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

would like to have his glass filled, but didn’t think it was the right moment for such a request.
    Marshal Beria and Yury Borisovich didn’t say anything. But their faces bore very different expressions. While Beria stared angrily at Allan, Yury just looked unhappy.
    Stalin absorbed the vodka he had just downed and then he lowered his voice to a normal level. He was still angry.
    ‘Has Stalin understood correctly?’ asked Stalin. ‘You were on Franco’s side, you have fought against Comrade Mao, you have… saved the life of the pig in London and you have put the deadliest weapon in the world in the hands of the arch-capitalists in the USA.
    ‘I might have known,’ Stalin mumbled and in his anger forgot to talk in the third person. ‘And now you are here to sell yourself to Soviet socialism? One hundred thousand dollars, is that the price for your soul? Or has the price gone up during the course of the evening?’
    Allan no longer wanted to help. Of course, Yury was still a good man and he was the one who actually needed the help. But you couldn’t get away from the fact that the results of Yury’s work would end up in the hands of Comrade Stalin, and he was not exactly Allan’s idea of a real comrade. On the contrary, he seemed unstable, and it would probably be best for all concerned if he didn’t get the bomb to play with.
    ‘Not exactly,’ said Allan. ‘This was never about money…’
    He didn’t get any further before Stalin exploded again.
    ‘Who do you think you are, you damned rat? Do you think that you, a representative of fascism, of horrid American capitalism, of everything on this Earth that Stalin despises, that you, you, can come to the Kremlin, to the Kremlin, and bargain with Stalin, and bargain with Stalin?’
    ‘Why do you say everything twice?’ Allan wondered, while Stalin went on:
    ‘The Soviet Union is prepared to go to war again, I’ll tell you that! There will be war, there will inevitably be war until American imperialism is wiped out.’
    ‘Is that what you think?’ asked Allan.
    ‘To do battle and to win, we don’t need your damned atom bomb! What we need is socialist souls and hearts! He who knows he can never be defeated, can never be defeated!’
    ‘Unless of course somebody drops an atom bomb on him,’ said Allan.
    ‘I shall destroy capitalism! Do you hear! I shall destroy every single capitalist! And I shall start with you, you dog, if you don’t help us with the bomb!’
    Allan noted that he had managed to be both a rat and a dog in the course of a minute or so. And that Stalin was being rather inconsistent, because now he wanted to use Allan’s services after all.
    But Allan wasn’t going to sit there and listen to this abuse any longer. He had come to Moscow to help them out, not to be shouted at. Stalin would have to manage on his own.
    ‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Allan.
    ‘What,’ said Stalin angrily.
    ‘Why don’t you shave off that moustache?’
    With that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted.
     
    Plans were changed with all haste. Allan was not, after all, housed in the finest guest suite at the Kremlin, but instead in a windowless room in the cellar of the nation’s secret police. Comrade Stalin had finally decided that the Soviet Union would get an atom bomb either through its own experts working out how to make it, or by good old-fashioned honest espionage. They would not kidnap any more westerners and they would definitely not bargain with capitalists or fascists or both combined.
    Yury was deeply unhappy. Not only because he had persuaded the nice Allan to come to the Soviet Union where death now certainly awaited him, but also because Comrade Stalin had exhibited such human failings! The Great Leader was intelligent, well-educated, a good dancer and he had a good singing voice. And on top of that he was completely bonkers! Allan had happened to quote the wrong poet and in a few seconds a pleasant dinner had been transformed into a… catastrophe.
    At the risk of his own life, Yury tried cautiously, so cautiously, to talk to Beria about Allan’s impending execution and whether despite everything there was an alternative.
    But Yury had misjudged the marshal. He did use violence against women and children, he did torture and execute guilty as well as innocent people, he did that and a lot more besides… but however revolting his methods, Marshal Beria did work single-mindedly in the best interests of the Soviet