The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

by Jonas Jonasson

  Upon which, The Beauty started shouting angrily at the corpse slumped over the steering wheel, her theme being how the hell he could have been so stupid as to position his car across the road like that.

  The corpse responded by gurgling weakly and moving one of his legs…

  The only plan that made sense to Chief Inspector Aronsson was to continue his journey in the same direction Boss Gerdin had taken just over half an hour earlier. There was of course no hope of catching up with the Never Again leader, but something interesting might turn up on the road. Besides, Växjö wasn’t so very far away, and the chief inspector needed to find a hotel so he could think through the situation and get a few hours’ sleep.

  After some time, Aronsson spotted the wreck of a new BMW X5 wrapped round a fir tree. At first, Aronsson wasn’t surprised that Gerdin had crashed, considering the speed with which he had left Lake Farm. But a closer look suggested a different story.

  First, the car was empty. It was full of blood on the driver’s seat, but there was no driver anywhere to be seen.

  Second, the right-hand side of the car seemed to be unnaturally dented, and here and there were signs of yellow paint. Something big and yellow had rammed the car at full speed.

  ‘For example, a yellow 1992 Scania K113,’ Chief Inspector Aronsson murmured to himself.

  This was hardly a difficult inference to make, and it became easier when it turned out that the number plate of the yellow Scania was firmly impressed into the right back door of the BMW. Aronsson only had to compare the numbers and letters with what the Vehicle Licensing Authority said about the change of ownership to have his suspicions confirmed.

  Chief Inspector Aronsson still couldn’t fathom what was actually going on. But one thing seemed more and more clear, however incredible: centenarian Allan Karlsson and his entourage seemed to be pretty accomplished at killing people and then spiriting away their corpses.

  Chapter 13

  1947–48

  Allan had most certainly experienced more comfortable nights than those he spent lying on his stomach in the back of a truck on the road to Tehran. It was cold, and there was no specially treated goats’ milk to warm him up. And that would have been difficult anyway because his hands were tied behind his back.

  No wonder Allan felt pleased when the journey was over. It was late afternoon when the truck stopped outside the main entrance of a large brown building in the middle of the capital.

  Two soldiers helped the stranger to his feet and brushed off the worst of the dirt. Then they loosened the ropes that had tied Allan’s hands and picked up their rifles to guard him.

  If Allan had mastered Farsi, he would have been able to read where he had ended up on a little yellow sign by the entrance. But he couldn’t. And he couldn’t care less. More important to him was whether anyone was going to serve breakfast. Or lunch. Or preferably both.

  But, of course, the soldiers knew exactly where they had brought the suspected communist. And when they pushed Allan through the doors, one of the soldiers said goodbye to Allan with a grin and a ‘good luck’ in English.

  Allan thanked him for the good wishes even though he realised they were meant ironically, and then he thought that he probably needed to pay attention to his surroundings now.

  The officer in the group that had arrested Allan formally handed his prisoner over to somebody of equivalent rank. When Allan was properly registered, he was moved to a holding cell down a nearby corridor.

  The holding cell was pure Shangri-La compared with what Allan had been used to recently. Four beds in a row, double blankets on each bed, an electric light in the ceiling, a washbasin with running water in one corner and in the other an adult-size bucket with a lid. Allan also received a decent-sized bowl of porridge and a whole litre of water to satisfy his hunger and quench his thirst.

  Three of the beds were unoccupied, but in the fourth lay a man on his back, with his hands clasped and his eyes closed. When Allan arrived, the man woke from his slumber and got up. He was tall and thin and had a white clerical collar, a contrast to his otherwise black clothing. Allan held out his hand to introduce himself and said that unfortunately he didn’t know the local language. Did the clergyman perhaps speak a word or two of English?

  The man in black explained that he did, since he was born and bred in Oxford, and educated there too. He introduced himself as Kevin Ferguson, an Anglican priest who had been in Iran for twelve years searching for lost souls to recruit to the true faith. And where did Mr Karlsson stand?

  Allan answered that in a purely physical sense he was lost, since he had no control of where he stood, but that didn’t mean he was spiritually lost. Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn’t know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.

  Allan saw that the Reverend Ferguson was about to embark on a longer sermon, so he quickly added that the priest should be so kind as to respect Allan’s sincere wish to avoid becoming an Anglican, or for that matter anything else.

  The Reverend Ferguson wasn’t a man who took no for an answer. Nevertheless, he hesitated just this once. Perhaps he shouldn’t be too eager to convert against his will the only person – besides God – who might be able to save him from his dire situation.

  The Reverend Ferguson settled for a compromise. He made a half-hearted attempt to suggest that it wouldn’t hurt Mr Karlsson if the priest could at least shed some light upon the Trinity. That happened to be the first of the thirty-nine articles in the Anglican creed.

  Allan answered that the priest couldn’t begin to appreciate just how uninterested Allan was in that trinity.

  ‘Of all the groupings here on Earth, I would think that the Trinity is the one I am least interested in,’ said Allan.

  The Reverend Ferguson thought that was so stupid that he promised he would leave Karlsson in peace as far as religion was concerned, ‘even though God must have had some purpose in placing us in the same cell’.

  Instead, he turned to the matter of his and Allan’s plight.

  ‘It doesn’t look good,’ said the Reverend Ferguson. ‘We might both of us be on our way to meeting the Creator, and if I hadn’t just promised to leave you in peace, I would add that it might be high time for you to embrace the true faith.’

  Allan looked sternly at the cleric, but said nothing. The priest explained that they were now both in the holding cell of the department for domestic intelligence and security, in other words the secret police. Perhaps Mr Karlsson thought that sounded safe and good, but the truth was that the secret police cared only about the shah’s security, and their purpose was actually to keep the Iranian populace suitably terrified and respectful, and whenever possible to hunt down and destroy socialists, communists, Islamists and other disturbing elements.

  ‘Such as Anglican priests?’

  Mr Ferguson answered that Anglican priests didn’t have anything to fear, because they had freedom of religion in Iran. But that this particular Anglican priest had probably gone too far.

  ‘The prognosis is not good for somebody who ends up in the clutches of the secret police, and for my part I am afraid that this is the last stop,’ said the Reverend Ferguson and suddenly looked very sad.

  Allan immediately found himself feeling sorry for his cellmate, even though he was a cleric. He said consolingly that they would probably find a way to get out, but that there was a time for everything. First of all he wanted to know what the priest had done to find himself in this pickle.

  The Reverend Kevin Ferguson sniffed and pulled himself together. It wasn’t that he was afraid to die, he explained, he just thought that he had so much more to do here on our Earth. The priest as always put his life in the hands of God, but if Mr Karlsson, while they were waiting for God to decide, could find a way out of this, then the priest was certain that God would not be offended.

  Then the priest told his story. The Lord had spoken to him in a dream when the priest had just finished his studies. ‘Go out into t
he world to do missionary work,’ the Lord had said, but then he hadn’t said any more so the priest himself had to decide where to go.

  An English friend and bishop had tipped him off about Iran – a country where the existing freedom of religion was grossly abused. For example, you could count the Anglicans in Iran on the fingers of only a few hands, but the place was seething with Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jews and people who adhered to pure mumbo-jumbo religions. To the extent that there were any Christians at all, they were Armenians or Assyrians.

  Allan said that he hadn’t known that, but now he did, and he thanked the priest for the information.

  The priest went on. Iran and Great Britain were on good terms and with the help of the Church’s highly placed contacts the priest had managed to get a lift to Tehran on an official British aeroplane.

  This was more than ten years earlier, around 1935. Since then, he had worked his way through religion after religion, in a growing ring around the capital. At first he concentrated on the various religious ceremonies. He sneaked into mosques, synagogues and temples of every kind and waited for a suitable moment before he quite simply interrupted the ceremony and with the help of an interpreter preached the true faith.

  Allan praised the priest for his courage but said he had some doubts about his mental abilities. Surely these visits had rarely ended well?

  The Reverend Ferguson conceded that in fact they had not ended successfully on a single occasion. He had never been able to have his full say. He and the interpreter had been thrown out and usually both of them had been knocked about too. But none of this had prevented the priest from continuing his struggle. He knew that he was planting tiny Anglican seeds in the souls of all the people he met.

  In the end, however, the reputation of the priest had spread so far and wide that it became difficult to find interpreters who would work with him.

  So the priest took a break and put more effort into studying Farsi. While doing so, he worked out how to refine his tactics and one day he felt so comfortable in the language that he launched his new plan.

  Instead of going to temples and services, he visited markets where he knew that the teachings he considered false had a lot of followers among the shoppers, and he would stand on a wooden box and preach.

  This method had not resulted in as many beatings as during his first years, but the number of souls saved was still not at all what the Reverend Ferguson had hoped.

  Allan asked by how many converts the Reverend Ferguson had fallen short of his target, and was told that it depended on how you looked at it. On the one hand, the priest had exactly one convert from every religion he had worked on, which amounted to eight in all. On the other hand, he had realised a few months ago that all eight could actually be spies from the secret police, sent out to keep track of the proselytising priest.

  ‘Between zero and eight genuine converts, then,’ said Allan.

  ‘Probably closer to zero than eight,’ answered the Reverend Ferguson.

  ‘In twelve years,’ said Allan.

  The priest admitted that he had become discouraged when he realised that his already meagre results were actually even more meagre. And he also realised that he would never succeed in this country, because however much the Iranians might want to convert, they wouldn’t dare. The secret police were everywhere and if someone changed his religion a dossier would definitely be created with his name in their archives. And from a dossier in the archives to disappearing without trace was rarely a long step.

  Allan said that, in addition, it might be the case that an Iranian or two – whatever the Reverend Ferguson might think – went around generally satisfied with their current religion, couldn’t he see that?

  The priest answered that he had rarely heard such ignorant talk, but that he was prevented from providing a proper answer because he had promised Mr Karlsson he would eschew all Anglican preaching. Could Mr Karlsson listen to the rest of the priest’s story without interrupting more than necessary?

  The Reverend Ferguson went on to describe how, with his newly acquired insights as to the manner in which the secret police had infiltrated his missionary work, he had started to think in new ways. He had started to think big.

  So the priest shook off his eight possible spying disciples, and contacted the underground communist movement. He told them he was a British representative for the True Faith and he wanted to meet them to discuss the future.

  It took time to get a meeting arranged, but he eventually found himself sitting with five gentlemen from leading communist circles in the province of Razavi Khorasan. He would have preferred to meet the Tehran communists because the Reverend Ferguson thought that they probably made the important decisions, but this meeting would do for starters.

  Or not.

  The Reverend Ferguson presented his big idea to the communists. In brief, Anglicanism would become the state religion in Iran the day the communists took over. If the communists went along with this, the Reverend Ferguson promised to accept the job of government minister of religion and ensure that right from the beginning there would be enough bibles for everyone. The churches could be built afterwards, but to start with, the synagogues and mosques – which would have been closed by decree – could be used. There was just one thing the Reverend Ferguson wanted to know: how long did the gentlemen think it would be before the communist revolution?

  The communists had not reacted with the enthusiasm, or even curiosity, that the Reverend Ferguson had expected. Instead, he was told in no uncertain terms that there wouldn’t be any Anglicanism or for that matter any other sort of ism besides communism when the day came. In addition, he got a loud telling-off for having requested this meeting under false pretences. The communists had never experienced such a dreadful waste of time.

  With a vote of 3–2 in favour, it was then decided that the Reverend Ferguson would be given a good beating before being put on the train back to Tehran, and with a unanimous vote it was decided that it would be best for the priest’s health if he didn’t come back.

  Allan smiled and said that – with permission – he could in no way eliminate the possibility that the priest was completely mad. To bring about a religious agreement with the communists was, of course, quite hopeless. Didn’t the priest understand that?

  The priest answered that heathens like Mr Karlsson would do well not to judge what was wise or unwise. But of course he had understood that there was little chance of success.

  ‘But just think, Mr Karlsson, if it had actually worked. Just think of being able to send a telegram to the Archbishop of Canterbury and report fifty million new Anglicans all at once.’

  Allan admitted that the difference between madness and genius was subtle, and that he couldn’t with certainty say which it was in this case, but that he had his suspicions.

  Be that as it may, it turned out that the shah’s cursed secret police were bugging the Razavikhorasan communists, and the Reverend Ferguson was picked up as soon as he got off the train in the capital, and taken in for questioning.

  ‘And I admitted everything and a bit more besides,’ said the Reverend Ferguson, ‘because my thin body is not created to withstand torture. A good beating is one thing, but torture is something else.’

  With that immediate and exaggerated confession, the Reverend Ferguson had been transported to this holding cell, and he had been left in peace for two weeks because the head of the secret police, the vice prime minister, was on a business trip to London.

  ‘The vice prime minister?’ Allan wondered.

  ‘Yes, or the boss of the murderers,’ said the Reverend Ferguson.

  It was said of the secret police that no organisation was more controlled from the top. Putting fear in the hearts of the population on a more routine basis, or killing communists, socialists or Islamists, that of course didn’t require the blessing of the boss. But as soon as something happened that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary, then it was he who decided. The shah had given him the t
itle vice prime minister, but in effect he was a murderer, in the Reverend Ferguson’s opinion.

  ‘And according to the prison guards, you’d better forget the “vice” bit of his title when you address him, if things go so badly that you need to meet him, which they seem to be doing in both your case and mine.’

  Perhaps the priest had spent more time with underground communists than he cared to admit, thought Allan, because he went on:

  ‘Ever since the end of the Second World War, the American CIA has been here and has built up the shah’s secret police.’

  ‘CIA?’ said Allan.

  ‘Yes, that’s what they are called now. They were the OSS before, but it’s the same dirty business. They’re the ones who have taught the Iranian police all the tricks and tortures. What can he be like, the man who allows the CIA to destroy the world in this way?’

  ‘You mean the American president?’

  ‘Harry S. Truman will burn in hell, believe you me,’ said the Reverend Ferguson.

  ‘You think so?’ said Allan.

  The days passed. Allan had told his own life story to the Reverend Ferguson, without leaving anything out at all. And after this, the priest stopped talking to Allan because he realised what sort of relationship his cellmate had to the American president and – even worse – to the bombs over Japan.

  Instead, the priest turned to God and prayed for advice. Was it the Lord who had sent Mr Karlsson to help him, or was it the Devil who lay behind it?

  But God answered with silence. He did that sometimes, and the Reverend Ferguson always interpreted it to mean that he should think for himself. Admittedly, it didn’t always work out well when the priest thought for himself, but you couldn’t just give up.

  After two days and two nights of deliberation, Mr Ferguson came to the conclusion that for the time being he should make his peace with the heathen in the next bed. And he informed Allan that he now intended to speak to him again.