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

interrogators, and they were just about to resort to violence when something rather remarkable happened on Seventh Avenue in New York.
    There, in Carnegie Hall, Albert Einstein was giving a lecture on the theory of relativity, to an audience of 2,800 specially invited guests, of which two were spies for the Soviet Union.
     
    Two Albert Einsteins was one too many for Marshal Beria, even if one of them was a long way away on the other side of the Atlantic. It was soon possible to ascertain that the one in Carnegie Hall was the real one, so who the hell was the other one?
    Under the threat of being subjected to procedures that nobody willingly undergoes, the false Albert Einstein promised to clarify everything for Marshal Beria.
    ‘You will get a clear picture of everything, Mr Marshal, as long as you don’t interrupt me,’ the false Albert Einstein promised.
    Marshal Beria promised not to interrupt him with anything other than a bullet in the head, and he would wait to do that until it was beyond any doubt that what he had heard was pure lies.
    ‘So please go ahead. Don’t let me put you off,’ said Marshal Beria, and cocked his pistol.
    The man who had previously claimed that he was Albert Einstein’s unknown brother Herbert, took a deep breath andstarted by… repeating the claim (at which point a shot was almost fired).
    Thereupon followed a story, which, if it was true, was so sad that even Marshal Beria could not bring himself to execute the narrator.
    Hermann and Pauline Einstein did indeed have two children: first Albert and then Maja. But papa Einstein hadn’t really been able to keep his hands and other parts of his body away from his beautiful (but dim) secretary at the electro-chemical factory he ran in Munich. This had resulted in Herbert, Albert and Maja’s secret and not-at-all legitimate brother.
    Just as the marshal’s agents had already been able to ascertain, Herbert was virtually an exact physical copy of Albert, although he was thirteen years younger. But as for his mind, Herbert had unfortunately inherited all his mother’s intelligence. Or lack thereof.
    When Herbert was two years old, in 1895, the family moved from Munich to Milan. Herbert followed along, but not his mother. Papa Einstein had of course offered to move her too, but Herbert’s mama was not interested. She couldn’t contemplate replacing bratwurst with spaghetti, and German with… whatever language they spoke in Italy. Besides, that baby had just been a lot of trouble; he screamed all the time for food, and was always making a mess! If somebody wanted to take Herbert somewhere else, that would be fine, but she herself intended staying where she was.
    Herbert’s mother got a decent sum of money from papa Einstein. The story goes that she then met a genuine count who persuaded her to invest all her money in his almost-finished machine for the production of a life elixir which cured every existing illness. But then the count had disappeared, and he must have taken the elixir with him because Herbert’s impoverished mama died some years later, of tuberculosis.
    Herbert thus grew up with his big brother Albert and big sister Maja. But in order to avoid scandal, papa Einstein referred to Herbert as his nephew. Herbert was never particularly close to his brother, but he loved his sister sincerely even though he had to call her his cousin.
    ‘To sum up,’ said Herbert Einstein, ‘I was abandoned by my mother, denied by my father – and I’m as intelligent as a sack of potatoes. I haven’t done any useful work in all my life, just lived on what I inherited from my father, and I have not had a single wise thought.’
     
    Marshal Beria lowered his pistol. The story did have a degree of credibility, and the marshal even admired the self-awareness that the stupid Herbert Einstein had demonstrated.
    What should he do now? The marshal got up from the chair in the interrogation room. For purposes of security he had put aside all thought of right and wrong, in the name of the revolution. He already had more than enough problems, he didn’t need another one to burden him. The marshal turned to the two guards at the door:
    ‘Get rid of him.’
    Upon which he left the room.
     
    It would not be pleasant to report on the Herbert Einstein cock-up to Comrade Stalin, but Marshal Beria was lucky, because before he had time to find himself out in the cold, there was a breakthrough at Los Alamos.
    Over the years, more than 130,000