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

disarmament treaties: one concerning anti-ballistic missiles (the ABM Treaty) and the other concerning strategic weapons. As the signing took place in Moscow, Nixon seized the opportunityto shake hands with the agent at the American Embassy who had so brilliantly supplied him with information about the Soviet nuclear weapons capacity.
    ‘You’re welcome, Mr President,’ said Allan. ‘But aren’t you going to invite me to dinner too? They usually do.’
    ‘Who does?’ asked the astounded president.
    ‘Well,’ said Allan. ‘The people who were satisfied with my help… Franco and Truman and Stalin… and Chairman Mao… although he didn’t give me anything but noodles… but it was very late in the evening of course… and the Swedish prime minister only gave me coffee when I come to think of it. Mind you, that wasn’t so bad either, considering there was rationing in those days…’
    Luckily President Nixon had been briefed as to the agent’s past, so he could calmly say that there was regrettably not time for dinner with Mr Karlsson. But then he added that an American president could not readily be less obliging than a Swedish prime minister, so a cup of coffee was definitely called for, and cognac to go with it. Now this very minute, if that suited?
    Allan thanked him for the invitation, and asked if a double cognac might be in order if he refrained from the coffee. Nixon answered that the American national budget could probably support both.
     
    The two gentlemen had a pleasant hour together, or at least, as pleasant as it could be for Allan to listen to President Nixon talk politics. The American president asked about how the political game worked in Indonesia. Without mentioning Amanda by name, Allan described in detail how careers in politics came about there. President Nixon listened carefully and seemed to be giving the subject his serious attention.
    ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’
     
    Allan and Yury were pleased with each other and with the developments. It seemed that the GRU and KGB had calmed down when it came to searching for the spy, and Allan and Yury found that comforting. Or as Allan put it:
    ‘It is better not to have two murder organisations on your heels.’
    Then he added that the two friends ought not to spend too much time on the KGB, GRU and all the other abbreviations, which they in any case couldn’t do anything about. Instead, it was high time to cook up the next intelligence report for Secret Agent Hutton and his president. Considerable rust damage to the middle-range missile store in Kamchatka, could they elaborate on that?
    Yury praised Allan for his delightful imagination. It made it so easy to put the intelligence reports together. And that meant more time for food, drink and good company.
     
    Richard M. Nixon had every reason to be satisfied with most things. Right up until the time when he didn’t have any reason at all.
    The American people loved their president and re-elected him in 1972, in a landslide. Nixon won in forty-nine states, George McGovern just managed to win one.
    But then everything got more difficult. And even more difficult. And in the end, Nixon had to do what no other American president had done before.
    He had to resign.
    Allan read about the so-called Watergate scandal in all the available papers at the city library in Moscow. In summary, Nixon had evidently cheated on his taxes, received illegal campaign donations, ordered secret bombings, persecuted enemies and made use of break-ins and telephone bugging. Allan thought that the president must have been impressed by thatconversation over a double cognac in Paris. And then he said to the newspaper picture of Nixon:
    ‘You should have gone in for a career in Indonesia instead. You would have gone far there.’
     
    The years went by. Nixon was replaced by Gerald Ford who was replaced by Jimmy Carter. And all the while Brezhnev stayed where he was. Just like Allan, Yury and Larissa. The three of them continued to meet five or six times a year, and they had just as good a time on every occasion. The meetings always resulted in a suitably imaginative report about the current status of the Soviet arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over the years, Allan and Yury had chosen to tone down the Soviet capacity more and more, because they noticed how much more satisfied this made the Americans (regardless of who the president was, it seemed) and how much more pleasant the atmosphere then seemed