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

languages: German and French from back home in Strasbourg, and now Spanish too. Could that perhaps, in the long term, serve the revolution?
    Yes, it could. The young Claude’s talent for languages was carefully checked and after that his general intelligence in a number of tests. And then he was put in a language-cum-ideology school and before he was fifteen years old he spoke fluent French, German, Russian, Spanish, English and Chinese.
    When he was eighteen, just after the end of the Second World War, Claude heard his mother and father express doubts as to the course the revolution was taking under Stalin. Claude reported these views to his superiors and before long Michel and Monique Pennant had been both convicted and executed for non-revolutionary activity. The young Claude thus gained his first award, a gold medal for the best pupil of his year, 1945–46.
    After 1946, Claude started to prepare for service abroad. The intention was to place him in the West and let him work his way up in the corridors of power, if necessary as a sleeper agent for dozens of years. Claude was now under the protective hawk-like wings of Marshal Beria and he was carefully kept out of all official engagements where he might possibly end up in a photograph. The only work the young Claude was allowed to do was an occasional bout as interpreter, and then only when the marshal himself was present.
    In 1949, at the age of twenty-one, Claude Pennant was sent back to France, but this time to Paris. He was allowed to keep his own name, although his life history had been rewritten. He started up the career ladder at the Sorbonne.
    Nineteen years later, in May 1968, he had risen to the immediate vicinity of the French president himself. The last two years he had been Interior Minister Fouchet’s right hand man and as such he now served the international revolution more than ever. His advice to the interior minister – and thus in extension to the president – was to react harshly to the ongoing student and worker uprising. To be on the safe side, he also made sure the French communists sent false signals, implying that they were not behind the demands of the students and workers. The communist revolution in France was at most one month away, and de Gaulle and Fouchet didn’t have a clue.
     
    After lunch, there was an opportunity for everyone to stretch their legs before coffee was served in the drawing room. Now, the two presidents had no choice but to exchange pleasantries with each other. It was while they were doing this, that the long-haired and bearded interpreter came up to them unexpectedly.
    ‘Excuse me for disturbing both the Mr Presidents, but I have to talk to Mr President de Gaulle and I don’t think it can wait.’
    President de Gaulle was just about to call a guard, because a French president most certainly did not mix with just anybody in that manner. But the long-haired and bearded man was perfectly polite, so he was allowed to speak.
    ‘Very well, but be quick about it. As you can see I’ve got more important things to do than chat with an interpreter.’
    Oh indeed, Allan promised not to go on. The simple fact was that Allan thought the president ought to know that Interior Minister Fouchet’s special advisor was a spy.
    ‘Excuse me, but what the hell are you saying?’ said President de Gaulle loudly, but not so loudly that Fouchet, smoking out on the terrace, and his right hand man, also smoking out on the terrace, could hear.
    Allan told him how he had had the dubious pleasure of dining with Misters Stalin and Beria almost exactly twenty years earlier, and that the interior minister’s right hand man was quite definitely on that occasion Stalin’s interpreter.
    ‘It was of course twenty years ago, but he looks just the same. I, however, looked different. I didn’t have a magpie’s nest on my face in those days, with my hair sticking out in all directions. I recognise the spy but the spy doesn’t recognise me, because I hardly recognised myself when I looked in the mirror yesterday.’
    President de Gaulle went bright red in the face, excused himself, and then immediately requested a private conversation with his interior minister (‘No, private conversation, I said, without your special advisor! Now!’).
    President Johnson and the Indonesian interpreter were left behind. Johnson looked very pleased. He decided to shake the interpreter’s hand, as thank you for him having made the French president lose