Dirty Snow Read Free Page A

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,