The Man Who Went Up In Smoke (9 page)

'Bye," said Martin Beck.

He went back into the vestibule, picked up his key and went up to his room. It was stuffy in there and he opened the window at oace. He took off his shirt and shoes, went out to the bathroom and rinsed his face and chest with cold water. He felt a bigger idiot than ever.

'I must be completely nuts," he said. "What luck no one saw me."

At that moment there was a light tap on the door. The handle went down, and she came in.

'I crept past," she said. "No one saw me."

She closed the door behind her, quickly and quietly, took two steps into the room, dropped the net onto the floor and stepped out of her sandals. He stared at her. Her eyes had changed and were cloudy, as if there were a veil over them. She bent down with her arms crossed, took hold of the hem of her dress with both hands and pulled off her dress in one swift movement. She had nothing on underneath. This in itself was not so surprising. Obviously she always sunbathed in the same bathing suit, for across her breasts and hips ran sharply demarcated areas which looked chalk-white against the rest of her dark-brown skin. Her breasts were smooth and white and round, and her nipples were large and pink and cylindrical, like anchored buoys. The jet-black hair growing up from her loins was also sharply demarcated: an inscribed triangle that filled a considerable part of the rectangular, white strip of skin. The hair was curly and thick and stiff, as if electric. The areas around her nipples were circular and light-brown. She looked like a highly colored geometrical old man.

His depressing years with the Public Morals Squad had made Martin Beck immune to provocations of this kind. And even if this were perhaps not really provocation in the proper sense of the term, he still found the situation far easier to deal with than what had irritated him in the dining room half an hour earlier. Before she even had time to get her dress over her head, he put his hand on her shoulder and said:

'Just a minute."

She lowered the dress a little and looked at him over the hem with glazed brown eyes, which neither reacted nor comprehended. She had got her left arm free from the dress. She stretched it out, gripped hold of his right band and slowly drew it down between her legs. Her sex was swollen and open. Vaginal secretion ran down his fingers.

'Feel it," she said, with a sort of helplessness, far beyond good or evil.

Martin Beck freed himself, stretched out his arm, opened the door to the hotel corridor and said in his schoolroom German:

'Please dress yourself."

She stood still for a moment, quite nonplussed, just as when he had knocked on the door in Újpest. Then she obeyed.

He put on his shirt and shoes, picked up her string bag and led her down to the vestibule with a light grip on her arm.

'Call for a taxi," he said to the night porter.

The taxi came almost at once. He opened the door, but as he was going to help her in, she freed herself vehemently.

'I'll pay the driver," he said.

She cast a look at him. The cloudy veil had gone. The patient had recovered. Her eyes were clear and dark and full of loathing.

'Like hell you will," she said. "Drive on."

She slammed the door and the taxi rolled away.

Martin Beck looked around. It was already long past midnight. He walked a bit south, up onto the new bridge, which was also deserted except for a few night trolleys. He stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned against the railing, looking down into the silently running water. It was warm and empty and silent. An ideal place to think—if a man only knew what to think. After a while he went back to the hotel. An Boeck had dropped a cigarette with a red filter tip on the floor. He picked it up and lit it. It tasted unpleasant and he threw it out the window.

Martin Beck was lying in the bathtub when the telephone rang.

He had slept past breakfast and taken a walk on the quay before lunch. The sun was hotter than ever, and even down by the river, the air was not moving at all. When he returned to the hotel, he had felt a greater need for a quick bath than for food, and had decided to let lunch wait. Now he was lying in the lukewarm water and heard the telephone ring with short quick signals.

He climbed out of the tub, swept a large bath towel around him and lifted the receiver.

'Mr. Beck?"

'Yes?"

'Please forgive me for not using your title. As you will understand, it is purely—well, let's say a, well… precautionary measure."

It was the young man from the Embassy. Martin Beck wondered whom this precautionary measure was against, as both the hotel people and Szluka knew he was a policeman, but he said, "Of course."

'How are things going? Have you made any progress?"

Martin Beck let the bath towel fall and sat down on the bed.

'No," he said.

'Haven't you got any clues?"

'No," said Martin Beck.

There was a brief silence, and then he added, "I've spoken to the police here."

'I think that was a singularly unwise move," said the man from the Embassy.

'Possibly," said Martin Beck. "I could hardly avoid it. I was visited by a gentleman called Vilmos Szluka."

'Major Szluka. What did he want?"

'Nothing. He probably said more or less the same thing to me as he already said to you. That he had no reason to take up the case."

'I see. What are you thinking of doing now?"

'Having some lunch," said Martin Beck.

'I mean about the matter we were discussing."

'I don't know."

There was another silence. Then the young man said, "Well, you know where to phone if there's anything."

'Yes."

'Good-bye, then."

'Good-bye."

Martin Beck put down the receiver and went out and pulled the plug out of the bathtub. Then he dressed and went down and sat under the awning outside the dining room and ordered lunch.

It was uncomfortably hot even in the shade of the awning. He ate slowly, taking large gulps of the cold beer. He had an unpleasant feeling of being watched. He had not seen the tall, dark-haired man, but all the same he continually felt he was under surveillance.

He looked at the people around him. They were the usual gathering of lunch guests—mostly foreigners like himself and most of them staying at the hotel. He heard scattered fragments of conversation, mainly in German and Hungarian, but also English and some language he could not identify.

Suddenly he heard someone behind him say quite clearly in Swedish: "Crispbread." He turned around and saw two ladies, undeniably Swedish, sitting by the window in the dining room.

He heard one of them say, "Yes, I always take some with me. And toilet paper. It's always so bad abroad. If there is any at all."

'Yes," said the other. "I remember once in Spain…"

Martin Beck gave up listening to this typically Swedish conversation, and devoted himself to trying to decide which of those sitting around him was his shadow. For a long time he suspected a man who was past middle age—he was sitting some way away with his back to him and kept glancing over his shoulder in his direction. But then the man got up and lifted down a fluffy little dog that had been sitting, concealed, on his lap and vanished with the dog around the corner of the hotel.

When Martin Beck had finished eating and had drunk a cup of that strong coffee, much of the afternoon was already gone. It was exhaustingly hot, but he walked up into town for a bit, trying to keep in the shade all the time. He had discovered that the police station was only a few blocks away from the hotel and had no difficulty in finding it. On the steps—where the key had been found, according to Szluka—there was a patrolman in blue-gray uniform standing wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Martin Beck circled the police station and took another route home, all the time with an unpleasant feeling he was being watched. This was something quite new to him. During his twenty-three years with the police, he had many times been involved in keeping a watch on suspected persons and shadowing them. Only now did he understand to the full what it felt like to be shadowed. To know that all the while one was being observed and watched, that every movement one made was being registered, that all the time someone was keeping himself hidden somewhere in the vicinity, following every step one took.

Martin Beck went up to his room and stayed there in the relative cool for the rest of the day. He sat at the table with a piece of paper in front of him and a pen in hand, trying to make some kind of summary of what he knew about the Alf Matsson case.

In the end he tore up the paper into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet What he knew was so infinitesimal that it seemed simply foolish to write it down. He would not have to strain himself to keep it all in mind. Actually, thought Martin Beck, he knew no more than what could be contained in a shrimp's brain.

The sun went down and colored the river red, the brief dusk passed unnoticeably into a velvet darkness, and with the dark came the first cool breezes from the hills down across the river.

Martin Beck stood by his window and watched the surface of the water being rippled by the light evening breeze. A man was standing by a tree just below his window. A cigarette glowed and Martin Beck thought he recognized the tall dark man. In some way it was a relief to see him there, to escape that vague, creeping sense of his presence in the vicinity.

He put on a suit, went down to the dining room and had dinner. He ate as slowly as possible and drank two 
barack palinkas
 before going up to his room again.

The evening breeze had gone, the river lay black and shiny, and the heat was just as suffocating outside as inside in the room.

Martin Beck left the windows and shutters open and drew back the curtains. Then he undressed and got into the creaking bed.

Heat that is really intense almost always becomes harder to tolerate when the sun has gone down. Anyone who is used to heat knows the routine and closes the window and shutters and draws the curtains. Like most Scandinavians, Martin Beck lacked these instincts. He had drawn back the curtains and opened the windows wide and was lying on his back in the dark, waiting for the cool air. It never came. He switched on the bedside lamp and tried to read. That did not work very well either. He did have a box of sleeping tablets in the bathroom, but was not very willing to take that way out. The past day had gone by without any positive achievements on his part and consequently there was every reason for him to try to remain on the alert and somehow produce results tomorrow. If he took the sleeping tablets, he would be walking around as if in a trance the next morning: he knew this of old.

He got up and sat down by the open window. The difference was infinitesimal: there was not the slightest draft, nor even a hot breeze from the Hungarian steppes, wherever they were. The city seemed almost as if it, too, had difficulty breathing, had fallen into a coma and become unconscious from the heat. After a while a lone yellow trolley appeared on the other side of the river. It drove slowly across Elisabeth Bridge, and the sound of the wheels' friction against the rails echoed and grew louder under the arch of the bridge before it rolled away across the water. Despite the distance, he could see that it was empty. Twenty-three hours earlier, he had been standing up there on the bridge, puzzling over his strange meeting with the woman from Újpest. It had not been a bad place.

He pulled on his trousers and shirt and went out. The porter's desk was empty. On the street, a green Skoda started up and drove slowly and reluctantly around the corner. Pairs of lovers in cars are the same the world over. He walked along the edge of the quay—past some sleeping boats—went by the statue of the Hungarian poet Petöfi and then came up onto the bridge. It was quite silent and deserted, as on the preceding night, and was clearly lit up, in contrast to many of the city streets. Again he stopped on the middle of the bridge, his elbows on the parapet, and stared down into the water. A tugboat passed beneath him. Far behind it came its load, four long barges tied together in pairs. Soundlessly gliding with their lights extinguished, only a shade darker than the night.

As he moved on a few yards, he heard his own footsteps give a faint echo somewhere on the silent bridge. He walked on a bit farther and again heard the echo. It seemed as if the sound could be heard a trifle too long. He stood still listening for a long time, but heard nothing. Then he walked quickly on for about twenty yards and stopped suddenly. The sound came again, and this time, too, he thought it came too late to be truly an echo. He walked as quietly as he could across to the other side of the bridge and looked back. It was quite silent now. Nothing moved. A trolley from the Pest side came up onto the bridge and made any further observations impossible. Martin Beck continued his promenade across the bridge. Evidently he was suffering from persecution mania. If someone had the energy and resources to watch him at this time of night, then it could hardly be anyone else but the police. And with that the problem was largely solved. So long as…

Martin Beck was almost over the bridge below Gellért Hill when the trolley rattled past. A lone passenger was sleeping with his mouth open, leaning against one of the windows.

He reached the steps leading down to the quay from the south side of the bridge and began to walk down them. Through the retreating rattle of the trolley, he thought he heard the sound of a car, which stopped somewhere in the vicinity, but he could not decide how far away or in which direction from him.

Martin Beck had reached the quay. Swiftly and silently he walked south, away from the bridge, and stopped where the darkness was thickest. He turned around, stood quite still and listened. Nothing could be heard or seen. In all probability there was no one on the bridge, but this in itself was not certain. If someone had followed him from the other side, he could easily also have got to the end of the bridge and gone down to the quay from the north side of the bridge. He was sure that no one other than himself had gone down the south steps.

The slight sounds which could be heard now came from traffic very far away. There was complete silence in the immediate vicinity. Martin Beck smiled in the darkness. He was now almost convinced that no one had followed him, but the game amused him, and in his innermost self he wished that there were some confused fellow creature over there in the dark on the other side of the bridge. He himself knew the routine backward and forward and knew that whoever might have gone down on the other side could not take the risk of returning the same way, crossing the bridge and going down the steps on the south side. Under the bridge two parallel streets ran along the quay, the inner one nearly six feet higher than the quay itself, which in its turn sloped down toward the river in steps. The two streets were separated by a low wall. Farther up, there was also a tunnel through the actual foundations of the bridge. But none of these ways was accessible to anyone shadowing him, provided that person knew his job. Every attempt to pass under the bridge would mean that the man would have the light behind him and thus risk immediate discovery. Consequently only one alternative remained: to go around the entire abutment of the bridge in a wide semicircle, cross several approach ramps and make his way down onto the quay as far south as possible. But this would take some time, even if the man took the risk of running, and during that time the person being shadowed—in this case Inspector Martin Beck from Stockholm—would have time to vanish in practically any direction he chose.

Now it was unlikely, however, that there was anyone shadowing him at all, and in addition Martin Beck had intended to walk north along the river and return to the hotel via the next bridge. Consequently, he left his observation post in the sheltering darkness and walked north at an easy pace. He chose the inner of the two streets, passed under the bridge and continued along the stone wall, six feet above the quay. On the opposite shore the hotel was dark except for two narrow perpendicular rectangles of light. The windows of his own room. He sat down on the low stone wall and lit a cigarette. Large houses of the kind built at the turn of the century lined the street. In front of them stood parked cars. All the windows were shuttered and dark. Martin Beck sat still and listened to the silence. He was still on guard, but without being conscious of the fact himself.

On the other side of the street a car engine started up. He let his eyes sweep along the row of parked vehicles but could not locate the noise. The engine was turning over slowly, purring. This continued for about thirty seconds. Then he heard the car being put into gear. A pair of parking lights went on. More than fifty yards ahead a car came out of the shadows and moved away from the edge of the pavement. It came in his direction, but on the other side of the street, and extremely slowly. A dark-green Skoda, and he had a feeling he had seen it before. The car came nearer. Martin Beck sat still on the stone wall and followed it with his eyes. Almost level with him, it began to turn to the left, as if the driver were going to turn around in the street. But the turn was not completed: the car was moving almost more slowly than before, straight at him. Obviously someone wanted to meet him, but his way of going about it was astounding. The idea could hardly be to run him down—not at that speed—and, besides, he could get to safety behind the wall in a second, if necessary. Provided no one was hiding in the back seat, there was only one person in the car.

Martin Beck put out his cigarette. He was in no way afraid, but very curious to know what was going to happen.

The green Skoda had stopped with its engine running and its right front wheel against the curb, only nine feet away from him. The driver switched on the headlights and everything was drowned in a flood of light. But only for a few seconds, then all the lights went out. The car door opened and a man stepped out onto the pavement.

Martin Beck had seen him often enough to be able to recognize him at once, despite the blinding effect of the light The tall man with dark hair brushed back on his head. The man was empty-handed. He took a step nearer. The engine of the car purred slowly.

He sensed something. Not a shadow, nor even a sound, only a small movement in the air, just behind him. So faint that only the stillness of the night made it perceptible.

Martin Beck knew that he was no longer alone on the wall, that the car was only meant to distract his attention while someone silently approached down on the quay and heaved himself up onto the stone wall behind him.

And in the same second he also realized clearly and penetratingly that this was not shadowing, not a game, but deadly serious. And more than that. It was death: this time out for 
him
, and not by chance, but in a cold, calculated, premeditated fashion.

Martin Beck was a bad fighter, but his reflex actions were remarkable. At the exact moment he felt the slight draft, he ducked his head down between his shoulders, put his right foot upon the edge of the wall, kicked away, twisted his body and threw himself backward, all in one lightning movement. The arm that had been on its way around his throat was pressed hard against the ridge of his nose and eyebrows before it slid away over his forehead. He felt a hot, astonished breath against his cheek and caught the swift glint of a knife blade, which had already missed its mark and was on its way away from him. He fell backward down onto the quay, hit his left shoulder hard on the stone paving and rolled around to give himself time, if possible, to get his balance and get onto his feet. On the wall he saw two figures, silhouetted against the starry sky. Then there was only one and while he still had one knee on the stone paving, the man with the knife was on him again. His left arm was temporarily paralyzed after his fall against the quay, but for a second or two the light was in his favor: he himself was low in the dark and the other man was etched against the background. His attacker missed and a second later Martin Beck managed to seize hold of the man's right wrist. It was not a good grip and the wrist was unusually large, but he held on, very conscious of the fact that it was his only chance. For a tenth of a second or so, they stood up and he noted that the other man was shorter than himself, but considerably broader. Mechanically, he applied one of the hoary old method holds learned at police college and succeeded in getting his opponent onto the ground. The only thing wrong was that he did not dare let go of the hand with the knife and was himself drawn down in the fall. They rolled around once and were now extremely close to the edge of the quay, where the steps down to the water began. The paralysis in his left arm had let up and he got a hold on the man's other wrist. But his opponent was stronger and slowly broke away. A hard kick in the head reminded him that he was not only physically but also numerically inferior. He was lying on his back so close to the stairs that he felt the first step with his foot. The man with the knife was panting heavily in his face, smelling of sweat, shaving water and throat pastilles. His opponent began slowly but relentlessly to free his right hand.

Martin Beck felt it was all over—at least very nearly. Lightning bolts clashed in the throbbing haze, his heart seemed to swell more and more and more, like a purple tumor about to burst. His head was thumping like a pile driver. He thought he heard terrible roars, shots, piercing shrieks, and he saw the world drowned in a flood of blinding white light that obliterated all shapes and all life. His last conscious thought was that he was going to die here on a quay in a foreign city, just as Alf Matsson had presumably done, and without knowing why.

With a last reflex-like effort, Martin Beck gripped the other man's right wrist with both hands as he kicked with his foot and tipped both himself and his opponent over the edge of of the quay. He hit his head on the second step and lost ' consciousness.

Martin Beck opened his eyes after an epoch of time that seemed boundless, and that in any case must have been very long. Everything was bathed in a white light. He was lying on his back with his head to one side and his right ear against the stone paving. The first thing he saw was a pair of well-polished black shoes, which almost filled his field of vision. He turned his head and looked up.

Szluka, in a gray suit and with that silly hunting hat still on his head, bent down over him and said:

'Good evening."

Martin Beck propped himself up on his elbow. The flood of light was coming from two police cars, one on the quay and the other driven up to the stone wall on the street above. About ten feet away from Szluka stood a policeman in a visored cap, black leather boots and a light-gray-blue uniform. He was holding a black night stick in his right hand and looking thoughtfully at a person lying at his feet. It was Tetz Radeberger, the man who had played with Ari Boeck's bathing suit in the house in Újpest. He was now on his back, deeply unconscious, with blood on his forehead and in his blond hair.

'The other one," said Martin Beck. "Where is he?"

'Shot," said Szluka. "Carefully, of course. In the leg."

A number of windows had been thrown open in the houses along the street and people were peering inquisitively down toward the quay.

'Lie still," said Szluka. "The ambulance will be here soon."

'No need," said Martin Beck, beginning to get up.

Exactly three minutes and fifteen seconds had passed since he had been sitting on the stone wall and had felt that draft at the back of his neck.