948–53

The man on the park bench had just said ‘Good afternoon, Mr Karlsson,’ in English, and from that Allan drew two conclusions. First, that the man was not Swedish, otherwise he would probably have tried speaking his own language. Second, that he knew who Allan was, because he had just called him by his name.

The man was smartly dressed, in a grey hat with a black rim, a grey overcoat and black shoes. He could very well be a businessman. He looked friendly and definitely had something in mind. So Allan said, in English:

‘Is my life, by any chance, about to take a new turn?’

The man answered that such a change could not be ruled out, but added in a friendly tone that it depended on Mr Karlsson himself. The fact was, the man’s employer wanted to meet Mr Karlsson to offer him a job.

Allan answered that at the moment he was doing quite well, but, of course, he could not remain sitting on a park bench for the rest of his life. Was it too much to ask for the name of his employer? Allan found it easier to say yes or no to something if he knew what he was saying yes or no to. Didn’t the man agree?

The man agreed completely, but his employer was a bit special and would probably prefer to introduce himself in person.

‘But I am prepared to accompany you to the employer in question without the slightest delay, if that would suit you?’

Why not, Allan said, it might suit him. The man added that it was some distance away. If Mr Karlsson would like to collect his belongings from the hotel room, the man promised to wait in the lobby. In fact, the man could give Mr Karlsson a lift back to the hotel, because the man’s car with chauffeur was right beside them.

A stylish car it was too, a red Ford sedan of the latest model. And a private chauffeur! He was a quiet type. Didn’t seem nearly as friendly as the friendly man.

‘I think we can skip the hotel room,’ Allan said. ‘I am used to travelling light.’

‘No problem,’ said the friendly man and tapped his chauffeur on the back in a way that meant ‘drive off’.

The journey took them out to Dalarö, just over an hour south of the capital on winding roads. Allan and the friendly man conversed about this and that. The friendly man explained the endless magnificence of opera, while Allan told him how you cross the Himalayas without freezing to death.

The sun had given up for the day when the red coupé rolled into the little village on the coast that was so popular with archipelago tourists in the summers, but as dark and silent as can be in the winters.

‘So this is where he lives, your employer,’ said Allan.

‘No, not exactly,’ said the friendly man.

The friendly man’s chauffeur – who was not nearly as friendly – said nothing. He just dropped Allan and the friendly man off by the harbour and left. Before that, the friendly man had managed to get out a fur coat from the boot of the Ford, and he put it around Allan’s shoulders in a friendly gesture while apologizing for the fact that they would now have to walk a short way in the winter cold.

Allan was not one to pin his hopes (or, for that matter, his fears) on what might happen in the immediate future. What happened happened. There was no point second-guessing it.

Nevertheless, Allan was surprised when the friendly man led him away from the centre of Dalarö and instead set off across the ice into the jet-black archipelago evening.

The friendly man and Allan walked on and on. Sometimes the friendly man turned his flashlight on and flashed it a bit in the winter darkness before using it to get the right bearing on his compass. He didn’t talk to Allan during the entire walk, but instead just counted his steps aloud – in a language that Allan hadn’t heard before.

After a fifteen minute walk at quite a good pace out into the void, the friendly man said that they had now arrived. It was dark around them, except for a flickering light on an island far away. The ground (or rather, the ice) under the two men’s feet suddenly broke up.

The friendly man had possibly counted incorrectly. Or the captain of the submarine hadn’t been exactly in the place he should have been. Whatever the cause, the 97-metre-long vessel now broke through the ice far too close to Allan and the friendly man. They both fell backwards and almost ended up in the icy water. But soon Allan was helped to climb down into the warmth.

‘Well, now you can see how sensible it is not to start your day by guessing what might happen,’ said Allan. ‘After all, how long would I have had to go on guessing before I guessed this?’

At this point, the friendly man thought that he didn’t have to be so secretive any longer. He told Allan that his name was Yury Borisovich Popov and that he worked for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that he was a physicist, not a politician or a military man, and that he had been sent to Stockholm to persuade Mr Karlsson to follow him to Moscow. Yury Borisovich was chosen for this mission because of Mr Karlsson’s possible reluctance which could perhaps be overcome by Yury Borisovitch’s background as a physicist, meaning that Mr Karlsson and Yury Borisovich both spoke the same language, so to speak.

‘But I am not a physicist,’ Allan said.

‘That may be the case, but my sources tell me that you know something that I would like to know.’

‘I do? Whatever could that be?’

‘The bomb, Mr Karlsson. The bomb.’

Yury Borisovich and Allan Emmanuel immediately took a liking to each other. To agree to follow him without knowing where he was going or why – that impressed Yury Borisovich and indicated that there was something devil-may-care about Allan that Yury himself lacked. And as for Allan, well, he appreciated the fact that for once he could talk with somebody who didn’t try to fill him with politics or religion.

Besides, it soon transpired that both Yury Borisovich and Allan Emmanuel shared a boundless enthusiasm for vodka. The previous evening Yury Borisovich had had the opportunity to taste the Swedish variety while he had been keeping an eye on Allan Emmanuel in the dining room at the Grand Hotel. At first, Yury Borisovich thought that it was too dry, without the Russian sweetness, but after a couple of glasses he got used to it. And another two glasses later, he let a ‘not bad at all!’ pass his lips.

‘But this is of course better,’ said Yury Borisovich and held up a whole litre of Stolichnaya. He and Allan Emmanuel sat and had the officers’ mess to themselves. ‘And now we shall each take a glass!’

‘Sounds good,’ said Allan. ‘The sea air tires you out.’

After the very first glass, Allan insisted on a change in the way the two men addressed each other. To say Yury Borisovich to Yury Borisovich every time he needed to attract Yury Borisovich’s attention just wasn’t practical in the long term. And he didn’t want to be called Allan Emmanuel, because he hadn’t used his middle name since he was baptised by the priest in Yxhult.

‘So from now on, you are Yury and I am Allan,’ said Allan. ‘Otherwise I’m getting off this boat now.’

‘Don’t do that, dear Allan, we are at a depth of two hundred metres,’ said Yury. ‘Fill your glass again instead.’

Yury Borisovich Popov was a passionate socialist and wanted nothing more than to keep working in the name of Soviet socialism. Comrade Stalin was a stern man but Yury knew that if you served the system loyally and well then you had nothing to fear. Allan said that he didn’t have any plans to serve any system, but that of course he could give Yury one or two tips if they had got stuck in working out the atom bomb problem. But first of all Allan wanted to taste another glass of the vodka whose name was unpronounceable even when you were sober. And another thing: Yury would have to promise that he would continue not to talk politics.

Yury thanked Allan heartily for his promise to help, and said straight off that Marshal Beria, Yury’s boss, intended to give the Swedish expert a one-off payment of 100,000 American dollars, on condition that Allan’s help led to the production of a bomb.

‘We’ll figure it out,’ said Allan.

The contents of the bottle shrank steadily while Allan and Yury talked about everything on heaven and earth (except politics and religion). They also touched upon the atom bomb problems and although the topic really belonged to the days to come, Allan decided to give him a couple of simple tips and then a couple more.

‘Hmmm,’ said senior physicist Yury Borisovich Popov. ‘I think I understand…’

‘Well, I don’t,’ said Allan. ‘Explain the thing with opera again. Isn’t it just a lot of shouting?’

Yury smiled, took a large gulp of vodka, stood up – and started to sing. In his drunkenness he didn’t just choose any old folk song, but instead the aria ‘Nessun Dorma’ from Puccini’s Turandot.

‘That was quite something,’ said Allan when Yury had finished.

‘Nessun dorma!’ said Yury solemnly. ‘Nobody is allowed to sleep!’

Regardless of whether anybody was allowed to sleep or not, they did both soon drop off in their berths beside the officers’ mess. When they woke up, the submarine was already docked in Leningrad harbour. There, a limousine was waiting to take them to the Kremlin for a meeting with Marshal Beria.

‘Saint Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad… Couldn’t you make up your mind?’ said Allan.

‘And a good morning to you too,’ said Yury.

Yury and Allan got into the back seat of a Humber Pullman limousine for a day-long journey from Leningrad to Moscow. A sliding window separated the driver’s seat from the luxurious compartment where Allan and his newfound friend were sitting. The compartment boasted a refrigerator with water, soft drinks and all the alcohol that these two passengers were not in need of at the moment. There was also a bowl of red gummy sweets and a whole tray of fancy chocolates. The car and its fittings would have been a brilliant example of Soviet socialist engineering if it hadn’t all been imported from England.

Yury told Allan about his background. He had studied under Nobel-prize laureate Ernest Rutherford, the legendary nuclear physicist from New Zealand, which was why Yury Borisovich spoke such good English. Allan, in turn, described (to an increasingly astounded Yury Borisovich) his adventures in Spain, America, China, the Himalayas and Iran.

‘And what happened to the Anglican priest?’ Yury wondered.

‘I don’t know,’ said Allan. ‘He has either Anglicanized all of Persia, or he’s dead. The least likely is probably something in between those two.’

‘That sounds a bit like challenging Stalin in the Soviet Union,’ said Yury candidly. ‘Setting aside the fact that it would be a crime against the revolution, the chance of survival is poor.’

On this particular day and in this particular company, Yury’s candidness seemed to know no bounds. He opened his heart about what he thought of Marshal Beria, the boss of the secret service who had suddenly become the head of the project to make an atom bomb. Beria had no sense of shame at all. He abused women and children sexually and as for undesirable people, well, he sent them to prison camps – if he hadn’t had them killed first.

‘Undesirable elements must of course be weeded out as soon as possible, but they must be undesirable on the correct, revolutionary grounds. Those who don’t further the aims of socialism must be got rid of! But not those who don’t further the aims of Marshal Beria. No! Allan, that is dreadful. Marshal Beria is no true representative of the revolution. But you can’t blame Comrade Stalin for that. I have never had the privilege of meeting him, but he has the responsibility for an entire country, almost an entire continent. And if amidst all that work, and in a hasty moment, he gave Marshal Beria more responsibility than he is capable of shouldering… well, Comrade Stalin has every right to do that! And now, my dear Allan, I shall tell you something really fantastic. You and I, this very afternoon, are going to be honoured with an audience not only with Marshal Beria, but also with Comrade Stalin in person! He has invited us to dinner!’

‘I look forward to that,’ said Allan. ‘But how are we going to manage until then? Are we supposed to survive on red gummy sweets?’

Yury saw to it that the limousine stopped in a little town on the way, to pick up a couple of sandwiches for Allan. Then their journey continued.

Between bites of his sandwich, Allan thought about this Marshal Beria character who, from Yury’s description, seemed to resemble the recently deceased boss of the secret service in Tehran.

Yury, for his part, sat there trying to figure out his Swedish colleague. The Swede would soon be eating dinner with Stalin, and he had said that he was looking forward to it. But Yury had to ask whether it was the dinner he meant, or the leader.

‘You have to eat to live,’ Allan said diplomatically and praised the quality of the Russian sandwiches. ‘But, dear Yury, would you allow me to ask a question or two?’

‘But of course, dear Allan. Ask away, I’ll do my best to answer.’

Allan said that 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 than once – 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’ blueprints.

The only solution was to bring in knowledge from the outside to complement what they already knew at the research centre in the secret city of Sarov, a few hours by car south-east of Moscow. Since only the best was good enough for Marshal Beria, he told the head of the department of international secret agents:

‘Pick up Albert Einstein.’

‘But… Albert Einstein…’ said the shocked boss of the international agents.

‘Albert Einstein is the sharpest brain in the world. Do you intend to do as I say, or are you nurturing a death wish?’ asked Marshal Beria.

The boss of the international agents had just met a new woman and nothing on Earth smelled as good as she did, so he certainly wasn’t nurturing a death wish. But before he had time to tell this to Marshal Beria, the marshal said:

‘Solve the problem. Or to express myself more clearly: SOLVE THE PROBLEM!’

It was no easy matter to pick up Albert Einstein, and send him in a package to Moscow. First of all, they had to find him. He was born in Germany, but moved to Italy and then on to Switzerland and America, and since then he had travelled back and forth between all sorts of places and for all sorts of reasons.

For the time being he had a house in New Jersey, but according to the agents on the spot, the house seemed to be empty. Besides, if possible Marshal Beria wanted the kidnapping to take place in Europe. Smuggling celebrities out of the USA and across the Atlantic was not without complications.

But where was the man? He rarely or never told people where he was going before a journey and he was notorious for arriving several days late for important meetings.

The boss of the international agents wrote a list of places with some sort of close connection with Einstein, and then he sent an agent to keep an eye on each place. There was his home in New Jersey, and his best friend’s house in Geneva. Then there was his publisher in Washington and two other friends, one in Basel, the other in Cleveland, Ohio.

It took some days of patient waiting, but then came the reward – in the form of a man in a grey raincoat, a turned-up collar and hat. The man came on foot and went up to the house where Albert Einstein’s best friend Michele Besso lived in Switzerland. He rang the doorbell and was heartily and sincerely welcomed by Besso himself, but also by an elderly couple who would need further investigation. The watching agent summoned his colleague who was doing the same job in Basel 250 kilometres away, and after hours of advanced window-watching and comparison with the sets of photos they had with them, the two agents came to the conclusion that it was indeed Albert Einstein who had just come to visit his best friend. The elderly couple were presumably Michele Besso’s brother-in-law and his wife, Maja, who was also Albert Einstein’s sister. Quite a family party!

Albert stayed there with his friend and his sister and her husband for two well-watched days, before again putting on his overcoat, gloves and hat and setting off, just as discreetly as he had come.

But he barely made it around the corner before being grabbed and pushed into the back seat of a car and anaesthetized with chloroform. Then he was taken via Austria to Hungary, which had a sufficiently friendly attitude towards the USSR that few questions were asked when the Soviets expressed the wish to land at the military airport in Pécs to refuel, pick up two Soviet citizens and a very sleepy man, and then immediately take off again for an unknown destination.

The next day they started to interrogate Albert Einstein on the premises of the secret police in Moscow, with Marshal Beria in charge. The question was whether Einstein would choose to cooperate, for the sake of his health, or to be obstructive which, wouldn’t help anybody.

Regrettably, it turned out to be the latter. Albert Einstein would not admit that he had given a moment’s thought to the technique of nuclear fission (even though it was common knowledge that as early as 1939 he had communicated with President Roosevelt about the matter, which in turn had led to the Manhattan Project). In fact Albert Einstein would not even admit that he was Albert Einstein. He maintained with idiotic stubbornness that he was instead Albert Einstein’s younger brother, Herbert Einstein. But Albert Einstein didn’t have a brother; he only had a sister. So that trick naturally didn’t work with Beria and his 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 and started 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 people had worked on the Manhattan Project, and naturally more than one of them was loyal to the socialist revolution. But nobody had managed to obtain the innermost secret of the atom bomb.

But they had found out something that was almost as useful:a Swede had solved the puzzle, and they knew his name!

It didn’t take more than twelve hours to find out that Allan Karlsson was staying at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, and that he spent his days just pottering about after the head of the Swedish atomic weapons programme had told him that they didn’t require his services.

‘The question is, who holds the world record in stupidity,’ Marshal Beria said to himself. ‘The boss of the Swedish atomic weapons programme or Herbert Einstein’s mum…’

This time, Marshal Beria chose a new tactic. Allan Karlsson would be persuaded to contribute his knowledge in exchange for a considerable number of American dollars. And the person who would take care of the persuading was a scientist like Allan Karlsson himself, not an awkward and clumsy agent. The agent in question ended up (to be on the safe side) behind the wheel as the private chauffeur of Yury Borisovich Popov, a sympathetic and competent physicist from the innermost circle of Marshal Beria’s atomic weapons group.

And everything had gone according to plan. Yury Borisovich was on his way back to Moscow with Allan Karlsson – and Karlsson seemed sympathetic to the whole idea.

Marshal Beria’s Moscow office was inside the walls of the Kremlin, at the wish of Comrade Stalin. The marshal himself greeted Allan Karlsson and Yury Borisovich in the lobby.

‘You are heartily welcome, Mr Karlsson,’ said Marshal Beria and shook his hand.

‘Thank you, Mr Marshal,’ said Allan.

Marshal Beria wasn’t the type to sit and chat about nothing. Life was too short for that (and besides he was socially incompetent). So he said to Allan:

‘Have I understood the reports correctly, Mr Karlsson, in that you are willing to assist the socialist Soviet republic in nuclear matters in exchange for a hundred thousand dollars?’

Allan replied that he hadn’t given the money much thought, but that he would like to give Yury Borisovich a hand if there was something he needed help with and there did seem to be. But it would be nice if Mr Marshal could wait until the next day, because he had travelled an awful lot lately.

Marshal Beria answered that he understood that the journey had been somewhat exhausting for Mr Karlsson, and told him that they would soon be having dinner with Comrade Stalin, after which Mr Karlsson would be able to rest in the very finest guest suite the Kremlin had to offer.

Comrade Stalin was not stingy when it came to food. There was salmon roe and herring and salted cucumbers and meat salad and grilled vegetables and borsht and pelmeni and blini and lamb cutlets and pierogi with ice cream. There was wine of various colours and of course vodka. And even more vodka.

Around the table sat Comrade Stalin himself, Allan Karlsson from Yxhult, nuclear physicist Yury Borisovich Popov, the boss of the Soviet state’s security Marshal Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria and a little, almost invisible young man without a name and without anything to either eat or drink. He was the interpreter, and they pretended he wasn’t there.

Stalin was in brilliant spirits right from the beginning. Lavrenty Pavlovich always delivered! OK, he had put his foot in it with Einstein, that had reached Stalin’s ear, but it was history now. And besides, Einstein (the real one) only had his brain; Karlsson had exact and detailed knowledge!

And it didn’t hurt that Karlsson seemed to be such a nice guy. He had told Stalin about his background, albeit extremely briefly. His father had fought for socialism in Sweden and then journeyed to Russia for the same purpose. Admirable indeed! His son had for his part fought in the Spanish Civil War and Stalin was not going to be so insensitive as to ask on which side. After that he had travelled to America (he had to flee, Stalin assumed) and by chance had found himself in the service of the Allies… and that could be forgiven, Stalin himself had in a manner of speaking done the same thing in the latter part of the war.

Only a few minutes into the main course, Stalin had learned how to sing the Swedish toast ‘Helan går, sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej’ whenever it was time to raise their glasses. Allan in turn praised Stalin’s singing voice, leading Stalin to tell of how in his youth he had not only sung in a choir but even performed as a soloist at weddings, and then he got up and gave proof of this by jumping around on the floor and waving his arms and legs in every direction to a song that Allan thought sounded almost… Indian… but nice!

Allan couldn’t sing. He couldn’t do anything of any cultural value, he realised, but the mood seemed to demand that he attempt something more than ‘Helan går…’, and the only thing he could remember straight off was the poem by Verner von Heidenstam that Allan’s village school teacher had forced the children to memorize.

Thus Stalin resumed his seat, while Allan got up and proclaimed the poem in his native Swedish.

As an eight-year-old, Allan hadn’t understood what he recited, and now that he declaimed the poem again, with impressive engagement, he realised that thirty-five years later he still hadn’t a clue what it was about. The Russian-English (insignificant) interpreter sat in silence on his chair and was even less significant than before.

Allan then announced (after the applause had died down) that what he had just recited was by Verner von Heidenstam. Had he known how Comrade Stalin would react to that news, Allan might have refrained from announcing it, or at least adjusted the truth a little.

Comrade Stalin had once upon a time been a poet, indeed a very competent one. The spirit of the times, however, had made him a revolutionary soldier instead. Such a background was poetical enough in itself. But Stalin had also retained his interest in poetry and his knowledge of the leading contemporary poets.

Unfortunately for Allan, Stalin knew all too well who Verner von Heidenstam was. And unlike Allan he knew all about Verner von Heidenstam’s love of – Germany. And about the love being mutual. Hitler’s righthand man, Rudolf Hess, had visited Heidenstam’s home in the 1930s, and shortly afterwards Heidenstam had been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg.

All of this caused Stalin’s mood to undergo an abrupt metamorphosis.

‘Is Mr Karlsson sitting here and insulting the generous host who received him with open arms?’ asked Stalin.

Allan assured him that such was not the case. If it was Heidenstam who had upset Mr Stalin, then Allan apologized profusely. Perhaps it might be some consolation that Heidenstam had been dead for some years?

‘And “sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej”, what did that actually mean? Did you have Stalin repeat a homage to the enemies of the revolution?’ asked Stalin, who always spoke of himself in the third person when he got angry.

Allan answered that he would need some time to think to be able to translate ‘sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej’ into English, but that Mr Stalin could rest assured that it was nothing more than a cheerful ditty.

‘A cheerful ditty?’ said Comrade Stalin in a loud voice. ‘Does Mr Karlsson think that Stalin looks like a cheerful person?’

Allan was beginning to tire of Stalin’s touchiness. The old geezer was quite red in the face with anger, but about not very much. Stalin went on:

‘And what actually did you do in the Spanish Civil War? It would perhaps be best to ask Mr Heidenstam-lover which side he fought for!’

Has he got a sixth sense too, the devil? Allan thought. Oh well, he was already as angry as he could reasonably become, so it was probably just as well to come clean.

‘I wasn’t really fighting, Mr Stalin, but at first I helped the republicans, before – for rather random reasons – changing sides and becoming good friends with General Franco.’

‘General Franco?’ Stalin shouted, and then stood up so that the chair behind him fell over.

It was evidently possible to get even angrier. On a few occasions in Allan’s eventful life, somebody had shouted at him, but he had never, ever, shouted back, and he had no plans to do so to Stalin. That didn’t mean that he was unmoved by the situation. On the contrary, he had rapidly come to dislike the little loudmouth on the other side of the table, in his own quiet way.

‘And not only that, Mr Stalin. I have been in China for the purpose of making war against Mao Tse-tung, before I went to Iran and prevented an attempt to assassinate Churchill.’

‘Churchill? That fat pig!’ Stalin shouted.

Stalin recovered for a moment before downing a whole glass of vodka. Allan watched enviously. He too 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 Union.

‘Don’t worry, my dear Yury Borisovich, Mr Karlsson won’t die. At least not yet.’

Marshal Beria explained that he intended to keep Allan Karlsson out of the way as a backup, in case Yury Borisovich and his fellow scientists continued to fail to make a bomb. This explanation had an inbuilt threat, and Marshal Beria was very pleased with that.

While waiting for his trial, Allan sat in one of the many cells at the headquarters of the secret police. The only thing that happened was that every day Allan was served a loaf of bread, thirty grams of sugar and three warm meals (vegetable soup, vegetable soup and vegetable soup).

The food had been decidedly better in the Kremlin than it was here in the cell. But Allan thought that although the soup tasted as it did, he could at least enjoy it in peace, without anyone shouting at him for reasons that he couldn’t quite follow.

This new diet lasted six days, before the special tribunal of the secret police summoned Allan. The courtroom, just like Allan’s cell, was in the enormous secret police headquarters beside Lubyanka Square, but a few floors higher up. Allan was placed on a chair in front of a judge behind a pulpit. To the left of the judge sat the prosecutor, a man with a grim expression, and to the right Allan’s defence lawyer, a man with an equally grim expression.

For starters, the prosecutor said something in Russian that Allan didn’t understand. Then the defence lawyer said something else in Russian that Allan didn’t understand either. After which the judge nodded as if he was thinking, before opening and reading a little crib (to make sure he got it right) and then proclaiming the verdict of the court:

‘The special tribunal hereby condemns Allan Emmanuel Karlsson, citizen of the kingdom of Sweden, as an element dangerous to the Soviet socialist society, to a sentence of thirty years in the correction camp in Vladivostok.’

The judge informed the convicted man that the sentence could be appealed, and that the appeal could take place within three months of the present day. But Allan Karlsson’s defence lawyer informed the court on behalf of Allan Karlsson that they would not be appealing. Allan Karlsson was, on the contrary, grateful for the mild sentence.

Allan was of course never asked whether or not he was grateful, but the verdict did undoubtedly have some good aspects. First, the accused would live, which was rare when you had been classified as a dangerous element. And second, he would be going to the Gulag camps in Vladivostok, which had the most bearable climate in Siberia. The weather there wasn’t much more unpleasant than back home in Södermanland, while further north and inland in Russia it could get as cold as -50, -60 and even -70 °C.

So Allan had been lucky, and now he was pushed into a drafty freight car with about thirty other fortunate dissidents. This particular load had also been allocated no fewer than three blankets per prisoner after the physicist Yury Borisovich Popov had bribed the guards and their immediate boss with a whole wad of roubles. The boss of the guards thought it was weird that such a prominent citizen would care about a simple transport to the Gulag camps, and he even considered reporting this to his superiors, but then he realised that he had actually accepted that money so perhaps it was best not to make a fuss.

It was no easy matter for Allan to find somebody to talk to in the freight wagon, since nearly everybody spoke only Russian. But one man, about fifty-five years old, could speak Italian and since Allan of course spoke fluent Spanish, the two of them could understand each other fairly well. Sufficiently well for Allan to understand that the man was deeply unhappy and would have preferred to kill himself, if in his own view he hadn’t been such a coward. Allan consoled him as best he could, saying that perhaps things would sort themselves out when the train reached Siberia, because there Allan thought that three blankets would be rather inadequate.

The Italian sniffled and pulled himself together. Then he thanked Allan for his support and shook hands. He wasn’t, incidentally, Italian but German. Herbert was his name. His family name was irrelevant.

Herbert Einstein had never had any luck in his life. On account of an administrative mishap, he had been condemned – just like Allan – to thirty years in the correction camps instead of the death he so sincerely longed for.

And he wouldn’t freeze to death on the Siberian tundra either, the extra blankets would see to that. Besides, January 1948 was the mildest January for many a year. But Allan promised that there would be many new possibilities for Herbert. They were on their way to a labour camp after all, so, if nothing else, he could work himself to death. How about that?

Herbert sighed and said that he was probably too lazy for that, but he wasn’t really sure because he had never worked in all his life.

And there, Allan could see an opening. In a prison camp you couldn’t just hang around, because if you did then the guards would shoot you.

Herbert liked the idea, but it gave him the creeps at the same time. A load of bullets, wouldn’t that be dreadfully painful?

Allan Karlsson didn’t ask much of life. He just wanted a bed, lots of food, something to do, and now and then a glass of vodka. If these requirements were met, he could stand most things. The camp in Vladivostok offered Allan everything he wished for except the vodka.

At that time, the harbour in Vladivostok consisted of an open and a closed part. Surrounded by a two-metre-high fence, the Gulag correction camp consisted of forty brown barracks in rows of four. The fence went all the way down to the pier. The ships that were going to be loaded or unloaded by Gulag prisoners berthed inside the fence, the others outside. Almost everything was done by the prisoners, only small fishing boats and their crews had to manage on their own, as did the occasional larger oil tanker.

With few exceptions, the days at the correction camp in Vladivostok all looked the same. Reveille in the barracks at six in the morning, breakfast at a quarter-past. The working day lasted twelve hours, from half-past six to half-past six, with a half-hour lunch break at midday. Immediately after the end of the working day, there was supper, and then it was time to be locked up until the next morning.

The diet was substantial: mainly fish admittedly, but rarely in the form of soup. The camp guards were not exactly friendly, but at least they didn’t shoot people without cause. Even Herbert Einstein got to stay alive, contrary to his own ambition. He did of course work more slowly than any other prisoner, but since he always stayed very close to the hardworking Allan, nobody noticed.

Allan had nothing against working for two. But he soon introduced a rule; Herbert wasn’t allowed to complain about how miserable his life was. Allan had already understood that to be the case, and there was nothing wrong with his memory. To keep on saying the same thing over and over again thus served no purpose.

Herbert obeyed, and then it was okay, just as most things were okay, apart from the lack of vodka. Allan put up with it for exactly five years and three weeks. Then he said:

‘Now I want a drink. And I can’t get that here. So it’s time to move on.’