Dirty Snow Read Free

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.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œLend 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,