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

inside one of the two innermost cylinders. But when he closed the wooden lid and saw the address label, he livened up.
    Addis Ababa.
    ‘He’s going to see the world if he keeps his peepers open,’ said Allan.
    ‘Hurry up,’ Julius said. ‘We can’t stay here.’
    The operation went well, and the two men were back under the birch trees well before the lunch break was over. They sat down on the trolley to rest, and soon things started to liven up in the factory yard. A truck driver filled the container with a few more cylinders. Then he closed and locked it, brought over a new container and continued the loading.
    Allan wondered what they actually manufactured there. Julius knew it was a works with a history; as far back as the seventeenth century they had cast and supplied cannons to everybody in the Thirty Years’ War who wanted to do their killing more efficiently.
    Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs. Then he announced that the break was now over and that it was time to make themselves scarce. Julius’s simple plan was that the two friends would walk the short distance into the more central parts of Åker and once there decide on their next move.
     
    Chief Inspector Aronsson went through the old station building in Byringe without finding anything of interest except apair of slippers that might have belonged to the centenarian. He would take them with him to show the staff at the Old People’s Home.
    There were pools of water here and there on the kitchen floor, leading to an open walk-in freezer, which was switched off. But that was unlikely to be of any significance.
    Aronsson continued into Byringe village to knock on doors. There were people at home in three of the houses, and from all three families he learned that a Julius Jonsson lived on the ground floor of the station building, that Julius Jonsson was a thief and a conman whom nobody wanted to have anything to do with, and that nobody had heard or seen anything strange since the previous evening. But they all took it for granted that Julius Jonsson was up to no good.
    ‘Put him behind bars,’ one of the angriest neighbours demanded.
    ‘For what reason?’ the chief inspector wondered in a tired voice.
    ‘Because he steals my eggs from the chicken coop at night, because he stole my newly purchased sled last winter and painted it and called it his own, because he orders books in my name, goes through my mailbox when they arrive and lets me pay the bill, because he tries to sell privately distilled vodka to my fourteen-year-old son, because he –’
    ‘OK, OK, fine. I’ll put him behind bars,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I just have to find him first.’
    Aronsson turned back towards Malmköping and was about halfway there when his telephone rang. A farmer had just phoned in with an interesting tip. An hour or so earlier, a known petty criminal from the district had passed his fields on an inspection trolley on the disused railway line between Byringe and Åker Foundry. On the trolley he saw an old man, a big suitcase and a young man with sunglasses. The young manseemed to be in charge, according to the farmer. Even though he wasn’t wearing any shoes…
    ‘I don’t get it,’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson and turned his car around at such a speed that the slippers on the passenger seat fell onto the floor.
     
    After a couple of hundred metres, Allan’s already glacial walking pace slowed. He didn’t complain, but Julius could see that the old man’s knees were causing problems. In the distance stood a hot-dog stand. Julius promised Allan that if he made it to the hot-dog stand, then Julius would treat him – he could afford it – and then he would find a solution to the transport problem. Allan replied that never in his life had he complained over a bit of discomfort, and that he wasn’t going to start now, but that a hot-dog would hit the spot.
    Julius increased his pace; Allan stumbled after him. When he arrived, Julius had already eaten half of his hot-dog. A fancy grilled one. And that wasn’t all.
    ‘Allan,’ he said, ‘come and say hello to Benny. He’s our new private chauffeur.’
    Benny, the owner of the hot-dog stand, was about fifty, and still in possession of all his hair including a pony tail at the back. In about