Dirty Snow (2 page)

Frank asked, ashamed of the childish tone he adopted despite himself, “Lend it to me, will you?”

“What for?”

“Nothing.”

“Things like this aren't made just for nothing.”

The other man smiled a bit indulgently, as though listening to the boasting of boys.

“Lend it to me.”

It wasn't just for nothing, of course. Yet he still didn't quite know what it was for. But then he happened to see, at the corner table under the light with the lavender silk shade, the fat noncommissioned officer, already red in the face—it was violet because of the light—take off his gun belt and set it down among the glasses.

Everybody knew the noncommissioned officer. He was almost a mascot, a sort of family pet you get used to seeing around the house. He was the only one among the Occupation forces who came to Timo's regularly and openly, without taking precautions, without bothering to be discreet.

He must have had a name. Here, they called him the Eunuch—because he was enormous, so fat that his flesh bulged out of his uniform, forming great rolls at his waist and under his arms. He made you think of a matron who has taken off her corset, leaving marks on her flabby flesh. There were more rolls of flesh around his neck and under his chin, and on his head a few stray hairs, colorless and silken.

He always sat in the same corner, invariably with two women, it didn't matter who so long as they were brunettes and skinny. They said he liked them hairy.

When customers entered and were startled by the sight of his uniform—that of the Occupation police—Timo barely lowered his voice to say, “Don't worry. He isn't dangerous.”

Did the Eunuch hear him? Did he understand? He ordered brandy by the carafe. One woman on his lap, another beside him on the bench. He would whisper stories to them and laugh. He drank, he told stories, he laughed, he made them drink, his hands busy under their skirts.

He must have had a family somewhere in his own country. Nouchi, whom he had allowed to go through his wallet, claimed it was stuffed with photographs of children of all ages. He called his girls by nicknames. It amused him. He bought them food. He loved watching them eat expensive dishes that could only be found at Timo's and a few other places that were even harder to get into, reserved exclusively for high-ranking officers.

He practically forced them to eat. He ate with them. He would paw at them in front of everyone. He would look at his wet fingers and laugh. Then, like clockwork, at a certain moment he would unbuckle his gun belt and set it on the table.

On the belt was a holster containing an automatic.

In itself none of this was important. The noncommissioned officer, the Eunuch, was just a lecherous fat man no one spoke about without laughing—even Lotte, Frank's mother.

She knew him, too. The whole neighborhood knew him, since to get to town, where his office must have been, he would cross the streetcar tracks twice a day and head to the Old Bridge.

He didn't live at the barracks. He boarded at Madame Mohr's, an architect's widow, two houses beyond the streetcar line.

He was a neighbor. He was seen at certain hours, always pink and well groomed despite his nights at Timo's. He had a certain smile that seemed knowing to some, but which was perhaps only a baby's.

He would turn to look at little girls, complimenting them and sometimes giving them the candy he always carried in his pockets.

“Bet we'll be seeing him up here one of these days,” said Lotte, Frank's mother.

Her business was illegal. She had the right, of course, to run a nail salon here in the Old Basin neighborhood, but it was obvious no one was going to climb three flights of stairs in a building crammed with tenants to have their nails done.

Everybody in the street, in fact everyone in town, knew that there were rooms in back.

The Eunuch, who belonged to the Occupation police, must have known it, too.

“You'll see, he'll come.”

Just by looking down at a man from her window on the third floor, Lotte could tell whether or not he would finally come upstairs. She could even predict how long it would take him to make up his mind, and she was usually right.

Embarrassed and awkward, the Eunuch finally did show up one Sunday morning—because of his office hours. Frank happened to be out, and he was sorry he was, because he could watch through the transom by climbing onto the kitchen table.

But he heard about it. There was nobody that day but Steffi, a big gawky girl with dark skin, who just lay there, opened her legs, and stared at the ceiling.

The noncommissioned officer was disappointed, probably because with Steffi there was nothing to be done if you didn't go all the way. She wasn't even artful enough to listen to the stories he told her.

“You're nothing but a hole, my poor girl,” Lotte often said to her.

The Eunuch must have expected something else. Maybe he was impotent. In any case he had never left Timo's with a woman.

Or perhaps he got off while fooling around with the girls at Timo's. That was possible. With men anything was possible, as Frank knew from the education he had gotten by standing on the kitchen table, looking through the transom.

So wasn't it natural that—since he had to kill someone sometime—he would choose the Eunuch?

First of all, he knew he had to use the knife that had been slipped into his hand. It was a handsome weapon, and you couldn't help wanting to try it out, to feel what it was like when it sank into flesh and slipped between bones.

There was a trick he'd been told about—you twisted your hands a little, like turning a key in a lock, once the blade was between the ribs.

The gun belt was on the table, the automatic smooth and heavy in its holster. The things you could do with a pistol! The kind of man you became just having one in your hand!

Then, too, there was this forty-year-old, this Berg, one of Kromer's pals, someone you knew was certainly the real thing. Frank wanted to impress him.

“Lend it to me for an hour and I'll break it in. I bet I'll come back with a pistol.”

And so, at that moment, that was all there was to it. Frank knew where he could lie in wait. In the rue Verte, which the Eunuch would have to take to get to the streetcar line from the Old Basin, there was an abandoned old building that was still called the tannery, although nothing had been tanned there for fifteen years. Frank himself had never known the tannery when it was running. People said that once, when it was on contract for the army, as many as six hundred men worked there.

It was nothing now but great bare walls of black brick with high windows, like a church's, opening at least six yards above the ground and with the glass all broken.

An unlit blind alley a yard wide led from the tannery to the street.

The nearest working streetlight—the city was full of twisted, broken ones—was far away, near the streetcar stop.

So it was all too easy, not even exciting. He was there in the alley, his back against the brick wall of the tannery, and except for the shrill whistles of the trains on the other side of the river, around him was nothing but silence. Not a light in a window. Everyone was asleep.

He could see, between the alley walls, a bit of the street, and it looked just like it had always looked in winter months. The snow along the sidewalks formed two grayish banks, one on the side of the houses, the other on the side of the street. Between the two banks was a narrow blackish path that people kept clear with salt or ashes. In front of each house this path was crossed by another leading to the street, which was deeply rutted with tire tracks.

Nothing to it.

Kill the Eunuch.

Men in uniform were killed every week, and it was the patriotic organizations that got into trouble, the hostages, councilmen, notables, who were shot or taken God knows where. In any case, they were never heard of again.

For Frank it was a question of killing his first man and breaking in Kromer's Swedish knife.

Nothing more.

The only problem was that he would have to stand there up to his knees in the crusted snow—since no one had shoveled the alley—and feel the fingers of his right hand slowly stiffening in the cold. He had decided not to wear a glove.

He wasn't scared when he heard footsteps. He knew they weren't the Eunuch's, whose heavy boots would have made more of a crunching noise in the snow.

He was interested, nothing more. The steps were too far apart to be those of a woman. It was long after curfew, and while for various reasons that didn't bother people like himself or Kromer or any of Timo's customers, no one in the neighborhood was in the habit of walking around at night.

The man was nearing the alley, and already, even before seeing him, Frank knew, or guessed, who it was, which gave him a certain satisfaction.

A little yellow light was flitting over the snow. It was the electric flashlight the man was swinging as he walked.

That long, almost silent stride—at once soft and astonishingly rapid—that automatically evoked the figure of Frank's neighbor Gerhardt Holst.

The encounter became perfectly natural. Holst lived in the same building as Lotte, on the same floor. The door to his apartment was just opposite theirs. He was a streetcar conductor whose hours changed each week. Sometimes he would leave early in the morning before it was light; other times he would go down the stairs in midafternoon, invariably with his tin lunch box under his arm.

He was very tall. His step was noiseless because he wore homemade boots of felt and rags. It was normal for a man who spent hours on the platform of a streetcar to try to keep his feet warm, yet for whatever reason Frank never saw those shapeless boots of blotting-paper gray—they seemed to have the texture of blotting paper, too—without feeling uncomfortable.

The man was the same grayish color all over, as though made of the same material. He never seemed to look at anyone or to be interested in anything but the tin lunch box under his arm.

Yet Frank would turn his head to avoid meeting the man's eyes; at other times he would make a point of staring Holst aggressively in the face.

Holst was going to pass by. And then?

There was every chance he would keep going straight along, pushing before him the bright circle of his flashlight on the snow and the black path. There was no reason for Frank to make a noise. Pressed against the wall, he was practically invisible.

Then why did he cough just when the man was about to reach the alley? He didn't have a cold. His throat wasn't dry. He had hardly smoked all evening.

In fact, he coughed to attract attention. And it wasn't even a threat. What possible interest could he have in threatening a poor man who drove a streetcar?

Holst wasn't a real streetcar conductor, though. It was obvious that he had come from somewhere else, that he and his daughter had led a different kind of life. The streets and the lines outside bakeries were full of people like that. Nobody turned to look at them anymore. And because they were ashamed of not being like everybody else, they assumed an air of humility.

Still, Frank had coughed on purpose.

Was it because of Sissy, Holst's daughter? That didn't make sense. He wasn't in love with Sissy. She was a sixteen-year-old girl who didn't mean anything to him at all. He meant something to her, though.

Didn't she open the door when she heard him coming up the stairs, whistling? Didn't she run to the window whenever he went out, hadn't he seen the curtain stir?

If he wanted to, he could have her anytime he felt like it. Maybe it would require patience and a show of good manners, but that wasn't hard to pull off.

The astonishing thing was that Sissy certainly knew who he was and what his mother did for a living. The whole building despised them. Not many people said hello.

Holst didn't say anything to them either, but then he never said anything to anyone. Out of pride. No, more out of humility, or because he couldn't be bothered with other people, because he lived with his daughter in a little circle from which he felt no need to step outside. Some people were like that.

He wasn't even mysterious.

Had Frank perhaps coughed out of childish impulse? That was too simple, too pat.

Holst wasn't scared. His step didn't falter. It never occurred to him that someone might be waiting for him in the alley. That was odd, too, since a man would have to have a good reason for flattening himself against a wall in the middle of the night, with the thermometer at ten degrees below freezing.

As he passed the alley, Holst raised his flashlight for an instant, just long enough to light up Frank's face.

Frank didn't bother to raise the collar of his coat or turn his head aside. He stood there in plain sight with that thoughtful and resolute air that he usually had, even when thinking about the most trivial things.

Holst had seen him and knew him. He was no more than a hundred yards from the apartment building. He was taking the key out of his pocket. Because he worked nights, he was the only tenant who had one.

Tomorrow he would learn from the papers—or simply while standing in line in front of some shop—that a noncommissioned officer had been killed at the corner of the alley.

Then he would know.

What would he decide to do? The Occupation authorities would offer a reward, as they always did when one of their own was in question, especially an officer. Holst and his daughter were poor. They couldn't afford meat more than a couple of times a month, and even then only odd scraps they boiled with turnips. From the odors escaping through the doors, you could tell who in the building ate what.

What would Holst do?

He definitely couldn't be happy to have a business like Lotte's going on just across the hall from his apartment, not with Sissy there all day long.

Wasn't this a chance to get rid of them?

Yet Frank had coughed, and not for a moment did he consider abandoning his plan. On the contrary—for a second he mouthed a sort of prayer that the Eunuch would turn the corner of the street before Holst had had time to enter the building.