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

understand the words, but he understood the sentiment. It probably wouldn’t hurt to keep his mouth shut for a while.
    On the other side of the globe, in Washington DC, President Harry Truman had problems of his own. Election time was coming up, and it was important for him to make his policies clear. And that meant deciding what they were. The biggest strategic question was how much he would be prepared to support the blacks in the south. You had to maintain a fine balance between seeming modern and not seeming too soft. That was how you maintained your support in the opinion polls.
    And in the world arena, he had Stalin to deal with. There, however, he was not prepared to compromise. Stalin had managed to charm quite a few people, but not Harry S. Truman.
    In light of everything else, China was now history. Stalin had backed Mao Tse-tung, and Truman couldn’t refrain from doing the same to that amateur Chiang Kai-shek. Soong May-ling had so far got what she wanted, but now that would have to end too. He wondered what had happened to Allan Karlsson. A very nice guy.
    Chiang Kai-shek suffered more and more military defeats. And Soong May-ling’s project failed because the explosives expert assigned to it disappeared, taking the clown’s wife with him.
    Soong May-ling asked time and time again for a meeting with President Truman, hoping to be able to strangle him with her bare hands for having sent her Allan Karlsson, but Truman never had time to receive her. Instead, the United States turned its back on the Kuomintang; in China, the corruption, hyperinflation and famine all played into the hands of Mao Tse-tung. In the end, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling and their subordinates had to flee to Taiwan. Mainland China became communist China.

Chapter 12
    Monday, 9th May 2005
    The friends at Lake Farm realised that it was high time to get in their bus and leave for good. But first they had some things to take care of.
    The Beauty put on a raincoat with a hood and rubber gloves and rolled out the hose to rinse off the remains of the thug that Sonya had just sat to death. But first, she eased the revolver out of the dead man’s right hand and carefully laid it on the veranda (where she later forgot it), with the barrel pointing at the thick trunk of a fir tree four metres away. You never knew when those things could go off.
    When Bucket was cleansed of Sonya’s excrement, he was put under the back seat of his own Ford Mustang. Normally there wouldn’t have been room for him, but now he was neatly flattened.
    Then Julius got behind the wheel of the thug’s car and drove off, with Benny right behind him in The Beauty’s Passat. The idea was to seek out a deserted place a safe distance from Lake Farm and then pour petrol over the thug’s car and set fire to it, just as real gangsters would have done.
    But that required a can and petrol. So Julius and Benny stopped at a service station in Braås, Benny went in to do what was necessary and Julius to buy something yummy to chew on.
    A new Ford Mustang with a V8 of more than 300 horsepower outside a service station is as sensational in Braås as a Boeing 747 would be on a street in downtown Stockholm. It didn’t take more than a second for Bucket’s little brother and one of his colleagues in The Violence to seize the opportunity. The little brother jumped into the Mustang while his colleague kept an eye on the man he presumed was the owner,who was looking at the sweets in the service station shop. What a find! And what an idiot! He’d even left the keys in the ignition.
    When Benny and Julius came out again – one with a newly purchased petrol can, the other with a newspaper under his arm and his mouth full of sweets – the Mustang was gone.
    ‘Didn’t I park the Mustang here?’ asked Julius.
    ‘Yes, you did,’ said Benny.
    ‘Do we have a problem now?’ asked Julius.
    ‘Yes, we do,’ said Benny.
    And then they took the unstolen Passat back to Lake Farm.
     
    The Mustang was black with two bright yellow stripes running the length of the roof. A really deluxe specimen that Bucket’s little brother and his buddies would get good money for. The theft had been just as accidental as it had been easy. Less than five minutes after the unplanned seizure, the car was safely tucked away in The Violence’s garage.
    The next day, they changed the number plates before the little brother let one of his henchmen take the car to their business companions in Riga. Using