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

various reasons two of the revolver man’s colleagues had died and that meant there were fewer people to share with.
    ‘Are Bolt and Bucket dead?’ asked the Boss.
    ‘Pike?!’ Bosse suddenly exclaimed. ‘It is you, Pike. It’s been a long time!’
    ‘Bosse Baddy!’ exclaimed Per-Gunnar ‘Pike’ Gerdin in return.
    And Bosse Baddy and Pike Gerdin met with a hug in the middle of the kitchen floor.
    ‘I do believe I’ll survive this too,’ said Allan.
     
    Buster was let out of the pantry, Benny dressed ‘Pike’ Gerdin’s bleeding injury, and Bosse Baddy set another place at the table.
    ‘Just a fork will do,’ said Pike, ‘I can’t use my right arm anyway.’
    ‘You used to be a dab hand with a knife in the old days,’ said Bosse Baddy.
    Pike and Bosse Baddy had been close friends, and also colleagues in the food trade. Pike had always been the impatient one, the one who wanted to go that bit further. In the end they had gone their separate ways when Pike insisted that the friends should import Swedish meatballs from the Philippines, treated with formaldehyde to increase their best-before date from three days to three months (or three years depending on how generously you applied the formalin). Bosse had said ‘stop’ atthat point. He didn’t want to be involved with preparing food with stuff that could kill people. Pike thought Bosse was exaggerating. People didn’t die from a few chemicals in their food, and with formalin their lives would surely be preserved.
    The friends separated amicably. Bosse moved to Västergötland, while Pike tried his hand at robbing a firm of importers and was so successful that he set aside his meatball plans and decided to become a full-time robber.
    At first, Bosse and Pike had been in touch once or twice a year, but over the years they had gradually drifted apart – until that evening when Pike was suddenly standing unsteadily in Bosse’s kitchen, just as threatening as Bosse remembered he could be when he was in the mood.
    But Pike’s anger subsided the moment he found the companion and comrade of his youth. He sat down at the table together with Bosse Baddy and his friends. It couldn’t be helped that they had killed Bolt and Bucket. They could sort out the business with the suitcase and everything else the next day. For the moment they were going to enjoy their dinner.
    ‘Cheers!’ said Per-Gunnar ‘Pike’ Gerdin and fainted, his face landing right in his food.
    They wiped the food off Pike’s face, moved him to the guest room and put him to bed. Benny checked his medical state and then gave the patient a new dose of morphine so he would sleep until the next day.
    Upon which it was at last time for Benny and the others to enjoy the chicken and roast potatoes. And enjoy it they did!
    ‘This chicken really is delicious!’ Julius praised the food, and they all agreed that they had never eaten anything tastier. What was the secret?
    Bosse told them that he imported fresh chickens from Poland (‘no junk, top-quality stuff’), and then he injected every chicken manually with up to one litre of his own special spicy watermixture. Then he re-packaged them and with all that had been added locally he thought he could just as well call them ‘Swedish’.
    ‘Twice as good on account of the spicy mixture, twice as heavy on account of the water and twice as popular on account of the Swedish origin,’ was how Bosse summed it up.
    Suddenly it had become big business, despite the fact that he had started off on a really small scale. And everybody loved his chickens. But for reasons of security, he didn’t sell to any of the wholesalers in the district, because one of them might come by and discover that there wasn’t a single chicken out pecking in Bosse’s farmyard.
    That was what he meant by the difference between law and morality, Bosse said. The Poles were surely no worse at feeding chickens and then killing them, than the Swedes? Quality had nothing to do with national boundaries, did it?
    ‘People are just stupid,’ Bosse maintained. ‘In France, French meat is best. In Germany, German meat. The same thing in Sweden. So for everybody’s benefit, I keep some information to myself.’
    ‘That is thoughtful of you,’ said Allan, without irony.
    Bosse said that he had done something similar with the watermelons he also imported, although not from Poland. They came from Spain or Morocco. He preferred to call them Spanish because nobody would