The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö Page B

laughter at the whole situation.
    But with the same curious logic it suddenly occurred to him that he’d better go home and get his pistol.
    It was over a year since he’d even looked at it.
    An empty cab came up the street from Stureplan.
    Martin Beck stuck out his hand and got it to stop.
    It was a yellow Volvo with a black stripe along the sides. This was a relatively recent innovation and a relaxation of the old rule that all taxicabs in Stockholm had to be black. He climbed into the front seat next to the driver.
    “Köpmangatan eight,” he said.
    And as he said it he recognized the driver. He was one of those policemen who eke out their incomes by driving a cab during their off-duty hours. That he recognized the man was pure coincidence. Several days earlier, outside the Central Station, he’d watched two unusually maladroit patrolmen drive an initially peaceable young drunk into a belligerent rage and then lose control of themselves. The man behind the wheel was one of them.
    He was about twenty-five years old and extremely garrulous.
    He was probably talkative from birth, and since his regular job permitted him only an occasionally angry grunt, he made up for it here in his cab.
    One of the Sanitation Department’s combination sweep-and-spray trucks temporarily blocked their path. The moonlighting patrolman fretfully studied a billboard advertising Richard Attenborough’s
10 Rillington Place.
    “Ten Rollington Palace, hunh?” he said in some sort of dialect. “And people want to see that kind of crap.Murder and misery and crazy people. If you ask me it’s a damned shame.”
    Martin Beck nodded. The man, who obviously didn’t recognize him, took the nod as encouragement and talked volubly on.
    “But you know it’s all these foreigners that make all the trouble.”
    Martin Beck said nothing.
    “But I will say one thing, you’re making a big mistake if you lump all foreigners together in one bag. The guy who drives this cab with me, he’s Portuguese, for example.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah, and you couldn’t find a better man. He works his ass off, doesn’t lie around on his butt. And can he drive! And do you know why?”
    Martin Beck shook his head.
    “Yeah, well, he drove a tank in Africa for four years. You know, Portugal’s fighting a war of liberation down there, place called Angola. They’re fighting like hell for their freedom down there, the Portuguese, but you never hear anything about it here in Sweden. This guy, the guy I’m talking about, he shot hundreds of commies those four years. And on him it really shows what a good thing the army is, and discipline and all that. He does exactly what you tell him, and he rakes in more dough than anyone else I know. And if he gets some drunk Finn bastard in the car, well, he sees to it he gets a hundred percent tip. They’ve got it coming, all those bums on welfare.”
    Just then, fortunately, the car stopped outside the building where Martin Beck lived. He told the driver to wait, let himself into the building and rode up to his apartment.
    The pistol was a 7.65 mm Walther and lay in itsplace in a locked drawer of his desk. The clips were also where they belonged, in another locked drawer in the other room. He slipped one of them into the pistol and put the other in his right-hand coat pocket. But he had to hunt for five minutes before he could find his shoulder holster, which was lying in a pile of old neckties and T-shirts on a shelf in the closet.
    Back down on the street, the effusive cop stood leaning against his yellow taxi, happily humming to himself. He held the door politely, climbed in behind the wheel and had already opened his mouth to resume his text when Martin Beck interrupted.
    “Kungsholmsgatan thirty-seven, please,” he said.
    “But that’s the …”
    “Right, Criminal Division. Drive along Skeppsbron, please.”
    The driver immediately turned red in the face and didn’t utter a sound the whole way there.
    And that was