The Man Who Went Up in Smoke Read online

  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 greying hair, straight nose, brown eyes, grey suit, black shoes, white shirt and grey 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 Úttöró 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 storeys and nothing about its exterior gave the impression that it was a boarding-house, but out on the street stood two cars with foreign licence 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.’

  ‘That's my niece. One flight up. Second door to the right.’

  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 paralysed 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 b
uilt, 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 colour. 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 ferry with roofed decks and growling diesel engines. There were only a few passengers on board – nearest to him sat two old women in gaudily coloured 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 biscuits out of a paper cornet and talking sporadically to a small, well-dressed man with a bald head and a black moustache. 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 of 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 grey-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 fish 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 grey 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.

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin Beck. ‘That's correct.’

  ‘Then wouldn't the most logical thing to do have been to turn to us first?’

  Martin Beck preferred not to reply to that one. After a pause of a few seconds, the other man developed the train of thought himself.

  ‘In the event something that demands an investigation really should have happened,’ he said.

  ‘I have no official assignment.’

  ‘And we have not been notified of any charge. Only an inquiry in very vague terms. In other words, it appears that nothing has happened.’

  Martin Beck gulped down his coffee, which was extremely strong. The conversation was growing more unpleasant than he had expected. But under any circumstances, there was no reason for him to allow himself to be lectured to in a hotel foyer by a policeman who did not even take the trouble to i
dentify himself.

  ‘Nonetheless, the police here have considered that they had cause to go through Alf Matsson's belongings,’ he said.

  It was a random comment but it struck home.

  ‘I don't know anything about that,’ said Szluka stiffly. ‘Can you identify yourself, by the way?’

  ‘Can you?’

  He caught a swift change in those brown eyes. The man was by no means harmless.

  Szluka put his hand into his inside pocket, withdrew his wallet and opened it, swiftly and casually. Martin Beck did not bother to look, but showed his service badge clipped to his key ring.

  ‘That's not valid identification,’ said Szluka. ‘In our country you can buy emblems of different kinds in the toyshops.’

  This point of view was not entirely without justification and Martin Beck did not consider the matter worth further argument. He took out his identification card.

  ‘My passport is at the reception desk.’

  The other man studied the card thoroughly and at length. As he returned it, he said, ‘How long are you planning to stay?’

  ‘My visa is good until the end of the month.’

  Szluka smiled for the first time during their conversation. The smile hardly came from the heart and it was not difficult to figure out what it meant. The Hungarian sipped up the last drop of coffee, buttoned up his jacket and said:

  ‘I do not wish to stop you although, naturally, I could do it. As far as I can see, your activities are more or less of a private nature. I assume that they will remain so and that they will not harm the interests of the general public or any individual citizen.’

  ‘You can always go on tailing me, of course.’

  Szluka did not reply. His eyes were cold and hostile.

  ‘What do you really think you're doing?’ he said.