Dirty Snow (24 page)

Was it to prevent him from escaping, or from strangling the old gentleman? Possibly. That was the first reason that came to mind. Yet there were armed soldiers in the courtyard. They could have stationed one at every door.

It was also possible that they didn't trust one another. He didn't dismiss out of hand the apparently absurd idea that they were there to watch the old gentleman and to record what he said. Who could tell? Might there be one among them who was even more powerful than he was? Perhaps the old gentleman didn't know which one it was, and trembled at the thought of the reports that might be sent to some higher-up.

But they seemed more like acolytes. They made him think of the choirboys who attended a priest during mass. They never sat down or smoked.

But the old gentleman smoked all the time. It was the only human thing about him. He smoked one cigarette after another. On the desk was a small ashtray, and it irritated Frank that nobody thought to replace it with a larger one. It was a green ashtray in the shape of a grape leaf. During the morning sessions it already overflowed with cigarette butts and ashes.

There was a stove in the room and a coal scuttle. All they had to do, every now and then, was empty the ashtray into the scuttle.

They never did. Perhaps he didn't want them to. The cigarette butts accumulated, and they were filthy. The old gentleman was a dirty smoker, never taking his cigarette out of his mouth. He would lick it, let it go out, light it again, wet the paper, chew the little grains of tobacco.

His fingertips were yellow. His teeth, too. And two little spots marked where he held his cigarettes between his lips.

The most unexpected thing about him was that he rolled his own cigarettes. He seemed to give no importance to the material side of life. You wondered when he ate, when he slept, when he shaved. Frank couldn't remember ever seeing him freshly shaved. And he would stop in the middle of an interrogation to pull his tobacco pouch out of his pocket. From his vest pocket would appear a packet of cigarette papers.

He was meticulous. The operation took quite a while. It was exasperating, since in the meantime life hung suspended. Was it a trick?

Night was nearing morning when, toward the end of the interrogation, he asked Frank about Bertha. As usual, whenever he threw out a new name, he did it in the way you least expected. He didn't use Bertha's last name. You might have thought the old gentleman was a regular at the house, a man like Chief Inspector Hamling, somebody who knew all about Lotte and her doings.

“Why did Bertha leave you?”

Frank had learned to gain time. Wasn't that the only reason he was there?

“She didn't leave me. She left my mother.”

“It is the same thing.”

“No. I never had anything to do with my mother's business.”

“But you slept with Bertha.”

They knew everything. God knows how many people they had questioned to find out all the things they knew! God knows how many hours it all represented, how much tireless activity!

“You did sleep with Bertha, did you not?”

“Sometimes.”

“Often?”

“I don't know what you'd call often.”

“Once, twice, three times a week?”

“It's difficult to say. It depended.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“No.”

“But you slept with her?”

“Occasionally.”

“And you would talk to her?”

“No.”

“You slept with her and you did not talk to her?”

He was always tempted, when they pressed him on subjects like this, to reply with an obscenity. Like in school. But you didn't use obscenities in front of your teacher. And not in front of the old gentleman, either. He wasn't looking for thrills.

“Let's say I spoke as little as possible.”

“Which is to say?”

“I don't know.”

“You never talked to her about what you had done during the day?”

“No.”

“You did not ask her what she had done?”

“Never.”

“You did not talk to her about the men she slept with?”

“I wasn't jealous.”

That was the tone. But it had to be kept in mind that the old gentleman chose his words carefully, putting them through a sieve before he spoke, which took time. His desk was the monumental American kind, with pigeonholes and lots of drawers full of meaningless-looking scraps of paper that he would pull out at certain moments, glancing at them quickly.

Frank knew those scraps of paper. There was no stenographer. No one to record his replies. The two men who were always standing near the door were without fountain pen or pencil. Frank wouldn't have been surprised if they didn't know how to write.

It was the old gentleman who wrote, always on scraps of paper, old torn envelopes, on the bottoms of letters or circulars that he trimmed with care. His handwriting was unbelievably small and must have been illegible to anyone else.

If there was a scrap of paper that dealt with Bertha in his pigeonholes, that meant the big girl had been questioned. Was that right? When he entered the room, Frank would try to sniff it out, as if to detect the smell, some trace of whoever might have been brought there in his absence.

“Your mother entertained officers, government officials.”

“That's possible.”

“You were often in the apartment during those visits.”

“I must have been sometimes.”

“You are young and curious.”

“I'm young but I'm not curious, and in any case I'm not a pervert.”

“You have friends, connections. It is interesting to know what officers do and say.”

“Not to me.”

“Your girlfriend Bertha …”

“She wasn't my girlfriend.”

“She is not any longer, not since she left you, you and your mother. I also wonder why on that day there was the sound of loud voices in your apartment, so loud that the other tenants were alarmed.”

Which tenants? Who had they spoken to? He thought of old Monsieur Wimmer, but he didn't believe it was him who had talked.

“It is curious that Bertha, who according to your mother was almost one of the family, should have left you just then.”

Was it on purpose that he let slip that Lotte had been questioned? Frank wasn't worried. He had heard worse.

“Bertha was very useful to your mama.”

He didn't know that Frank had never called his mother that, that no one would call Lotte “mama.”

“I forget who said”—he pretended to look through his scraps of paper—“that she was as strong as a stallion.”

“As a mare.”

“As a mare, yes. We must speak of this again.”

At first, Frank thought that such remarks were shots in the dark, meant to intimidate him. He hadn't supposed that his actions could be so important in the eyes of the old gentleman that they would call for all the complicated machinery that was now at work.

The most extraordinary thing about it was that the old gentleman, from his point of view, wasn't wrong. He knew where he was going. He knew it better than Frank, who was only just beginning to perceive hidden depths that he had never suspected before.

In this building, there were no empty words, no bluffs. If the old man said, “We need to talk about this again,” well, it was because he was going to do a lot more than just talk. Poor fat stupid Bertha!

Yet he didn't feel sorry for her or anybody. He'd rounded that cape. He bore no grudge. He didn't despise her. He didn't hate her. He was beginning to see certain people with the old gentleman's fish eyes, as through the glass of an aquarium.

The proof that the old gentleman didn't waste his time shooting in the dark was that he had got the better of Frank on the subject of Kromer. It was in the beginning, when Frank still didn't understand. He had supposed, as with the officer with the ruler, that all he had to do was deny everything.

“You knew a certain Fred Kromer?”

“No.”

“You have never met anyone with this name?”

“I don't remember it.”

“He goes to the same places you do, the same restaurants, the same bars.”

“It's possible.”

“You are sure you never drank champagne with him at Timo's?”

They were baiting the hook.

“I've drunk with a lot of people at Timo's, even drunk champagne.”

A blunder. He realized it at once, too late. The old gentleman was gathering nonsense on his scraps of paper. It didn't seem a very appropriate occupation for a man of his age and position. Yet not one of those scraps of paper ever got lost, or failed to reappear at the right time.

“You don't know him by his first name, Fred, either? Certain people, in certain circumstances, are only known by their first names. For example, many people who used to meet you daily, so to speak, do not know that your name is Friedmaier.”

“It's not the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing with Kromer?”

Everything counted. Everything carried weight. Everything was recorded. He spent two exhausting hours denying any connection with Kromer, for no other reason than because that was the line of conduct he had adopted. The next day, and the days following, there was no further mention of his friend. He thought they had forgotten him. Then, in the very middle of a night interrogation, when he was literally swaying on his feet—they kept him standing on purpose—his eyes burning, he was handed a photograph of himself, together with Kromer and two women, on the bank of a river in the middle of summer. They had taken off their jackets. It was a typical summer snapshot. Kromer, naturally, had his hand on the breast of the blond girl he was with.

“You do not know him?”

“I don't remember his name.”

“Nor that of the girls?”

“As if I could remember the names of all the girls I've gone canoeing with!”

“This one, the brunette, is named Lili.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

“Her father works at the mayor's office.”

“Possibly.”

“And your companion, that is Kromer.”

“Hmm.”

He didn't remember the snapshot, which he'd never seen before. What he remembered was that there had been five of them that day, three men and two women, never a very happy arrangement. Fortunately, the third man had been busy taking photographs. He himself had paddled the canoe. Even if Frank had wanted to, he couldn't have told the old gentleman the third man's name.

All this proved how thorough their investigations were. God knows where they'd dug up that photograph. Had they searched Kromer's place? If it was there, it was odd that Frank had never seen it. Had they found it at the third guy's place? Did they get it from the place that had developed the film?

That was the good thing about the old gentleman, what encouraged Frank, what gave him hope. The officer would probably have had Frank shot at once just to get it over, to keep things simple. With the old gentleman, he had plenty of time ahead.

To tell the truth, deep down he was convinced—no, it was faith rather than conviction—that it depended entirely on himself. He thought in pictures, in sensations, the way people who hardly sleep do, people who have to force themselves to sleep.

He would have to come back to his dream of flying. All he had to do was put out his palms and press against the empty air with all his might,
with all his willpower
, and then he'd rise, slowly at first, then with perfect ease, until his head touched the ceiling.

He couldn't talk about it. Even if Holst himself were there, he couldn't confess his secret hope. Not yet. It was just like his dream, it was marvelous that he'd had that dream several times, because now it helped him. Maybe he was living in a dream. There were times, because of the lack of sleep, when he was no longer sure. This time, again, it all depended on him, on his willpower.

If he had the energy, if he kept faith, it would last as long as it had to.

There was no question of returning to the outside. There was no question, for him, of entertaining hopes like the men in the next classroom. Such hopes didn't interest him; they even shocked him.

They did what they could. It wasn't their fault.

For him, there was simply a gap in time that he had to fill. If he had been asked to explain how important the gap was, to express it in days, weeks, or months, he wouldn't have been able to answer. And what if he had been asked what was waiting at the end of it?

Enough! Better to argue with the old gentleman. Everything had its appointed hour. All through the interrogation they kept him standing. He drew a distinction between seated interrogations and standing interrogations. It was a childish trick, really. They were always trying to wear him down. He didn't let on that he preferred standing. When they made him sit down, it was on a stool without a back. In the end that was even more exhausting.

The old gentleman never left his chair, never seemed to feel the need to walk around and stretch his legs. Never once, even during one five-hour interrogation, had he left the room to go to the toilet or get a drink of water. He drank nothing. There was nothing to drink on his desk. Cigarettes were enough for him, and he even let them go out two or three times before he was done with them.

He had all sorts of tricks. Like leaving Frank's automatic on the desk as though it had been forgotten, as though it were an anonymous object of no importance. He used it as a paperweight. Since the first day, after Frank had been searched, he had never alluded to it. But the weapon remained there, like a threat.

He had to reason coolly. Frank wasn't the only person in the old gentleman's section. Despite the time he devoted to him—a considerable time—a man of his importance must have other problems to solve, other prisoners to question. Was the automatic left there when he questioned them? Did they set the stage differently each time, replacing the automatic with something else, a dagger, a check, a letter, some other piece of evidence?