The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (8 page)

Bosse and Benny immediately started on a seven-week course in welding skills and the lawyer confirmed that according to the will that would suffice, ‘although I suspect that your uncle Frank might have had something more advanced in mind’.

Two things happened halfway through the course. One, Benny finally had enough of his brother’s bossiness. That’s the
way he had always been but it was time to make it clear to big brother that they were both grown and he needed to find someone else to order around. Two, Benny realised that he didn’t want to become a welder and that in any case he had no talent for it. The two brothers argued about this for a while, until Benny managed to talk his way into a course on botany at Stockholm University. According to the lawyer, the will allowed for a change of subject, as long as there was no interruption.

Bosse finished his welder’s training, but didn’t get a penny of Uncle Frasse’s money because his brother Benny was still
studying
. In addition, the lawyer immediately ended Bosse’s monthly allowance, in accordance with the will.

This, of course, meant that the brothers became enemies. And when Bosse, in a bout of drunken confusion, smashed up Benny’s newly purchased motorcycle (bought with money from his generous study allowance), that was the end of all brotherly love, the end of any relationship whatsoever.

Bosse started to do business deals in the spirit of Uncle Frasse, yet perhaps without his uncle’s talent. After a while he moved to Västergötland, partly in search of new business opportunities, partly to avoid the risk of bumping into his damned brother. Benny, on the other hand, stayed in the academic world, year after year. The monthly allowance was, as explained earlier, generous and by changing his subject just before taking final exams and starting on something new, Benny could live well, while his bullying jerk of a brother had to wait for his money.

And Benny continued like this for thirty years, until the extremely aged lawyer one day contacted him and announced that the money in the will was now used up, that there wouldn’t be any more monthly allowances, and of course there was no other money available for anything else. The brothers could forget the inheritance, said the lawyer who was now more than ninety years old and who appeared to have stayed alive for the
sake of the will, because just a couple of weeks later he died in his television armchair.

All this had happened just a few weeks ago. Benny had suddenly found himself forced to get a job. But despite being one of the best-educated people in Sweden, he discovered that the labour market was not interested in the number of years he had studied, but rather in his final exam grades. Benny had almost finished at least ten academic degrees, but still found himself investing in a hot-dog stand in order to have something to do. Benny and Bosse were compelled to be in each other’s presence to hear the lawyer’s announcement that the inheritance had now been used up but on that occasion Bosse expressed himself in such a way that Benny did not make any immediate plans to go and visit him.

Having got this far in Benny’s story, Julius was beginning to worry that it might lead to all-too-personal questions from The Beauty, such as how Benny had ended up with Julius and Allan. But The Beauty didn’t bother with the details, thanks to the beer and the bitters. Instead, she had to admit that she was feeling a bit infatuated, old as she was.

‘So what else have you almost become over the years, besides a vet?’ she asked with sparkling eyes.

Benny understood just as well as Julius that the developments of the last few days shouldn’t be described in too much detail, so he was grateful for the direction of The Beauty’s question. He couldn’t remember everything, he said, but you can cover a lot if you sit at a school desk for three decades, and do your homework once in a while. Benny was an almost-vet, almost-doctor,
almost-architect
, almost-engineer, almost-botanist, almost-
language-teacher
, almost-sports-coach, almost-historian and almost quite a few other things. And for a bit of variety he had taken some shorter courses of varying quality and importance. Sometimes he had even taken two courses at the same time.

Then Benny remembered something else that he almost was. He leapt to his feet, facing The Beauty, and declaimed in very poetic Swedish:

Complete silence followed; then The Beauty mumbled an
inaudible
expletive while she blushed.

‘Erik Axel Karlfeldt,’ Benny explained. ‘With those words I would like to thank you for the food and the hospitality. I don’t think I said that I am an almost-literary-expert too?’

Benny might have gone too far when he asked The Beauty if she would like to dance in front of the fire, because she quickly said no, adding that there must be some damned limit to these stupidities. But Julius noticed that she was flattered. She zipped up her tracksuit jacket and smoothed it down to look her best for Benny.

After which Allan retired for the night while the other three moved on to coffee, cognac optional. Julius happily said yes to the entire offer, while Benny settled for half.

Julius showered The Beauty with questions about the farm and her own story, partly because he was curious, partly because he wanted to avoid the subject of who they were, where they were going, and why. But he didn’t have to worry. The Beauty had now got up steam and was talking about her
childhood
, about the man she married when she was eighteen and kicked out ten years later (that part of the story contained even more expletives), about never having children, about Lake Farm which had been her parents’ summer house before her mother died seven years ago and her father had let The Beauty take it
over, about her sincerely uninspiring job as a receptionist at the health clinic in Rottne, about the inheritance that was starting to run out and about it soon being time to move on.

‘I’m already forty-three,’ said The Beauty. ‘That is damn well halfway to the grave.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Julius.

The dog-handler gave Kicki new instructions and she moved away from the trolley, sniffing constantly. Chief Inspector Aronsson hoped that the corpse in question would turn up somewhere in the vicinity, but only thirty metres inside the grounds, Kicki started walking in circles, and seemed to be searching at random, before looking up pleadingly at her handler.

‘Kicki says she’s sorry, but she can’t figure out where the corpse has gone,’ the dog-handler translated.

The dog-handler did not convey this message as precisely as he perhaps should have. Chief Inspector Aronsson interpreted the answer as meaning that Kicki had lost track of the corpse as soon as she walked away from the trolley. But if Kicki had been able to talk, she would have told him that the body was definitely moved a few metres into the grounds before disappearing. And then Chief Inspector Aronsson might have investigated whether any shipments had left the foundry in the last few hours. The answer would have been just one: a tractor trailer with a container bound for Gothenburg harbour. Then, the police could have been notified and the tractor trailer intercepted on the main road. But now the corpse had disappeared beyond the borders of Sweden.

Almost three weeks later, a young Egyptian watchman sat on a barge which had just emerged from the southern end of the Suez Canal. He noticed a terrible stench from the cargo.

Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer. He wet a rag and tied it around his nose and mouth. In one of the wooden boxes he found the explanation: a half-rotten corpse.

The Egyptian seaman deliberated. He had no desire to leave the corpse there to ruin the rest of the journey. Besides he would almost certainly be subjected to long police interrogations in Djibouti, and everybody knew what the police were like in Djibouti.

Moving the body himself wasn’t a pleasant thought either, but in the end he made up his mind. First he emptied the corpse’s pockets of everything of value – he deserved something for his trouble – and then he shoved it overboard.

And that is how what had once been a young man of slight build, with long blond and greasy hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words
Never Again
on the back, was turned with a splash into fish food in the Red Sea.

The group at Lake Farm split up just before midnight. Julius went upstairs to sleep, while Benny and The Beauty got into the Mercedes to visit the health clinic in Rottne after hours. Halfway there they discovered Allan under a blanket on the back seat. He woke up and explained that he had gone out for a breath of fresh air and once outside he had realised that the car would be a good place to sleep because the stairs up to the bedrooms were a bit too much for his shaking knees, after such a long day.

‘I’m no longer ninety,’ he said.

The duo had become a trio for the nocturnal exercise, but it didn’t matter. The Beauty described her plan in more detail. They would get into the clinic with the help of the key The Beauty had forgotten to return when she resigned. Once inside, they would log in to Doctor Erlandsson’s computer and in Erlandsson’s name send a prescription for antibiotics, made out in The Beauty’s name. For that you needed Erlandsson’s
password
, but that was no problem said The Beauty, because Doctor Erlandsson was not just pompous, he was also a fool. When the
new computer system was installed a couple of years earlier, it was The Beauty who had to teach the doctor how to file electronic prescriptions, and she was the one who chose his username and password.

The Mercedes arrived at the intended crime scene. Benny, Allan and The Beauty got out and inspected the surroundings before committing the actual crime. At that moment a car passed slowly by. The driver was as surprised by the trio as they were by him. A single living being awake at that time of night in Rottne was a sensation. On this particular night there were four.

But the car drove on and darkness and silence settled on Rottne once more. The Beauty led Benny and Allan in through the staff entrance in the back, and then to Doctor Erlandsson’s room. There she turned on Doctor Erlandsson’s computer and logged in.

Everything went according to plan and The Beauty giggled happily until suddenly, she let loose a long stream of curses. She had just realised that you couldn’t simply send a prescription for ‘one kilo of antibiotics’.

‘Write Erythromycin, Rifamin, Gentramicin and Rifampin, two hundred and fifty grams each,’ said Benny. ‘Then we can attack the inflammation from several different angles.’

The Beauty looked admiringly at Benny. Then she invited him to sit down and spell it all out. Benny did and added various other medicines, useful to have on hand in case of future bad luck.

Breaking out of the clinic was just as easy as breaking in. And their journey home was without incident. Benny and The Beauty helped Allan upstairs and when it was almost half-past two in the morning, the last light was turned off at Lake Farm.

After ten at night there weren’t many people awake in that sleepy area. But in Braås, about twenty kilometres from Lake Farm, a young man lay in bed turning restlessly, desperate for
a cigarette. It was Bucket’s little brother, the new leader of The Violence. Three hours earlier, he had finished his last cigarette and soon felt an unstoppable need to have another. He cursed himself for having forgotten to buy fags before everything shut for the evening.

At first he had intended to hold out until the following morning, but by midnight he couldn’t stand it any longer. That was when he got the idea of reliving old times, of simply gaining entry to a newspaper kiosk with the help of a crowbar. But it couldn’t be in Braås, where he had a reputation to
uphold
. Besides, he would be suspected of the crime almost before it was discovered.

It would be best to go a bit further afield, but he needed a smoke so badly that he had to compromise. And the
compromise
was Rottne, about fifteen minutes away. Dressed inconspicuously he rolled slowly into the little town in his old Volvo 240, a little after midnight. When he drove past the health clinic he was surprised to see three people on the
pavement
: a woman with red hair, a man with a ponytail and just behind them a terribly old man.

Bucket’s little brother didn’t analyse the event deeply. (He rarely analysed anything deeply, or even superficially.) Instead, he drove on, stopped under a tree quite close to the newspaper kiosk he’d been seeking, failed to break in because the owner had secured the door against crowbars, and then drove home again, just as desperate for a smoke as before.

When Allan woke up just after eleven o’clock the next morning he felt reinvigorated. He looked out of the window where the forest spread out around a lake. The landscape reminded him of Södermanland. It looked like it was going to be a nice day.

He got dressed, putting on the only clothes he had, and thought that he could perhaps afford to renew his wardrobe
a little. Neither he nor Julius nor Benny had even managed to bring a toothbrush with them.

When Allan came downstairs, Julius and Benny were eating breakfast. Julius had been out for a walk while Benny had slept deeply and for a long time. The Beauty had put out plates and glasses and left written instructions about self-service in the kitchen. She herself had gone to Rottne. The note ended with an order that the gentlemen should make sure to leave a
reasonable
amount of breakfast on the plates, so Buster could have some too.

Allan said good morning and received the same greeting in return. After which Julius added that he had had the idea of staying another night at Lake Farm because the surroundings were so enchanting. Allan asked if perhaps the private chauffeur had had some influence over that decision, considering the passion that had been in the air the previous evening. Julius answered that Benny had indeed given a wealth of reasons for staying on at Lake Farm for the rest of the summer, but that the conclusion was his own. Where would they go anyway? Didn’t they need an extra day to think? All they needed in order to stay was a plausible story explaining who they were and where they were going – and The Beauty’s permission, of course.