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

shouting and swearing and throwing things at each other. Riot barriers were being put up along and across the streets where Allan was walking along, keeping his head down.
    It was all like the Bali he had just left — just a bit cooler. Allan turned around and went back to the embassy.
    There he met a furious ambassador. The Élysée Palace had just called to say that the two-minute-long accreditation ceremony had been replaced by a long lunch and that the ambassador was warmly welcome to bring along her husband and of course her own interpreter, and that President de Gaulle for his part intended to invite the Minister of the Interior Fouchet and – not least – that the American President Lyndon B. Johnson would be there too.
    Amanda was in despair. She might have managed two minutes in the company of the president without risking immediate deportation, but three hours and with yet another president at the table…
    ‘What’s happening and what shall we do, Allan?’ asked Amanda.
    But the development from a handshake to a long lunch with double presidents was just as incomprehensible to Allan. And trying to understand things that were incomprehensible was not in his nature.
    ‘What should we do? I think we should find Herbert and have a drink. It is already after noon.’
     
    An accreditation ceremony with President de Gaulle on the one side and an ambassador from a distant and unimportant nation on the other usually lasted at most sixty seconds, but might be allowed to go on twice as long if the diplomat in question was talkative.
    In the case of the Indonesian ambassador it had suddenly become completely different for major political reasons, ones that Allan Karlsson would never have been able to work out even if he had cared to try.
    As it happened President Lyndon B. Johnson was sitting in the American Embassy in Paris and longing for a political victory. The protests the world over against the war in Vietnam were now raging like a hurricane and the person most associated with the war, President Johnson, was undeniably unpopular everywhere.
    Johnson had long since abandoned his plans to run in the November elections, but he wouldn’t mind being remembered by some more attractive epithet than ‘murderer’ and other unpleasant names that were being shouted out all over the place. So first he had ordered a break in the bombing of Hanoi and had actually organized a peace conference. The fact that there then happened to be semi-war raging on the streets in the city where the conference came to be held was something President Johnson found almost comical. There was something for that de Gaulle to get his teeth into.
    President Johnson thought that de Gaulle was a jerk. He seemed to have completely ‘forgotten’ who had rolled up his sleeves and saved France from the Germans. But the rules of politics were such that a French and an American president can’t be in the same capital together without at least having lunch.
    So a lunch was booked, and would have to be endured. But luckily the French had evidently messed things up (Johnson wasnot surprised) and had double-booked their president. So now the new Indonesian ambassador – a woman! – was joining them. President Johnson thought that was just fine; he could talk to her instead of that de Gaulle.
     
    But it wasn’t actually a double booking. Instead, President de Gaulle had personally and at the last moment had the brilliant idea of pretending that was the case. In that way, the lunch would be endurable, he could converse with the Indonesian ambassador – a woman! – instead of that Johnson.
    President de Gaulle didn’t like Johnson, but it was for historical rather than personal reasons. At the end of the war, the USA had placed France under American military jurisdiction – they had intended to steal his country! How could de Gaulle forgive them that, regardless of whether the sitting president was actually involved? The sitting president, for that matter… Johnson… He was called Johnson. The Americans simply had no style, thought Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle.
     
    Amanda and Herbert soon agreed that it would be best if Herbert stayed at the embassy during the meeting with the presidents in the Élysée Palace. In this way, they both thought, the risk that something would go totally wrong would be almost exactly halved. Didn’t Allan think so too?
    Allan was silent for a moment, considering possible answers, before he finally