by Maj Sjowall
“Take it for what it’s worth.”
“Thanks,” said Martin Beck, without a trace of enthusiasm. “So long.”
“Wait a second. I haven’t finished yet. They never mentioned her name—I don’t think they even knew it. But they gave enough details for me to be able to … It rained yesterday too.”
“Lennart,” said Martin Beck desperately.
“I managed to force my way into the Royal Library and sat all day yesterday looking through back numbers. As far as I can make out, it can only be a gal named—I’ll spell it.”
Martin Beck switched on the bedside lamp and wrote the letters on the edge of the map of Budapest. A-R-I B-Ö-K-K.
“Got it?” said Kollberg.
“Of course.”
“She’s German actually, but a Hungarian citizen. Don’t know where she lives, nor that the spelling’s quite right. Not very famous. I couldn’t think of any name that reminded me of hers in any connection since May of last year. Apparently she was some kind of substitute. On the second team.”
“Have you finished now?”
“One more thing. His car is where it ought to be. In the airport parking place here at Arlanda. An Opel Rekord. Nothing special about it.”
“Really. Have you finished now?”
“Yes.”
“G’bye, then.”
“Bye.”
Martin Beck stared listlessly at the letters he had written down. Ari Bökk. It did not even look like the name of a human being. Probably the particulars were wrong and the information completely useless.
He got up, opened the shutters and let in the summer. The view over the river and the Buda side was just as fascinating as it had been twenty-four hours ago. The Czech paddle steamer had left, making way for a propeller-driven motor vessel with two low funnels. It was Czechoslovakian too and was called Druzba. People dressed for summer were sitting eating breakfast at the tables in front of the hotel. It was already half past nine. He felt useless and negligent of his duties, so he swiftly washed and dressed, put the map in his pocket and hurried downstairs to the vestibule. Having hurried all the way down, he then remained standing absolutely motionless. To hurry seemed pointless when you didn’t know what to do when you got there anyway. He meditated on this for a moment, then went into the dining room, sat down by one of the open windows and had breakfast served to him. Boats of every size were passing by. A large Soviet tugboat towing three oil barges worked its way upstream. Presumably it came from Batum. That was a long way away. The captain was wearing a white cap. The waiters swarmed around Martin Beck’s table as if he were Rockefeller. Small boys were kicking a ball on the street. A big dog wanted to join in and almost knocked over the well-dressed lady holding its leash. She had to grab hold of one of the stone pillars of the balustrade to keep from falling. After a while she let go of the pillar but retained her hold on the leash, running, at a sharp backward tilt behind the dog, in among the ballplayers. It was already very warm. The river sparkled.
His lack of constructive ideas was conspicuous. Martin Beck turned his head and saw a person staring at him: a sunburned man of his own age, with graying hair, straight nose, brown eyes, gray suit, black shoes, white shirt and gray tie. He had a large signet ring on the little finger of his right hand and beside him on the table lay a speckled green hat with a narrow brim and a fluffy little feather in the band. The man returned to his double espresso.
Martin Beck moved his eyes and saw a woman staring at him. She was African and young and very beautiful, with clean features, large brilliant eyes, white teeth, long slim legs and high insteps. Silver sandals and a tight-fitting light-blue dress of some shiny material.
Presumably they were both staring at Martin Beck—the man with envy, the woman with ill-concealed desire—because he was so handsome.
Martin Beck sneezed and three waiters blessed him. He thanked them, went out into the vestibule, took the map out of his pocket and showed the letters he had written on it to the porter.
“Do you know of anybody by this name?”
“No sir.”
“It’s supposed to be some kind of sports star.”
“Really?”
The porter looked politely sympathetic. Naturally, a guest was always right.
“Perhaps not so well known, sir.”
“Is it a man’s or a woman’s name?”
“Ari is a woman’s name—almost a nickname. A different version of Aranka, for children.”
The porter cocked his head and looked at the words.
“But the last name, sir. Is it really a name?”
“May I borrow a telephone directory?”
Naturally there was no one called Bökk, anyhow no human being. But he didn’t give up that easily. (A cheap virtue when a person still doesn’t know what to do.) He tried several other possibilities. The result was as follows: BOECK ESZTER penzió XII Venetianer út 6 292-173.
Struck by his first thought of the day, he took out the slip of paper he had received from the girl at the young people’s hotel. Venetianer út. It could hardly be a coincidence.
At the reception desk a young lady had taken the august old porter’s place.
“What does this mean?”
“Penzió. Pension—boarding house. Shall I call the number for you?”
He shook his head.
“Where is this street?”
“The Fourth District. In Újpest.”
“How do you get there?”
“It’s quickest by taxi, of course. Otherwise, Trolley Line Three from Marx Square. But it’s more comfortable to take one of the boats that tie up outside here. Heading north.”
11
The boat was called Úttörő and was a joy to the eye. A little coal-fired steamer with a tall, straight funnel and open decks. As it calmly and comfortably chugged up the river past the Parliament building and green Margaret Island, Martin Beck stood at the railing philosophizing about the accursed cult of the combustion engine. He walked over to the engine room and peered down. The heat came out like a column from the boiler room. The fireman was dressed in bathing trunks, and his muscular back was shiny with sweat. The coal shovel rattled. What was this man thinking about down in that infernal heat? In all probability, about the blessing of the combustion engine: he no doubt saw himself sitting reading the newspaper beside a diesel engine, cotton waste and an oil can within easy reach. Martin Beck returned to studying the boat, but the fireman had spoiled his enjoyment. It was the same with most things. You couldn’t have your cake and eat it too.
The boat slid past spacious, open-air parks and bathing places, edged its way through a swarm of canoes and pleasure boats, passed two bridges and continued through a narrow sound into quite a small tributary of the river. It gave a short hoarse toot of triumph and tied up in Újpest.
After Martin Beck had gone ashore, he turned around and looked at the steamer, so exquisite in form and so functional—in its day. The fireman came up on deck, laughed at the sun and leaped straight into the water.
This part of the city was of a different character from the sections of Budapest he had seen previously. He walked diagonally across the large, bare square and made a few feeble attempts to ask his way, but could not make himself understood. Despite the map, he went astray and wound up in a yard behind a synagogue, evidently a home for elderly Jews. Frail survivors from the days of great evil nodded cheerfully at him from their wicker chairs in the narrow strip of shade along the walls.
Five minutes later he was standing outside the building Venetianer út Number 6. It was built in two stories and nothing about its exterior gave the impression that it was a boarding house, but out on the street stood two cars with foreign license plates. He met the landlady as soon as he got into the hall.
“Frau Boeck?”
“Yes—we’re full up I’m afraid.”
She was a stout woman of fifty years. Her German sounded extraordinarily fluent.
“I am looking for a lady named Ari Boeck.”
With that, she went away. Simple as that. Martin Beck stood for a moment outside the white-painted door and heard someone moving about inside. Then he knocked quite lightly. The door was opened at once.
“Fräulein Boeck?”
The woman seemed surprised. Very likely, she had been expecting someone. She was wearing a dark-blue, two-piece bathing suit and in her right hand she was carrying a green rubber diving mask and a snorkel. She was standing with her feet wide apart and her left hand still on the lock, quite still, as if paralyzed in the middle of a movement. Her hair was dark and short, and her features were strong. She had thick black eyebrows, a broad straight nose and full lips. Her teeth were good but somewhat uneven. Her mouth was half-open and the tip of her tongue was resting against her lower teeth, as if she was just about to say something. She was hardly taller than five foot one, but strongly and harmoniously built, with well-developed shoulders, broad hips and quite a narrow waist. Her legs were muscular and her feet short and broad, with straight toes. She had a very deep suntan and her skin appeared soft and elastic, especially across her diaphragm and stomach. Shaved armpits. Large breasts and curved stomach with thick down that seemed very light against her tanned skin. Here and there, long and curly black hairs had made their way out from under the elastic at her loins. She might have been twenty-two or twenty-three years old, at the most. Not beautiful in the conventional sense of the word, but a highly functional specimen of the human race.
A questioning look in large, dark-brown eyes. Finally she said, “Yes, that’s me. Were you looking for me?”
Not quite such fluent German as her aunt’s, but almost.
“I’m looking for Alf Matsson.”
“Who is that?”
Her general attitude was that of a child in a state of shock. It made him incapable of discerning any definite reaction to the name. Quite possibly it was completely new to her.
“A Swedish journalist. From Stockholm.”
“Is he supposed to be living here? There’s no Swede here at the moment. You must have made a mistake.”
She thought for a moment, frowning.
“But how did you know my name?”
The room behind her was an ordinary boarding-house room. Clothes lay carelessly strewn about on the furniture. Only women’s clothing, as far as he could see.
“He gave me this address himself. Matsson is a friend of mine.”
She looked suspiciously at him and said: “How odd.”
He took the passport out of his pocket and turned to the page with Matsson’s photo on it. She looked at it carefully.
“No. I’ve never seen him before.”
After a while she said, “Have you lost each other?”
Before Martin Beck had time to reply, he heard a padding sound behind him and took a step to one side. A man in his thirties went past him into the room. Wearing bathing trunks, below average height, blond, very strongly built, with the same formidable tan as the woman. The man took a position behind her and to one side and peered inquisitively at the passport.
“Who’s that?” he said in German.
“I don’t know. This gentleman has lost him. Thought he’d moved here.”
“Lost,” said the blond man. “That’s not good. And without his passport too. I know what a bother that can be. I’m in that line myself.”
Playfully, he pulled the elastic of the woman’s bathing suit as far as he could and let it go with a smack. She gave him a quick look of annoyance.
“Aren’t we going out for a swim?” said the man.
“Yes, I’m ready.”
“Ari Boeck,” said Martin Beck. “I recognize the name. Aren’t you the swimmer?”
For the first time, the girl’s eyes wavered.
“I don’t compete any longer.”
“Haven’t you done some swimming in Sweden?”
“Yes, once. Two years ago. I was last. Funny that he gave you my address.”
The blond man looked inquiringly at her. No one said anything. Martin Beck put the passport away.
“Well, good-bye, then. Sorry to have troubled you.”
“Good-bye,” said the woman, smiling for the first time.
“Hope you find your friend,” said the blond man. “Have you tried the camping site by the Roman Baths? It’s up here, on the other side of the river. A huge number of people there. You can take a boat over.”
“You’re German, aren’t you?”
“Yes, from Hamburg.”
The man rumpled the girl’s short dark hair. Lightly she brushed his chest with the back of her left hand. Martin Beck turned around and went away.
The entrance hall was empty. On a shelf behind the table that served as a reception desk lay a little stack of passports. The top one was Finnish, but underneath it lay two in that familiar moss-green color. As if in passing, he stretched out his hand and took one of them. He opened it and the man he had met in Ari Boeck’s doorway stared glassily up at him. Tetz Radeberger, Travel Agency Official, Hamburg, born in 1935. Evidently no one had taken the trouble to lie to him.
He had bad luck on his journey home and ended up on a modern fast-moving ferryboat with roofed decks and growling diesel engines. There were only a few passengers on board-nearest to him sat two old women in gaudily colored shawls and bright dresses. They were carrying large white bundles and presumably had come from the country. Farther away in the saloon sat a serious, middle-aged man in a brown felt hat who was carrying a briefcase and wearing the facial expression of a civil servant. A tall man in a blue suit was whittling listlessly at a stick. By the landing stage stood a uniformed police officer, eating figure-eight-shaped cookies out of a paper cornet and talking sporadically to a small, well-dressed man with a bald head and a black mustache. A young couple with two doll-like children completed the assemblage.
Martin Beck inspected his fellow passengers gloomily. His expedition had been a failure. There was nothing to indicate that Ari Boeck had not been telling the truth.
Inwardly he cursed the strange impulse that had made him take on this pointless assignment. The possibilities of his solving the case became more and more remote. He was alone and without an idea in his head. And if, on the other hand, he had had any ideas, he would have lacked resources to implement them.
The worst of it was that, deep down within himself, he knew that he had not been guided by any kind of impulse at all. It was just his policeman’s soul—or whatever it might be called—that had started to function. It was the same instinct that made Kollberg sacrifice his time off—a kind of occupational disease that forced him to take on all assignments and do his best to solve them.
When he got back to the hotel it was a quarter past four and the dining room was closed. He had missed lunch. He went up to his room, showered and put on his dressing gown. Taking a pull of whisky from the bottle he had bought on the plane, he found the taste raw and unpleasant and went out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Then he leaned out the window, his elbows resting on the wide window sill, and watched the boats. Not even that managed to amuse him very much. Directly below him, at one of the outdoor tables, sat one of the passengers on the boat: the man in the blue suit. He had a glass of beer on the table and was still whittling at his stick.
Martin Beck frowned and lay down on the creaking bed. Again he thought the situation over. Sooner or later he would be forced to contact the police. It was a doubtful measure and no one would like it—at this stage not even he himself.
He whiled away the time remaining before dinner by sitting idling in an armchair in the lobby. On the other side of the room a gray-haired man wearing a signet ring was reading a Hungarian newspaper. It was the same man who had stared at him at breakfast. Martin Beck looked at him for a long time, but the man tranquilly went on drinking his coffee and seemed quite unconscious of his surroundings.
Martin Beck dined on mushroom soup and a perch-like fi
sh from Lake Balaton, washed down felicitously with white wine. The little orchestra played Liszt and Strauss and other composers of that elevated school. It was a superb dinner, but it did not gladden him, and the waiters swarmed around their lugubrious guest like medical experts around a dictator’s sickbed.
He had his coffee and brandy in the lobby. The man with the signet ring was still reading his newspaper on the other side of the room. Once again a glass of coffee was standing in front of him. After a few minutes, the man looked at his watch, glanced across at Martin Beck, folded up his paper and walked across the room.
Martin Beck was to be spared the problem of contacting the police. The police had taken that initiative. Twenty-three years’ experience had taught him to recognize a policeman from his walk.
12
The man in the gray suit took a calling card out of his top pocket and placed it on the edge of the table. Martin Beck glanced down at it as he rose to his feet. Only a name. Vilmos Szluka.
“May I sit down?”
The man spoke English. Martin Beck nodded.
“I’m from the police.”
“So am I,” said Martin Beck.
“I realized that. Coffee?”
Martin Beck nodded. The man from the police held up two fingers and almost immediately a waiter hurried forward with two glasses. This was clearly a coffee-drinking nation.
“I also realize that you are here to make certain investigations.”
Martin Beck did not reply immediately. He rubbed his nose and thought. Obviously this was the right moment to say, “Not at all—I’m here as a tourist, but I’m trying to get hold of a friend I’d like to see.” That was presumably what was expected of him.
Szluka did not seem to be in any special hurry. With obvious pleasure he sipped at his double espresso, however many that made now. Martin Beck had seen him drink at least three earlier in the day. The man was behaving politely but formally. His eyes were friendly, but very professional.
Martin Beck went on pondering. This man was indeed a policeman, but so far as he knew there was no law in the whole world that said that individual citizens should tell the police the truth. Unfortunately.