'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 the 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 Ujpest. 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
