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

then, he had worked his way through religion after religion, in a growing ring around the capital. At first he concentrated on the various religious ceremonies. He sneaked into mosques, synagogues and temples of every kind and waited for a suitable moment before he quite simply interrupted the ceremony and with the help of an interpreter preached the true faith.
    Allan praised the priest for his courage but said he had some doubts about his mental abilities. Surely these visits had rarely ended well?
    The Reverend Ferguson conceded that in fact they had not ended successfully on a single occasion. He had never been able to have his full say. He and the interpreter had been thrown out and usually both of them had been knocked about too. But none of this had prevented the priest from continuing his struggle. He knew that he was planting tiny Anglican seeds in the souls of all the people he met.
    In the end, however, the reputation of the priest had spread so far and wide that it became difficult to find interpreters who would work with him.
    So the priest took a break and put more effort into studying Farsi. While doing so, he worked out how to refine his tactics and one day he felt so comfortable in the language that he launched his new plan.
    Instead of going to temples and services, he visited markets where he knew that the teachings he considered false had a lot of followers among the shoppers, and he would stand on a wooden box and preach.
    This method had not resulted in as many beatings as during his first years, but the number of souls saved was still not at all what the Reverend Ferguson had hoped.
    Allan asked by how many converts the Reverend Ferguson had fallen short of his target, and was told that it depended onhow you looked at it. On the one hand, the priest had exactly one convert from every religion he had worked on, which amounted to eight in all. On the other hand, he had realised a few months ago that all eight could actually be spies from the secret police, sent out to keep track of the proselytising priest.
    ‘Between zero and eight genuine converts, then,’ said Allan.
    ‘Probably closer to zero than eight,’ answered the Reverend Ferguson.
    ‘In twelve years,’ said Allan.
    The priest admitted that he had become discouraged when he realised that his already meagre results were actually even more meagre. And he also realised that he would never succeed in this country, because however much the Iranians might want to convert, they wouldn’t dare. The secret police were everywhere and if someone changed his religion a dossier would definitely be created with his name in their archives. And from a dossier in the archives to disappearing without trace was rarely a long step.
    Allan said that, in addition, it might be the case that an Iranian or two – whatever the Reverend Ferguson might think – went around generally satisfied with their current religion, couldn’t he see that?
    The priest answered that he had rarely heard such ignorant talk, but that he was prevented from providing a proper answer because he had promised Mr Karlsson he would eschew all Anglican preaching. Could Mr Karlsson listen to the rest of the priest’s story without interrupting more than necessary?
    The Reverend Ferguson went on to describe how, with his newly acquired insights as to the manner in which the secret police had infiltrated his missionary work, he had started to think in new ways. He had started to think big.
    So the priest shook off his eight possible spying disciples, and contacted the underground communist movement. He toldthem he was a British representative for the True Faith and he wanted to meet them to discuss the future.
    It took time to get a meeting arranged, but he eventually found himself sitting with five gentlemen from leading communist circles in the province of Razavi Khorasan. He would have preferred to meet the Tehran communists because the Reverend Ferguson thought that they probably made the important decisions, but this meeting would do for starters.
    Or not.
    The Reverend Ferguson presented his big idea to the communists. In brief, Anglicanism would become the state religion in Iran the day the communists took over. If the communists went along with this, the Reverend Ferguson promised to accept the job of government minister of religion and ensure that right from the beginning there would be enough bibles for everyone. The churches could be built afterwards, but to start with,