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

his shame, he had never been in the capital before. It was a beautiful city indeed, with water and bridges everywhere, and none of them had been blown up.
    The prime minister welcomed Allan with a ‘Mr Karlsson! I have heard so much about you!’ Upon which he pushed the assistant out of the room and closed the door.
    Allan didn’t say so, but he realised that he himself had heard nothing whatsoever about Tage Erlander. Allan didn’t even know if the prime minister was Left or Right. He must certainly be one of them, because if there was one thing life had taught Allan, it was that people insisted on being one or the other.
    Anyway, the prime minister could be whichever he liked. Now it was a question of hearing what he had to say.
    The prime minister had, it transpired, called President Truman back and had a longer conversation about Allan. So now he knew all about…
    But then the prime minister stopped talking. He had been in the job less than a year and there was a lot left to learn. He did, however, already know one thing; in certain situations it was best not to know or at least best not to leave any way of proving that you knew what you knew.
    So the prime minister never finished his sentence. What President Truman had told him about Allan Karlsson would be forever a secret between them. Instead the prime minister came straight to the point:
    ‘I understand that you don’t have anything to come back to here in Sweden, so I have arranged a cash payment for servicesrendered to the nation… in a manner of speaking… Here are ten thousand crowns for you.’
    And the prime minister handed over a thick envelope full of banknotes and asked Allan to sign a receipt. Everything had to be by the book.
    ‘Thank you very much, Mr Prime Minister. It occurs to me that with this fine and generous contribution I will be able to afford new clothes and clean sheets at a hotel tonight. Perhaps I’ll even be able to brush my teeth for the first time since August 1945…’
    The prime minister interrupted Allan just as he was about to describe the condition of his underpants, and informed him that the money was of course without any conditions, but that since some activities connected to nuclear fission were being carried out in Sweden at this time, the prime minister would like Mr Karlsson to have a look.
    The truth was that Prime Minister Erlander had inherited a number of important issues when his predecessor’s heart had stopped the previous autumn, and he had no idea what to do about them. For example: what stance should Sweden take with regard to something called an atom bomb. The commander-in-chief had been telling him about how the country must defend itself against communism, since they only had little Finland between Sweden and Stalin.
    There were two sides to the question. On the one hand, the commander-in-chief happened to have married into a rich upper class family and it was generally known that he sometimes drank a bit of the hard stuff with the old Swedish King. But Social Democrat Erlander couldn’t bear the idea that Gustav V might imagine that he could influence Swedish defence policy.
    On the other hand, Erlander could not exclude the possibility that the C-in-C might be right. You couldn’t trust Stalin and the communists, and if they should get it into their heads to widentheir sphere of interest westwards then Sweden was unpleasantly close.
    Sweden’s military research department had just moved its few nuclear energy specialists to the newly created Atomic Energy PLC. Now these experts were trying to figure out exactly what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, their mission in more general terms was to ‘analyse the nuclear future from a Swedish perspective’. It was never spelled out, but Prime Minister Erlander had understood that the vaguely formulated task – had it been put in plain language – would have read:
    How the hell do we build our own atom bomb, if necessary?
    And now the answer was sitting right across from the prime minister. Tage Erlander knew that, but above all he knew that he didn’t want anybody else to know he knew. Politics was about watching where you put your feet.
    So the previous day, Prime Minister Erlander had contacted the head of research at Atomic Energy PLC, Dr Sigvard Eklund, and asked him to invite Allan Karlsson for a job interview at which he could thoroughly question him as to whether he could be of use in Atomic Energy PLC’s