The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (20 page)

Yury said that what was tragic about Allan’s observation was that it did have some relevance. Marshal Beria had more than
once – in the name of the revolution – tortured innocent people. Yury knew that to be the case. But now the situation was, said Yury — who found it hard to say exactly what he meant — the situation was such that, said Yury — and opened the
refrigerator
to find a fortifying beer even though it wasn’t even noon yet — the situation was such that Marshal Beria had very recently failed with this strategy. A western expert had been kidnapped in Switzerland and taken to Marshal Beria, but it all ended in a dreadful mess. Yury apologized; he didn’t want to get into the details, but Allan must believe what Yury had said: what had been learned from the recent failure was that the necessary nuclear advice, according to a decision from above, would be bought in the western market, based on supply and demand, however vulgar that might be.

The Soviet atomic weapons programme began with a letter from the nuclear physicist Georgij Nikolajevitch Flyorov to Comrade Stalin in April 1942, in which the former pointed out that there hadn’t been a word uttered or written in western, allied media concerning nuclear fission since it had been
discovered
in 1938.

Comrade Stalin wasn’t born yesterday. And just like nuclear physicist Flyorov, he thought that a complete silence of three years around the discovery of fission could only mean that someone had something to hide, such as, for example, that someone was in the process of developing a bomb which would immediately put the Soviet Union – to use a Russian image – in checkmate.

So there was no time to lose, apart from the minor detail that Hitler and Nazi Germany were fully occupied with seizing parts of the Soviet Union – that is everything west of the Volga, which would include Moscow, which was bad enough, but also Stalingrad!

The Battle of Stalingrad was, to put it mildly, a personal matter for Stalin. Although 1.5 million or so people were killed, the Red Army won and started to push Hitler back, in the end all the way to his bunker in Berlin.

It wasn’t until the Germans were about to retreat that Stalin felt that he and his nation might have a future, and that’s when nuclear fission research really got going.

But, of course, atom bombs were not something you could screw together in a morning, especially when they hadn’t even been invented yet. The Soviet atom bomb research had been under way for a couple of years without a breakthrough when one day there was an explosion – in New Mexico. The
Americans
had won the race, but that wasn’t surprising since they had started running so much earlier. After the test in the desert in New Mexico, there were two more explosions which were for real: one in Hiroshima, another in Nagasaki. With that, Truman had twisted Stalin’s nose and shown the world who mattered, and you didn’t need to know Stalin well to
understand
that he was not going to put up with that.

‘Solve the problem,’ Comrade Stalin said to Marshal Beria. ‘Or to make it clearer, SOLVE THE PROBLEM!’

Marshal Beria realised that his own physicists, chemists and mathematicians were bogged down, and it wouldn’t even help to send half of them to the Gulag prison camps. Besides, the marshal had not received any indication that his agents in the field were getting close to the holy of holies. For the moment it was simply impossible to steal the Americans’ blueprints.

The only solution was to bring in knowledge from the outside to complement what they already knew at the research centre in the secret city of Sarov, a few hours by car south-east of Moscow. Since only the best was good enough for Marshal Beria, he told the head of the department of international secret agents:

‘Pick up Albert Einstein.’

‘But… Albert Einstein…’ said the shocked boss of the
international
agents.

‘Albert Einstein is the sharpest brain in the world. Do you intend to do as I say, or are you nurturing a death wish?’ asked Marshal Beria.

The boss of the international agents had just met a new woman and nothing on Earth smelled as good as she did, so he certainly wasn’t nurturing a death wish. But before he had time to tell this to Marshal Beria, the marshal said:

‘Solve the problem. Or to express myself more clearly: SOLVE THE PROBLEM!’

It was no easy matter to pick up Albert Einstein, and send him in a package to Moscow. First of all, they had to find him. He was born in Germany, but moved to Italy and then on to Switzerland and America, and since then he had travelled back and forth between all sorts of places and for all sorts of reasons.

For the time being he had a house in New Jersey, but according to the agents on the spot, the house seemed to be empty. Besides, if possible Marshal Beria wanted the
kidnapping
to take place in Europe. Smuggling celebrities out of the USA and across the Atlantic was not without complications.

But where was the man? He rarely or never told people where he was going before a journey and he was notorious for arriving several days late for important meetings.

The boss of the international agents wrote a list of places with some sort of close connection with Einstein, and then he sent an agent to keep an eye on each place. There was his home in New Jersey, and his best friend’s house in Geneva. Then there was his publisher in Washington and two other friends, one in Basel, the other in Cleveland, Ohio.

It took some days of patient waiting, but then came the reward – in the form of a man in a grey raincoat, a turned-up collar and hat. The man came on foot and went up to the house where Albert Einstein’s best friend Michele Besso lived in Switzerland. He rang the doorbell and was heartily and sincerely welcomed by Besso himself, but also by an elderly couple who would need further investigation. The watching agent summoned his
colleague
who was doing the same job in Basel 250 kilometres away, and after hours of advanced window-watching and comparison with the sets of photos they had with them, the two agents came to the conclusion that it was indeed Albert Einstein who had just come to visit his best friend. The elderly couple were presumably Michele Besso’s brother-in-law and his wife, Maja, who was also Albert Einstein’s sister. Quite a family party!

Albert stayed there with his friend and his sister and her husband for two well-watched days, before again putting on his overcoat, gloves and hat and setting off, just as discreetly as he had come.

But he barely made it around the corner before being grabbed and pushed into the back seat of a car and anaesthetized with chloroform. Then he was taken via Austria to Hungary, which had a sufficiently friendly attitude towards the USSR that few questions were asked when the Soviets expressed the wish to land at the military airport in Pécs to refuel, pick up two Soviet citizens and a very sleepy man, and then immediately take off again for an unknown destination.

The next day they started to interrogate Albert Einstein on the premises of the secret police in Moscow, with Marshal Beria in charge. The question was whether Einstein would choose to cooperate, for the sake of his health, or to be obstructive which, wouldn’t help anybody.

Regrettably, it turned out to be the latter. Albert Einstein would not admit that he had given a moment’s thought to the
technique of nuclear fission (even though it was common knowledge that as early as 1939 he had communicated with President Roosevelt about the matter, which in turn had led to the Manhattan Project). In fact Albert Einstein would not even admit that he was Albert Einstein. He maintained with idiotic stubbornness that he was instead Albert Einstein’s younger brother, Herbert Einstein. But Albert Einstein didn’t have a brother; he only had a sister. So that trick naturally didn’t work with Beria and his interrogators, and they were just about to resort to violence when something rather remarkable happened on Seventh Avenue in New York.

There, in Carnegie Hall, Albert Einstein was giving a lecture on the theory of relativity, to an audience of 2,800 specially invited guests, of which two were spies for the Soviet Union.

Two Albert Einsteins was one too many for Marshal Beria, even if one of them was a long way away on the other side of the
Atlantic
. It was soon possible to ascertain that the one in Carnegie Hall was the real one, so who the hell was the other one?

Under the threat of being subjected to procedures that nobody willingly undergoes, the false Albert Einstein promised to clarify everything for Marshal Beria.

‘You will get a clear picture of everything, Mr Marshal, as long as you don’t interrupt me,’ the false Albert Einstein promised.

Marshal Beria promised not to interrupt him with anything other than a bullet in the head, and he would wait to do that until it was beyond any doubt that what he had heard was pure lies.

‘So please go ahead. Don’t let me put you off,’ said Marshal Beria, and cocked his pistol.

The man who had previously claimed that he was Albert Einstein’s unknown brother Herbert, took a deep breath and
started by… repeating the claim (at which point a shot was almost fired).

Thereupon followed a story, which, if it was true, was so sad that even Marshal Beria could not bring himself to execute the narrator.

Hermann and Pauline Einstein did indeed have two children: first Albert and then Maja. But papa Einstein hadn’t really been able to keep his hands and other parts of his body away from his beautiful (but dim) secretary at the electro-chemical factory he ran in Munich. This had resulted in Herbert, Albert and Maja’s secret and not-at-all legitimate brother.

Just as the marshal’s agents had already been able to
ascertain
, Herbert was virtually an exact physical copy of Albert, although he was thirteen years younger. But as for his mind, Herbert had unfortunately inherited all his mother’s
intelligence
. Or lack thereof.

When Herbert was two years old, in 1895, the family moved from Munich to Milan. Herbert followed along, but not his mother. Papa Einstein had of course offered to move her too, but Herbert’s mama was not interested. She couldn’t contemplate replacing bratwurst with spaghetti, and German with… whatever language they spoke in Italy. Besides, that baby had just been a lot of trouble; he screamed all the time for food, and was always making a mess! If somebody wanted to take Herbert somewhere else, that would be fine, but she herself intended staying where she was.

Herbert’s mother got a decent sum of money from papa Einstein. The story goes that she then met a genuine count who persuaded her to invest all her money in his almost-finished machine for the production of a life elixir which cured every existing illness. But then the count had disappeared, and he must have taken the elixir with him because Herbert’s
impoverished
mama died some years later, of tuberculosis.

Herbert thus grew up with his big brother Albert and big sister Maja. But in order to avoid scandal, papa Einstein referred to Herbert as his nephew. Herbert was never particularly close to his brother, but he loved his sister sincerely even though he had to call her his cousin.

‘To sum up,’ said Herbert Einstein, ‘I was abandoned by my mother, denied by my father – and I’m as intelligent as a sack of potatoes. I haven’t done any useful work in all my life, just lived on what I inherited from my father, and I have not had a single wise thought.’

Marshal Beria lowered his pistol. The story did have a degree of credibility, and the marshal even admired the self-awareness that the stupid Herbert Einstein had demonstrated.

What should he do now? The marshal got up from the chair in the interrogation room. For purposes of security he had put aside all thought of right and wrong, in the name of the
revolution
. He already had more than enough problems, he didn’t need another one to burden him. The marshal turned to the two guards at the door:

‘Get rid of him.’

Upon which he left the room.

It would not be pleasant to report on the Herbert Einstein
cock-up
to Comrade Stalin, but Marshal Beria was lucky, because before he had time to find himself out in the cold, there was a breakthrough at Los Alamos.

Over the years, more than 130,000 people had worked on the Manhattan Project, and naturally more than one of them was loyal to the socialist revolution. But nobody had managed to obtain the innermost secret of the atom bomb.

But they had found out something that was almost as useful:a Swede had solved the puzzle, and they knew his name!

It didn’t take more than twelve hours to find out that Allan Karlsson was staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, and that he spent his days just pottering about after the head of the Swedish atomic weapons programme had told him that they didn’t require his services.

‘The question is, who holds the world record in stupidity,’ Marshal Beria said to himself. ‘The boss of the Swedish atomic weapons programme or Herbert Einstein’s mum…’

This time, Marshal Beria chose a new tactic. Allan Karlsson would be persuaded to contribute his knowledge in exchange for a considerable number of American dollars. And the person who would take care of the persuading was a scientist like Allan Karlsson himself, not an awkward and clumsy agent. The agent in question ended up (to be on the safe side) behind the wheel as the private chauffeur of Yury Borisovich Popov, a sympathetic and competent physicist from the innermost circle of Marshal Beria’s atomic weapons group.

And everything had gone according to plan. Yury Borisovich was on his way back to Moscow with Allan Karlsson – and Karlsson seemed sympathetic to the whole idea.

Marshal Beria’s Moscow office was inside the walls of the Kremlin, at the wish of Comrade Stalin. The marshal himself greeted Allan Karlsson and Yury Borisovich in the lobby.

‘You are heartily welcome, Mr Karlsson,’ said Marshal Beria and shook his hand.