by Maj Sjowall
She looked at Martin Beck. For the first time during their conversation he noticed a vague anxiety in her eyes.
“It does seem peculiar, doesn’t it? That he’s never got in touch with the magazine. Supposing something really has happened to him.”
“Have you any idea what might have happened to him?”
She shook her head.
“No, none at all.”
“You said before that he drinks. Does he drink a lot?”
“Yes—sometimes, at least. Toward the end, when he lived here, he often came home drunk. If he generally ever came home at all.”
The bitter lines around her mouth had returned.
“But didn’t that affect his work?”
“No, it didn’t really. Anyhow not much. When he began working for this weekly magazine, he often got special assignments. Abroad and that kind of thing. In between, he didn’t have much to do and was often free. He didn’t have to be at the office much. That was when he drank. Sometimes he sat around that café for days on end.”
“I see,” said Martin Beck. “Can you give me the names of anyone he used to go around with?”
She gave Martin Beck the names of three journalists who were unknown to him, and he wrote them down on a taxi receipt he found in his inside pocket. She looked at him and said:
“I thought the police always had little notebooks with black covers that they wrote everything down in. But maybe that’s just in books and at the movies.”
Martin Beck got up.
“If you hear anything from him, perhaps you’d be good enough to call me,” she said. “Would you?”
“Naturally,” said Martin Beck.
In the hall, he asked, “Where did you say he was living now?”
“On Fleminggatan. Number 34. But I didn’t say.”
“Have you got a key to the apartment?”
“Oh, no. I haven’t even been there.”
6
On the door was a piece of cardboard with MATSSON lettered on it in India ink. The lock was an ordinary one and caused Martin Beck no difficulties. Aware that he was overstepping his authority, he made his way into the flat. On the doormat was some mail—a few advertisements, a postcard from Madrid signed by someone called Bibban, a sports car magazine in English and an electricity bill amounting to 28:45 kronor.
The flat consisted of two large rooms, a kitchen, hall and toilet. There was no washroom, but two large wardrobes. The air in the flat was heavy and musty.
In the largest room, facing the street, were a bed, a night table, bookshelves, a low circular table with a glass top, a desk and two chairs. On the night table stood a record player and on the shelf below, a pile of long-playing records. Martin Beck read in English on the top sleeve: Blue Monk. It meant nothing to him. On the desk were a sheaf of typing paper, a daily paper dated July twentieth, a taxi receipt for 6:50 kronor dated the eighteenth, a German dictionary, a magnifying glass and a stenciled information sheet from a youth club. There was a telephone too, and telephone directories and two ash trays. The drawers contained old magazines, magazine photographs, receipts, a few letters and postcards, and a number of carbon copies of manuscripts.
In the back room there was no furniture at all except a narrow divan with a faded red cover, a chair and a stool that served as a night table. There were no curtains.
Martin Beck opened the doors of both wardrobes. One of them contained an almost empty laundry bag and on the shelves lay shirts, sweaters and underclothes, some of them with the laundry’s paper bands still unbroken around them. In the other hung two tweed jackets, a dark-brown flannel suit, three pairs of trousers and a winter overcoat. Three hangers were empty. On the floor stood a pair of heavy brown shoes with rubber soles, a pair of thinner black ones, a pair of boots and a pair of galoshes. There was a large suitcase in the cupboard above the one wardrobe, but the other cupboard was empty.
Martin Beck went out into the kitchen. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, but on the drainboard were two glasses and a mug. The pantry was empty except for a few empty wine bottles and two cans. Martin Beck thought about his own pantry, which he had quite unnecessarily cleaned out so thoroughly.
He walked through the flat one more time. The bed was made, the ash trays were empty, and there were neither passport, money, bankbooks nor anything else of value in the drawers of the desk. All in all, there was nothing to indicate that Alf Matsson had been home since he had left the flat and gone to Budapest two weeks previously.
Martin Beck left Alf Matsson’s flat and stood for a moment by the deserted taxi stand down on Fleminggatan, but as usual at lunch time there were no taxis available and he took a trolley instead.
It was past one when he went into the dining room of the Tankard. All the tables were taken and the harassed waitresses took no notice of him. There was no headwaiter to be seen. He crossed over to the bar on the other side of the entrance hall. At that moment a fat man in a corduroy jacket gathered up his papers and rose from a round table in the corner next to the door. Martin Beck took his place. Here too, all the tables were full, but some of the customers were just paying their bills.
He ordered a sandwich and beer from the headwaiter and asked if any of the three journalists was there.
“Mr. Molin is sitting over there, but I haven’t seen the others today. They’ll probably be in later.”
Martin Beck followed the headwaiter’s glance toward a table where five men were sitting talking with large steins of beer in front of them.
“Which of the gentlemen is Mr. Molin?”
“The gentleman with the beard,” said the headwaiter, and went away.
Confused, Martin Beck looked at the five men. Three of them had beards.
The waitress came with his sandwich and beer and gave him the chance to say, “Do you happen to know which of the gentlemen over there is Mr. Molin?”
“Of course, the one with the beard.”
She followed his somewhat desperate look and added, “Nearest the window.”
Martin Beck ate his sandwich very slowly. The man named Molin ordered another stein of beer. Martin Beck waited. The place began to empty. After a while Molin emptied his stein and was given another. Martin Beck finished eating his sandwich, ordered coffee, and waited.
Finally the man with the beard got up from his place by the window and walked toward the entrance hall. Just as he was passing, Martin Beck said, “Mr. Molin?”
The man stopped. “Just a moment,” he said, and went on out.
A short while later, he returned, breathed heavily all over Martin Beck, and said, “Do we know each other?”
“No, not yet. But perhaps you’d like to sit down a moment and have a beer with me. There’s something I’d like to ask you about.”
He himself could hear that it didn’t sound especially good. Smelled of police business a mile away. But it worked anyhow. Molin sat down. He had fair, rather thin hair, combed forward onto his forehead. His beard was reddish and neat. He looked about thirty-five and was quite plump. He waved a waitress over to him.
“Say Stina, get me a round, will you?”
The waitress nodded and looked at Martin Beck.
“The same,” he said.
A “round” turned out to be a bulbous and considerably larger stein than the cylindrical though quite large one he himself had drunk with his sandwich.
Molin took a large gulp and wiped his mustache with his handkerchief.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about? Hangovers?”
“About Alf Matsson,” said Martin Beck. “You’re good friends, aren’t you?”
It still didn’t sound quite right and he tried to improve on it by saying, “Buddies, aren’t you?”
“Of course. What’s up with him? Does he owe you money?”
Molin looked suspiciously and haughtily at Martin Beck.
“Well then, I’d first like to point out that I’m not any kind of collection agency.”
“No, nothing like that at all,” said Martin Beck.
“Then what do you want Alfie for?”
“Alfie and I’ve known each other for a long time. We worked on the same … well, we were on the same job together a number of years ago. I met him quite by chance a few weeks ago and he promised to do a job for me, and then I never heard another word from him. He talked about you quite a bit, so I thought perhaps you’d know where he was.”
Somewhat exhausted by this strenuous oratorical effort, Martin Beck took a deep gulp of his beer. The other man followed suit.
“Oh, hell. You’re an old pal of Alfie’s, are you? The fact is that I’ve been wondering where he was too. But I suppose he’s stayed on in Hungary. He’s not in town, anyhow. Or we’d have seen him here.”
“In Hungary? What’s he doing there?”
“On some trip for that gossip sheet he works for. But he should really be home by now. When he left, he said he was only going to be away for two or three days.”
“Did you see him before he left?”
“Yes indeed. The night before. We were here in the daytime and then went to a couple of other places in the evening.”
“You and him?”
“Yes, and some of the others. I don’t really remember who. Per Kronkvist and Stig Lund were there, I think. We got really stoned. Yes, Åke and Pia were there too. Don’t you know Åke, by the way?”
Martin Beck thought. It seemed somewhat pointless.
“Åke? I don’t know. Which Åke?”
“Åke Gunnarsson,” said Molin, turning around toward the table where he had been sitting before. Two of the men had left during their conversation. The two remaining were sitting silently over their beers.
“He’s sitting over there,” said Molin. “The guy with the beard.”
One of the beards had gone, so there was no doubt which of them was Gunnarsson. The man looked quite pleasant.
“No,” said Martin Beck. “I don’t think I know him. Where does he work?”
Molin gave the name of a publication that Martin Beck had never heard of, but it sounded like some kind of auto magazine.
“Åke’s all right. He got pretty high that night too, if I remember rightly. Otherwise, he doesn’t get really drunk very often. No matter how much he pours into himself.”
“Haven’t you seen Alfie since then?”
“That’s a hell of a lot of questions you’re asking. Aren’t you going to ask me how I am too?”
“Of course. How are you?”
“Absolutely god-damned awful. Hangover. Damned bad one, too.”
Molin’s fat face grew gloomy. As if to obliterate the last shreds of the pleasures of living, he drank the remains of his beer in one huge gulp. He took out his handkerchief, and with a brooding look in his eyes, mopped his foamy mustache.
“They ought to serve beer in mustache cups,” he said. “There isn’t much service left these days.”
After a brief pause he said, “No, I haven’t seen Alfie since he left. The last I saw of him was when he was pouring his drink over some gal in the Opera House bar. Then he went to Budapest the next morning. Poor devil, having to sit up flying right across half of Europe with a hangover like that. Hope he didn’t fly Scandinavian Airlines anyhow.”
“And you’ve not heard anything from him since then?”
“We don’t usually write letters when we’re on overseas trips,” said Molin haughtily. “What the hell kind of a rag do you work for, anyhow? The Kiddy Krib? Well, what about another round?”
Half an hour and two more rounds later, Martin Beck managed to escape from Mr. Molin, after having first lent him ten kronor. As he left, he heard the man’s voice behind him, “Fia, old thing, get me a round, will you?”
7
The plane was an Ilyushin 18 turboprop from Czechoslovak Airlines. It rose in a steep arc over Copenhagen and Saltholm, and an Öresund that glittered in the sun.
Martin Beck sat by the window and looked down at Ven Island below, with Backafall Cliffs, the church and the little harbor. He had just had time to see a tugboat rounding the harbor pier before the plane turned south.
He liked traveling, but this time disappointment over his spoiled holiday overshadowed most of his pleasure. Moreover, his wife had not seemed to understand at all that his own choice in the matter had not been very great. He had called the evening before and tried to explain, but had not been particularly successful.
“You don’t care a bit about me or the children,” she had said.
And a moment later:
“There must be other policemen besides you. Do you have to take on every assignment?”
He had tried to convince her that he would in fact have preferred to go out to the island, but she had gone on being unreasonable. In addition, she had demonstrated various evidence of faulty logic.
“So you’re going to Budapest to enjoy yourself while the children and I are stuck by ourselves out on this island.”
“I am not going for fun.”
“Hmm-mph.”
In the end she had put down the receiver in the middle of a sentence. He knew she would calm down eventually, but he had not attempted to call again.
Now, at an altitude of 16,000 feet, he tipped his seat back, lit a cigarette and let his thoughts of the island and his family sink into the back of his mind.
During their stopover at Schönefeld airport in East Berlin, he drank a beer in the transit lounge. He noted that the beer was called Radeberger. It was excellent beer, but he didn’t think he would have cause to remember the name. The waiter entertained him in Berlin German. He did not understand very much of it and wondered gloomily how he was going to manage in the future.
In a basket by the entrance lay a few pamphlets in German and he took one out at random to have something to read while he waited. Clearly he needed to practice his German.
The leaflet was published by the German journalist’s union and dealt with the Springer concern, one of the most powerful newspaper and magazine publishers in West Germany, and its chief, Axel Springer. It gave examples of the company’s menacing fascist politics and quoted several of its more prominent contributors.
When his flight was called, Martin Beck noted that he had read almost the whole pamphlet without difficulty. He put the pamphlet into his pocket and boarded the plane.
After an hour in the air, the plane again came down to land, this time in Prague, a city that Martin Beck had always wanted to visit. Now he had to be content with a brief glimpse, from the air, of its many towers and bridges and of the Moldau; the stopover was too short to give him time to get into the city from the airport.
His red-haired namesake in the Foreign Office had apologized for the connections between Stockholm and Budapest which were not the world’s best, but Martin Beck had no objections to the delays, although he was not able to see more of Berlin and Prague than their transit lounges.
Martin Beck had never been to Budapest and when the plane had taken off again, he read through a couple of leaflets he had received from the redhead’s secretary. In one dealing with the geography of Hungary, he read that Budapest had two million inhabitants. He wondered how he was going to find Alf Matsson if the man had decided to disappear in this metropolis.
In his mind he reviewed what he knew about Alf Matsson. It was not a great deal, but he wondered whether there was really anything else to know. He thought of Kollberg’s comment: “Singularly uninteresting person.” Why should a man like Alf Matsson want to disappear? That is, if he had disappeared of his own free will? A woman? It seemed hardly credible that he should sacrifice a well-paid position—one that he seemed to be happy with, moreover—for that reason. He was still married, of course, but perfectly free to do as he wished. He had a home, work, money and friends. It was hard to think of any plausible reason why he should voluntarily leave all that.
Martin B
eck took out the copy of the personal file from the Security Division. Alf Matsson had become an object of interest to the police simply because of his many and frequent trips to places in Eastern Europe. “Behind the Iron Curtain,” the redhead had said. Well, the man was a reporter, and if he preferred to undertake assignments in Eastern Europe, then that in itself wasn’t so peculiar. And if he had anything on his conscience now, why should he disappear? The Security Division had consigned the case to oblivion after a routine investigation. “A new Wallenberg affair,” the man at the F.O. had said, thinking of the famous case of a well-known Swede last seen in Budapest in 1945: “Spirited away by the Communists.” “You see too many James Bond movies,” Kollberg would have said if he had been there.
Martin Beck folded up the copy and put it into his briefcase. He looked out the window. It was completely dark now but the stars were out, and way down there he could see small dots of light from villages and communities and pearl strings of light where the street lamps were on.
Perhaps Matsson had started to drink, abandoning the magazine and everything else. When he sobered up again he would be broke and full of remorse and would have to make his presence known. But that didn’t sound likely either. True, he drank occasionally, but not to that degree, and normally he never neglected his job.
Perhaps he had committed suicide, had an accident, fallen into the Danube and drowned or been robbed and killed. Was this more likely? Hardly. Somewhere or other, Martin Beck had read that, of all the capitals in the world, Budapest had the lowest crime rate.
Perhaps he was sitting in the hotel dining room right now, having his dinner, and Martin Beck would be able to take the plane back the next day and continue his holiday.
The signs lit up. No smoking. Please fasten your seatbelts. And then they repeated the same thing in Russian.