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

by Jonas Jonasson

  The liquor would have to wait, Bosse said, since the food was ready. Chicken straight from the grill and roast potatoes with beer for the grown-ups and a soft drink for his little brother.

  While they were starting their dinner in the kitchen, Per-Gunnar ‘Boss’ Gerdin woke up. He had a headache, it hurt when he breathed, one arm was probably broken because it was in a sling, and when he struggled down from the bus’s cabin, a wound in his right thigh began to bleed. Amazingly he found his own revolver in the glove compartment. It would seem that all the people in the whole world were idiots apart from him.

  The morphine was still effective, so he could cope with the pain, but it also made it hard for him to sort out his thoughts. He limped about in the yard and peered in through various windows, until he was certain that all the people in the house were gathered together in the kitchen, including an Alsatian dog. And, it turned out, the kitchen door to the garden was unlocked. The Boss limped in through the door, and with considerable determination and the revolver in his left hand, said:

  ‘Lock the dog in the pantry, otherwise I’ll shoot it. After that I’ve got five bullets left, one for each of you.’

  The Boss was surprised how well he was keeping his anger under control. The Beauty looked unhappy rather than afraid when she led Buster into the pantry and closed the door. Buster was surprised and a bit worried, but above all satisfied. He discovered he had just been shut inside a pantry, and there are worse things to do to a dog.

  The five friends were now lined up. The Boss informed them that the suitcase in the corner belonged to him, and that he was going to take it with him when he left. It was possible that he would leave one or two of the five alive, depending on their answers to his questions, and on how much of the contents of the suitcase had disappeared.

  Allan was the first to speak. He said that a few million were indeed missing from the suitcase, but that Mr Revolver Man could perhaps be satisfied with less, since for various reasons two of the revolver man’s colleagues had died and that meant there were fewer people to share with.

  ‘Are Bolt and Bucket dead?’ asked the Boss.

  ‘Pike?!’ Bosse suddenly exclaimed. ‘It is you, Pike. It’s been a long time!’

  ‘Bosse Baddy!’ exclaimed Per-Gunnar ‘Pike’ Gerdin in return.

  And Bosse Baddy and Pike Gerdin met with a hug in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  ‘I do believe I’ll survive this too,’ said Allan.

  Buster was let out of the pantry, Benny dressed ‘Pike’ Gerdin’s bleeding injury, and Bosse Baddy set another place at the table.

  ‘Just a fork will do,’ said Pike, ‘I can’t use my right arm anyway.’

  ‘You used to be a dab hand with a knife in the old days,’ said Bosse Baddy.

  Pike and Bosse Baddy had been close friends, and also colleagues in the food trade. Pike had always been the impatient one, the one who wanted to go that bit further. In the end they had gone their separate ways when Pike insisted that the friends should import Swedish meatballs from the Philippines, treated with formaldehyde to increase their best-before date from three days to three months (or three years depending on how generously you applied the formalin). Bosse had said ‘stop’ at that point. He didn’t want to be involved with preparing food with stuff that could kill people. Pike thought Bosse was exaggerating. People didn’t die from a few chemicals in their food, and with formalin their lives would surely be preserved.

  The friends separated amicably. Bosse moved to Västergötland, while Pike tried his hand at robbing a firm of importers and was so successful that he set aside his meatball plans and decided to become a full-time robber.

  At first, Bosse and Pike had been in touch once or twice a year, but over the years they had gradually drifted apart – until that evening when Pike was suddenly standing unsteadily in Bosse’s kitchen, just as threatening as Bosse remembered he could be when he was in the mood.

  But Pike’s anger subsided the moment he found the companion and comrade of his youth. He sat down at the table together with Bosse Baddy and his friends. It couldn’t be helped that they had killed Bolt and Bucket. They could sort out the business with the suitcase and everything else the next day. For the moment they were going to enjoy their dinner.

  ‘Cheers!’ said Per-Gunnar ‘Pike’ Gerdin and fainted, his face landing right in his food.

  They wiped the food off Pike’s face, moved him to the guest room and put him to bed. Benny checked his medical state and then gave the patient a new dose of morphine so he would sleep until the next day.

  Upon which it was at last time for Benny and the others to enjoy the chicken and roast potatoes. And enjoy it they did!

  ‘This chicken really is delicious!’ Julius praised the food, and they all agreed that they had never eaten anything tastier. What was the secret?

  Bosse told them that he imported fresh chickens from Poland (‘no junk, top-quality stuff’), and then he injected every chicken manually with up to one litre of his own special spicy water mixture. Then he re-packaged them and with all that had been added locally he thought he could just as well call them ‘Swedish’.

  ‘Twice as good on account of the spicy mixture, twice as heavy on account of the water and twice as popular on account of the Swedish origin,’ was how Bosse summed it up.

  Suddenly it had become big business, despite the fact that he had started off on a really small scale. And everybody loved his chickens. But for reasons of security, he didn’t sell to any of the wholesalers in the district, because one of them might come by and discover that there wasn’t a single chicken out pecking in Bosse’s farmyard.

  That was what he meant by the difference between law and morality, Bosse said. The Poles were surely no worse at feeding chickens and then killing them, than the Swedes? Quality had nothing to do with national boundaries, did it?

  ‘People are just stupid,’ Bosse maintained. ‘In France, French meat is best. In Germany, German meat. The same thing in Sweden. So for everybody’s benefit, I keep some information to myself.’

  ‘That is thoughtful of you,’ said Allan, without irony.

  Bosse said that he had done something similar with the watermelons he also imported, although not from Poland. They came from Spain or Morocco. He preferred to call them Spanish because nobody would believe that they came from Skövde in the middle of Sweden. But before he sold them, he injected half a litre of sugar solution into each melon.

  ‘That makes them twice as heavy – good for me! – and three times as tasty – good for the consumer!’

  ‘That is also thoughtful of you,’ said Allan. Still without irony.

  The Beauty thought that there must be one or two consumers who for medical reasons should not gobble down a whole litre of sugar solution, but she didn’t say anything. Besides, the watermelon tasted almost as heavenly as the chicken.

  Chief Inspector Göran Aronsson sat in the restaurant at the Hotel Royal Corner in Växjö and ate chicken cordon bleu. The chicken, which didn’t come from Västergötland, was dry and tasteless. But Aronsson washed it down with a bottle of good wine.

  By now, the prosecutor would surely have whispered in some reporter’s ear, and the next day the pack of journalists would be out in force again. Prosecutor Ranelid was probably right in assuming that there would be lots of tipoffs about the whereabouts of the yellow bus with the smashed front. While he was waiting for them, Aronsson might as well stay where he was. He had nothing else to do: no family, no close friends, not even a sensible hobby. When this strange chase was over, he was definitely going to have his life overhauled.

  Chief Inspector Aronsson ended the evening with a gin and tonic, and while he drank, he sat there feeling sorry for himself and fantasized about pulling out his service pistol and shooting the pianist in the bar. If he had managed to stay sober and carefully thought through what he already knew, the story would most certainly have developed differently.

  That same evening in the editorial off
ices of The Express they had a short semantic discussion before deciding on the billboards for the next day. In the end, the head of the news desk decided that one dead person could be murder, two dead people could be double murder, but three dead people could not be called mass murder as some of his colleagues wanted to. But he managed a nice headline in the end:

  Missing

  CENTENARIAN

  Suspected of

  TRIPLE MURDER

  They had a late evening at Bellringer Farm with one and all in very good spirits. Amusing stories were trotted out one after the other. Bosse was a hit when he pulled out the Bible and said that now he would tell them the story of how he, quite involuntarily, came to read the whole book from beginning to end. Allan wondered what devilish method of torture Bosse had suffered, but that wasn’t what lay behind it. No outsider had forced Bosse to do anything, no, Bosse’s own curiosity was responsible.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll never be that curious,’ said Allan.

  Julius asked whether Allan could stop interrupting Bosse for once so that they could hear the story, and Allan said that he could. Bosse went on:

  One day some months earlier he had received a phone call from an acquaintance at the recycling centre outside Skövde. The two of them had got to know each other at the racetrack. This acquaintance had learned that Bosse’s conscience was flexible and that Bosse was always interested in opportunities that might provide new sources of income.

  The recycling centre had just received a pallet with half a ton of books that were to be pulped, because they had been classified as waste and not as literature, presumably because of some defect. Bosse’s acquaintance had become curious as to what sort of literature it was, and he had opened the packaging only to find a bible (his acquaintance had been hoping for something of a totally different kind).

  ‘But this wasn’t just your standard bible,’ said Bosse, and passed a specimen around so they could see for themselves. ‘We are talking ultra thin in genuine leather with golden lettering and stuff… And just look at this: a list of characters, maps in colour, index…’

  His acquaintance had been just as impressed as his friends now were, and instead of pulping the goodies, had phoned Bosse and offered to smuggle the books out of the recycling centre in exchange for… say a thousand crowns.

  Bosse jumped at the chance, and that very same afternoon he found himself with half a ton of fancy bibles in his barn. But try as he might, he couldn’t find anything wrong with the books. It was driving him crazy. So one evening he sat down in front of the fire in the living room and started to read, from ‘In the beginning…’ onwards. To be on the safe side, he had his old confirmation bible for reference. There must be a misprint somewhere, otherwise why would they throw out something so beautiful and… holy?

  Bosse read and read, evening after evening, the Old Testament followed by the New Testament, and still he read on, comparing it with his old confirmation bible – without finding anything wrong.

  Then one evening he reached the last chapter, and then the last page, the last verse.

  And there it was! That unforgivable and unfathomable misprint that had caused the owner of the books to order them to be pulped.

  Now Bosse handed a copy to each of them sitting round the table, and they thumbed through to the very last verse, and one by one burst out laughing.

  Bosse was happy enough to find the misprint. He had no interest in finding out how it got there. He had satisfied his curiosity, and in the process had read his first book since his schooldays, and even got a bit religious while he was at it. Not that Bosse allowed God to have any opinion about Bellringer Farm’s business enterprise, nor did he allow the Lord to be present when he filed his tax return, but – in other respects – Bosse now placed his life in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely none of them would worry about the fact that he set up his stall at markets on Saturdays and sold bibles with a tiny misprint in them? (‘Only ninety-nine crowns each! Jesus! What a bargain!’)

  But if Bosse had cared, and if, against all odds, he had managed to get to the bottom of it, then after what he had told his friends, he would have continued:

  A typesetter in a Rotterdam suburb had been through a personal crisis. Several years earlier, he had been recruited by Jehovah’s Witnesses but they had thrown him out when he discovered, and questioned rather too loudly, the fact that the congregation had predicted the return of Jesus on no less than fourteen occasions between 1799 and 1980 – and sensationally managed to get it wrong all fourteen times.

  Upon which, the typesetter had joined the Pentecostal Church; he liked their teachings about the Last Judgment, he could embrace the idea of God’s final victory over evil, the return of Jesus (without their actually naming a date) and how most of the people from the typesetter’s childhood including his own father, would burn in hell.

  But this new congregation sent him packing too. A whole month’s collections had gone astray while in the care of the typesetter. He had sworn by all that was holy that the disappearance had nothing to do with him. Besides, shouldn’t Christians forgive? And what choice did he have when his car broke down and he needed a new one to keep his job?

  As bitter as bile, the typesetter started the layout for that day’s jobs, which ironically happened to consist of printing two thousand bibles! And besides, it was an order from Sweden where as far as the typesetter knew, his father still lived after having abandoned his family when the typesetter was six years old.

  With tears in his eyes, the typesetter set the text of chapter upon chapter. When he came to the very last chapter – the Book of Revelation – he just lost it. How could Jesus ever want to come back to Earth? Here where Evil had once and for all conquered Good, so what was the point of anything? And the Bible… It was just a joke!

  So it came about that the typesetter with the shattered nerves made a little addition to the very last verse in the very last chapter in the Swedish bible that was just about to be printed. The typesetter didn’t remember much of his father’s tongue, but he could at least recall a nursery rhyme that was well suited in the context. Thus the bible’s last two verses plus the typesetter’s extra verse were printed as:

  20. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

  21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

  22. And they all lived happily ever after.

  The late evening became night at Bellringer Farm. Vodka as well as brotherly love had flowed freely and would probably have continued to do so if it wasn’t for the fact that teetotaller Benny realised how late it was. He informed those present that it was high time that everyone went to bed. There were a lot of things that needed to be sorted out the following day, and it would be best for one and all to be rested.

  ‘If I was of a more curious disposition, I’d be eager to see what sort of mood the man with his face in his food is going to be in when he wakes up,’ said Allan.

  Chapter 16

  1948–53

  The man on the park bench had just said ‘Good afternoon, Mr Karlsson,’ in English, and from that Allan drew two conclusions. First, that the man was not Swedish, otherwise he would probably have tried speaking his own language. Second, that he knew who Allan was, because he had just called him by his name.

  The man was smartly dressed, in a grey hat with a black rim, a grey overcoat and black shoes. He could very well be a businessman. He looked friendly and definitely had something in mind. So Allan said, in English:

  ‘Is my life, by any chance, about to take a new turn?’

  The man answered that such a change could not be ruled out, but added in a friendly tone that it depended on Mr Karlsson himself. The fact was, the man’s employer wanted to meet Mr Karlsson to offer him a job.

  Allan answered that at the moment he was doing quite well, but, of course, he could not remain sitting on a park bench for the rest of his life. Was it too much to
ask for the name of his employer? Allan found it easier to say yes or no to something if he knew what he was saying yes or no to. Didn’t the man agree?

  The man agreed completely, but his employer was a bit special and would probably prefer to introduce himself in person.

  ‘But I am prepared to accompany you to the employer in question without the slightest delay, if that would suit you?’

  Why not, Allan said, it might suit him. The man added that it was some distance away. If Mr Karlsson would like to collect his belongings from the hotel room, the man promised to wait in the lobby. In fact, the man could give Mr Karlsson a lift back to the hotel, because the man’s car with chauffeur was right beside them.

  A stylish car it was too, a red Ford sedan of the latest model. And a private chauffeur! He was a quiet type. Didn’t seem nearly as friendly as the friendly man.

  ‘I think we can skip the hotel room,’ Allan said. ‘I am used to travelling light.’

  ‘No problem,’ said the friendly man and tapped his chauffeur on the back in a way that meant ‘drive off’.

  The journey took them out to Dalarö, just over an hour south of the capital on winding roads. Allan and the friendly man conversed about this and that. The friendly man explained the endless magnificence of opera, while Allan told him how you cross the Himalayas without freezing to death.

  The sun had given up for the day when the red coupé rolled into the little village on the coast that was so popular with archipelago tourists in the summers, but as dark and silent as can be in the winters.

  ‘So this is where he lives, your employer,’ said Allan.

  ‘No, not exactly,’ said the friendly man.