Dirty Snow

by Georges Simenon

  It was the old gentleman who wrote, always on scraps of paper, old torn envelopes, on the bottoms of letters or circulars that he trimmed with care. His handwriting was unbelievably small and must have been illegible to anyone else.

  If there was a scrap of paper that dealt with Bertha in his pigeonholes, that meant the big girl had been questioned. Was that right? When he entered the room, Frank would try to sniff it out, as if to detect the smell, some trace of whoever might have been brought there in his absence.

  “Your mother entertained officers, government officials.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “You were often in the apartment during those visits.”

  “I must have been sometimes.”

  “You are young and curious.”

  “I’m young but I’m not curious, and in any case I’m not a pervert.”

  “You have friends, connections. It is interesting to know what officers do and say.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Your girlfriend Bertha …”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend.”

  “She is not any longer, not since she left you, you and your mother. I also wonder why on that day there was the sound of loud voices in your apartment, so loud that the other tenants were alarmed.”

  Which tenants? Who had they spoken to? He thought of old Monsieur Wimmer, but he didn’t believe it was him who had talked.

  “It is curious that Bertha, who according to your mother was almost one of the family, should have left you just then.”

  Was it on purpose that he let slip that Lotte had been questioned? Frank wasn’t worried. He had heard worse.

  “Bertha was very useful to your mama.”

  He didn’t know that Frank had never called his mother that, that no one would call Lotte “mama.”

  “I forget who said”—he pretended to look through his scraps of paper—“that she was as strong as a stallion.”

  “As a mare.”

  “As a mare, yes. We must speak of this again.”

  At first, Frank thought that such remarks were shots in the dark, meant to intimidate him. He hadn’t supposed that his actions could be so important in the eyes of the old gentleman that they would call for all the complicated machinery that was now at work.

  The most extraordinary thing about it was that the old gentleman, from his point of view, wasn’t wrong. He knew where he was going. He knew it better than Frank, who was only just beginning to perceive hidden depths that he had never suspected before.

  In this building, there were no empty words, no bluffs. If the old man said, “We need to talk about this again,” well, it was because he was going to do a lot more than just talk. Poor fat stupid Bertha!

  Yet he didn’t feel sorry for her or anybody. He’d rounded that cape. He bore no grudge. He didn’t despise her. He didn’t hate her. He was beginning to see certain people with the old gentleman’s fish eyes, as through the glass of an aquarium.

  The proof that the old gentleman didn’t waste his time shooting in the dark was that he had got the better of Frank on the subject of Kromer. It was in the beginning, when Frank still didn’t understand. He had supposed, as with the officer with the ruler, that all he had to do was deny everything.

  “You knew a certain Fred Kromer?”

  “No.”

  “You have never met anyone with this name?”

  “I don’t remember it.”

  “He goes to the same places you do, the same restaurants, the same bars.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You are sure you never drank champagne with him at Timo’s?”

  They were baiting the hook.

  “I’ve drunk with a lot of people at Timo’s, even drunk champagne.”

  A blunder. He realized it at once, too late. The old gentleman was gathering nonsense on his scraps of paper. It didn’t seem a very appropriate occupation for a man of his age and position. Yet not one of those scraps of paper ever got lost, or failed to reappear at the right time.

  “You don’t know him by his first name, Fred, either? Certain people, in certain circumstances, are only known by their first names. For example, many people who used to meet you daily, so to speak, do not know that your name is Friedmaier.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is not the same thing with Kromer?”

  Everything counted. Everything carried weight. Everything was recorded. He spent two exhausting hours denying any connection with Kromer, for no other reason than because that was the line of conduct he had adopted. The next day, and the days following, there was no further mention of his friend. He thought they had forgotten him. Then, in the very middle of a night interrogation, when he was literally swaying on his feet—they kept him standing on purpose—his eyes burning, he was handed a photograph of himself, together with Kromer and two women, on the bank of a river in the middle of summer. They had taken off their jackets. It was a typical summer snapshot. Kromer, naturally, had his hand on the breast of the blond girl he was with.

  “You do not know him?”

  “I don’t remember his name.”

  “Nor that of the girls?”

  “As if I could remember the names of all the girls I’ve gone canoeing with!”

  “This one, the brunette, is named Lili.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Her father works at the mayor’s office.”

  “Possibly.”

  “And your companion, that is Kromer.”

  “Hmm.”

  He didn’t remember the snapshot, which he’d never seen before. What he remembered was that there had been five of them that day, three men and two women, never a very happy arrangement. Fortunately, the third man had been busy taking photographs. He himself had paddled the canoe. Even if Frank had wanted to, he couldn’t have told the old gentleman the third man’s name.

  All this proved how thorough their investigations were. God knows where they’d dug up that photograph. Had they searched Kromer’s place? If it was there, it was odd that Frank had never seen it. Had they found it at the third guy’s place? Did they get it from the place that had developed the film?

  That was the good thing about the old gentleman, what encouraged Frank, what gave him hope. The officer would probably have had Frank shot at once just to get it over, to keep things simple. With the old gentleman, he had plenty of time ahead.

  To tell the truth, deep down he was convinced—no, it was faith rather than conviction—that it depended entirely on himself. He thought in pictures, in sensations, the way people who hardly sleep do, people who have to force themselves to sleep.

  He would have to come back to his dream of flying. All he had to do was put out his palms and press against the empty air with all his might, with all his willpower, and then he’d rise, slowly at first, then with perfect ease, until his head touched the ceiling.

  He couldn’t talk about it. Even if Holst himself were there, he couldn’t confess his secret hope. Not yet. It was just like his dream, it was marvelous that he’d had that dream several times, because now it helped him. Maybe he was living in a dream. There were times, because of the lack of sleep, when he was no longer sure. This time, again, it all depended on him, on his willpower.

  If he had the energy, if he kept faith, it would last as long as it had to.

  There was no question of returning to the outside. There was no question, for him, of entertaining hopes like the men in the next classroom. Such hopes didn’t interest him; they even shocked him.

  They did what they could. It wasn’t their fault.

  For him, there was simply a gap in time that he had to fill. If he had been asked to explain how important the gap was, to express it in days, weeks, or months, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. And what if he had been asked what was waiting at the end of it?

  Enough! Better to argue with the old gentleman. Everything had its appointed hour. All through the interrogation they kept h
im standing. He drew a distinction between seated interrogations and standing interrogations. It was a childish trick, really. They were always trying to wear him down. He didn’t let on that he preferred standing. When they made him sit down, it was on a stool without a back. In the end that was even more exhausting.

  The old gentleman never left his chair, never seemed to feel the need to walk around and stretch his legs. Never once, even during one five-hour interrogation, had he left the room to go to the toilet or get a drink of water. He drank nothing. There was nothing to drink on his desk. Cigarettes were enough for him, and he even let them go out two or three times before he was done with them.

  He had all sorts of tricks. Like leaving Frank’s automatic on the desk as though it had been forgotten, as though it were an anonymous object of no importance. He used it as a paperweight. Since the first day, after Frank had been searched, he had never alluded to it. But the weapon remained there, like a threat.

  He had to reason coolly. Frank wasn’t the only person in the old gentleman’s section. Despite the time he devoted to him—a considerable time—a man of his importance must have other problems to solve, other prisoners to question. Was the automatic left there when he questioned them? Did they set the stage differently each time, replacing the automatic with something else, a dagger, a check, a letter, some other piece of evidence?

  How could he explain that this man was a blessing from heaven? Others wouldn’t understand him, would begin to hate him. If not for him, Frank wouldn’t have this contstant sense of the time that he still had left. If not for him, if not for these tiring interrogations, he would never have known the lucidity he now enjoyed, which was so little like what he used to call by that name.

  You had to keep on your toes, be careful not to give too much away all at once. There was the danger of going too quickly, of coming to the end too soon.

  It mustn’t end. Not yet. There were points Frank still needed to clear up. It was slow. Slow and fast at the same time.

  It kept him from thinking about the men in the next classroom who were taken out at dawn to be shot. The most disturbing thing about it was the hour of the day, when the prisoners were only half awake, haggard, unwashed, ushaved, without a cup of coffee to warm their bellies. And then, because of the cold, all of them, without exception, turned the collars of their jackets up. Why weren’t they allowed to put on overcoats? It was a mystery. It wasn’t as though the overcoats were worth much. And cloth, no matter how thick, wouldn’t stop a bullet. Was it just to make it even more sinister?

  Would Frank turn the collar of his jacket up, too? Possibly. He didn’t think about it. He rarely thought about it. Besides, he was convinced they wouldn’t shoot him in the courtyard, by the covered playground where all the desks were piled up.

  Those men had been tried. They had committed crimes that could be judged and written down in the great ledgers of the law. With a little fudging if necessary.

  If they had meant to try him, it was more than likely they would have taken him back to the officer with the brass ruler.

  When everything was finally over, when the old gentleman was satisfied in his soul and conscience that he had squeezed everything he possibly could out of Frank, they would dispose of him without ceremony. He didn’t know where yet. He wasn’t familiar enough with the building. They would shoot him from behind on the stairs or in some corridor. There must be a cellar for that somewhere.

  And he wouldn’t care. He wasn’t afraid. His only fear, the one thing that haunted him, was that it would happen too soon, before he decided for himself, before he was done.

  If they were set on it after that, he would be the first to say, “Do it!”

  And if he got to make a last request, a last wish, he would ask them to perform their little operation while he was lying flat on his stomach in his bed.

  Didn’t this prove that the old gentleman was heavensent? He was sure to find out something new. Every day he found out something new. It was a question of staying on the alert on every front. He had to think of Timo as well as of the people he had met at Taste’s, at the confectioner’s, and all the anonymous tenants in his building. The old man with his eyeglasses mixed up everything on purpose.

  What was his latest discovery? He wiped his glasses carefully with a huge colored handkerchief that was always sticking out of his pants pocket. He fiddled with his scraps of paper as usual. Anyone looking through the window would have thought they were lottery tickets or a hand of cards. He really seemed to be casting about at random. Then he rolled a cigarette with infuriating deliberation. He stuck his tongue out to lick the paper and looked around for matches.

  He could never find his matches, which lay buried under oceans of paper. He didn’t look at Frank. He rarely looked directly at him, and when he did it was with utter indifference. Who knows, perhaps the two others, the acolytes, were there to spy on Frank’s reactions and to report on them afterward.

  “Do you know Anna Loeb?”

  Frank didn’t blink. He never blinked anymore. He tried to think. It was a name he didn’t know, but that meant nothing at the outset. More precisely, he knew the name Loeb like everyone else did. The Loeb brewery. He had drunk Loeb’s beer ever since he had begun drinking. The name appeared in big letters on all the rooftops, in all the cafés and grocery stores, on calendars, even on streetcar windows.

  “I know the beer.”

  “I am asking you if you know Anna Loeb.”

  “No.”

  “And yet she was one of your mother’s lodgers.”

  So it was someone who used another name.

  “You may be right. I don’t know.”

  “Does this help you remember?”

  He held out a photograph he had pulled from a drawer. He always had photographs in reserve.

  Frank could hardly help exclaiming, “Anny!”

  It was Anny, but a different Anny from the one he had known, perhaps because she was fashionably decked out in a sundress with a large straw hat, smiling, linking arms with someone the old gentleman masked with his thumb.

  “Do you know her?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “She lived in the same apartment as you only recently.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “She said she slept with you.”

  “That’s possible, too.”

  “How many times?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Had Anny been arrested? With them, you never knew. It was often in their interests, in order to learn the truth, to tell lies. That was part of their job. Frank was never altogether fooled by the little scraps of paper.

  “Why did you bring her to your mother’s?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I didn’t!”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you mean to say that she came on her own?”

  “There would be nothing strange about that.”

  “In that case, it must be supposed that someone gave her your address.”

  Frank didn’t yet understand; he sensed a trap and didn’t reply. Long silences like that made the interrogations last forever.

  “Your mother’s activities are illegal, but we don’t need to go into that again.”

  That might very well mean that Lotte, too, had been arrested.

  “For this reason, it would be in your mother’s interest to let as few people know as possible. If Anna Loeb showed up at your mother’s, it was because she knew she could find refuge there.”

  The word “refuge” warned Frank, who had to struggle against sleep and against vague thoughts that, if he let his attention stray even for an instant, would take possession of him, and that he only halfheartedly resisted because, in reality, they were his whole life now. Like a sleepwalker, he repeated, “A refuge?”

  “You claim to know nothing about Anna Loeb’s past?”

  “I didn’t even know her real name.”


  “What did she call herself?”

  This was what he called giving ground. He had to do it.

  “Anny.”

  “Who sent her to you?”

  “No one.”

  “Your mother took her on without any references?”

  “She was a beautiful girl and she was willing to sleep with the customers. My mother doesn’t ask more than that.”

  “How many times did you sleep with her?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Were you in love?”

  “No.”

  “Was she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you slept together.”

  Was he some sort of a puritan, or pervert, to attach so much importance to such questions? Was he impotent? He had gone on the same way about Bertha.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She never said anything.”

  “What did she do with her time?”

  “She read magazines.”

  “Magazines you brought her?”

  “No.”

  “How did she get them? Did she go out?”

  “No. I don’t think she ever went out.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She only stayed a few days.”

  “Was she hiding from someone?”

  “I didn’t get that feeling.”

  “Where did the magazines come from?”

  “She must have brought them with her.”

  “Who mailed her letters for her?”

  “Nobody, I guess.”

  “Did she ever ask you to mail letters for her?”

  “No.”

  “Nor to deliver messages for her?”

  “No.”

  It all came so easily because it was true.

  “She slept with clients?”

  “Naturally.”

  “With whom?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t always there.”

  “But when you were there?”

  “I didn’t pay any attention.”

  “You were not jealous?”

  “Not at all.”

  “And yet she is pretty.”