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

to be honest he hadn’t really been listening while Yury had been spouting on about politics just now, because politics was not what interested Allan most in this world. Besides, he did distinctly recall from the previous evening that Yury had promised not to sail off in that direction.
    But Allan had made a note of Yury’s description of Marshal Beria’s human failings. Allan believed that in his earlier life he had come across people of the same type. On the one hand, if Allan had understood correctly, Marshal Beria was ruthless. On the other hand, he had now seen to it that Allan was extraordinarily well cared for, with a limousine and everything.
    ‘But it does occur to me to wonder why he didn’t simply have me kidnapped and then make sure that you wring out of me what he wants to know,’ said Allan. ‘Then he wouldn’t have had to waste the red gummy sweets, the fancy chocolates, the hundred thousand dollars and a lot of other stuff.’
    Yury said that what was tragic about Allan’s observation was that it did have some relevance. Marshal Beria had more thanonce – in the name of the revolution – tortured innocent people. Yury knew that to be the case. But now the situation was, said Yury — who found it hard to say exactly what he meant — the situation was such that, said Yury — and opened the refrigerator to find a fortifying beer even though it wasn’t even noon yet — the situation was such that Marshal Beria had very recently failed with this strategy. A western expert had been kidnapped in Switzerland and taken to Marshal Beria, but it all ended in a dreadful mess. Yury apologized; he didn’t want to get into the details, but Allan must believe what Yury had said: what had been learned from the recent failure was that the necessary nuclear advice, according to a decision from above, would be bought in the western market, based on supply and demand, however vulgar that might be.
     
    The Soviet atomic weapons programme began with a letter from the nuclear physicist Georgij Nikolajevitch Flyorov to Comrade Stalin in April 1942, in which the former pointed out that there hadn’t been a word uttered or written in western, allied media concerning nuclear fission since it had been discovered in 1938.
    Comrade Stalin wasn’t born yesterday. And just like nuclear physicist Flyorov, he thought that a complete silence of three years around the discovery of fission could only mean that someone had something to hide, such as, for example, that someone was in the process of developing a bomb which would immediately put the Soviet Union – to use a Russian image – in checkmate.
    So there was no time to lose, apart from the minor detail that Hitler and Nazi Germany were fully occupied with seizing parts of the Soviet Union – that is everything west of the Volga, which would include Moscow, which was bad enough, but also Stalingrad!
    The Battle of Stalingrad was, to put it mildly, a personal matter for Stalin. Although 1.5 million or so people were killed, the Red Army won and started to push Hitler back, in the end all the way to his bunker in Berlin.
    It wasn’t until the Germans were about to retreat that Stalin felt that he and his nation might have a future, and that’s when nuclear fission research really got going.
    But, of course, atom bombs were not something you could screw together in a morning, especially when they hadn’t even been invented yet. The Soviet atom bomb research had been under way for a couple of years without a breakthrough when one day there was an explosion – in New Mexico. The Americans had won the race, but that wasn’t surprising since they had started running so much earlier. After the test in the desert in New Mexico, there were two more explosions which were for real: one in Hiroshima, another in Nagasaki. With that, Truman had twisted Stalin’s nose and shown the world who mattered, and you didn’t need to know Stalin well to understand that he was not going to put up with that.
    ‘Solve the problem,’ Comrade Stalin said to Marshal Beria. ‘Or to make it clearer, SOLVE THE PROBLEM!’
    Marshal Beria realised that his own physicists, chemists and mathematicians were bogged down, and it wouldn’t even help to send half of them to the Gulag prison camps. Besides, the marshal had not received any indication that his agents in the field were getting close to the holy of holies. For the moment it was simply impossible to steal the Americans’