The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

'The day after tomorrow, in that case.'

'That's all right too.'

'I'll let you know this afternoon.'

'Don't think about it too long, though.'

'I'll phone in about an hour. Good-bye.'

The red-haired man rushed up and round his desk. He thumped Martin Beck on the back with his left hand and shook hands with his right.

'Well, good-bye then. Good-bye, Martin. And do what you can. This is important.'

'It really is,' said the other man.

'Yes,' said the redhead, 'we might have another Wallenberg affair on our hands.'

'That was the word we were told not to mention,' said the other man in weary despair.

Martin Beck nodded and left.

4

'Are you going out there?' said Hammar.

'Don't know yet. I don't even know the language.'

'Neither does anyone else on the force. You can be quite sure we checked. Anyhow, they say you can get by with German and English.'

'Odd story.'

'Stupid story,' said Hammar. 'But I know something that those people at the F.O. don't know. We've got a dossier on him.'

'Alf Matsson?'

'Yes. The Third Section had it. In the secret files.'

'Counter-Espionage?'

'Exactly. The Security Division. An investigation was made on this guy three months ago.'

There was a deafening thumping on the door and Kollberg thrust his head in. He stared at Martin Beck in astonishment

'What are you doing here?'

'Having my holiday.'

'What's all this hush-hush you're up to? Shall I go away? As quietly as I came, without anybody noticing?'

'Yes,' said Hammar. 'No, don't. I'm tired of hush-hush. Come in and shut the door.'

He pulled a file out of a desk drawer.

'This was a routine investigation,' he said, 'and it gave rise to no particular action. But parts of it might interest anyone who is thinking of looking into the case.'

'What the hell are you up to?' said Kollberg. 'Have you opened a secret agency or something?'

'If you don't pipe down, you can go,' said Martin Beck. 'Why was Counter-Espionage interested in Matsson?'

'The passport people have their own little eccentricities. At Arlanda airport, for instance, they write down the names of people who travel to those European countries that require visas. Some bright boy who looked in their books got it into his head that this Matsson traveled all too often. To Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Constanta, Belgrade. He was great for using his passport.'

'And?'

'So Security did a little hush-hush investigation. They went, for instance, to the magazine he works for and asked.'

'And what did they reply?'

'Perfectly correct, said the magazine. Alf Matsson is a great one for using his passport. Why shouldn't he be? He's our expert on Eastern European affairs. The results are no more remarkable than that. But there are one or two things. Take this rubbish and read it for yourself. You can sit here. Because now I'm going to go home. And this evening I'm going to go to a James Bond film. Bye!'

Martin Beck picked up the report and began to read. When he had finished the first page, he pushed it over to Kollberg, who picked it up between the tips of his fingers and placed it down in front of him. Martin Beck looked question-ingly at him.

'I sweat so much,' said Kollberg. 'Don't want to mess up their secret documents.'

Martin Beck nodded. He himself never sweated except when he had a cold.

They said nothing for the following half hour.

The dossier did not offer much of immediate interest, but it was very thoroughly compiled. Alf Matsson was not born in Gothenburg in 1934, but in Molndal in 1933. He had begun as a journalist in the provinces in 1952 and been a reporter on several daily papers before going to Stockholm as a sports writer in 1955. As a sports reporter, he had made several trips abroad, among others to the Olympic Games, in Melbourne in 1956 and in Rome in 1960. A number of editors vouchsafed that he was a skillful journalist: '… adroit, with a speedy pen.' He had left the daily press in 1961, when he was taken on by the weekly for which he still worked. During the last four years he had devoted more and more of his time to overseas reporting on a very wide variety of subjects, from politics and economics to sport and pop stars. He had taken his university entrance exam and spoke fluent English and German, passable Spanish and some French and Russian. He earned over 40,000 kronor a year and had been married twice. His first marriage took place in 1954 and was dissolved the following year. He had married again in 1961 and had two children, a daughter by his first marriage and a son by his second.

With praiseworthy diligence, the investigator now went over to the man's less admirable points. On several occasions he had neglected to pay maintenance for his elder child. His first wife described him as a 'drunkard and a brutal beast.' Parenthetically, it was pointed out that this witness appeared to be not entirely reliable. There were, however, several indications that Alf Matsson drank, among others a remark in a statement by an ex-colleague who said that he was 'all right, but a bastard when he got drunk,' but only one of these statements was supported by evidence. On the eve of Twelfth Day in 1966, a radio patrol in Malmo had taken him to the emergency room of General Hospital after he had been stabbed in the hand during a brawl at the home of a certain Bengt Jonsson, whom he had happened to be visiting. The case was investigated by the police but was not taken to court, as Matsson had not wished to press a charge. However, two policemen by the names of Kristiansson and Kvant described both Matsson and Jonsson as under the influence, so the case was registered at the Commission on Alcoholism.

The tone of the statement by his present boss, an editor called Eriksson, was snooty. Matsson was the magazine's 'expert on Eastern Europe' (whatever use a publication of this kind could possibly have for such a person) and the editorial board found no cause to give the police any further information about his journalistic activities. Matsson was, they went on to say, very interested in and well-informed on Eastern European matters, often produced projects of his own, and had on several occasions proved himself ambitious by giving up holidays and days off without extra pay to be able to carry out certain reporting assignments that especially interested him.

Some previous reader had in turn appeared ambitious by underlining this sentence in red. It could hardly have been Hammar, who did not mess up other people's reports.

A detailed account of Matsson's published articles showed that they consisted almost exclusively of interviews with famous athletes and reportage on sports, film stars and other figures from the entertainment world.

The dossier contained several items in the same style. When he had finished reading, Kollberg said, 'Singularly uninteresting person.'

'There's one peculiar detail.'

'That he's disappeared, you mean?'

'Exactly,' said Martin Beck.

A minute later, he dialed the Foreign Office number and Kollberg, much to his surprise, heard him say, 'Is that Martin? Yes, hi Martin—this is Martin.'

Martin Beck seemed to listen for a moment, a tortured expression on his face. Then he said, 'Yes, I'm going.'

5