Dirty Snow (9 page)

He walked slowly, looking short and squat in his big, thick overcoat, his face relaxed, a subdued light in his eyes. Kromer wasn't alone. He was never alone. Frank knew his two companions and preferred not to talk in front of them.

He leaned over Kromer.

“Can I see you for a moment?”

They went into the bathroom, and without a word Frank put the case with the watch in it into Kromer's hand. In spite of the darkness in the car, he had chosen the right one. It was the big blue case containing a watch with a porcelain face and a shepherd and a shepherdess engraved on the back.

“Just one?”

“I have at least fifty, but you'll have to talk to him first and find out where we stand.”

Had the evening left its mark on him? In the car on the way back, Adler had avoided looking at him, and their shoulders hadn't brushed even once.

Kromer too seemed different, embarrassed. He was afraid to ask questions and avoided Frank's eyes, glancing at him surreptitiously.

The other times they had discussed a job, he had been the boss. He had been careful to let Frank know it.

But now he didn't argue. He was in a hurry to get back to the main room. He said tamely, “I'll try to see him tomorrow.”

Then, as he was sitting down again, “You want a drink?”

As a matter of fact, Frank had forgotten to return his flask of brandy. He hadn't touched it, and now, handing it over, he looked him straight in the eye.

Did Kromer understand?

Then he went home to Minna's bed and made love so furiously that she was frightened.

She understood, too. They all did.

H
E SPENT
the day in the kitchen with his feet on the oven, unshaved, unwashed, reading a Zola paperback. Did his mother suspect anything? Ordinarily by noon she was urging him to wash up because there was only one bathroom and in the afternoon it was needed for the clients and the girls.

Yet today she said nothing. She must have heard the racket that he had made in the night with Minna, and Minna looked tired and very worried. She spent her time either at the window, as though expecting to see the police, or with her eyes fixed on Frank, amazed that he was worried only about the cold he said he'd caught.

As for him, he swallowed some aspirin, put drops in his nose, and stubbornly returned to his book.

Sissy must be waiting for him. Several times, especially after Holst left, Frank had found himself looking at the alarm clock over the stove, but he hadn't stirred. There had been a lot of coming and going in the apartment as usual, voices behind the doors, noises he knew so well. But he wasn't curious enough to climb onto the table and look through the transom. Minna, completely naked, her hand on her belly, face haggard, had come to get a hot-water bottle but couldn't attract his attention.

He got dressed at last, once night had fallen. He went by the Holsts' apartment. He could have sworn he saw the door move, that Sissy was there ready to open it, but he went calmly downstairs, smoking his cigarette, which tasted to him like menthol.

Kromer didn't arrive at Leonard's until after seven. He tried to hide his excitement.

“I've seen the general.”

Frank remained stock-still.

Kromer named a very large sum. “Half for you and half for me, and I'll take care of the others.”

Already Kromer was trying to treat him the way he used to, acting like an important man, very busy.

“I want sixty percent,” Frank decided.

“All right.”

Kromer figured that it really didn't matter, since Frank wouldn't see the general and wouldn't know how much he really paid.

“On second thought, fifty percent as agreed. Only I want a green card.”

Kromer didn't have one. If Frank asked for one, it was because it was the hardest thing to get. It was extremely rare to see one. A man like Ressl might have one, but even then he wouldn't flash it around. In the hierarchy, first came permits for automobiles, then the ones that authorized a person to be out at night, finally those that allowed the bearer to go into certain forbidden zones.

The green card, with photograph and fingerprints, the signatures of the commandant of the armed forces and the chief of the political police, required all authorities to give the bearer free passage to “accomplish his mission without hindrance.”

In other words, no one had the right to search you. At the sight of a green card, patrols stood at attention, apologized profusely, and were vaguely uneasy.

And the astonishing thing about it was that it had never crossed Frank's mind until his talk with Kromer. The idea came to him all of a sudden while they were discussing percentages, and he had started wondering what other exorbitant demands he could make.

And even more astonishingly, Kromer, after a moment of stupefaction, didn't burst out laughing or protest.

“I can try.”

“Your general can take it or leave it. If he wants his watches, he knows what to do.”

He would have his card, he was certain.

“The little girl?”

“Nothing new. It's all right.”

“Have you touched her again?”

“No.”

“Will you let me have her?”

“Maybe.”

“She's not too thin, is she? Is she clean?”

Frank was almost sure now that the story about the strangled girl in the barn was just make-believe. It was all the same to him. He despised Kromer. And it was amusing to think that a man like Kromer was going to pull every string to get him a green card that he would never dare to ask for himself.

“Tell me, who is this Carl Adler?”

“The driver of the car? I think he's a radio engineer.”

“What does he do?”

“He works for them, locating underground transmitters in the telegraph office. You can trust him.”

“I hope so.”

And Kromer kept coming back to his obsession.

“Why don't you ever bring her here?”

“Who?”

“The little girl.”

“I told you, she lives with her father.”

“What difference does it make?”

“We'll see. Maybe I'll get around to it.”

People must think he was hard. Even his mother was afraid of him. Yet he was capable of great tenderness, lapsing into a daydream while staring at a splash of greenish color, as he was now. It was nothing—part of the background of a decorative wall panel at Leonard's. It showed a meadow, and each blade of grass was distinct, the daisies had all their petals.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I'm not thinking about anything.”

It was a question his wet-nurse used to ask him long ago. So had his mother, when she came to see him on Sundays.

“What's my little Frank thinking about?”

“Nothing.” He answered angrily because he hated being called “my little Frank.”

“Say, Frank! If I get that green card for you …”

“You'll get it.”

“All right. Supposing. Then we could really pull something off, right?”

“Maybe.”

That night he knew his mother had understood. He came home early because he was coming down with a bad cold, and he had always been afraid of being sick. They were sitting in the front room, the one they always called the salon. There was fat Bertha darning stockings, Minna with a hot-water bottle on her belly, and Lotte reading the paper.

They were all three so still and silent in the sleeping house that they looked like a painting. It was surprising to see their lips move.

“Home so soon?”

The paper must have reported what had happened to Mademoiselle Vilmos. There was no longer much fuss made over attacks of that sort, since they happened every day. But even if there had been only three lines on the last page, Lotte wouldn't have missed them. She never missed information about people she had known.

She must have understood part of the truth and guessed the rest. Even the noise he had made with Minna the night before must have come back to her. Knowing men the way she did, she would have found a special significance in a detail like that.

“Have you had dinner?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

She was afraid of him. She walked on eggshells around him. It had always been like that, though not as flagrant or obvious.

“You're sniffling.”

“I have a cold.”

“Why not have some hot rum and let me cup you?”

He agreed to the rum but not the cupping. He had a horror of those little glasses that his mother had a perfect mania for putting on her girls at the slightest sign of a cough, leaving round pink or brown spots on their skin.

“Bertha!”

“I'll go,” Minna said quickly, a sudden pain twisting her face as she rose.

It was warm and peaceful, Frank's cigarette smoke gathered around the light, the fire roared—there were four fires roaring in the apartment—while a very fine snow had once again started to drift lazily through the darkness outside the windows.

“You really don't want anything to eat? There's some liver sausage.”

In the end, words meant nothing. They served only as a means of contact. He understood that Lotte simply needed to hear his voice, to see if anything about it had changed.

Because of the old Vilmos woman!

He smoked his cigarette, leaning back in a deep red-velvet armchair, legs stretched out toward the fire. The oddest thing was that he sensed guilt in his mother. If she had recognized his footsteps in time, would she have hidden the newspaper? Had he intentionally come up the last steps on tiptoe?

The truth is, he hadn't been thinking of Lotte, but of Sissy, afraid that she might open her door a crack.

This time of night she was alone with her saucers. Did she go to bed while waiting for her father to come home? Or stay up, all alone, till midnight?

He had been afraid, he admitted to himself, of seeing the door open and of being forced to go in, of being alone with her in the dimly lit kitchen with, perhaps, the remains of her supper on the table.

At night she must fold out the cot. And the door to her bedroom would be left open for the heat.

It was all really too lousy. Too sad, too ugly.

“Why don't you take off your shoes? Bertha!”

Bertha came to take them off. Sissy, too, would have taken them off, going down on her knees without hesitation.

“You look tired.”

“It's my cold.”

“You ought to get a good night's rest.”

Again he understood. It was like automatically translating from a foreign language. Lotte was advising him to sleep alone, not to have sex. There was one thing she didn't know yet and that he was only beginning to realize himself: he didn't want Minna or Bertha or even Sissy.

A little later she saw to it that his bed was properly made up.

“Will you be warm enough?”

“Yes.”

He wasn't going to sleep there. Tonight he would sleep in anybody's bed, even an old woman's. He needed to feel someone next to him.

And Minna, who hadn't had any experience at all when she first arrived and whose thighs still curved on the inside like a little girl's—Minna seemed to have learned everything in three days. She made a place for his head in the hollow of her arm. She was careful not to talk. She stroked him gently, like a woman nursing her child.

His mother knew. There was no longer any doubt. The proof was that the next morning the newspaper had disappeared. And there was a little thing he noticed that she would have refused to admit. When she kissed him, as she did every morning, she recoiled slightly. She checked herself instantly and all of a sudden was more affectionate than usual.

He would get his green card, he was sure. For someone else, that would represent an extraordinary success, a goal you hardly dreamed of attaining, since it made you equal to a section chief on the other side.

He could have been a section chief.

He had tried to enlist in the beginning, when they were still fighting with tanks and cannons, and they had sent him back to school.

For a long time he had hung around the sixth-floor tenant, a bachelor of about forty with a huge brown mustache and mysterious ways. He turned out to be the first to be shot.

Had the violinist been shot already, or deported? Had they tortured him? No one would ever know, probably, and his mother would be at wit's end from then on, like so many others. She would keep at it for a while, waiting in lines, knocking on office doors and being sent on her way, then no one would see her anymore, everyone would stop thinking about her, and, one fine day, the concierge would decide to call in a locksmith.

They would find her in her room, dead for the past week or two.

He didn't feel pity, not for anyone. Not even for himself. He didn't ask for pity, didn't accept it, and that was what irritated him about Lotte, whose eyes brooded over him, anxious and tender at the same time.

What interested him was talking to Holst, just once, at length and alone. That desire had been gnawing at him for a long time, even when he was still unconscious of it.

Why Holst? He didn't know. Maybe he would never know. He refused to think that it was because he had never had a father.

Sissy was stupid. That morning while she was cleaning, Bertha had found an envelope addressed to Frank slipped under the salon door. In the envelope was a sheet of paper with a question mark in pencil and the signature: “Sissy.”

Because she hadn't heard from him yesterday! She had wept. She had believed her life was over. Just for that, just because of her insistence, he decided not to see her, to go alone to the movies, if he had to, while waiting for his appointment with Kromer.

But she was even more determined than he thought. He was hardly on the stairs—and he had been careful not to make any noise—when she came out, with her coat and hat on, which showed she had been waiting for hours behind the door, ready to leave the whole time.