Dirty Snow (25 page)

How could he explain that this man was a blessing from heaven? Others wouldn't understand him, would begin to hate him. If not for him, Frank wouldn't have this contstant sense of the time that he still had left. If not for him, if not for these tiring interrogations, he would never have known the lucidity he now enjoyed, which was so little like what he used to call by that name.

You had to keep on your toes, be careful not to give too much away all at once. There was the danger of going too quickly, of coming to the end too soon.

It mustn't end. Not yet. There were points Frank still needed to clear up. It was slow. Slow and fast at the same time.

It kept him from thinking about the men in the next classroom who were taken out at dawn to be shot. The most disturbing thing about it was the hour of the day, when the prisoners were only half awake, haggard, unwashed, ushaved, without a cup of coffee to warm their bellies. And then, because of the cold, all of them, without exception, turned the collars of their jackets up. Why weren't they allowed to put on overcoats? It was a mystery. It wasn't as though the overcoats were worth much. And cloth, no matter how thick, wouldn't stop a bullet. Was it just to make it even more sinister?

Would Frank turn the collar of his jacket up, too? Possibly. He didn't think about it. He rarely thought about it. Besides, he was convinced they wouldn't shoot him in the courtyard, by the covered playground where all the desks were piled up.

Those men had been tried. They had committed crimes that could be judged and written down in the great ledgers of the law. With a little fudging if necessary.

If they had meant to try him, it was more than likely they would have taken him back to the officer with the brass ruler.

When everything was finally over, when the old gentleman was satisfied in his soul and conscience that he had squeezed everything he possibly could out of Frank, they would dispose of him without ceremony. He didn't know where yet. He wasn't familiar enough with the building. They would shoot him from behind on the stairs or in some corridor. There must be a cellar for that somewhere.

And he wouldn't care. He wasn't afraid. His only fear, the one thing that haunted him, was that it would happen too soon, before he decided for himself, before he was done.

If they were set on it after that, he would be the first to say, “Do it!”

And if he got to make a last request, a last wish, he would ask them to perform their little operation while he was lying flat on his stomach in his bed.

Didn't this prove that the old gentleman was heavensent? He was sure to find out something new. Every day he found out something new. It was a question of staying on the alert on every front. He had to think of Timo as well as of the people he had met at Taste's, at the confectioner's, and all the anonymous tenants in his building. The old man with his eyeglasses mixed up everything on purpose.

What was his latest discovery? He wiped his glasses carefully with a huge colored handkerchief that was always sticking out of his pants pocket. He fiddled with his scraps of paper as usual. Anyone looking through the window would have thought they were lottery tickets or a hand of cards. He really seemed to be casting about at random. Then he rolled a cigarette with infuriating deliberation. He stuck his tongue out to lick the paper and looked around for matches.

He could never find his matches, which lay buried under oceans of paper. He didn't look at Frank. He rarely looked directly at him, and when he did it was with utter indifference. Who knows, perhaps the two others, the acolytes, were there to spy on Frank's reactions and to report on them afterward.

“Do you know Anna Loeb?”

Frank didn't blink. He never blinked anymore. He tried to think. It was a name he didn't know, but that meant nothing at the outset. More precisely, he knew the name Loeb like everyone else did. The Loeb brewery. He had drunk Loeb's beer ever since he had begun drinking. The name appeared in big letters on all the rooftops, in all the cafés and grocery stores, on calendars, even on streetcar windows.

“I know the beer.”

“I am asking you if you know Anna Loeb.”

“No.”

“And yet she was one of your mother's lodgers.”

So it was someone who used another name.

“You may be right. I don't know.”

“Does this help you remember?”

He held out a photograph he had pulled from a drawer. He always had photographs in reserve.

Frank could hardly help exclaiming, “Anny!”

It was Anny, but a different Anny from the one he had known, perhaps because she was fashionably decked out in a sundress with a large straw hat, smiling, linking arms with someone the old gentleman masked with his thumb.

“Do you know her?”

“I'm not sure.”

“She lived in the same apartment as you only recently.”

“It's possible.”

“She said she slept with you.”

“That's possible, too.”

“How many times?”

“I don't know.”

Had Anny been arrested? With them, you never knew. It was often in their interests, in order to learn the truth, to tell lies. That was part of their job. Frank was never altogether fooled by the little scraps of paper.

“Why did you bring her to your mother's?”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“But I didn't!”

“Then who did?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you mean to say that she came on her own?”

“There would be nothing strange about that.”

“In that case, it must be supposed that someone gave her your address.”

Frank didn't yet understand; he sensed a trap and didn't reply. Long silences like that made the interrogations last forever.

“Your mother's activities are illegal, but we don't need to go into that again.”

That might very well mean that Lotte, too, had been arrested.

“For this reason, it would be in your mother's interest to let as few people know as possible. If Anna Loeb showed up at your mother's, it was because she knew she could find refuge there.”

The word “refuge” warned Frank, who had to struggle against sleep and against vague thoughts that, if he let his attention stray even for an instant, would take possession of him, and that he only halfheartedly resisted because, in reality, they were his whole life now. Like a sleepwalker, he repeated, “A refuge?”

“You claim to know nothing about Anna Loeb's past?”

“I didn't even know her real name.”

“What did she call herself?”

This was what he called giving ground. He had to do it.

“Anny.”

“Who sent her to you?”

“No one.”

“Your mother took her on without any references?”

“She was a beautiful girl and she was willing to sleep with the customers. My mother doesn't ask more than that.”

“How many times did you sleep with her?”

“I don't remember.”

“Were you in love?”

“No.”

“Was she?”

“I don't think so.”

“But you slept together.”

Was he some sort of a puritan, or pervert, to attach so much importance to such questions? Was he impotent? He had gone on the same way about Bertha.

“What did she tell you?”

“She never said anything.”

“What did she do with her time?”

“She read magazines.”

“Magazines you brought her?”

“No.”

“How did she get them? Did she go out?”

“No. I don't think she ever went out.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. She only stayed a few days.”

“Was she hiding from someone?”

“I didn't get that feeling.”

“Where did the magazines come from?”

“She must have brought them with her.”

“Who mailed her letters for her?”

“Nobody, I guess.”

“Did she ever ask you to mail letters for her?”

“No.”

“Nor to deliver messages for her?”

“No.”

It all came so easily because it was true.

“She slept with clients?”

“Naturally.”

“With whom?”

“I don't know. I wasn't always there.”

“But when you were there?”

“I didn't pay any attention.”

“You were not jealous?”

“Not at all.”

“And yet she is pretty.”

“I was used to that.”

“Were there clients who came exclusively for her?”

“You ought to ask my mother.”

“She has been asked.”

“What did she say?”

And so, almost every day he was forced to relive life in the building. He spoke of it with a detachment that visibly surprised the old gentleman, all the more because he felt that Frank was sincere.

“No one ever called her on the telephone?”

“There's only one telephone that works in the building, the concierge's.”

“I know.”

So what was he hoping to find out?

“Have you ever seen this man?”

“No.”

“This one?”

“No.”

“This one?”

“No.”

People he didn't know. Why was the old man always so careful to hide part of each photograph, letting him see only the face, not the clothes?

Because they were officers, of course! High-ranking ones, perhaps.

“Did you know that Anna Loeb was wanted?”

“I never heard that.”

“Were you also not aware that her father had been shot?”

The brewer Loeb had been shot almost a year before, after a whole arsenal had been found hidden in the vats at his brewery.

“I didn't know he was her father. I never knew her last name.”

“Yet she came to your place to hide.”

It was extraordinary. He had slept two or three times with the daughter of Loeb, the brewer, one of the richest and most important men in town, and he had never even known it. Every day, thanks to the old gentleman, he discovered new labyrinths.

“She left you?”

“I don't remember anymore. She was still there when I was arrested.”

“You are sure?”

What should he say? What did they know? He had never liked Anny, who always seemed so contemptuous—so absent, which was worse—even in bed. None of that mattered now. Had she been arrested? Had they made a clean sweep of everyone since he'd been in prison?

“I think. I'd been drinking the night before.”

“At Timo's?”

“Maybe. And other places.”

“With Kromer?”

He didn't miss a trick, the old shark!

“With a lot of people.”

“Before taking refuge with you, Anna Loeb had been successively the mistress of several officers, and she chose them carefully.”

“Hmm.”

“More for their rank than for their physique or their money.”

Frank didn't reply. No question had been asked.

“She was in the pay of a foreign power, and she went to hide out at your place.”

“It's not hard for a good-looking woman to be taken into a whorehouse.”

“You admit it was a whorehouse?”

“Call it what you like. Women slept with clients.”

“Including officers?”

“Perhaps. I wasn't on duty at the door.”

“Not at the transom?”

He knew everything! He must have gone over the apartment himself with particular care.

“Did you know their names?”

“No.”

Was, perhaps, the old gentleman's section working against the other section, the one where he had been hit with the brass ruler? The word “officer” recurred with a frequency that interested him.

“Would you recognize them?”

“No.”

“Sometimes they stayed for a long time, no?”

“Long enough to do what they came for.”

“Did they talk?”

“I wasn't in the room.”

“They talked,” affirmed the old gentleman. “
Men always talk
.”

You'd think he'd had as much experience as Lotte. He knew where he was going, and he went about it meticulously and patiently. He saw a long way ahead. He had plenty of time. He picked at a bit of thread and delicately teased it out.

The soup had been brought long before. Frank would find the liquid cold in his tin bowl, as he did almost every day.

“When women make men talk, it is in order to repeat what they say to someone else.”

Frank shrugged.

“Anna Loeb slept with you, but you insist she said nothing. She did not go out, and yet she sent messages.”

His head was swimming. He must hold out to the end, until bed, until he finally sank into the planks with all his weight, eyes closed, ears buzzing, listening to the blood circulating through his arteries, feeling the life in his body, thinking about things other than idiocies, things that made it possible for him to hang on, the window, the four walls, a room with a bed, a stove—he didn't dare add the cradle—a man who went away every morning knowing he'd come back to a woman who was always there and who knew that she'd never be alone, of the sun that always rose and set in the same place, of a tin lunch box you carried under your arm like a treasure, of gray felt boots, of a geranium in bloom, of things so simple that nobody really knew them, or that they despised, that they complained about when they were theirs.

There was so little time left!

T
HAT NIGHT
he endured a particularly grueling interrogation. They must have woken him up in the middle of the night, and he was still in the office when he heard the noise of the firing squad in the courtyard, followed, as always, by single, fainter shots. He looked at the window. It was dawn.

It was one of the few times he nearly lost his temper. He was sure they were dragging out the session just for the sake of it, that he was being asked questions of no importance entirely at random. Ressl, the editor in chief, had been mentioned among others. Frank replied that he hardly knew him, had spoken to him only once.