The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

dumb or such a waste of time to go to university? It was almost as if his little brother had become a big brother, and that actually felt really good, Bosse thought.
    Allan didn’t make much of a fuss about anything. He sat in his hammock all day long, although the weather had becomemore as it usually was in Sweden in May. Sometimes Pike sat down near him for a little chat.
    During one of these conversations, it transpired that they had a shared image of what nirvana was. Both of them thought that this perfect and absolute harmony was to be found in a beach chair under a parasol in a sunny and warm climate where the staff served chilled drinks of various sorts. Allan told Pike what a delightful time he had had on the island of Bali once upon a time, when he was vacationing with money he had got from Mao Tse-tung.
    But when it came to what should be in the glasses, Allan and Pike differed. The centenarian wanted vodka cola or possibly vodka grape. On more festive occasions, he preferred vodka straight up. Pike Gerdin, on the other hand, liked more colourful liquids — best of all something orange turning into a golden yellow a bit like a sunset. And there had to be a little parasol in the middle. Allan wondered what on earth Pike wanted with a parasol in his glass. You couldn’t drink it. Pike answered that while Allan had been out and seen the world, and certainly knew a lot more about this and that than a simple ex-con from Stockholm, this was something Allan didn’t have a clue about.
    And so this friendly bickering on the theme of nirvana went on for a while. One of them was about twice as old as the other, and the other about twice as big as the first, but they got along pretty well.
     
    As the days and then weeks passed, journalists found it harder to keep the story alive – the story, that is, about the suspected triple murderer and his henchmen. After only a day or two, TV and the national and local newspapers had stopped reporting, according to the old-fashioned and easily defensible standpoint that if you didn’t have anything to say, you said nothing.
    The evening papers, the Swedish tabloids, held out longer. If you had nothing to say, you could always interview somebody who didn’t realise that he too had nothing to say. The Express toyed with the idea of using Tarot cards to help them home in on Allan’s whereabouts, but dropped it. That was enough about Allan Karlsson. Go and nose out the next piece of shit… as one said in the trade. If nothing else was available, you could run an article on the latest miracle diet. That always worked.
    So the media were letting the mystery of the centenarian disappear into oblivion – with one exception. In the local paper, there were a number of reports about various items related to Allan Karlsson’s disappearance, like, for example, that the ticket office at the bus station had now been fitted with a security door as protection against future attacks. And that Director Alice at the Old People’s Home had decided that Allan Karlsson had forfeited the right to his room and it would be allocated to someone else, someone who ‘was more appreciative of the care and warmth of the staff’.
    In every article, however, there was a short recap of the events that the police believed were a result of Allan Karlsson climbing out of his window at the Old People’s Home.
    The local paper happened to have a dinosaur of a publisher (cum editor-in-chief), a man with the hopelessly outdated attitude that a citizen is innocent until the opposite is proven. So the paper was careful about which people in the drama they identified by name. Allan Karlsson was indeed Allan Karlsson, but Julius Jonsson was the ‘67-year-old’ and Benny Ljungberg was the ‘hot-dog-stand proprietor’.
    This in turn led an angry gentleman to phone Chief Inspector Aronsson at his office. The man said he had a tip about the missing Allan Karlsson, the man suspected of murder.
    Chief Inspector Aronsson said that a tip was just what he needed.
    Well, the man had read all the articles in the local paper and thought very carefully about what had happened. While he didn’t have as much information as the chief inspector, it seemed to him that the police hadn’t checked up properly on the foreigner.
    ‘And I am certain that is where you will find the real villain,’ said the man.
    ‘Foreigner?’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson.
    ‘Yes, I don’t know whether he is called Ibrahim or Muhammed,