The Abominable Man (2 page)

The object was a carbine bayonet.

He drew it and very carefully wiped off the yellow gun grease before sliding it into its steel-blue scabbard.

In spite of the fact that he was tall and rather heavy, his movements were quick and lithe and economical, and his hands were as steady as his gaze.

He unbuckled his belt and slid it through the leather loop on the sheath. Then he zipped up his jacket, put on a pair of gloves and a checked tweed cap and left the house.

The wooden stairs creaked beneath his weight, but his footsteps themselves were inaudible.

The house was small and old and stood on the top of a little hill above the highway. It was a chilly, starlit night.

The man in the tweed cap swung around the corner of the house and moved with the sureness of a sleepwalker toward the driveway behind.

He opened the left front door of his black Volkswagen, climbed in behind the wheel and adjusted the bayonet, which rested against his right thigh.

Then he started the motor, turned on the headlights, backed out onto the highway and drove north.

The little black car hurtled forward through the darkness precisely and implacably, as if it were a weightless craft in space.

The buildings tightened along the road and the city rose up beneath its dome of light, huge and cold and desolate, stripped of everything but hard naked surfaces of metal, glass and concrete.

Not even in the central city was there any street life at this hour of the night. With the exception of an occasional taxi, two ambulances and a squad car, everything was dead. The police car was black with white fenders and rushed quickly past on its own bawling carpet of sound.

The traffic lights changed from red to yellow to green to yellow to red with a meaningless mechanical monotony.

The black car drove strictly in accordance with traffic regulations, never exceeded the speed limit, slowed at all cross streets and stopped at all stop lights.

It drove along Vasagatan past the Central Station and the newly completed Sheraton-Stockholm, swung left at Norra Bantorget and continued north on Torsgatan.

In the square was an illuminated tree and bus 591 waiting at its stop. A new moon hung above St. Eriksplan and the blue neon hands on the Bonnier Building showed the time. Twenty minutes to two.

At that instant, the man in the car was precisely thirty-six years old.

Now he drove east along Odengatan, past deserted Vasa Park with its cold white streetlamps and the thick, veined shadows of ten thousand leafless tree limbs.

The black car made another right and drove one hundred and twenty-five yards south along Dalagatan. Then it braked and stopped.

With studied negligence, the man in the lumberjacket and the tweed cap parked with two wheels on the sidewalk right in front of the stairs to the Eastman Institute.

He stepped out into the night and slammed the door behind him.

It was the third of April, 1971. A Saturday.

It was still only an hour and forty minutes old and nothing in particular had happened.

At a quarter to two the morphine stopped working.

He’d had the last injection just before ten, which meant the narcosis lasted less than four hours.

The pain came back sporadically, first on the left side of his diaphragm and then a few minutes later on the right as well. Then it radiated out toward his back and passed fitfully through his body, quick, cruel and biting, as if starving vultures had torn their way into his vitals.

He lay on his back in the tall, narrow bed and stared at the white plaster ceiling, where the dim glow of the night light and the reflections from outside produced an angular static pattern of shadows that were indecipherable and as cold and repellent as the room itself.

The ceiling wasn’t flat but arched in two shallow curves and seemed distant. It was in fact high, over twelve feet, and old-fashioned like everything else in the building. The bed stood in the middle of the stone floor and there were only two other pieces of furniture: the night table and a straight-backed wooden chair.

The drapes were not completely drawn, and the window was ajar. Air filtered chilly and fresh through the two-inch crack from the spring-winter night outside, but he nevertheless felt a suffocating disgust at the rotting
odor from the flowers on the night table and from his own sick body.

He had not slept but lain wakeful and silent and thought about this very fact—that the painkiller would soon wear off.

It was about an hour since he’d heard the night nurse pass the double doors to the corridor in her wooden shoes. Since then he’d heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing and maybe of his blood, pulsing heavily and unevenly through his body. But these were not distinct sounds; they were more like figments of his imagination, fitting companions to his dread of the agony that would soon begin and to his mindless fear of dying.

He had always been a hard man, unwilling to tolerate mistakes or weakness in others and never prepared to admit that he himself might someday falter, either physically or mentally.

Now he was afraid and in pain. He felt betrayed and taken by surprise. His senses had sharpened during his weeks in the hospital. He had become unnaturally sensitive to all forms of pain and shuddered even at the prospect of an injection or the needle in the fold of his arm when the nurses took the daily blood tests. On top of that he was afraid of the dark and couldn’t stand to be alone and had learned to hear noises he’d never heard before.

The examinations—which ironically enough the doctors referred to as the “investigation”—wore him out and made him feel worse. And the sicker he felt, the more intense his fear of death became, until it circumscribed his entire conscious life and left him utterly naked, in a state of spiritual exposure and almost obscene egoism.

Something rustled outside the window. An animal of course, padding through the withered rose bed. A field mouse or a hedgehog, maybe a cat. But didn’t hedgehogs hibernate?

It must be an animal, he thought, and then no longer in control of his actions, he raised his left hand toward the electric call-button that hung in comfortable reach, wound once around the bedpost.

But when his fingers brushed the cold metal of the bed frame, his hand trembled in an involuntary spasm and the switch slid away and fell to the floor with a little rattling bang.

The sound made him pull himself together.

If he’d gotten his hand on the switch and pushed the white button, a red light would have gone on out in the corridor above his door and pretty soon the night nurse would have come trotting from her room in her clattering wooden clogs.

Since he wasn’t only afraid but also vain, he was almost glad he hadn’t managed to ring.

The night nurse would have come into the room and turned on the overhead light and stared at him questioningly as he lay there in his wretchedness and misery.

He lay still for a while and felt the pain recede and then approach again in sudden waves, as if it were a runaway locomotive driven by an insane engineer.

He suddenly became aware of a new urgency. He needed to urinate.

There was a bottle within reach, stuck down in the yellow plastic wastebasket behind the night table. But he didn’t want to use it. He was allowed to get up if he wanted to. One of the doctors had even said it would be good for him to move around a little.

So he thought he’d get up and open the double doors and walk to the toilet, which was right on the other side of the corridor. It was a distraction, a practical task, something that could force his mind into new combinations for a time.

He folded aside the blanket and the sheet, heaved
himself into a sitting position and sat for several seconds on the edge of the bed with his feet dangling while he pulled at the white nightgown and heard the plastic mattress cover rustling underneath him.

Then he carefully eased himself down until he felt the cold stone floor beneath the damp soles of his feet. He tried to straighten up and, in spite of the broad bandages that pulled at his groin and tightened around his thighs, he succeeded. He was still wearing plastic foam pressure-dressings from the aortography the day before.

His slippers lay beside the table and he stuck his feet into them and walked cautiously and gropingly toward the door. He opened the first door in and the second out and walked straight across the shadowy corridor and into the lavatory.

He went to the toilet and rinsed off his hands in cold water and started back, then stopped in the corridor to listen. The muffled sound of the night nurse’s radio could be heard a long way off. He was in pain again and his fear came back and he thought after all he could go in and ask for a couple of painkillers. They wouldn’t have any particular effect, but anyway she’d have to unlock the medicine cabinet and take out the bottle and then give him some juice, and that way at least someone would have to fuss over him for a little while.

The distance to the office was about sixty feet and he took his time. Shuffled along slowly with the sweaty nightshirt slapping against his calves.

The light was on in the duty room but there was no one there. Only the transistor radio, which stood serenading itself between two half-emptied coffee cups.

The night nurse and the orderly were busy someplace else of course.

The room began to swim and he had to support himself against the door. It felt a little better after a minute
or two, and he walked slowly back toward his room through the darkened corridor.

The doors were the way he’d left them, slightly ajar. He closed them carefully, took the few steps to the bed, stepped out of his slippers, lay down on his back and pulled the blanket up to his chin with a shiver. Lay still with wide-open eyes and felt the express train rushing through his body.

Something was different. The pattern on the ceiling had changed in some slight way.

He was aware of it almost at once.

But what was it that had made the pattern of shadows and reflections change?

His gaze ran over the bare walls, then he turned his head to the right and looked toward the window.

The window had been open when he left the room, he was certain of that.

Now it was closed.

Terror overwhelmed him immediately and he lifted his hand to the call button. But it wasn’t in its place. He’d forgotten to pick up the cord and the switch from the floor.

He held his fingers tightly around the iron pipe where the buzzer ought to have been and stared at the window.

The gap between the long drapes was still about two inches wide, but they weren’t hanging quite the way they had been, and the window was closed.

Could someone from the staff have been in the room?

It didn’t seem likely.

He felt the sweat bursting from his pores, and his nightshirt cold and clammy against his sensitive skin.

Completely at the mercy of his fear and unable to tear his eyes from the window, he began to sit up in bed.

The drapes hung absolutely motionless, yet he was certain someone was standing behind them.

Who, he thought.

Who?

And then with a last flash of common sense: This must be a hallucination.

Now he stood beside the bed, ill and unsteady, his bare feet on the stone floor. Took two uncertain steps toward the window. Came to a stop, slightly bent, his lips twitching.

The man in the window alcove threw aside the drapes with his right hand as he simultaneously drew the bayonet with his left.

Reflections glittered on the long broad blade.

The man in the lumberjacket and the checked tweed cap took two quick steps forward and stopped, legs apart, tall, straight, with the weapon at shoulder height.

The sick man recognized him at once and started to open his mouth to bellow.

The heavy handle of the bayonet hit him across the mouth and he felt his lips being torn to shreds and his dental plate breaking.

And that was the last thing he felt.

The rest of it went too fast. Time rushed away from him.

The first blow caught him on the right side of his diaphragm just below his ribs, and the bayonet sank in to its hilt.

The sick man was still on his feet, his head thrown back, when the man in the lumberjacket raised the weapon for the third time and sliced open his throat, from the left ear to the right.

A bubbling, slightly hissing noise came from the open windpipe.

Nothing more.

It was Friday evening and Stockholm’s cafés should have been full of happy people enjoying themselves after the drudgery of the week. Such, however, was not the case, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. In the course of the preceding five years, restaurant prices had as good as doubled, and very few ordinary wage-earners could afford to treat themselves to even one night out a month. The restaurant owners complained and talked crisis, but the ones who had not turned their establishments into pubs or discotheques to attract the easy-spending young managed to keep their heads above water by means of the increasing number of businessmen with credit cards and expense accounts who preferred to conduct their transactions across a laden table.

The Golden Peace in the Old City was no exception. It was late, to be sure—Friday had turned into Saturday—but during the last hour there had been only two guests in the ground-floor dining room. A man and a woman. They’d eaten steak tartare and were now drinking coffee and
punsch
as they talked in low voices across the table in the alcove.

Two waitresses sat folding napkins at a little table opposite the entrance. The younger, who was red-haired and looked tired, stood up and threw a glance at the clock above the bar. She yawned, picked up a napkin and walked over to the guests in the alcove.

“Will there be anything else before the bar closes?” she said, using the napkin to sweep some crumbs of tobacco
from the tablecloth. “Would you care for some more hot coffee, Inspector?”

Martin Beck noticed to his own surprise that he was flattered at her knowing who he was. He was normally irritated by any reminder that as chief of the National Homicide Squad he was a more or less public personage, but it was a long time now since he’d had his picture in the papers or appeared on television, and he took the waitress’s recognition only as an indication that the Peace was beginning to regard him as a regular customer. Rightly so, for that matter. He’d been living not far away for two years now, and when he now and again went out to eat he gave his custom mostly to the Peace. Having a companion, as he did this evening, was less usual.