He left the window open and went down to eat. Opening the glass doors from the hall, he came into a lobby with deep armchairs, low tables and mirrors along one wall. Two steps led up to the dining room and at the far end sat the little orchestra he had heard up in his room.
The dining room was colossal, with two huge mahogany pillars and a balcony running along three of the walls, high up under the roof. Three waiters wearing reddish-brown jackets with black lapels were standing inside the door. They bowed and greeted him in chorus, while a fourth rushed forward and directed him to a table near the window and the orchestra.
Martin Beck stared at the menu for a long time before he found the column written in German and began to read. After a while the waiter, a gray-haired man with the physiognomy of a friendly boxer, leaned over toward him and said:
'Very gut Fischsuppe, gentleman."
Martin Beck at once decided upon fish soup.
"Barack?" said the waiter.
'What's that?" said Martin Beck, first in German, then in English.
'Very gut aperitif," said the waiter.
Martin Beck drank the aperitif called barack. Barack palinka, explained the waiter, was Hungarian apricot brandy.
He ate the fish soup, which was red and strongly spiced with paprika and was indeed very good.
He ate fillet of veal with potatoes in strong paprika sauce and he drank Czechoslovakian beer.
When he had finished his coffee, which was strong, and an additional barack, he felt very sleepy and went straight up to his room.
He shut the window and the shutters and crept into bed. It creaked. It creaked in a friendly way, he thought, and fell asleep.
8
Martin Beck was waked by a hoarse, long-drawn-out toot. As he tried to orient himself, blinking in the half-light, the toot was repeated twice. He turned over on his side and picked his wristwatch up off the night table. It was already ten to nine. The great bed creaked ceremoniously. Perhaps, he thought, it had once creaked as majestically beneath Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf. The daylight was trickling through the shutters. It was already very warm in the room.
He got up, went out into the bathroom and coughed for a while, as he usually did in the mornings. After drinking a gulp of mineral water, he pulled on his dressing gown and opened the shutters and the window. The contrast between the dusky light of the room and the clear, sharp sunlight outside was almost overwhelming. So was the view.
The Danube was flowing past him on its calm, even course from north to south, not especially blue, but wide and majestic and indubitably very beautiful. On the other side of the river rose two softly curved hills crowned by a monument and a walled fortress. Houses clambered only hesitantly along the sides of the hills, but farther away were other hills strewn with villas. That was the famous Buda side, then, and there you were very close to the heart of Central European culture. Martin Beck let his glance roam over the panoramic view, absently listening to the wingbeats of history. There the Romans had founded their mighty settlement Aquincum, from there the Hapsburg artillery had shot Pest into ruins during the War of Liberation of 1849, and there Szalasis' fascists and Lieutenant General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's SS troops had stayed for a whole month during the spring of 1945, with a meaningless heroism that invited annihilation (old fascists he had met in Sweden still spoke of it with pride).
Immediately below lay a white paddle steamer tied up to the quay, with its red, white and blue Czechoslovak flag hanging limply in the heat and tourists sunbathing in deckchairs on board. What had waked him was a Yugoslavian paddle-wheel tugboat that was slowly struggling upstream. It was big and old, with two tall funnels tilting asymmetrically, and it was pulling six heavily loaded barges. On the last barge a line had been strung between the wheelhouse and the low loading crane between the hatches. A young woman in a head scarf and blue work garb was tranquilly picking washing out of a basket and carefully hanging up baby clothes, unmoved by the beauty of the shores. To the left, arching over the river, was a long, airy, slender bridge. It seemed to lead directly to the mountain with the monument—a tall, slim bronze woman with a palm leaf raised above her head. Across the bridge thronged cars, buses, trolleys and pedestrians. To the right, northward, the tugboat had reached the next bridge. Again it let out three hoarse toots to announce the number of barges it was pulling, let down its funnels fore and aft and slid in under the low arch of the bridge. Just in front of the window a very small steamer swung in toward the shore, slid over fifty yards athwartship with the current and smartly completed the maneuver, putting in with hardly an inch to spare at a pontoon jetty. A preposterous number of people went ashore from the steamer and an equally preposterous number then boarded it.
The air was dry and warm. The sun was high. Martin Beck leaned out of the window, letting his eyes sweep from north to south as he considered a few facts he had gleaned from the brochures he had read on the plane.
'Budapest is the capital of the Hungarian People's Republic. It is considered to have been founded in 1873, when the three towns Buda, Pest and Óbuda were united into one, but excavations have revealed settlements several thousand years old, and Aquincum, the capital of the Roman province of Lower Pannonia, was situated on this spot. Today the city has nearly two million inhabitants and is divided into twenty-three districts."
It was certainly a very large city. He remembered the legendary Gustaf Lidberg's almost classic reflection on landing in New York in 1899, on his search for the counterfeiter Skog: "In this ant-heap is Mr. Who, address: Where?"
Well, New York was certainly larger than this, even at that time, but on the other hand, Chief Detective Lidberg had had unlimited tune at his disposal. He himself had only a week.
Martin Beck left history and the river traffic to their respective fates and went and took a shower. He put on his sandals and his light-gray Dacron slacks and wore his shirt outside. As he critically observed his unconventional attire in the mirror in the huge wardrobe, the mahogany doors suddenly opened by themselves, slowly and fatefully, with an unnerving creak, as in early thriller films. He still hadn't got his pulse under control when the telephone began to ring with short, urgent little signals.
'There's a gentleman to see you. He's waiting in the foyer. A Swedish gentleman."
'Is it Mr. Matsson?"
'Yes, I'm sure it is," said the receptionist happily.
Of course it is, thought Martin Beck as he went down the stairs. In that case there would be a thoroughly honorable end to this odd assignment.
It was not Alf Matsson, but a young man from the Embassy, extremely correctly dressed in a dark suit, black shoes, white shirt and a pale-gray silk tie. The man's eyes ran over Martin Beck, a glint of wonder in them, but only a glint.
'As you will understand, we are aware of the nature of your assignment. Perhaps we should discuss the matter."
They sat down in the lobby and discussed the matter.
'There are better hotels than this one," said the man from the Embassy.
'Really?"
'Yes. More modern. Tip-top. Swimming pool."
'Oh yes."
'The night club here isn't much good either."
'Oh yes."
'With regard to this Alf Matsson."
The man lowered his voice and looked around the lobby, which was empty except for an African sleeping in the farthest corner.
'Yes. Have you heard from him?"
'No. Nothing at all. The only thing we know for certain is that he checked in at Ferihegyi, that's the airport here, on the evening of the twenty-second. He spent the night at some kind of youth hotel called Ifjuság up on the Buda side. The next morning he moved in here. About half an hour later, he went out and took his room key with him. Since then, no one has seen him."