chief inspector could taste the blood on his tongue.
“I'm a police officer,” he said.
This information was greeted with roars of laughter.
“Police officers are our favorites,” said the youth pressing him up against the wall, and the others sniggered in delight.
The one who had hit him tried again, but this time Van Veeteren parried, at the same time thrusting his knee up between the close-cropped redhead's legs. The youth doubled up and groaned.
Van Veeteren delivered a right hook and succeeded in hitting somebody in the nasal region. He heard clearly how something gristly was rendered even more gristly, and as far as he could judge, the damaged area was not in his own hand.
The injured youth retired, but that was naturally the end of Van Veeteren's successes. The three remaining- and uninjured-youths forced the chief inspector down on all fours and began beating him up.
Van Veeteren curled up like a hedgehog, and as the punches and kicks were landing on him, all he could think of was: Silly little brats! Where are your daddies now, damn them?
After a while-it probably was no more than ten or fifteen seconds-they went away and left him. Ran off shouting and yelling.
“Hell and damnation…,” muttered Van Veeteren as he slowly got to his feet. He could feel he was bleeding from his lips and from a wound over his eyebrow; but when he started moving his arms and legs, he was able to establish that he was relatively unharmed.
He scanned the empty square.
Where the hell are all the witnesses? he thought, then resumed his walk home.
A little later, when he examined himself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to him that it had been absolutely right to put the investigation on ice over the weekend.
An officer in charge looking like this could hardly be a source of inspiration for his team.
Then, in his capacity as a private citizen, he phoned the police and reported the assault. He also insisted, in his capacity as a detective chief inspector, that he should be the one to interrogate any of the young delinquents the police managed to find.
“Were they immigrants?” asked the duty constable.
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Bodybuilders, I'd say. Why should they be immigrants?”
He received no answer.
When he had washed and gone to bed, he was surprised to note, on reflection, that he hadn't felt in the least bit scared during the whole of the incident.
Indignant and annoyed, but not scared.
I suppose I'm too old for that, he thought.
Or perhaps it needs something worse than that to put the wind up me.
Or then again-it occurred to him just as he was about to fall asleep-perhaps I'm no longer scared of anything on my own account.
Only for others.
For society For future developments.
For life?
Then he recalled a silly riddle Rooth had come up with the other day:
QUESTION: How do you make a random-number generator nowadays?
ANSWER: You pour two beers into a bodybuilder.
Then he fell asleep.
VIII
February 16-
March 9
33
The Pawlewski Hotel had seen better days, but then, so had Mr. Pawlewski.
And better guests.
More specifically, he had seen them sixty years ago and more, when he had to stand on a blue-painted and scratched stool in order to be able to see over the edge of the reception desk. When it was still Pawlewski senior and Pawlewski grand-senior running the show. And his mother and grandmother ruled the roost in the restaurant and linen store, and kept the cooks and pomaded bellboys in good order. While the century was somewhat younger.
A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then. An awful lot of water. Nowadays the stool stood under a tired palm tree in his own den, the former so-called bridal suite on the fifth floor of the hotel.
Everything has its day.
Biedersen spent the first three evenings in the bar in the company of numerous whiskeys and the assortment of doubtful characters that comprised the clientele, roughly half of them one-night guests and the rest introverted regulars. All of them were men. All had thinning hair and almost all had drooping shoulders, some kind of beard or mustache, and vacant expressions. He didn't waste a minute on any of them, and from Monday night onward he drank from the bottle he had in his room instead.
This made the days monotonous and indistinguishable. He got up about noon. Left his room an hour later and spent the afternoon wandering around the town, so that the chambermaid had an opportunity to come in and mark the commencement of a new day. He would drink black coffee in some cafe or other, preferably Gunther's near the town center, try to read a newspaper or perhaps several, go for a long walk, and buy some cigarettes plus the evening's bottle, which he would choose with a degree of care that struck him as unjustified but nevertheless essential. As if it were one of the basic rules in a game-he was not sure if he was playing it or if he was one of the pieces, but for the moment it was the only thing taking place. There was nothing else at all.
He returned by devious routes to the Pawlewski the moment he noticed that the dirt-gray dusk was beginning to fall. It happened early in a town like this, accompanied by acid rain and the smog from coal fires.
Stretched out on his newly made bed, with sick-looking pigeons cooing outside on the roof, he drank his first whiskey of the day before taking a bath, with number two within easy reach on the floor. Went down to the restaurant for dinner, usually as one of the first diners, occasionally completely alone in the oversized, mouse- brown room with uninspiring crystal glass chandeliers and tablecloths that had once been white. Drank beer with the food, coffee and cognac afterward, and each night he remained sitting there a little longer.
He tried to last out for a few extra minutes; to shrink and cut back as much as possible the accursed boredom of what remained of the waking day. And it was as he returned from these meals-on his way to the bar or up to his room-that Mr. Pawlewski saw him. Pawlewski spent virtually all his waking hours more or less invisible behind the reception desk; from there he could observe and pass judgment and as usual ascertain that most things had seen better days.
Who this particular guest was, and what the hell he was doing in this lugubrious town in a month like February were the kind of questions that, in his capacity of observer and man of the world, he had ceased to ask forty or more years ago.
At first the intoxication and numbing of the senses was an aim in itself. Simply to get away, to run away and put distance between himself and what was happening, had been the primary, not to say the only, goal he had had
