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

free.’
     
    It was a hectic day for Chief Inspector Aronsson. Thanks to all the publicity, they were now drowning in tips about where the presumed triple-murderer and his companions were holed up. But the only tip-off that Chief Inspector Aronsson had any faith in was the one that came from the deputy chief of police in Jönköping, Gunnar Löwenlind. He reported that on the main road somewhere near Råslätt, he had met a yellow Scania bus with a badly dented front and only one functioning headlight. If it hadn’t been for the fact that his grandson had just started throwing up in his babyseat in the back of the car, Löwenlind would have phoned the traffic police and tipped them off.
    Chief Inspector Aronsson sat for a second evening in the piano bar at the Hotel Royal Corner in Växjö and once again made the mistake of analysing the situation while under the influence.
    ‘The northbound road,’ the chief inspector reflected. ‘Are you going back into Södermanland? Or are you going to hide in Stockholm?’
    He decided to check out of the hotel the next day and set off home to his depressing three-room apartment in the centre of Eskilstuna. Ronny Hulth from the bus station at least had a cat to hug. Göran Aronsson didn’t have anything, he thought and downed the last whisky of the evening. 

Chapter 18
    1953
    In the course of five years and three weeks, Allan had naturally learned to speak Russian very well, but also brushed up on his Chinese. The harbour was a lively place, and Allan established contact with returning sailors who could keep him up to date on what was happening out in the world.
    Among other things, the Soviet Union had exploded its own atom bomb one and a half years after Allan’s meeting with Stalin, Beria and the sympathetic Yury Borisovich. In the West, they suspected espionage, because the bomb seemed to be built according to exactly the same principle as the Los Alamos bomb. Allan tried to work out how many clues Yury might have picked up in the submarine while vodka was being drunk straight from the bottle.
    ‘I believe that you, dear Yury Borisovich, have mastered the art of drinking and listening at the same time,’ he said.
    Allan also discovered that the United States, France and Great Britain had combined their zones of occupation and formed a German federal republic. And an angry Stalin had immediately retaliated by forming a Germany of his own, so now the West and East each had one, which seemed practical to Allan.
    The Swedish king had gone and died, as Allan had read in a British newspaper which for some obscure reason had found its way to a Chinese sailor, who in turn remembered the Swedish prisoner in Vladivostok and so brought the newspaper with him. The king had admittedly been dead almost a whole year when it came to Allan’s attention, but that didn’t really matter. A new king had immediately replaced him, so things were fine in the old country.
    Otherwise the sailors in the harbour mainly talked about the war in Korea. And that wasn’t so surprising. Korea was after all only about 200 kilometres away.
    As Allan understood it, the following had happened:
    The Korean Peninsula was kind of left over when the Second World War ended. Stalin and Truman each occupied a bit in brotherly agreement, and decided that the 38th parallel would separate north from south. This was then followed by negotiations lasting for ever about how Korea should be able to govern itself, but since Stalin and Truman didn’t really have the same political views (not at all, in fact) it all ended up like Germany. First, the United States established a South Korea, upon which the Soviet Union retaliated with a North Korea. And then the Americans and the Russians left the Koreans to get on with it.
    But it hadn’t worked out so well. Kim Il Sung in the north and Syngman Rhee in the south, each thought that he was best suited to govern the entire peninsula. And then they had started a war.
    But after three years, and perhaps four million dead, absolutely nothing had changed. The north was still the north, and the south was still the south. And the 38th parallel still kept them apart.
     
    When it came to getting that drink – the main reason to escape from the Gulag – the most natural way would of course have been to sneak on board one of the many ships that stopped in the harbour in Vladivostok. But at least seven of Allan’s friends in the camp hut had thought the same over the years,