hotel he could find.

The receptionist at the Grand Hotel had his doubts about the dirty and badly dressed man, until Allan showed proof of his identity with a Swedish diplomatic passport.

‘Of course we have a room for you, Mr Military Attaché, sir,’ the receptionist announced. ‘Would you like to pay cash or should we send the bill to the Foreign Ministry?’

‘Cash would be fine,’ said Allan. Did he want payment in advance?

‘Oh, no, Mr Attaché, sir. Of course not!’ The receptionist bowed.

If the receptionist had been able to see into the future, he would most certainly have answered differently.

The next day, Dr Eklund welcomed a newly showered and more-or-less well dressed Allan Karlsson to his Stockholm office. The doctor offered him coffee and a cigarette, just as the murder boss in Tehran used to do. (Eklund, however, stubbed his cigarettes out in his own ashtray.)

Dr Eklund was unhappy with the way the prime minister had interfered with his recruiting process. And Allan, for his part, felt the negative vibe in the room and for a moment was reminded of the first time he met Soong May-ling. People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.

The meeting between the two men was short:

‘The prime minister has asked me to question you thoroughly, Mr Karlsson, to ascertain whether you would be suited to work in our organisation. And that is what I shall do, with your permission, of course.’

Yes, that’s fine, Allan thought. It was quite in order for the Mr Doctor to want to know more about Allan and
thoroughness
was a virtue, so Mr Doctor should simply ask away.

‘Well, then,’ said Dr Eklund. ‘If we can begin with your studies…?’

‘Not much to boast of,’ said Allan. ‘Only three years.’

‘Three years!?’ exclaimed Dr Eklund. ‘With only three years of academic studies, Mr Karlsson, you can hardly be a physicist, mathematician or a chemist?’

‘No, three years altogether. I left school before my tenth birthday.’

Dr Eklund made an effort to retain his composure. So the man didn’t have any education! Could he even read and write?

‘Do you, Mr Karlsson, have any professional experience that might be seen as relevant for the work that you might assume we carry out here at Atomic Energy PLC?’

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, Allan did. He had worked for a while in the USA, at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

Now Dr Eklund’s face lit up. Erlander might have had his reasons after all. What had been achieved at Los Alamos was general knowledge. What had Mr Karlsson worked on there?

‘I served coffee,’ Allan answered.

‘Coffee?’ Dr Eklund’s face darkened again.

‘Yes, and on occasion tea too. I was a general assistant and waiter.’

‘Were you ever involved in any decisions at all that were connected to nuclear fission?’

‘No,’ Allan answered, ‘the closest I came was probably that time I happened to say something at a meeting when I was really meant to be serving coffee.’

‘So Mr Karlsson happened to say something at a meeting where he was in fact a waiter… and then what happened?’

‘Well, we were interrupted… and then I was asked to leave the room.’

Dr Eklund was utterly dumbfounded. Did the prime minister think that a waiter who had dropped out of school before he was ten years old could be put to use to build atom bombs for Sweden?

Dr Eklund thought to himself that it would be a sensation if this beginner of a prime minister would even last the year out, then he said to Allan that if Mr Karlsson had nothing to add then their meeting could end now. Dr Eklund did not think that at present there was any opening for Mr Karlsson. It was true that the assistant who made the coffee for the academics at Atomic Energy PLC had never been to Los Alamos, but Dr Eklund thought that she nevertheless managed to do a good job. Besides, Greta even found time to clean the offices and that must be seen as a plus.

Allan sat there in silence for a moment, and wondered whether he ought to point out to the Doctor that, unlike all of Dr Eklund’s academics, and probably Greta too, he actually knew how to build an atom bomb.

But then Allan decided that Dr Eklund didn’t deserve his assistance if he hadn’t the sense to ask the question. Besides, Greta’s coffee tasted like dishwater.