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

cowardly, incompetent figure who to cap it all had the intelligence of a cow, and between them, a serpent drunk on green, banana liquor.
    ‘It’ll definitely be interesting to see how it all turns out,’ Allan said sincerely. ‘Incidentally and apropos nothing at all, Captain, do you by any chance have a few drops of vodka somewhere, to wash down this green liquor?’
    No, unfortunately the captain didn’t. But there were a lot of other flavours if Mr Karlsson wanted some variety for his palate: lemon liquor, cream liquor, mint liquor…
    ‘Apropos nothing at all again,’ said Allan, ‘when do you think we will reach Shanghai?’
     
    Allan Karlsson and a force of twenty men from Soong May-ling’s bodyguard travelled on the Yangtze by riverboat in the direction of Sichuan, as part of their plan to make life moredifficult for the communist upstart Mao Tse-tung. They departed on 12th October 1945, two days after the peace negotiations had, as predicted, broken down.
    They proceeded at a leisurely pace since the bodyguards wanted to have fun in every harbour. And there were lots of harbours. First Nanjing, then Wuhu, Anqing, Jiujiang, Wuhan, Yueyang, Yidu, Fengjie, Wanxian, Chongqing and Luzhou. And every stop featured drunkenness, prostitution and a general lack of morals.
    Since such a lifestyle uses up funds very quickly, the twenty bodyguards devised a new tax. The peasants who wanted to unload their products onto the ship in the harbour could not do so unless they paid a fee of five yuan. And anyone who complained was shot.
    This new tax revenue was immediately spent in the darkest quarters of the city in question, and those quarters were nearly always close to the harbour. Allan thought that if Soong May-ling believed it was important to have the people on her side, she might have conveyed that message to her subordinates. But that, thank God, was her problem not Allan’s.
    It took two months for Allan and the twenty soldiers to reach Sichuan province, and by then Mao Tse-tung’s forces had long since left for the north. And they didn’t sneak off through the mountains, but went down into the valley and did battle with the Kuomintang regiment that had been left to defend the city of Yibin.
    Yibin was soon on the verge of falling into communist hands. Three and a half thousand Kuomintang soldiers were killed in the battle, at least 2,500 of them because they were too drunk to fight. In comparison, three hundred communists died, presumably sober.
    The battle for Yibin had nevertheless been a success for the Kuomintang, because among the fifty captured communiststhere was one jewel. Forty-nine of the prisoners could simply be shot and pushed into a hole in the ground, but the fiftieth! Mmmm! The fiftieth was none other than the beautiful Jiang Qing, the actress who became a Marxist-Leninist and – far more important – Mao Tse-tung’s third wife.
    A palaver immediately started up between, on the one side, the Kuomintang’s company command in Yibin and, on the other, Soong May-ling’s bodyguards. The argument was about who would have the responsibility for the star prisoner, Jiang Qing. So far, the company commander had just kept her locked up, waiting for the boat with Soong May-ling’s men to arrive. He hadn’t dared to do otherwise because Soong May-ling could be on board. And you didn’t argue with her.
    But it turned out that Soong May-ling was in Taipei, which simplified things considerably as far as the Kuomintang company commander was concerned. Jiang Qing would first be raped in the most brutal manner and then, if she was still alive, she would be shot.
    Soong May-ling’s bodyguards did not object to the rape bit. They could even see themselves joining in, but Jiang Qing must definitely not be allowed to die. Instead she should be taken to Soong May-ling or Chiang Kai-shek for them to decide her fate. This was big time politics, the internationally experienced soldiers explained in a superior tone to the provincially schooled company commander in Yibin.
    The company commander grudgingly promised that he would hand over his jewel the same afternoon. The meeting broke up and the soldiers decided to celebrate their victory with a drinking spree. They were going to have a lot of fun with the jewel later on the trip home!
    The final negotiations had been carried out on the deck of the riverboat that had brought Allan and the soldiers all the way from the sea. Allan was astounded by the fact