by Maj Sjowall
They stood above the wheelhouse and watched the shores gliding by. She leaned against him, quite lightly, and he now felt very clearly something he had noticed earlier: that she had no bra on under her dress.
A small ensemble was playing on the afterdeck and a number of people were dancing.
'Do you want to dance?" she said.
'No," said Martin Beck.
'Good. I don't think it's much fun either."
A moment later she said, "But I can, if necessary."
'So can I," said Martin Beck.
The boat passed Margaret Island and Újpest, before turning and soundlessly gliding back southward with the current. They stood behind the funnel for a moment and looked through the open hatches. The engine was beating with calm pulse beats, the copper pipes were shining and the warm oily current of air was flung upward in their direction.
'Have you been on this boat before?" he said.
'Yes, many a time. It's the best thing to do in this city on a really hot evening."
He did not really know who she was and what he thought of her, and this, above all else, irritated him.
The boat passed the colossal Parliament building—where nowadays a small red star shone discreetly above the central cupola—and then it slipped its lowered funnel under the bridge with large stone lions on it and hove to at the same place as where they started.
As they walked along the gangplank, Martin Beck let his eyes sweep over the quay. Under the lamp by the ticket office stood the tall man with dark hair brushed back on his head. He was again wearing his blue suit and was staring straight at them. A moment later the man turned around and vanished with swift steps behind the shelter. The woman followed Martin Beck's glance and put her left hand in his right one, suddenly but carefully.
'Did you see that man?" he said.
'Yes," she said.
'Do you know who he is?"
She shook her head.
'No. Do you?"
'No, not yet."
Martin Beck felt hungry for once. He had had no lunch and the dinner hour would soon be over.
'Would you like to come and have a meal with me?"
'Where?"
'At the hotel."
'Can I go there in these clothes?"
'Sure."
He almost added, "We're not in Sweden now."
Quite a number of people were still in the dining room and along the balustrade outside the open windows. Swarms of insects were dancing around the lamps.
'Little gnats," she said. "They don't sting. When they disappear, the summer's over. Did you know that?"
The food was excellent, as usual, and so was the wine. She was evidently hungry and ate with a healthy, youthful greed. Then she sat still and listened to the music. They smoked with their coffee and drank a kind of cherry-brandy liqueur which also tasted of chocolate. When she put out her cigarette in the ash tray, she brushed his right hand with her fingertips, as if by accident. A little later she repeated the maneuver and soon after that he felt her foot against his ankle under the table. Evidently she had kicked off her sandal.
After a while she moved her foot and her hand away and went off to the powder room.
Martin Beck thoughtfully massaged his hairline with the fingers of his right hand. Then he leaned over the table and picked up the nylon string bag that was lying on the chair beside him. He thrust his hand into it, unfolded the bathing suit and felt it. The material was completely dry, even in the seams and along the elastic. So dry that it could hardly have been in contact with water during the past twenty-four hours. He rolled up the bathing suit, put the net carefully back on the chair and bit his knuckle thoughtfully. Naturally it did not necessarily mean anything. In any case, he was still behaving like an idiot.
She came back and sat down, smiling at him. She crossed her legs, lit another cigarette and listened to the Viennese melody.
'How lovely it is," she said.
He nodded.
The dining room began to empty, the waiters gathering together in groups, talking. The musicians ended the evening's concert with "The Blue Danube." She looked at the clock.
'I must be going home."
He thought about this intensely. One floor up there was a small night-club-type bar with jazz music, but he loathed that kind of place so profoundly that only the most pressing assignment could make him go into them. Perhaps this was just what this was?
'How will you get home?" he said. "By boat?"
'No, the last one's gone. I'll go by trolley. It's quicker, in fact."
He went on thinking. In all its simplicity, the situation was somewhat complicated. Why, he did not know.
He chose to do nothing and say nothing. The musicians went away, bowing in exhaustion. She looked at the clock again.
'I'd better go now," she said.
The night porter bowed in the vestibule. The doorman whirled them respectfully out through the revolving doors.
They stood on the pavement, alone in the warm night air. She took a short step so that she was standing facing him, with her right leg between his. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. Very clearly, he felt her breasts and stomach and loins and thighs through the material of her dress. She could hardly reach up to him.
'Oh my, how tall you are," she said.
She made a small supple movement and again stood firmly on the ground, an inch or so from him.
'Thank you for everything," she said. "See you again soon. Bye."
She walked away, turned her head and waved her right hand. The net with her bathing things in it swung against her left leg.
'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 t
he 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.
15
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.
16
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 conseque
ntly 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…