The Man Who Went Up In Smoke by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö Read Free Book Online

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.

Chapter 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