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

walk to the city library in Moscow every day and sit there for hours reading the daily papers and magazines. He was hoping that he would come across an article about Popov making a public appearance outside the barbed wire that fenced in Arzamas-16.
    The months went by and no such news items cropped up. But Allan could read about how the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy met with the same fate as his brother and how Czechoslovakia had asked the Soviet Union for help getting its socialism in order.
    Furthermore, Allan noted one day that Lyndon B. Johnson had been succeeded by a man called Richard M. Nixon. But since he was still getting his expenses from the embassy in an envelope every month, Allan thought that he had better keep on looking for Popov. If anything changed, then Secret Agent Hutton would no doubt get in touch.
     
    1968 turned into 1969 and spring was approaching when Allan in his everlasting thumbing through newspapers at the library came across something interesting. The Vienna Opera was going to give a guest performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, with Franco Corelli as tenor and the international Swedish star Birgit Nilsson in the role of Turandot.
    Allan scratched his (now again) beardless chin and remembered the first and only entire evening that he and Yury had spent together. Late in the night, Yury had started to sing an aria. ‘ Nessun dorma ’ is what he had sung – nobody is allowedto sleep! Not long afterwards, he had for reasons connected with alcohol fallen asleep anyway, but that was another matter.
    To Allan’s way of thinking, a person who at one time could manage a more or less good rendering of Puccini and Turandot at a depth of 200 metres, would hardly miss a guest performance from Vienna with the same opera at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, would he? Especially if the man in question lived only a few hours away and had received so many medals that he would have no problem getting a seat.
    Or perhaps he might. And, in that case, Allan would have to continue his daily walks to and from the library. That was the worst that could happen, and that wasn’t so bad.
    For the time being, Allan worked on the assumption that Yury might turn up outside the Opera, and then all he had to do was to stand there and remind him of their last drinking bout. And that would be that.
    Or it wouldn’t.
    Not at all, in fact.
     
    On the evening of 22nd March 1969, Allan placed himself strategically on the left of the main entrance to the Bolshoi Theatre. The idea had been that from such a position he would be able to recognise Yury when he passed by on his way into the auditorium. There turned out to be a problem, however: all the visitors looked almost identical. They were men in black suits under a black coat and women in long dresses which showed under a black or brown fur coat. They all came in pairs and rapidly went from the cold outside into the warmth of the theatre, past Allan where he stood on the magnificent stairway’s top step. And it was dark too, so how on earth would Allan be able to identify a face he had seen for two days twenty-one years ago? Unless he had the incredible luck that Yury recognise him instead.
    No, Allan didn’t have any such luck. It was of course far from certain that Yury Borisovich was now inside the theatre, but, if he was, he had passed a few metres from his old friend without noticing. So what could Allan do? He thought aloud:
    ‘If you have just gone into the theatre, dear Yury Borisovich, then you will pretty certainly be coming out again in a few hours through the same door. But then you are going to look just the same as when you went in. So I am not going to be able to find you. That means you will have to find me.’
    So be it. Allan went back to his little office at the embassy, made his preparations and returned well before Prince Calàf had made Princess Turandot’s heart melt.
    More than anything Secret Agent Hutton had impressed upon Allan the word ‘discretion’. A successful agent never made any noise. He should melt into his environment to such a degree that he was almost invisible.
    ‘Do you understand, Mr Karlsson?’
    ‘Absolutely, Mr Hutton,’ Allan had answered.
     
    Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli were called back to the stage twenty times by the applauding audience; the performance was a huge success. So it took an extra long time before people who all looked alike started to stream down the steps again. What everyone