He had made up his mind to meet Adler and the other man without seeing Kromer again, but at the last moment he didn’t. Not so much because of Kromer but because he felt the need to cling to something stable, familiar. The crowds in the streets always frightened him a little. You saw, in the light of the shop windows and streetlamps, faces that were too pale, with features too drawn and eyes that had a fierce, vacant look. Most were a mystery. But worst of all were the dead eyes. As time went by, you saw more and more people with eyes that were dead.
Was he thinking of Holst? It wasn’t exactly the same thing. Holst’s eyes weren’t full of hate, and they weren’t empty. But you felt no contact was possible and that was humiliating.
He pushed open the door into Leonard’s. Kromer was there with a man who looked different from both of them. It was Ressl, editor in chief of the evening paper, always accompanied by his bodyguard with the broken nose.
“You know Peter Ressl?”
“I know his name. Everyone does.”
“My friend Frank.”
“Delighted.”
He held out a long, bony, very white hand. Maybe yesterday evening it had been Carl Adler’s hands that had upset Frank. They looked like Ressl’s.
Ressl’s family was one of the oldest in town, and his father had once been a councillor of state. They had been ruined even before the war, but it was in their mansion that the Occupation authorities had set up headquarters. Not a month went by that those gentlemen didn’t ask for something.
It was said that Councillor Ressl, who could be seen slipping among the houses like a shadow, had never spoken a word to them, and that anyone else in his place would have been shot or hanged by this time.
Peter, a lawyer who had once had something to do with the movies, was quick to accept the post of editor in chief of the evening paper. He was probably the only person in the whole region to have obtained, for some mysterious reason, a permit to cross the border. He had gone to Rome, Paris, London. The dark suit he wore that evening had come from London, and he was ostentatiously smoking English cigarettes.
He was a nervous, unhealthy-looking fellow. Some said he took drugs. Others said he was a homosexual.
“I thought you had urgent business,” said Kromer— obviously very proud to be seen with Ressl but worried by Frank’s presence at this hour. “What’ll you have?”
“I only stopped in for a minute to say hello.”
“Have something to drink. Bartender!”
A few moments later, when Frank was leaving, Kromer took something out of his pocket and slipped it into his hand.
“You never know …”
It was a flat bottle full of brandy. “Good luck.
Don’t forget about the little girl”
They barely exchanged a word. The car was in fact a small truck. Carl Adler was waiting in the driver’s seat, his foot on the clutch.
“Where’s the other guy?” Frank asked uneasily.
“Back there.”
Of course. He had seen the reddish glow of a cigarette in the darkness in the rear of the truck.
“Where to?”
“Cut through town first.”
They caught glimpses of familiar places as they passed. They even drove by the Lido, and for a moment Frank thought of Sissy sitting under her lamp, painting flowers and waiting for her father to come home.
The man in the back was probably a worker, as Frank had noted yesterday. He had big, dirty hands and a face that, with a good wash, would have resembled Kromer’s, except that it was franker and more open. He wasn’t nervous. Though he had no idea what they were going to do, he didn’t ask any questions.
Carl Adler didn’t, either. But he had an unpleasant way of only looking straight ahead. The profile he presented to Frank was too self-consciously indifferent, with an expression of dislike, and certainly of condescension.
“And now?”
“Take a left.”
Since no car could drive around without a permit from the authorities, who were tricky to deal with, Adler must work for them. Lots of people played a double game. One had just been shot. He had been seen every day in the company of high-ranking officers, and was so notorious that the children used to spit on the sidewalk when he went by. Now they called him a hero.
“Take another left at the next intersection.”
Frank was smoking cigarettes and passing them back to their friend in the rear, who must have been sitting on the spare tire. Carl Adler said he didn’t smoke. Too bad for him.
“When you see a pylon, go right and up the hill.”
They were coming to the village now, and Frank could have found the rest of the way with his eyes closed. He might have said “his” village, if there had been anything anywhere in the world that belonged to him. It was here that he had been raised, where Lotte, who had had him when she was nineteen, had put him out to nurse.
There was a fairly steep hill beyond which lay what they called the lower houses, almost all small farms. Then the road widened out into a sort of large square, paved with cobblestones that made the truck bounce. The church was behind the pond, really nothing but a large water hole, with the cemetery, where the gravedigger—was it still old Pruster?—always struck water with his shovel less than a couple of feet down.
“I don’t bury them, I drown them!” he would say after a drink or two.
The headlights illuminated a pink house with two life-size painted angels on the gabled roof. The whole village was painted like a plaything. There were pink houses, green houses, blue houses. Almost all had a little niche with a porcelain virgin in it, and there was a feast day once a year when candles were lit in front of all the statuettes.
Frank was emotionless. He had decided, when Kromer had spoken to him about the watches, that it wasn’t going to mean anything to him.
It was, instead, a stroke of luck. He owed those people nothing, he owed nothing to anyone. It was easy to give a child candy and to talk to him in a ridiculous baby voice.
He had lived here until he was ten, and his mother had come to see him every Sunday, in summer at least—he remembered her big white straw hats. There wasn’t a more beautiful woman in the world. His wet-nurse, every time Lotte came, would cross her red hands over her stomach in an ecstasy of admiration.
Lotte didn’t always come alone. Five or six times there had been a man with her—a different one each time, with a reserved air, at whom she glanced uneasily. She’d say with affected gaiety, “And this is my Frank!”
It never seemed to work out, for one reason or another. When she put him in school in town as a boarder, Frank had understood, and begged her not to come see him anymore in the visitors’ parlor, although she always brought him presents.
“But why?”
“No reason.”
“Have your little friends said something to you?”
“No.”
She wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. It was an obsession.
Luckily the war had come and the schools closed for a few months. When they reopened, he was past fifteen.
“I’m not going back to school,” he announced.
“Why, Frank?”
“Because.”
He never knew whether it was because he reminded her of someone, but even as a small boy he had noticed that when he assumed a certain expression, his mother wouldn’t insist. As if terrified, she would let him have his way.
His “closed” expression, she always called it.
Since then, life had been so complicated for everyone that Lotte didn’t mention his education again. They had got into the habit of saying, “Later, when it’s all over.”
And it went on. And he was a man now. It wasn’t so long ago that, during an argument in which he was the calmer of the two, he had tossed back at her, quite calmly, with his eyes like two pinpricks, “Whore!”
Now just as calmly he ordered Adler, “Stop.”
A little off the square. There was a street to the right whe
re a car wouldn’t be noticed. Anyway, there was no one around. Hardly any lights shone in the windows, since the villagers kept their shutters tightly closed. You could scarcely imagine any life going on inside. The windows of the school were dark, too. How many panes of glass in those five windows had he broken with a ball!
“Coming?” he said to the man in the back.
And the latter, rough but friendly, replied, “Call me Stan.” Then, slapping his empty pockets, he added, “Your pal said not to bring anything. That right?”
Frank had his automatic, which was enough. Adler would wait for them in the car.
“You sure?” Stan asked, trying to catch his eye.
Adler sneered as if disgusted and said, “That’s what I’m here for!”
The snow crunched under their feet more noisily than in town. Gardens could be made out behind the houses, pine trees, hedges silvered with ice. The Vilmos house was to the right, set back a little from the square.
The house showed no light, but the rooms where they lived were in the back.
“Let me handle this.”
“Fine.”
“We may have to frighten them.”
“Sure.”
“We may have to get a little rough.”
“Okay!”
It was years since he had been here, but it was impossible for his feet not to follow in his old footsteps. The watch-maker Vilmos and his watches, and his famous garden, these were perhaps his most vivid childhood memories.
Even before reaching the door, he seemed to recognize the smell of the house, which had always had old people in it, since as far as he was concerned the watchmaker Vilmos and his sister had never been young.
Frank took a dark handkerchief out of his pocket and tied it around his face below his eyes. Stan was about to protest.
“You don’t need one. They don’t know you. But if you like …”
He handed him a similar handkerchief; he had thought of everything.
He still remembered Mademoiselle Vilmos’s cakes, like nothing else that he had ever eaten, tasteless, thick, decorated with pink-and-blue sugar. She always kept them in a box with pictures from the adventures of Robinson Crusoe on it.
And she insisted on calling him “my little angel.”
Vilmos must be over eighty now, his sister around seventy-five. It was hard to tell exactly, since children have a different way of judging age. For him they had always been old, and Vilmos had been the first person he had ever seen who could remove all his teeth at once, since he wore dentures.
They were misers, brother and sister, each as bad as the other.
“Should I ring the bell?” asked Stan, who was uneasy standing there in the deserted square under the moonlight.
Frank rang, surprised to find the bell rope so low, when once he had had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. He held his automatic in his right hand. His foot was ready to keep the door from closing, like the first time he had gone to Sissy’s. Footsteps could be heard inside, a sound like in a church. He remembered that, too. The hall, long and wide, with dark walls and mysterious doors like those of a sacristy, was paved with gray tiles, and two or three were always loose.
“Who is it?”
It was the voice of old Mademoiselle Vilmos, who was afraid of nothing.
“The priest sent me,” he replied.
He heard the chain being pulled back. He pushed his foot against the door as it opened, his pistol at his waist. He said to Stan, who suddenly seemed awkward, “Go on!” Then to the old woman, “Where’s Vilmos?”
God, how tiny and gray she was! She clasped her hands and stammered in her cracked voice, “But, my good sir, you know very well he’s been dead for a year.”
“Give me the watches.”
He remembered the hallway, the dark-brown wallpaper that was supposed to imitate Cordova leather and where traces of gold were still visible. The shop was to the left, with the workbench where Vilmos used to sit, bent over his watches, the little jeweler’s glass with the black rim screwed in his eye.
“Where are the watches?” He added, nervously, “The collection.” Then, raising the automatic, “Get it now!”
Could it all go wrong? He hadn’t foreseen that Vilmos might be dead. With him it would have been easy. The watchmaker was such a coward that he would have given up his watches without a word.
The old bag was made of different stuff. She had seen the automatic, all right, but you felt that she was still looking for a way out, that she wouldn’t give in, that she would fight to the end, taking her last chance.
Then he heard a voice, Stan’s—Frank had forgotten about him. From deep in his throat, he drawled, “Maybe we could help her remember.”
He must have done this before. Kromer obviously hadn’t chosen a novice. Maybe he hadn’t been entirely sure about Frank.
The old woman had flattened herself against the wall. A pitiful yellowish-gray lock of hair hung over her face. She had held out both arms, her hands flat against the imitation-leather walls.
He repeated almost mechanically, “The watches …”
He hadn’t had much to drink and yet things seemed to be happening as if he were drunk. Everything was blurred, confused, with only certain details standing out, exaggeratedly clear: the lock of yellowish-gray hair, the hands flat against the wall, the old hands with their big blue veins …
Usually so deliberate, he must have moved too quickly turning to say something to Stan, and the handkerchief slipped down. Before he could pull it up over his face, she exclaimed, “Frank!” Adding immediately—it was really too ridiculous—“Little Frank!”
He repeated, his voice hard, “The watches!”
“You’ll find them. You always got what you wanted. But don’t hurt me—I’ll tell you … Oh God! Frank! Little Frank!”
She seemed reassured, but at the same time even more frightened. She had lost her immobility. Her mind was beginning to work again. She trotted off down the hall, toward the kitchen, where Frank noticed a wicker armchair with an orange cat curled up in a ball on a red cushion.
She seemed to be talking to herself, or praying, her bony limbs rattling about in her baggy old clothes.
Was she just stalling? She cast a furtive glance at Stan, probably wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to rouse his pity.
“What do you need them for? When I think about my poor brother, he used to be so happy to show them to you, he used to hold them up to your ear and make them strike one after the other, and I always had candy for you … There’s no candy to be found anymore … You can’t find anything … I’d be better off dead …”
She began to cry, the way she always did, but it could be just a trick.
“The watches!”
“He moved them from place to place, with all the things going on. He’s been dead a year and you never knew! If he were here, I’m sure …”
What was she so sure of? It was too absurd. It was time to put an end to it. Adler must be getting impatient and would be likely to leave without them.
“Where are the watches?”
She still found time to poke at a log in the fireplace and turn her back on him, intentionally he was sure, before spitting out, “Under the tile …”
“Which tile?”
“You know perfectly well. The cracked one. The third.”
Stan stayed in the kitchen to watch the old woman while Frank went to look for something to pry the tile loose. She had offered him coffee. Frank vaguely heard her saying, “He used to come almost every day, and I always had cakes for him in that box over there.” Then she added, lowering her voice as if she hadn’t been talking to a man with a handkerchief tied around his face, “My Lord, monsieur, can he have become a robber? And armed, too! Is the pistol loaded?”
Frank had found the watches, all in their cases, covered with old sacking. He called out sharply, “Stan!”
It was over now. They only had to leave. Stupidly, the old woman stammered, “You don’t think he’d li
ke a cup of coffee?”
“Stan!”
She clung to them, following them into the hall.
“Oh Lord, who ever would have thought! I who …”
They only had to leave, to go back to the car that was waiting two hundred yards away. Even if she could shout loud enough to rouse the neighbors, it wouldn’t matter, since there wasn’t a car in the village that had any gas, and the telephones didn’t work at night.
He cracked open the door and saw the square bathed in moonlight, without a trace of life. He said to his companion, “You go on ahead …”
And the other knew what that meant. The old woman had seen Frank’s face. She knew him. There were times when you could count on the protection of the Occupation forces. Other times, you never knew why, they wouldn’t lift a finger to help you, and the police were quick to take advantage. No matter how well you thought you knew them, their behavior remained a mystery.
No one was safe.
Stan started walking away, holding the sack full of watches in his arms. You could hear the crunching of the hard snow.
The door closed behind him. He must have heard a dull report. Then the door opened again. He saw a rectangle of yellow light that narrowed before disappearing altogether.
Footsteps came up to him. A hand out of the darkness took hold of the sack again.
Then, just before reaching the car, while there were still only the two of them, Stan said, “An old woman!”
His remark found no echo, and in the car Frank passed back his pack of cigarettes and curtly ordered, “Back to town.”
He was going to have a bad time, but he knew it wouldn’t last long. He had been all right until he got into the car. Until then he had kept his nerves under control.
He went to pieces suddenly. Not badly. The others didn’t notice. It was inside him, a sort of trembling, a spasm. He had to make an effort to keep his hands from shaking, and it seemed like there was a bubble of air trying to escape from his chest.
He rolled down the window. The cold air on his forehead made him feel better. He breathed greedily.
Dirty Snow Page 6
