The Fire Engine that Disappeared

by Maj Sjowall

  “Did you tell him Karlsson had committed suicide?”

  “We-ell … I said he was dead, anyhow, and that the police had been there.”

  When Martin Beck got back to Västberga, he sat smoking and thinking for a long time before calling up Hammar.

  “This is getting crazier and crazier,” said Hammar. “It would be a good thing for once if you could find someone involved in this case who is alive. What are you going to get out of all this? And why did the man write your name down before killing himself?”

  “I think that Karlsson and Olofsson and Malm belonged to the same—well, shall we call it gang? And Karlsson for some reason wanted to get out. He thought of calling up the police and had perhaps heard of me and so wrote down my name. Then he changed his mind. I don’t know what part he played in the gang. How do you think that sounds?”

  “I think the whole mess sounds like a schoolboy’s story,” said Hammar. “Now we’ve three dead men, one murdered, one both murdered and committed suicide and one who only committed suicide. How do you explain this suicidal psychosis?”

  Martin Beck sighed.

  “I presume Malm began to get nervous and finally looked up Karlsson to ask him if he knew where Olofsson had got to. When he heard that Karlsson was dead, then he felt impelled to take his own life.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Yes,” said Hammar. “It could have been like that. But I’ve never been on a case with so many ifs and buts and perhapses and presumablys. We don’t know much for certain. We’ll have to have a meeting soon. I’ll call and get it fixed.”

  He put the receiver down.

  Martin Beck sat for a moment with his hand on the telephone receiver, trying to imagine what Kollberg would say. Before he had time to lift the receiver, the telephone rang.

  “Bingo!” said Kollberg.

  “What?” Martin Beck asked.

  “Reply from Interpol. Lasalle’s fingerprints.”

  “Oh, hell. Well?”

  “Well, they recognize that thumb, but not the name Alfonse Lasalle.”

  “Whose thumbprint is it then?”

  “Just wait a moment, will you? The man with the thumb has many aliases. The French police know him as the following: Albert Corbier, Alfonse Benette, Samir Riffi, Alfred Laffey, Auguste Cassin and Auguste Dupont. They’re sending more names later. They don’t know who he is but think he has Lebanese citizenship and that he’s spent most of his time lately in France and North Africa. They think it is evident that he was a member of the OAS earlier. He’s suspected of a whole string of crimes or complicity in crimes. Drug-trafficking, currency-smuggling and plenty more, murder among them.”

  “Has he never been caught?”

  “Apparently not. Sounds a slippery devil. He obviously changes passports and names and nationality more often than his underpants and they’ve still got no real evidence against him.”

  “Description then?”

  “Well, it’s not all that clear. They’ve sent one, but say it need not necessarily fit. Nice of them. Let me see, now. Yes, age about thirty-five, height five ten, weight hundred and sixty, black hair, good teeth, wait … this is in French and I’ve not had time to translate it yet … straight hair-line, thick straight eyebrows, slightly hooked nose with a three-quarter-inch, scarcely visible scar on the left nostril, otherwise no known physical defects or special marks of recognition.”

  “Yes, that fits well with Lasalle. They don’t know where he is, of course?”

  “No. I’ll call back in a while. Must get this translated and written down.”

  Martin Beck remained sitting with the silent receiver in his hand. As he put it down, he remembered that he had not had time to tell Kollberg about Ernst Sigurd Karlsson.

  28

  Månsson went to Copenhagen on Tuesday morning, the twenty-third of July. As he considered speed essential, he took one of the hovercraft ferries. It was called The Flying Fish and covered the stretch across the strait in exactly thirty-five minutes. Otherwise, it was no fun at all. One sits there, shaking in an airplane seat and without a window seat, the prospects of catching even a passing glimpse of the water are remote.

  As far as Denmark was concerned, Månsson’s international connections were excellent. He slipped past all ordinary obstacles and interstate complications and walked straight up to a police inspector named Mogensen and said:

  “Hello. I’m looking for a woman. I don’t know her name.”

  “Hello, yourself,” said Mogensen. “What does she look like?”

  “She’s got short curly fair hair and blue eyes. Strong features, wide mouth, good teeth and a dimple in her chin. About five feet eight, broad shoulders and hips, narrow waist. Strong short legs and well-shaped calves. She’s about thirty-five. Swedish. Certainly from Skåne, probably from Malmö.”

  “Sounds delightful,” said Mogensen.

  “I’m not sure about that. She usually wears long dark knitted sweaters and long trousers or short checked skirts, the latter probably, at this time of year. She wears very wide belts, which seem to be pulled very tight around her waist. It’s not out of the question that she takes drugs. She may have some kind of artistic connection. People who have seen her say that she’s always got paint or something like it on her hands.”

  “Good,” said Mogensen.

  And that was that.

  Månsson’s good relationship with this man went far back in time. They had known each other since the end of the war, when Mogensen had gone to Trelleborg from Germany. He was one of approximately two thousand Danish policemen arrested by the Gestapo during the great raid on the nineteenth of September, 1944, and taken off to German concentration camps.

  They had kept contact ever since then; their connection was informal and practical and useful on both sides. What would have taken Månsson six months to find out if he had gone through the usual channels, Mogensen could arrange in a day. And when Mogensen wanted something definite in Malmö, Månsson generally managed to find it in a couple of hours. The time-difference was due to the fact that Copenhagen is actually four times the size of Malmö.

  It is part of good Scandinavian relations to say that cooperation between the Swedish and the Danish police is extremely good. In practice, however, it is otherwise, to some extent due to language difficulties.

  That Swedes and Danes understand each other’s languages with the minimum of effort is a truth which over the years has been carefully cherished at high levels in both countries. But this is often a truth with modification, and even more often something much more serious, an attack of wishful thinking, for instance, or an illusion. Or to put it bluntly, a lie.

  Two of the many victims of this wishful thinking were Hammar and a prominent Danish criminologist, who had known each other for many years and wrestled together at numerous police conferences. They were good friends and each used to make high-sounding statements on how they both mastered each other’s language with the greatest of ease, which any other normal Scandinavian ought to be able to do anyhow, a sarcastic addendum they seldom neglected to make.

  This was so until, after a decade of hobnobbing at conferences and other high-level meetings, they met for a weekend at Hammar’s country cottage, when it turned out that they could not even communicate with each other on the simplest everyday matters. When the Dane asked to borrow a map, Hammar went and fetched a photograph of himself, and then it was all over. Part of their universe had collapsed and after celebrating formal orgies of foolish misunderstandings for a few hours, they went over to speaking English and discovered that they did not really like each other at all.

  Part of the secret of the good relations between Månsson and Mogensen was that they did in fact understand each other. Neither of them was sufficiently presumptuous to think that he would understand the other’s language just like that, and consequently they spoke to each other in so-called Scandinavian, a homemade mixture which they were almost the only ones to understand. In addition, th
ey were both good policemen and neither of them was of a disposition to complicate matters.

  At half-past two in the afternoon, Månsson went back to the police station in Polititorvet in Copenhagen and received a paper on which was typed a name and address.

  A quarter of an hour later, he was standing outside an old apartment block in Læderstræde, comparing the words on the piece of paper with the faded number above a narrow dark entrance. He went through it, continued up an outside wooden staircase, which sagged precariously under his weight, and finally arrived at a peeling door with no name plate.

  He knocked on the door and a woman opened it.

  She was small and sturdy, but well built, with broad shoulders and hips, narrow waist and good strong legs. About thirty-five years old, with fair curly hair cut short, wide sensual mouth, blue eyes and a dimple in her chin. She was bare-legged and barefooted and was wearing a paint-smeared coverall which had once been white. Under the coverall, she was wearing a black pullover sweater. More than that he could not see, as the coverall was tightly drawn in at the waist by a broad leather belt. Behind her he could just see a kitchen. It was dark and very small.

  She stared inquiringly at him and then said in typical Malmöese:

  “Who might you be?”

  Månsson did not answer her question.

  “Is your name Nadja Eriksson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know Bertil Olofsson?”

  “Yes.”

  Then she repeated her first remark.

  “Who might you be?”

  “Sorry,” said Månsson. “I just wanted to check that I’d come to the right place. My name is Per Månsson and I work for the police in Malmö.”

  “The police? What are the Swedish police doing here? You’ve no right to push your way in here.”

  “No, you’re quite right. I’ve no warrant or anything like that. I just want to talk to you for a moment. And I only wanted to tell you who I was. If you don’t want to talk, then I’ll go away again.”

  She looked at him for a moment, thoughtfully poking in her ear with a yellow pencil. Finally she said:

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk, as I said.”

  “About Bertil?”

  “Yes.”

  She wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her coverall and bit her lower lip.

  “I’m not that keen on the police,” she said.

  “You can regard me as—”

  “What?” she interrupted. “A private person? The neighbor’s cat?”

  “Whichever you like,” said Månsson.

  She laughed huskily and suddenly.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Come on in.”

  Then she turned around and crossed the minute kitchen. As Månsson followed, he noticed that her feet were dirty.

  Beyond the kitchen was a large studio with slanting windows, which could not truthfully be called unclean. Pictures, newspapers, tubes of paint, paintbrushes and clothes lay scattered all over the place. The furniture consisted of a large table, a few wooden chairs, two large cupboards and a bed. On the walls hung posters and pictures, and on pedestals and stands stood pieces of sculpture, of which several were wound around with wet cloths, and one clearly just being created. On the bed lay a small dark-skinned youth wearing a string undershirt and underpants. He had curly black hair on his chest and a silver crucifix on a chain around his neck.

  Månsson looked around at the disorder. It was untidy, but it appeared singularly lived in. He threw an inquiring look at the figure on the bed.

  “You don’t have to bother about him,” said the woman. “He can’t understand what we say anyhow. For that matter I can get rid of him.”

  “Not for my sake,” said Månsson.

  “You’d better run along, baby,” she said.

  The young man on the bed got up at once, picked a pair of khaki trousers up off the floor, pulled them on and left.

  “Ciao,” he said.

  “He’s queer,” the woman said laconically.

  Månsson looked timidly at the sculpture. As far as he could make out, it represented an erect penis, stuck through in all directions with old screws and rusty bits of iron.

  “This is just a model,” she said. “It should really be three hundred feet high.”

  She frowned thoughtfully.

  “Isn’t it awful?” she said. “Do you think anyone will buy it?”

  Månsson thought about the public works of art which ornamented his native city.

  “Yes, why not?” he said.

  “What do you know about me?” she said, thrusting another bit of iron into the sculpture with a glint of sadistic enjoyment.

  “Very little.”

  “There isn’t much to know,” she said. “I’ve lived here for ten years. I do this sort of thing. But I’ll never be famous.”

  “You knew Bertil Olofsson?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I did.”

  “Do you know he’s dead?”

  “Yes. The newspapers had a bit about it a few months ago. Is that why you’re here?”

  Månsson nodded.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “That’s rather a lot,” she said.

  There was a moment’s silence. She picked up a wooden club with a short handle and thumped the sculpture a few times with no noticeable effect. Then she scratched her curly blonde head and frowned, standing with her head bowed, gazing at her feet. She was quite nice-looking. There was a kind of confident maturity about her which appealed very much to Månsson.

  “Do you want to sleep with me?” she said suddenly.

  “Yes,” said Månsson. “Why not?”

  “Good. It’ll be easier to talk afterward. If you open the cupboard over there you’ll find a pair of clean sheets on the top shelf. I’ll lock the outer door and get washed. Especially my feet. Toss the dirty linen into the bag over there.”

  Månsson fetched the newly laundered sheets and made the bed. Then he sat down on the bed, threw his chewed toothpick onto the floor and began to unbutton his shirt.

  She walked through the room wearing black clogs, a towel flung over her shoulder. So far as he could see, she had no scars on her arms or on her thighs, and in general no special markings on her body.

  She sang as she showered.

  29

  The telephone rang at three minutes past eight on Friday the twenty-sixth of July. It was the middle of the summer and very hot. Martin Beck had taken off his jacket and begun to roll up his shirtsleeves the moment he entered the office. He picked up the receiver and said:

  “Yes. Beck.”

  “Månsson here. Hi. I’ve found that girl.”

  “Good. Where are you now?”

  “In Copenhagen.”

  “Did you find her there? In Denmark?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what have you found out?”

  “Quite a lot. For instance, Olofsson was here on the afternoon of the seventh of February. But there’s too much to tell you over the phone.”

  “You’d better come up here.”

  “Yes, I thought that too.”

  “Can’t you bring the woman with you?”

  “Should hardly think she’d come. And it’s not necessary. But I can always ask her.”

  “When did you find her?”

  “Last Tuesday. I’ve had time to talk to her quite a bit. I’m going up to Kastrup now and asking for a standby flight. I’ll take the first plane to Arlanda.”

  “Good,” said Martin Beck, replacing the receiver.

  Thoughtfully, he stroked his chin. Månsson had seemed strangely confident, and he had also voluntarily offered to come to Stockholm. He really must have found something.

  Månsson arrived at the police station in Kungsholmsgatan just before one, sunburned, calm, pleased, and casually dressed in sandals, khaki trousers with a checked shirt hanging outside them.

  He had no lady acc
ompanying him, but he did have a cassette tape recorder which he placed on the table. Then he looked around and said:

  “Helluva great crowd here.… Hi! … Good afternoon.”

  Since he had called from Arlanda half an hour earlier, an illustrious gathering of detectives had collected. Hammar and Melander and Gunvald Larsson and Rönn. Plus supporting troops from Västberga, i.e., Martin Beck, Kollberg and Skacke.

  “Aren’t you going to applaud as well?”

  Martin Beck was suffering dreadfully in the crush. He wondered how the hell Månsson, a man two or more years older than himself, could appear so fit and contented.

  Månsson laid his hand on the tape recorder and said:

  “It’s like this. The woman’s name is Nadja Eriksson. She is thirty-seven years old and a sculptress. Born and bred in Arlöv, but lived in Denmark for more than ten years. Arlöv is a place just outside Malmö. Now we’ll hear what she has to say.”

  He switched on the tape recorder and it sounded slightly odd to hear himself speaking.

  “Conversation with Anna Desirée Eriksson, born on the sixth of May 1931, in Malmö. Sculptress. Unmarried. Known as Nadja.”

  Martin Beck pricked up his ears. That Rönn had sniggered was quite clear, but had Månsson not sniggered too, on the tape? Well, anyhow, he continued by saying:

  “Shall we summarize all this about Bertil Olofsson?”

  “Yes, of course. Wait a moment, though.”

  The woman spoke with a Skåne accent, but not in a whining manner. Her voice was deep and clear and resonant. There was a rustle on the tape. Then Nadja Eriksson said:

  “Well, I met him almost two years ago. The first time in September 1966 and the last time at the beginning of February this year. He came here regularly, mostly once at the beginning of each month, staying one or two days. Never more than three. He used to come about the fifth and go again on the seventh or eighth. When he was here in Copenhagen, he lived with me, never anywhere else, as far as I know.”