The friendly man’s chauffeur – who was not nearly as friendly – said nothing. He just dropped Allan and the friendly man off by the harbour and left. Before that, the friendly man had managed to get out a fur coat from the boot of the Ford, and he put it around Allan’s shoulders in a friendly gesture while apologizing for the fact that they would now have to walk a short way in the winter cold.
Allan was not one to pin his hopes (or, for that matter, his fears) on what might happen in the immediate future. What happened happened. There was no point second-guessing it.
Nevertheless, Allan was surprised when the friendly man led him away from the centre of Dalarö and instead set off across the ice into the jet-black archipelago evening.
The friendly man and Allan walked on and on. Sometimes the friendly man turned his flashlight on and flashed it a bit in the winter darkness before using it to get the right bearing on his compass. He didn’t talk to Allan during the entire walk, but instead just counted his steps aloud – in a language that Allan hadn’t heard before.
After a fifteen minute walk at quite a good pace out into the void, the friendly man said that they had now arrived. It was dark around them, except for a flickering light on an island far away. The ground (or rather, the ice) under the two men’s feet suddenly broke up.
The friendly man had possibly counted incorrectly. Or the captain of the submarine hadn’t been exactly in the place he should have been. Whatever the cause, the 97-metre-long vessel now broke through the ice far too close to Allan and the friendly man. They both fell backwards and almost ended up in the icy water. But soon Allan was helped to climb down into the warmth.
‘Well, now you can see how sensible it is not to start your day by guessing what might happen,’ said Allan. ‘After all, how long would I have had to go on guessing before I guessed this?’
At this point, the friendly man thought that he didn’t have to be so secretive any longer. He told Allan that his name was Yury Borisovich Popov and that he worked for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that he was a physicist, not a politician or a military man, and that he had been sent to Stockholm to persuade Mr Karlsson to follow him to Moscow. Yury Borisovich was chosen for this mission because of Mr Karlsson’s possible reluctance which could perhaps be overcome by Yury Borisovitch’s background as a physicist, meaning that Mr Karlsson and Yury Borisovich both spoke the same language, so to speak.
‘But I am not a physicist,’ Allan said.
‘That may be the case, but my sources tell me that you know something that I would like to know.’
‘I do? Whatever could that be?’
‘The bomb, Mr Karlsson. The bomb.’
Yury Borisovich and Allan Emmanuel immediately took a liking to each other. To agree to follow him without knowing where he was going or why – that impressed Yury Borisovich and indicated that there was something devil-may-care about Allan that Yury himself lacked. And as for Allan, well, he appreciated the fact that for once he could talk with somebody who didn’t try to fill him with politics or religion.
Besides, it soon transpired that both Yury Borisovich and Allan Emmanuel shared a boundless enthusiasm for vodka. The previous evening Yury Borisovich had had the opportunity to taste the Swedish variety while he had been keeping an eye on Allan Emmanuel in the dining room at the Grand Hotel. At first, Yury Borisovich thought that it was too dry, without the Russian sweetness, but after a couple of glasses he got used to it. And another two glasses later, he let a ‘not bad at all!’ pass his lips.
‘But this is of course better,’ said Yury Borisovich and held up a whole litre of Stolichnaya. He and Allan Emmanuel sat and had the officers’ mess to themselves. ‘And now we shall each take a glass!’
‘Sounds good,’ said Allan. ‘The sea air tires you out.’
After the very first glass, Allan insisted on a change in the way the two men addressed each other. To say Yury Borisovich to Yury Borisovich every time he needed to attract Yury Borisovich’s attention just wasn’t practical in the long term. And he didn’t want to be called Allan Emmanuel, because he hadn’t used his middle name since he was baptised by the priest in Yxhult.
‘So from now on, you are Yury and I am Allan,’ said Allan. ‘Otherwise I’m getting off this boat now.’
‘Don’t do that, dear Allan, we are at a depth of two hundred metres,’ said Yury. ‘Fill your glass again instead.’
Yury Borisovich Popov was a passionate socialist and wanted nothing more than to keep working in the name of Soviet socialism. Comrade Stalin was a stern man but Yury knew that if you served the system loyally and well then you had nothing to fear. Allan said that he didn’t have any plans to serve any system, but that of course he could give Yury one or two tips if they had got stuck in working out the atom bomb problem. But first of all Allan wanted to taste another glass of the vodka whose name was unpronounceable even when you were sober. And another thing: Yury would have to promise that he would continue not to talk politics.
Yury thanked Allan heartily for his promise to help, and said straight off that Marshal Beria, Yury’s boss, intended to give the Swedish expert a one-off payment of 100,000 American dollars, on condition that Allan’s help led to the production of a bomb.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ said Allan.
The contents of the bottle shrank steadily while Allan and Yury talked about everything on heaven and earth (except politics and religion). They also touched upon the atom bomb problems and although the topic really belonged to the days to come, Allan decided to give him a couple of simple tips and then a couple more.
‘Hmmm,’ said senior physicist Yury Borisovich Popov. ‘I think I understand…’
‘Well, I don’t,’ said Allan. ‘Explain the thing with opera again. Isn’t it just a lot of shouting?’
Yury smiled, took a large gulp of vodka, stood up – and started to sing. In his drunkenness he didn’t just choose any old folk song, but instead the aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot.
‘That was quite something,’ said Allan when Yury had finished.
‘Nessun dorma!’ said Yury solemnly. ‘Nobody is allowed to sleep!’
Regardless of whether anybody was allowed to sleep or not, they did both soon drop off in their berths beside the officers’ mess. When they woke up, the submarine was already docked in Leningrad harbour. There, a limousine was waiting to take them to the Kremlin for a meeting with Marshal Beria.
‘Saint Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad… Couldn’t you make up your mind?’ said Allan.
‘And a good morning to you too,’ said Yury.
Yury and Allan got into the back seat of a Humber Pullman limousine for a day-long journey from Leningrad to Moscow. A sliding window separated the driver’s seat from the luxurious compartment where Allan and his newfound friend were sitting. The compartment boasted a refrigerator with water, soft drinks and all the alcohol that these two passengers were not in need of at the moment. There was also a bowl of red gummy sweets and a whole tray of fancy chocolates. The car and its fittings would have been a brilliant example of Soviet socialist engineering if it hadn’t all been imported from England.
Yury told Allan about his background. He had studied under Nobel-prize laureate Ernest Rutherford, the legendary nuclear physicist from New Zealand, which was why Yury Borisovich spoke such good English. Allan, in turn, described (to an increasingly astounded Yury Borisovich) his adventures in Spain, America, China, the Himalayas and Iran.
‘And what happened to the Anglican priest?’ Yury wondered.
‘I don’t know,’ said Allan. ‘He has either Anglicanized all of Persia, or he’s dead. The least likely is probably something in between those two.’
‘That sounds a bit like challenging Stalin in the Soviet Union,’ said Yury candidly. ‘Setting aside the fact that it would be a crime against the revolution, the chance of survival is poor.’
On this particular day and in this particular company, Yury’s candidness seemed to know no bounds.
He opened his heart about what he thought of Marshal Beria, the boss of the secret service who had suddenly become the head of the project to make an atom bomb. Beria had no sense of shame at all. He abused women and children sexually and as for undesirable people, well, he sent them to prison camps – if he hadn’t had them killed first.
‘Undesirable elements must of course be weeded out as soon as possible, but they must be undesirable on the correct, revolutionary grounds. Those who don’t further the aims of socialism must be got rid of! But not those who don’t further the aims of Marshal Beria. No! Allan, that is dreadful. Marshal Beria is no true representative of the revolution. But you can’t blame Comrade Stalin for that. I have never had the privilege of meeting him, but he has the responsibility for an entire country, almost an entire continent. And if amidst all that work, and in a hasty moment, he gave Marshal Beria more responsibility than he is capable of shouldering… well, Comrade Stalin has every right to do that! And now, my dear Allan, I shall tell you something really fantastic. You and I, this very afternoon, are going to be honoured with an audience not only with Marshal Beria, but also with Comrade Stalin in person! He has invited us to dinner!’
‘I look forward to that,’ said Allan. ‘But how are we going to manage until then? Are we supposed to survive on red gummy sweets?’
Yury saw to it that the limousine stopped in a little town on the way, to pick up a couple of sandwiches for Allan. Then their journey continued.
Between bites of his sandwich, Allan thought about this Marshal Beria character who, from Yury’s description, seemed to resemble the recently deceased boss of the secret service in Tehran.
Yury, for his part, sat there trying to figure out his Swedish colleague. The Swede would soon be eating dinner with Stalin, and he had said that he was looking forward to it. But Yury had to ask whether it was the dinner he meant, or the leader.
‘You have to eat to live,’ Allan said diplomatically and praised the quality of the Russian sandwiches. ‘But, dear Yury, would you allow me to ask a question or two?’
‘But of course, dear Allan. Ask away, I’ll do my best to answer.’
Allan said that to be honest he hadn’t really been listening while Yury had been spouting on about politics just now, because politics was not what interested Allan most in this world. Besides, he did distinctly recall from the previous evening that Yury had promised not to sail off in that direction.
But Allan had made a note of Yury’s description of Marshal Beria’s human failings. Allan believed that in his earlier life he had come across people of the same type. On the one hand, if Allan had understood correctly, Marshal Beria was ruthless. On the other hand, he had now seen to it that Allan was extraordinarily well cared for, with a limousine and everything.
‘But it does occur to me to wonder why he didn’t simply have me kidnapped and then make sure that you wring out of me what he wants to know,’ said Allan. ‘Then he wouldn’t have had to waste the red gummy sweets, the fancy chocolates, the hundred thousand dollars and a lot of other stuff.’
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 int
ernational 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.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 20