The Abominable Man (3 page)

The girl across from him was his daughter, Ingrid. She was nineteen years old, and if you overlooked the fact that she was very blond and he very dark, they were strikingly similar.

“Do you want more coffee?” asked Martin Beck.

Ingrid shook her head and the waitress withdrew to prepare the check. Martin Beck lifted the little bottle of
punsch
from its ice bucket and poured what remained into the two glasses. Ingrid sipped at hers.

“We ought to do this more often,” she said.

“Drink
punsch?”

“Mmm, it is good. No, I mean get together. Next time I’ll invite you to dinner. At my place on Klostervägen. You haven’t seen it yet.”

Ingrid had moved away from home three months before her parents separated. Martin Beck sometimes wondered if he ever would have had the strength to break out of his stagnant marriage to Inga if Ingrid hadn’t encouraged him. She hadn’t been happy at home and moved in
with a friend even before she was out of high school. Now she was studying sociology at the university and had just recently found a one-room apartment in Stocksund. For the time being she was still subletting, but she had prospects of eventually getting the lease on her own.

“Mama and Rolf were out to visit day before yesterday,” she said. “I was hoping you’d come too, but I couldn’t get hold of you.”

“No, I was in Orebro for a couple of days. How are they?”

“Fine. Mama had a whole trunkload of stuff with her. Towels and napkins and that blue coffee service and I don’t know what all. Oh, and we talked about Rolf’s birthday. Mama wants us to come out and have dinner with them. If you can.”

Rolf was three years younger than Ingrid. They were as different as a brother and sister can be, but they’d always gotten along well.

The redhead came with the check. Martin Beck paid and emptied his glass. He looked at his wristwatch. It was a couple of minutes to one.

“Shall we go?” said Ingrid, quickly downing the last few drops of her
punsch.

They strolled north on Österlånggatan. The stars were out and the air was quite chilly. A couple of drunken teen-agers came walking out of Drakens Gränd, shouting and hollering until the walls of the old buildings echoed with the din.

Ingrid put her hand under her father’s arm and suited her stride to his. She was long-legged and slim, almost skinny, Martin Beck thought, but she herself was always saying she’d have to go on a diet.

“Do you want to come up?” he asked on the hill up toward Köpmantorget.

“Yes, but only to call a taxi. It’s late, and you have to sleep.”

Martin Beck yawned.

“As a matter of fact I am pretty tired,” he said.

A man was squatting by the base of the statue of St. George and the Dragon. He seemed to be sleeping, his forehead resting against his knees.

As Ingrid and Martin Beck passed, he lifted his head and said something inarticulate in a high thick voice, then stretched his legs out in front of him and fell asleep again with his chin on his chest.

“Shouldn’t he be sleeping it off at Nicolai?” said Ingrid. “It’s pretty cold to be sitting outside.”

“He’ll probably wind up there eventually,” Martin Beck said. “If there’s room. But it’s a long time since it was my job to take care of drunks.”

They walked on into Köpmangatan in silence.

Martin Beck was thinking about the summer twenty-two years ago when he’d walked a beat in the Nicolai precinct. Stockholm was a different city then. The Old City had been an idyllic little town. More drunkenness and poverty and misery, of course, before they’d cleared out the slums and restored the buildings and raised the rents so the old tenants could no longer afford to stay. Living here had become fashionable, and he himself was now one of the privileged few.

They rode to the top floor on the elevator, which had been installed when the building was renovated and was one of the few in the Old City. The apartment was completely modernized and consisted of a hall, a small kitchen, a bathroom and two rooms whose windows opened on a large open yard on the east. The rooms were snug and asymmetrical, with deep bay windows and low ceilings. The first of the two rooms was furnished with
comfortable easy chairs and low tables and had a fireplace. The inner room contained a broad bed framed by deep built-in shelves and cupboards and, by the window, a huge desk with drawers beneath.

Without taking off her coat, Ingrid went in and sat down at the desk, lifted the receiver and dialed for a taxi.

“Won’t you stay for a minute?” Martin called from the kitchen.

“No, I have to go home and get to bed. I’m dead tired. So are you, for that matter.”

Martin Beck made no objection. All of a sudden he didn’t feel a bit sleepy, but all evening long he’d been yawning, and at the movie—they’d been to see Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
—he’d several times been on the verge of dozing off.

Ingrid finally got hold of a taxi, came out to the kitchen and kissed Martin Beck on the cheek.

“Thanks for a good time. I’ll see you at Rolf’s birthday if not before. Sleep well.”

Martin Beck followed her out to the elevator and whispered good night before closing the doors and going back into his apartment.

He poured the beer he’d taken from the refrigerator into a big glass, walked in and set it on the desk. Then he went to the hi-fi by the fireplace, looked through his records and put one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on the turntable. The building was well insulated and he knew he could turn the volume quite high without bothering the neighbors. He sat down at the desk and drank the beer, which was fresh and cold and washed away the sweet sticky taste of
punsch.
He pinched together the paper mouthpiece of a Florida, put the cigarette between his teeth and lit a match. Then he rested his chin in his hands and stared out through the window.

The spring sky arched deep blue and starry above the
moonlit roof on the other side of the yard. Martin Beck listened to the music and let his thoughts wander freely. He felt utterly relaxed and content.

When he’d turned the record, he walked over to the shelf above the bed and lifted down a half-completed model of the clipper ship
Flying Cloud.
He worked on masts and yards for almost an hour before putting the model back on its shelf.

While getting undressed, he admired his two completed models with a certain pride—the
Cutty Sark
and the training ship
Danmark.
Soon he’d have only the rigging left to do on the
Flying Cloud,
the most difficult and the most trying part.

He walked naked out to the kitchen and put the ashtray and the beer glass on the counter beside the sink. Then he turned out all the lights except the one above his pillow, closed the bedroom door to a crack and went to bed. He wound the clock, which said two thirty-five, and checked to see that the alarm button was pushed in. He had, he hoped, a free day in front of him and could sleep as long as he liked.

Kurt Bergengren’s
Archipelago Steamboats
lay on the night table and he browsed through it, looking at pictures he’d studied carefully before and reading a passage here and a caption there with a strong feeling of nostalgia. The book was large and heavy and not particularly well suited for reading in bed, and his arms were soon tired from holding it. He put it aside and reached out to turn off the reading light.

Then the telephone rang.

Einar Rönn really was dead tired.

He’d been at work for over seventeen hours at a single stretch. Right at the moment, he was standing in the Criminal Division orderly room in the police building on Kungsholmsgatan, looking at a sobbing male adult who had laid hands on one of his fellow men.

For that matter maybe “male adult” was saying too much, since the prisoner was by and large only a child. An eighteen-year-old boy with shoulder-length blond hair, bright red Levi’s and a brown suede jacket with a fringe and the word
LOVE
painted on the back. The letters were surrounded by ornamental flowers in flourishes of pink and violet and baby blue. There were also flowers and words on the legs of his boots, to be exact, the words
PEACE
and
MAGGIE
. Long fringes of soft wavy human hair were ingeniously sewn to the jacket’s arms.

It was enough to make you wonder if someone hadn’t been scalped.

Rönn felt like sobbing himself. Partly from exhaustion, but mostly, as was so often the case these days, because he felt sorrier for the criminal than for the victim.

The young man with the pretty hair had tried to kill a narcotics pusher. The attempt had not been particularly successful, yet successful enough that the police regarded him as a prime suspect to attempted murder in the second degree.

Rönn had been hunting him since five o’clock that afternoon, which meant he’d been forced to track down and search through no fewer than eighteen narcotics
hangouts in different parts of his beautiful city, each one filthier and more repulsive than the one before.

All because some bastard who sold hash mixed with opium to school kids on Mariatorget had gotten a bump on the head. All right, caused by an iron pipe and motivated by the fact that the agent of the blow was broke. But after all. Rönn thought.

Plus: nine hours overtime, which for that matter would be ten before he got home to his apartment in Vällingby.

But you had to take the bad with the good. In this case the good would be the salary.

Rönn was from Lapland, born in Arjeplog and married to a Lappish girl. He didn’t particularly like Vällingby, but he liked the name of the street he lived on: Lapland Street.

He looked on while one of his younger colleagues, on night duty, wrote out a receipt for the transfer of the prisoner and delivered up the hair fetish to two guards, who in their turn shoved the prisoner into an elevator for forwarding to the booking section three flights up.

A transfer receipt is a piece of paper bearing the name of the prisoner and binding on no one, on the back of which the duty officer writes appropriate remarks. For example:
Very wild, threw himself again and again against the wall and was injured.
Or:
Uncontrollable, ran into a door and was injured.
Maybe just:
Fell down and hurt himself.

And so on.

The door from the yard opened and two patrolmen ushered in an older man with a bushy gray beard. Just as they crossed the threshold one of the patrolmen drove his fist into the prisoner’s abdomen. The man doubled up and gave out a stifled cry, something like the howl of a dog. The two on-duty detectives shuffled their papers undisturbed.

Rönn threw a tired look at the patrolmen but said nothing.

Then he yawned and looked at his watch.

Seventeen minutes after two.

The telephone rang. One of the detectives answered.

“Yes, this is Criminal, Gustavsson here.”

Rönn put on his fur hat and moved toward the door. He had his hand on the knob when the man named Gustavsson stopped him.

“What? Wait a second. Hey, Rönn?”

“Yeah?”

“Here’s something for you.”

“What now?”

“Something at Mount Sabbath. Somebody’s been shot or something. The guy on the phone sounds pretty confused.”

Rönn sighed and turned around. Gustavsson took his hand off the receiver.

“One of the boys from Violence is here right now. One of the big wheels. Okay?”

A short pause.

“Yes, yes, I can hear you. It’s awful, yes. Now exactly where are you?”

Gustavsson was a thinnish man in his thirties with a tough and impassive air. He listened, then put his hand over the receiver again.

“He’s at the main entrance to the central building at Mount Sabbath. Obviously needs help. Are you going?”

“Okay,” Rönn said. “I guess I will.”

“Do you need a ride? This radio car seems to be free.”

Rönn looked a little woefully at the two radio patrolmen and shook his head. They were big and strong and armed with pistols and night sticks in leather holsters. Their prisoner lay like a whimpering bundle at their feet.
They themselves stared jealously and foolishly at Rönn, the hope of promotion in their shallow blue eyes.

“No, I’ll take my own car,” he said, and left.

Einar Rönn was no big wheel, and right at the moment he didn’t feel even like a cog. There were some people who thought he was a very able policeman, and others who said he was typically mediocre. Be that as it might, he had, after years of faithful service, become a deputy inspector on the Violence Squad. A real sleuth, to use the language of the tabloids. That he was peaceable and middle-aged, red-nosed and slightly corpulent from sitting still too much—on those points everyone agreed.

It took him four minutes and twelve seconds to drive to the indicated address.

Mount Sabbath Hospital is spread out over a large, hilly, roughly triangular tract with its base in the north along Vasa Park, its sides along Dalagatan on the east and Torsgatan on the west, and its tip cut off abruptly by the approach to the new bridge over Barnhus Bay. A large brick building belonging to the gas works pushes in from Torsgatan, putting a notch in one corner.

The hospital gets its name from an innkeeper, Vallentin Sabbath, who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, owned two taverns in the Old City—the Rostock and the Lion. He bought land here and raised carp in ponds that have since dried out or been filled in, and for three years he operated a restaurant on the property before departing this life in 1720.

About ten years later a mineral springs, or spa, was opened on the premises. The two-hundred-year-old mineral springs hotel, which in the course of the years has
seen service both as a hospital and a poorhouse, now crouches in the shadow of an eight-story geriatric center.

The original hospital was built a little more than a hundred years ago on the rocky outcropping along Dalagatan and consisted of a number of pavilions connected by long, covered passages. Some of the old pavilions are still in use, but a number of them have quite recently been torn down and replaced by new ones, and the system of passages is now underground.