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

sense he was lost, since he had no control of where he stood, but that didn’t mean he was spiritually lost. Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn’t know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.
    Allan saw that the Reverend Ferguson was about to embark on a longer sermon, so he quickly added that the priest should be so kind as to respect Allan’s sincere wish to avoid becoming an Anglican, or for that matter anything else.
    The Reverend Ferguson wasn’t a man who took no for an answer. Nevertheless, he hesitated just this once. Perhaps he shouldn’t be too eager to convert against his will the only person – besides God – who might be able to save him from his dire situation.
    The Reverend Ferguson settled for a compromise. He made a half-hearted attempt to suggest that it wouldn’t hurt Mr Karlsson if the priest could at least shed some light upon the Trinity. That happened to be the first of the thirty-nine articles in the Anglican creed.
    Allan answered that the priest couldn’t begin to appreciate just how uninterested Allan was in that trinity.
    ‘Of all the groupings here on Earth, I would think that the Trinity is the one I am least interested in,’ said Allan.
    The Reverend Ferguson thought that was so stupid that he promised he would leave Karlsson in peace as far as religion was concerned, ‘even though God must have had some purpose in placing us in the same cell’.
    Instead, he turned to the matter of his and Allan’s plight.
    ‘It doesn’t look good,’ said the Reverend Ferguson. ‘We might both of us be on our way to meeting the Creator, and if I hadn’t just promised to leave you in peace, I would add that it might be high time for you to embrace the true faith.’
    Allan looked sternly at the cleric, but said nothing. The priest explained that they were now both in the holding cell of the department for domestic intelligence and security, in other words the secret police. Perhaps Mr Karlsson thought that sounded safe and good, but the truth was that the secret police cared only about the shah’s security, and their purpose was actually to keep the Iranian populace suitably terrified and respectful, and whenever possible to hunt down and destroy socialists, communists, Islamists and other disturbing elements.
    ‘Such as Anglican priests?’
    Mr Ferguson answered that Anglican priests didn’t have anything to fear, because they had freedom of religion in Iran. But that this particular Anglican priest had probably gone too far.
    ‘The prognosis is not good for somebody who ends up inthe clutches of the secret police, and for my part I am afraid that this is the last stop,’ said the Reverend Ferguson and suddenly looked very sad.
    Allan immediately found himself feeling sorry for his cellmate, even though he was a cleric. He said consolingly that they would probably find a way to get out, but that there was a time for everything. First of all he wanted to know what the priest had done to find himself in this pickle.
    The Reverend Kevin Ferguson sniffed and pulled himself together. It wasn’t that he was afraid to die, he explained, he just thought that he had so much more to do here on our Earth. The priest as always put his life in the hands of God, but if Mr Karlsson, while they were waiting for God to decide, could find a way out of this, then the priest was certain that God would not be offended.
    Then the priest told his story. The Lord had spoken to him in a dream when the priest had just finished his studies. ‘Go out into the world to do missionary work,’ the Lord had said, but then he hadn’t said any more so the priest himself had to decide where to go.
    An English friend and bishop had tipped him off about Iran – a country where the existing freedom of religion was grossly abused. For example, you could count the Anglicans in Iran on the fingers of only a few hands, but the place was seething with Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jews and people who adhered to pure mumbo-jumbo religions. To the extent that there were any Christians at all, they were Armenians or Assyrians.
    Allan said that he hadn’t known that, but now he did, and he thanked the priest for the information.
    The priest went on. Iran and Great Britain were on good terms and with the help of the Church’s highly placed contacts the priest had managed to get a lift to Tehran on an official British aeroplane.
    This was more than ten years earlier, around 1935. Since