‘I’ll be damned,’ he mumbled to himself.
‘What’s that?’ Julius wondered.
‘It was nothing. Except what I just said.’
‘Damned?’
‘Yes.’
Indonesia
Once Allan had come to terms with his new-found relative interest in the rest of humanity, his black tablet helped him regain lost ground. It greeted him with the news of a Norwegian who had his own lake, where he fed the roach and bream pellets full of carotene. When the pike in the lake ate the recently fed fish their flesh turned pink, whereupon the Norwegian caught them, filleted them and sold them as salmon. He minimized his risks by exporting the frauds solely to Namibia where, naturally, there lived a retired health inspector from Oslo. The inspector sounded the alarm, the Norwegian was locked up, and the price of salmon in south-western Africa went back to normal.
And so on. The black tablet helped Allan enjoy life again, even as Julius continued to live in frustration. It had been months since he’d managed a single dishonourable undertaking. In his last few years as a criminal at home in Sweden, he had devoted himself to a mild form of that Norwegian pike-salmon business. He’d imported vegetables from distant lands, had them repackaged and sold them as Swedish. There was a lot of money to be made there. The cool northern climate in combination with a sun that never set meant that tomatoes and cucumbers matured slowly and developed world-class flavour. Or, as the nineteenth-century poet Carl Jonas Love Almqvist put it, ‘Only Sweden has Swedish gooseberries.’
Gooseberries in particular were not of interest to Julius; besides, there was little market for them. But the same was not true of green asparagus. When spring became early summer, people would pay four or five times as much for a bunch of asparagus, as long as it was Swedish.
Julius Jonsson’s Swedish asparagus, at that point, was shipped all the way from Peru. For a long time business was good. But then one of Jonsson’s middlemen grew too eager and began to sell Gotland asparagus on Hötorget in Stockholm at least five weeks before it was even to be found on Gotland. This led to rumours of fraud, and the Swedish foodstuffs authorities began to stir. Suddenly there were spot checks when and where there shouldn’t have been. In short order Julius lost three whole Peruvian lots, all seized and destroyed in the name of the law. Moreover, his middlemen – unlike Julius – were locked up. Such is a middleman’s lot.
But even if the long arm of the law couldn’t reach all the way to the brains behind it, Julius had lost interest. He was tired of Sweden being orderly beyond all reason. Who’d ever died of eating Peruvian asparagus?
No, honourable petty thieves might as well not bother any more. So Julius had chosen to retire. He made some moonshine, poached a moose here and there, borrowed the neighbour’s electricity without permission – and that was about it. Until a hundred-year-old man unexpectedly knocked on his door. The old man said his name was Allan, and with him he had a stolen suitcase they opened after a pleasant dinner and accompanying vodka. It had turned out to be full of millions.
So one thing had led to another, and another to the third. Julius and Allan had shaken off all the stubborn individuals who wanted their money back and ended up in Bali, where they were doing away with it at a steady pace.
Allan saw that Julius was hanging his head. He tried to inspire his bored friend by reading aloud from his black tablet about various types of immorality from all the corners of the world. Romania, Italy and Norway were already settled. President Zuma of South Africa managed to take up a whole breakfast when it turned out he’d built a private swimming pool and a theatre with taxpayers’ money. A Swedish dance-band queen received well-deserved attention after calling seven dresses and eighteen pairs of shoes a ‘business trip’ on her tax return.
But the head-hanging didn’t stop. Julius needed something to do before he became depressed for real.
Allan, who hadn’t let himself be concerned about anything at all for a hundred years, could not feel at peace, given his friend’s lost spark. Surely there must be something Julius could engage himself in.
That was as far as he got in his musings before chance stepped in. It happened one evening after Allan had crawled into bed, while Julius felt he still had sorrows in his soul to deaden. He sat down in the hotel bar and ordered a glass of local arak. It was made of rice and sugarcane, tasted like rum, and was so strong it made the eyes water. Julius had learned that one glass would blur one’s troubles and a second would chase them away. Just to be safe, he tended to have a third glass, too, before bedtime.
The evening’s first was empty and the other well on its way when Julius’s senses expanded enough for him to notice that he wasn’t alone in the bar. Three chairs away sat a middle-aged Asian man, also with arak in hand.
‘Cheers,’ Julius said, raising his glass.
The man smiled in response, whereupon both turned bottoms up and grimaced.
‘Now things are starting to look up,’ said the man, whose eyes were as full of tears as Julius’s.
‘First or second?’ Julius asked.
‘Second,’ said the man.
‘Same here.’
Julius and the man moved closer and each decided to have a third glass of the same.
They chatted for a while before the man chose to introduce himself. ‘Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas,’ he said. ‘It’s a pleasure!’
Julius looked at the man who had just said his name. And had enough arak in his body to say what he was thinking. ‘Surely no one could have a name like that.’
Yes, one could. Especially if one was of Indian origin. Simran Etc. Etc. had ended up in Indonesia after an unfortunate incident with the daughter of a far-too-unsympathetic man.
Julius nodded. Dads of daughters could be more unsympathetic than most. But was that any reason to possess a name that took an entire morning to say?
The man, who was named what he was named, turned out to have a pragmatic attitude toward the significance of his own identity. Or perhaps he just had a sense of humour. ‘What do you think I should be called instead?’
Julius liked the exiled Indian. But if they were going to become friends, all those names in a row just wouldn’t do. He had to seize this opportunity. ‘Gustav Svensson,’ he said. ‘That’s a proper name, rolls off the tongue, easy to remember.’
The man said he’d never had trouble remembering Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas either, but he agreed that Gustav Svensson sounded pleasant. ‘Swedish, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Yes. Julius nodded again. Couldn’t get much more Swedish than that.
And there and then, his new business idea began to take root.
* * *
Julius Jonsson and Simran Something truly hit it off as the third glass of arak took hold. Before the night was over they had decided to meet again. Same place, same time, the next night. In addition, Julius had decided that the man with the impossible name would henceforth be called Gustav Svensson. Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas thought that was just as well. The name he’d had so far hadn’t brought him an overabundance of luck.
The old men went on in the same vein for several nights in a row. The Indian grew used to his new alias. He liked it.
He’d checked into the hotel under his previous name on the day the two had met, and he continued to stay there while he and Julius laid plans for their future partnership. When the hotel manager informed him, at increasing volume, that he wanted payment for the Indian guest’s stay, Gustav told Julius that he intended to depart from the place permanently. Without paying. And without announcing his intentions. The management would never understand, after all, that Gustav couldn’t be held responsible for Simran’s bill.
But Julius understood. When was Gustav planning to depart?
‘Preferably in the next fifteen minutes.’
Julius understood this too. But he didn’t want to lose his new friend, so he sent the man off with the phone Allan had given him. ‘Here’s something so you can be re
ached. I’ll call you from my room. Now go. Take the way through the kitchen. That’s what I would do.’
Gustav followed Julius’s advice and was gone. Later that evening, the hotel manager appeared after wandering around for at least an hour in pursuit of the now-vanished Indian guest.
Julius and Allan observed the sunset from the shore, each in a comfortable chair and with an accompanying drink. The manager apologized for the intrusion. But he had a question. ‘Mr Jonsson, is there any chance you have seen our guest Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas? I’ve noticed the two of you spending some time together here at our establishment in recent days.’
‘Simran who?’ said Julius.
* * *
Thenceforth, Gustav Svensson and Julius Jonsson had to meet somewhere other than the hotel when the time came to talk business. The manager couldn’t exactly lay the blame for his vanished guest at Jonsson’s feet, but that didn’t stop him aiming a slightly raised level of suspicion at the Swedish gentlemen. In their case, there was considerably more money at stake. Thus far they had always paid up, but currently the bill was larger than usual and it seemed advisable to proceed with caution.
Jonsson and Svensson’s meetings were instead held in a filthy bar in central Denpasar. Gustav turned out to be almost as much a petty thief as Julius. Back home in India, he had spent many years living large by renting cars, switching their engines and returning them. It often took the rental agency several months to discover that the vehicle in question had become seven years older, and by then it was impossible to say which of several hundred renters was the guilty party. Unless it was someone on the staff.
In those days, fancy cars had become part of Gustav’s daily life. As a result he noticed that the nicer the car, the greater the potential to attract a beautiful girl. This equation got him into trouble more than once. To such an extent, most recently, that he had found it best to leave the automotive industry, the girl and all of India behind, since the girl had become pregnant. Her father had turned out to be both a Member of Parliament and a military man, and when Gustav, for strategic reasons, had asked for the girl’s hand in marriage, the father responded by threatening to send the seventh infantry after him.
‘What a grumpy bastard,’ Julius said. ‘Couldn’t he think of what was best for his daughter?’
Gustav agreed. A complicating factor was that the father had just noticed that his six-cylinder BMW had become a four-cylinder while he was on a business trip to Singapore.
‘And he blamed you?’
‘Yes. With no evidence.’
‘Were you innocent?’
‘That’s beside the point.’
In conclusion, Gustav said it felt right that Simran Aryabhat Chakrabarty Gopaldas was no more.
‘But it’s too bad he didn’t have time to settle up with the hotel. Cheers to you, my friend.’
* * *
Some time after their initial, cheerful meeting at the bar, Julius Jonsson and his new partner Gustav Svensson, with the help of a substantial amount of the money that remained in the suitcase, took over an asparagus farm in the mountains. Julius held the reins, Gustav was the site manager, and a great number of impoverished Balinese people bent their backs in the fields.
With the help of previous contacts in Sweden, Julius and his new partner now exported ‘Gustav Svensson’s locally grown asparagus’ in lovely bunches tied with blue-and-yellow ribbon. Nowhere did Julius or the man who had, until recently, been named something else claim that the asparagus was Swedish. The only thing Swedish about it was the price, and the name of the Indian grower. Unlike the Peru project, this wasn’t as illegal as Julius would have preferred, but you couldn’t have it all. Furthermore, he and Gustav succeeded in establishing a supplementary, and shadier, line of business. Swedish asparagus had such a good international reputation that Gustav’s Balinese variety could be shipped to Sweden, transferred into different boxes, and exported to a series of luxury hotels around the world. In Bali, for example. High-profile hotels there had their international reputations to consider, and it was worth every single extra rupiah it cost to avoid serving guests the bland, locally grown variety.
Allan was glad his friend Julius was back to his old self. And with that, life surely would have been a gas once more for both Julius and his hundred-year-old friend with the black tablet, except the money in the suitcase that never ran dry was starting to run dry. The income from the crop fields in the mountains was respectable, but life at the luxury hotel where the friends resided was anything but free. Even the imported Swedish asparagus in the restaurant cost half a fortune.
Julius had wanted to broach the topic of their finances with Allan for some time. He just hadn’t got round to it. At breakfast that morning, however, the time had come. Allan had brought his black tablet along as usual, and the day’s news was a story about the love between siblings. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had just had his brother poisoned to death at an airport in Malaysia. Allan said he wasn’t overly surprised: he’d had his own dealings with Kim Jong-un’s father. And grandfather.
‘Both father and grandfather did in fact intend to take my life,’ he recalled. ‘Now both of them are dead, but here I sit. Such is life.’
Julius had grown used to Allan popping up with such reflections on the past and was no longer surprised by them. He had probably heard that particular story before, but he didn’t quite recall. ‘You met the North Korean leader’s father? And grandfather? How old are you?’
‘A hundred, almost a hundred and one,’ said Allan. ‘In case that somehow escaped you. Their names were Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung. The one was only a child, but he was very angry.’
Julius resisted the urge to enquire further. Instead he guided the conversation towards the topic he’d been planning to discuss from the start.
The problem was, as Julius had hinted earlier, that the suitcase of money was increasingly transforming into a suitcase without money. And it had been two and a half months since they’d last settled their debts with the hotel. Julius didn’t want to think about what the bill would say.
‘Then don’t,’ Allan suggested, taking a bite of his mildly seasoned nasi goreng.
More urgent was the issue with the boat-renter, who had been in touch to say that he had throttled their line of credit and intended to do the same to Messrs Karlsson and Jonsson unless their debt was settled within the week.
‘The boat-renter?’ Allan said. ‘Did we rent a boat?’
‘The luxury yacht.’
‘Oh, right. So that counts as a boat, does it?’
Then Julius confessed that he’d been planning to surprise Allan on his hundred-and-first birthday, but their financial situation was such that the celebration couldn’t be up to Harry Belafonte standards.
‘Well, we met him once before,’ Allan said. ‘And my birthday parties and I have never quite seen eye to eye, so don’t worry about that.’
But Julius did. He wanted Allan to know he had appreciated the Belafonte gesture. It had been above and beyond. Julius was no spring chicken himself, and at no time in history had anyone done anything as nice for him as Allan had.
‘Though I wasn’t the one singing,’ Allan said.
Julius went on to say that there would absolutely be a party: he’d already ordered a cake from the one bakery he’d been able to find that would make it on credit. Thereafter awaited a hot-air balloon ride over the beautiful green island, along with the balloon pilot and two bottles of champagne.
Allan thought a hot-air balloon ride sounded pleasant. But perhaps they could skip the cake, given that their finances were strained. Even the hundred and one candles might cost a fortune.
The state of the friends’ joint capital didn’t hinge on a hundred and one birthday candles, according to Julius. He had dug through the suitcase the night before and made a rough estimate of how much was left. Then he made another based on what he expected the hotel thought they owed. When it came to the yacht, he didn’t ne
ed to make an estimate, since the lessor had been kind enough to tell him the exact amount.
‘I’m afraid we’re at least a hundred thousand dollars in the red,’ said Julius.
‘Is that with or without the candles?’ Allan asked.
Indonesia
The hundred-year-old man had always had a calming effect on those around him, except during isolated moments in history in which he had riled people beyond all rhyme and reason. Like the time he’d met Stalin in 1948. That had led to five years in a gulag. And a few years after that, it had turned out the North Koreans weren’t great fans of his either.
Oh, well, that was all in the past. Now, he had got Julius to agree that they would first celebrate his hundred-and-first birthday according to the plan (since Julius so desperately wanted to) and then they would sit down and deal with their finances. Everything would work out. With a little luck, perhaps a new suitcase full of money would turn up.
Julius didn’t believe it would, although one never knew what might happen in Allan’s company. Despite their sub-optimal financial situation, he had gone along with Allan’s suggestion that there be four bottles of champagne in the hot-air balloon rather than two. There might be a lull in the air up there, and in that case they would need some way to amuse themselves.
‘Perhaps a few sandwiches as well,’ Julius mused.
‘But why?’ said Allan.
The hotel manager was keeping a close eye on the old man and his even older friend, these days. Their unpaid bills had surpassed a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That was only a small part of what the manager had made from the spendthrift Scandinavians in the past year, but at the same time it was far too much to let it go unpaid. He had taken certain steps and measures. A few days ago, or nights ago, he had put a man on discreet watch outside the gentlemen’s luxury bungalow, just in case they should get it into their heads to climb through one of the paneless windows and vanish.
The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man Page 2