Dirty Snow (7 page)

“Have I ever tried to cheat you?”

“No. But I'll need a car.”

“That's more difficult. I could ask the general, but that might not be a smart thing.”

“No … A civilian car. Just for two or three hours.”

Kromer didn't ask for details. He was a lot more prudent than he liked people to think. Since Frank was offering to get the watches, he preferred not to know where they came from, or how Frank was going to get them.

Still, he was curious. What he was even more curious about was Frank himself, the way he had of making a decision so calmly.

“Why don't you just pick one up in the street?”

Naturally that would have been the simplest thing to do, and at night, for the fifteen or twenty miles he would have to drive, there'd be practically no risk. But Frank didn't want to admit he couldn't drive.

“Just find me a car and someone you're sure of, and I'm almost positive I can get the watches.”

“What did you do today?”

“I went to a movie.”

“With a girl?”

“Of course.”

“Did you feel her up?”

Kromer was a letch. He chased girls, especially poor ones because that was easier, and he liked them very young. He loved to talk about it, nostrils twitching, lips thick, using the crudest terms, relishing the most intimate details.

“Do I know her?”

“No.”

“Will you introduce me?”

“Maybe. She's a virgin.”

Kromer wriggled in his chair and moistened the end of his cigar. “Do you want her?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then let me have her.”

“I'll see.”

“Is she young?”

“Sixteen. She lives with her father. Don't forget about the car.”

“I'll give you the answer tomorrow. Meet me at Leonard's around five.”

That was another bar they went to, in the Upper Town, but because of where his place was, Leonard had to close at ten every night.

“Tell me what the two of you did at the movies … Timo! A bottle. Go on, tell me.“

“The usual. Her stocking, her garter, then …”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

He was going home. There was a chance his mother had kept Minna in. Lotte didn't like to let them go out the first few days, because some of them never came back.

He would go to her, and, after all, it would be just like it was Sissy. In the dark he wouldn't know the difference.

H
E WALKED
with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar turned up, his breath visible in the cold air, along the brightest street in town, but even here there were great patches of darkness. The meeting was in half an hour.

It was Thursday. It had been on Tuesday that Kromer had spoken to him about the watches. Wednesday, when Frank had joined him at five o'clock at Leonard's, Kromer had asked him, “Do you still want to do it?”

To older people, it must have seemed strange to see them, so young and talking together so seriously. God knows they were deciding serious things! Frank caught sight of himself in one of the mirrors of the café, calm and blond, his overcoat well cut.

“Did you get the car?”

“I'll introduce you to the driver in a second. He's waiting across the street.”

It was a cheaper and noisier establishment, but you could still get pretty good drinks here. A man stood up. He was twenty-three or twenty-four, very thin, and in spite of his leather jacket he looked like a student.

“That's him,” Kromer said, indicating Frank. Then he said, “Carl Adler. You can trust him. He's all right.”

They had a drink, because that's what you did.

“And the other guy?” Frank asked in a low voice.

“Ah! Yes. Will he have to …”

Kromer hesitated. He hated to speak plainly and there were certain words it was better never to say, words that people had, out of superstition, erased from their vocabulary.

“Will there be any … rough stuff?”

“Not likely.”

Kromer, who knew everybody, glanced around the café, found a certain face in the smoke, and disappeared onto the sidewalk, taking someone with him. When he came back, he was accompanied by a young fellow who looked working class. Frank didn't catch his name.

“What time do you think you'll be through? He has to be back at his mother's by ten o'clock. Later than that and the concierge won't open the door, and his mother is sick and often needs him in the night.”

Frank had almost decided to give the project up, not because of this second man, but because of the first, Adler, who hadn't opened his mouth the whole time they were alone together. Frank wasn't sure, but he could have sworn he'd seen him with the violinist from the second floor. Where, he couldn't remember. Maybe it was only an impression. It was enough to bother him.

“When do you want to meet?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Tomorrow? What time?”

“Eight o'clock in the evening. Here.”

“Not here,” Adler interposed. “My car will be in the back street, opposite the fish market. All you'll have to do is hop in.”

When they were alone, Frank couldn't help asking Kromer, “You're sure they're okay?”

“Have I ever introduced you to anyone I wasn't sure of?”

“What does he do, this Adler?”

A vague gesture. “Don't worry about it.”

It was odd. You suspected someone and trusted him at the same time. Perhaps it came from the fact that people had, more or less, a hold on one another, and everyone, if you looked hard enough, had something on his conscience. In short, if you hadn't been betrayed, it was because the other fellow was afraid you'd betray him first.

“And the little girl? Have you thought about it?”

Frank didn't answer. He didn't tell him that on that very day, Wednesday—he had taken her to the movies on Tuesday— he had seen Sissy again. Not for very long. And not right after Holst had left. He had watched him from the window going toward the streetcar stop.

He had waited until four o'clock. Finally, shrugging his shoulders, he had said to himself,
We'll see
.

He knocked on the door as though he was just passing by. On account of the old fool lying in ambush on the other side of the transom, he had no intention of going in. He simply said, “I'll wait for you outside. Will you comedown?”

He didn't have to wait long. She came. She ran the last few yards over the sidewalk, glancing up automatically at the windows of the building, then, automatically too, slipping her hand through his arm.

“Monsieur Wimmer didn't speak to my father,” she announced right away.

“I was sure he wouldn't.”

“I can't stay out very long.”

They never could stay on the second day.

It was just beginning to grow dark. He drew her into the blind alley. She offered her lips to him and asked, “Have you been thinking about me, Frank?”

He didn't do anything to her. He just slipped his hand inside her blouse because the day before, at the Lido, his mind wasn't on her breasts and he still didn't know what they were like. The question had crossed his mind at night, when he was in bed with Minna, who hardly had any.

Was that it, curiosity, that had prompted him to knock at Sissy's door and ask her to come down?

He had seen her again today at the same time, but today he said, “I only have a few minutes.”

She didn't question him, though he knew she wanted to. Making a little face, she murmured, “Do you think I'm ugly, Frank?”

Again, just like all the others, though he would have been at a loss to say whether he found any young girl ugly or not.

Well, it didn't matter. He wouldn't promise Kromer anything, but he wouldn't say no. He would wait and see. Minna insisted she was in love with him, that she was ashamed now of what she had to do with the clients. She hadn't been lucky with the first one. More complications! Frank had done his best to calm her. On top of everything else, she was worried about him. She had seen the gun, and it had terrified her.

Today he had had to promise to wake her up, no matter what time he came in.

“I won't go to sleep before then,” she promised him.

She already smelled like the other women in the house. Probably due to the regime Lotte put them through and the soap she provided. Whatever the case, the transformation was quick. And all morning she had wandered around the apartment in a black chemise trimmed with lace.

He had made up his mind to meet Adler and the other man without seeing Kromer again, but at the last moment he didn't. Not so much because of Kromer but because he felt the need to cling to something stable, familiar. The crowds in the streets always frightened him a little. You saw, in the light of the shop windows and streetlamps, faces that were too pale, with features too drawn and eyes that had a fierce, vacant look. Most were a mystery. But worst of all were the dead eyes. As time went by, you saw more and more people with eyes that were dead.

Was he thinking of Holst? It wasn't exactly the same thing. Holst's eyes weren't full of hate, and they weren't empty. But you felt no contact was possible and that was humiliating.

He pushed open the door into Leonard's. Kromer was there with a man who looked different from both of them. It was Ressl, editor in chief of the evening paper, always accompanied by his bodyguard with the broken nose.

“You know Peter Ressl?”

“I know his name. Everyone does.”

“My friend Frank.”

“Delighted.”

He held out a long, bony, very white hand. Maybe yesterday evening it had been Carl Adler's hands that had upset Frank. They looked like Ressl's.

Ressl's family was one of the oldest in town, and his father had once been a councillor of state. They had been ruined even before the war, but it was in their mansion that the Occupation authorities had set up headquarters. Not a month went by that those gentlemen didn't ask for something.

It was said that Councillor Ressl, who could be seen slipping among the houses like a shadow, had never spoken a word to them, and that anyone else in his place would have been shot or hanged by this time.

Peter, a lawyer who had once had something to do with the movies, was quick to accept the post of editor in chief of the evening paper. He was probably the only person in the whole region to have obtained, for some mysterious reason, a permit to cross the border. He had gone to Rome, Paris, London. The dark suit he wore that evening had come from London, and he was ostentatiously smoking English cigarettes.

He was a nervous, unhealthy-looking fellow. Some said he took drugs. Others said he was a homosexual.

“I thought you had urgent business,” said Kromer— obviously very proud to be seen with Ressl but worried by Frank's presence at this hour. “What'll you have?”

“I only stopped in for a minute to say hello.”

“Have something to drink. Bartender!”

A few moments later, when Frank was leaving, Kromer took something out of his pocket and slipped it into his hand.

“You never know …”

It was a flat bottle full of brandy. “Good luck.

Don't forget about the little girl”

They barely exchanged a word. The car was in fact a small truck. Carl Adler was waiting in the driver's seat, his foot on the clutch.

“Where's the other guy?” Frank asked uneasily.

“Back there.”

Of course. He had seen the reddish glow of a cigarette in the darkness in the rear of the truck.

“Where to?”

“Cut through town first.”

They caught glimpses of familiar places as they passed. They even drove by the Lido, and for a moment Frank thought of Sissy sitting under her lamp, painting flowers and waiting for her father to come home.

The man in the back was probably a worker, as Frank had noted yesterday. He had big, dirty hands and a face that, with a good wash, would have resembled Kromer's, except that it was franker and more open. He wasn't nervous. Though he had no idea what they were going to do, he didn't ask any questions.

Carl Adler didn't, either. But he had an unpleasant way of only looking straight ahead. The profile he presented to Frank was too self-consciously indifferent, with an expression of dislike, and certainly of condescension.

“And now?”

“Take a left.”

Since no car could drive around without a permit from the authorities, who were tricky to deal with, Adler must work for them. Lots of people played a double game. One had just been shot. He had been seen every day in the company of high-ranking officers, and was so notorious that the children used to spit on the sidewalk when he went by. Now they called him a hero.

“Take another left at the next intersection.”

Frank was smoking cigarettes and passing them back to their friend in the rear, who must have been sitting on the spare tire. Carl Adler said he didn't smoke. Too bad for him.

“When you see a pylon, go right and up the hill.”

They were coming to the village now, and Frank could have found the rest of the way with his eyes closed. He might have said “his” village, if there had been anything anywhere in the world that belonged to him. It was here that he had been raised, where Lotte, who had had him when she was nineteen, had put him out to nurse.

There was a fairly steep hill beyond which lay what they called the lower houses, almost all small farms. Then the road widened out into a sort of large square, paved with cobblestones that made the truck bounce. The church was behind the pond, really nothing but a large water hole, with the cemetery, where the gravedigger—was it still old Pruster?—always struck water with his shovel less than a couple of feet down.

“I don't bury them, I drown them!” he would say after a drink or two.

The headlights illuminated a pink house with two life-size painted angels on the gabled roof. The whole village was painted like a plaything. There were pink houses, green houses, blue houses. Almost all had a little niche with a porcelain virgin in it, and there was a feast day once a year when candles were lit in front of all the statuettes.