The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

Martin Beck was lying in the bathtub when the telephone rang.

He had slept past breakfast and taken a walk on the quay before lunch. The sun was hotter than ever, and even down by the river, the air was not moving at all. When he returned to the hotel, he had felt a greater need for a quick bath than for food, and had decided to let lunch wait. Now he was lying in the lukewarm water and heard the telephone ring with short quick signals.

He climbed out of the tub, swept a large bath towel around him and lifted the receiver.

'Mr. Beck?'

'Yes?'

'Please forgive me for not using your title. As you will understand, it is purely—well, let's say a, well… precautionary measure.'

It was the young man from the Embassy. Martin Beck wondered whom this precautionary measure was against, as both the hotel people and Szluka knew he was a policeman, but he said, 'Of course.'

'How are things going? Have you made any progress?'

Martin Beck let the bath towel fall and sat down on the bed.

'No,' he said.

'Haven't you got any clues?'

'No,' said Martin Beck.

There was a brief silence, and then he added, 'I've spoken to the police here.'

'I think that was a singularly unwise move,' said the man from the Embassy.

'Possibly,' said Martin Beck. 'I could hardly avoid it. I was visited by a gentleman called Vilmos Szluka.'

'Major Szluka. What did he want?'

'Nothing. He probably said more or less the same thing to me as he already said to you. That he had no reason to take up the case.'

'I see. What are you thinking of doing now?'

'Having some lunch,' said Martin Beck.

'I mean about the matter we were discussing.'

'I don't know.'

There was another silence. Then the young man said, 'Well, you know where to phone if there's anything.'

'Yes.'

'Good-bye, then.'

'Good-bye.'

Martin Beck put down the receiver and went out and pulled the plug out of the bathtub. Then he dressed and went down and sat under the awning outside the dining room and ordered lunch.

It was uncomfortably hot even in the shade of the awning. He ate slowly, taking large gulps of the cold beer. He had an unpleasant feeling of being watched. He had not seen the tall, dark-haired man, but all the same he continually felt he was under surveillance.

He looked at the people around him. They were the usual gathering of lunch guests—mostly foreigners like himself and most of them staying at the hotel. He heard scattered fragments of conversation, mainly in German and Hungarian, but also English and some language he could not identify.

Suddenly he heard someone behind him say quite clearly in Swedish: 'Crispbread.' He turned around and saw two ladies, undeniably Swedish, sitting by the window in the dining room.

He heard one of them say, 'Yes, I always take some with me. And toilet paper. It's always so bad abroad. If there is any at all.'

'Yes,' said the other. 'I remember once in Spain…'

Martin Beck gave up listening to this typically Swedish conversation, and devoted himself to trying to decide which of those sitting around him was his shadow. For a long time he suspected a man who was past middle age —he was sitting some way away with his back to him and kept glancing over his shoulder in his direction. But then the man got up and lifted down a fluffy little dog that had been sitting, concealed, on his lap and vanished with the dog around the corner of the hotel.

When Martin Beck had finished eating and had drunk a cup of that strong coffee, much of the afternoon was already gone. It was exhaustingly hot, but he walked up into town for a bit, trying to keep in the shade all the time. He had discovered that the police station was only a few blocks away from the hotel and had no difficulty in finding it. On the steps—where the key had been found, according to Szluka—there was a patrolman in blue-gray uniform standing wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Martin Beck circled the police station and took another route home, all the time with an unpleasant feeling he was being watched. This was something quite new to him. During his twenty-three years with the police, he had many times been involved in keeping a watch on suspected persons and shadowing them. Only now did he understand to the full what it felt like to be shadowed. To know that all the while one was being observed and watched, that every movement one made was being registered, that all the time someone was keeping himself hidden somewhere in the vicinity, following every step one took.

Martin Beck went up to his room and stayed there in the relative cool for the rest of the day. He sat at the table with a piece of paper in front of him and a pen in hand, trying to make some kind of summary of what he knew about the Alf Matsson case.

In the end he tore up the paper into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet What he knew was so infinitesimal that it seemed simply foolish to write it down. He would not have to strain himself to keep it all in mind. Actually, thought Martin Beck, he knew no more than what could be contained in a shrimp's brain.

The sun went down and colored the river red, the brief dusk passed unnoticeably into a velvet darkness, and with the dark came the first cool breezes from the hills down across the river.

Martin Beck stood by his window and watched the surface of the water being rippled by the light evening breeze. A man was standing by a tree just below his window. A cigarette glowed and Martin Beck thought he recognized the tall dark man. In some way it was a relief to see him there, to escape that vague, creeping sense of his presence in the vicinity.

He put on a suit, went down to the dining room and had dinner. He ate as slowly as possible and drank two barack palinkas before going up to his room again.

The evening breeze had gone, the river lay black and shiny, and the heat was just as suffocating outside as inside in the room.

Martin Beck left the windows and shutters open and drew back the curtains. Then he undressed and got into the creaking bed.

16

Heat that is really intense almost always becomes harder to tolerate when the sun has gone down. Anyone who is used to heat knows the routine and closes the window and shutters and draws the curtains. Like most Scandinavians, Martin Beck lacked these instincts. He had drawn back the curtains and opened the windows wide and was lying on his back in the dark, waiting for the cool air. It never came. He switched on the bedside lamp and tried to read. That did not work very well either. He did have a box of sleeping tablets in the bathroom, but was not very willing to take that way out. The past day had gone by without any positive achievements on his part and consequently there was every reason for him to try to remain on the alert and somehow produce results tomorrow. If he took the sleeping tablets, he would be walking around as if in a trance the next morning: he knew this of old.

He got up and sat down by the open window. The difference was infinitesimal: there was not the slightest draft, nor even a hot breeze from the Hungarian steppes, wherever they were. The city seemed almost as if it, too, had difficulty breathing, had fallen into a coma and become unconscious from the heat. After a while a lone yellow trolley appeared on the other side of the river. It drove slowly across Elisabeth Bridge, and the sound of the wheels' friction against the rails echoed and grew louder under the arch of the bridge before it rolled away across the water. Despite the distance, he could see that it was empty. Twenty-three hours earlier, he had been standing up there on the bridge, puzzling over his strange meeting with the woman from Ujpest. It had not been a bad place.

He pulled on his trousers and shirt and went out. The porter's desk was empty. On the street, a green Skoda started up and drove slowly and reluctantly around the corner. Pairs of lovers in cars are the same the world over. He walked along the edge of the quay—past some sleeping boats—went by the statue of the Hungarian poet Petofi