Dirty Snow Read Free Page B

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.
    Holst would hear him, would see him. Perhaps he’d wait a moment with his key in his hand and even see the thing done.
    That didn’t happen. Too bad—Frank had been excited by the idea. It seemed that there was already a secret bond between him and the man now climbing the stairs in the dark building.
    Of course it wasn’t because of Holst that he was going to kill the Eunuch. That had already been decided.
    It was just that, at that moment, his act had made no sense. It had been almost a joke, a childish prank. What was it he had said? Like losing his virginity.
    Right now there was something else he wanted, that he accepted with open eyes.
    There was Holst, Sissy, and himself. The noncommissioned officer fell into the background; Kromer and his pal Berg were completely unimportant.
    There was Holst and himself.
    And it was really as though he had just chosen Holst, as though he had always known that things would turn out this way, because he wouldn’t have done it for anyone but the streetcar conductor.
    A half-hour later, he knocked at Timo’s, on the little door at the back of the alley, just like everyone else. Timo himself opened the door. There was hardly anyone left, and one of the girls who had been drinking with the Eunuch was vomiting into the kitchen sink.
    â€œHas Kromer left?”
    â€œAh! Yes … He said to tell you that he had an appointment in the Upper Town