When she recognized Frank, she clenched her jaws. ‘Is that you, you brat? Just do that again and I’ll—’
Lotte didn’t have time to intervene. Two more slaps rang out as clearly as whips at the circus. As a result, Bertha, red-faced, threw herself on him, clutching at him as best she could, while he made an effort to keep her at a distance.
‘Bertha! Frank!’
Minna had taken refuge in the salon, while Anny, smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder, had leaned back against the doorframe to watch the match.
‘A little brat, yes, that’s what you are! A lowlife who thinks he can do whatever he likes just because his mother runs a brothel! He does stuff so filthy he’d make even a hardened whore blush! Let go of me! Let go of me, or I’ll scream as loud as I can and bring out the neighbours! It’ll take more than your revolver or your bloody papers to get rid of them once they come after you!’
‘Frank!’
He let go. His scratched cheek was bleeding a little.
‘Just wait until they’ve got you in a corner, which won’t be long now! There won’t always be foreign soldiers in the country to protect you, you and people like you!’
‘Just come and settle your account, Bertha.’
‘I’ll go in my own good time, madam. Just see how you like it tomorrow morning, when there’s nobody to make your coffee or empty your chamber pots! When I think I had to bring you pork from my parents!’
‘Come on, Bertha.’
She turned one last time to Frank, eyes shining, and spat at him by way of farewell. ‘Coward! Dirty little coward!’
And yet she had been the tenderest among them when he had slept with her, a tenderness that was quite motherly.
Most likely, Bertha will say nothing. Lotte is worried, but she ought to be thinking she has seen it all before. There have been lots of scenes like that, and there have never been any consequences. As Bertha went downstairs with her belongings, Lotte tried to listen out, anxious to know if she would talk to some of the tenants or the caretaker. It was unlikely, because Bertha is looked down on as much as they are. Wasn’t it her the boy spat at? It is still her that people would pick on most easily.
There she is, waiting for a tram on the corner of the street, maybe already regretting what she has done.
Lotte regrets it even more. Bertha may not have exactly excited the men, but she managed to satisfy them in the end all the same, and the one big advantage, with her, was that she did almost all the housework.
Minna will take over, but she is not strong, and her insides still hurt. As for Anny, the most they can expect from her is that she might make her own bed in the morning.
And then there is the shopping, the queues, where you inevitably find yourself in contact with local people, sometimes with tenants from this building.
‘You shouldn’t have slapped her . . . Well, what’s done is done!’
She looks at her son’s pale complexion and the dark rings under his eyes. Frank has never drunk as much as now, has never gone out as much without saying where he is going, with that hard look in his eyes and always with his loaded revolver in his pocket.
‘Do you think it’s wise to go around with that thing on you?’
He doesn’t bother to answer, or even to shrug. He has got into a new habit that is quickly becoming a mannerism: the habit of looking at people who talk to him as if he doesn’t see them and carrying on as if he hasn’t heard a word.
Not once has he been lucky enough to meet Holst on the stairs, even though he goes up and down them five or six times a day, much more frequently than in normal circumstances. It is likely that Holst has asked the tram company for leave so that he can look after his daughter. Frank thought he would be obliged to go out, even if only to buy medicines or food. But they have made other arrangements. Old Wimmer knocks at his neighbours’ door in the morning, and it is he who takes care of their shopping. One time when the door was left ajar, Frank spotted him in a woman’s apron, doing the housework.
The doctor comes once a day, around two o’clock. Frank makes sure he is standing in his way when he comes out. He is quite a young man, who looks more like an athlete. He doesn’t seem worried. Of course, it’s not his daughter, or his wife. Could Holst be ill, too? Frank has thought of that. Then, on Wednesday, as he was about to get on the tram, he turned mechanically towards the window and saw him in the gap between the curtains. Their eyes met from a distance, Frank is sure of it. Nothing could happen, obviously, but all the same Frank was quite shaken by that first contact. They both remained calm and grave, without hatred, with nothing but a great void between them.
His mother would be more worried if she learned that every day, sometimes twice a day, he deliberately went into the little café near the tram stop, the one where you go down a step. It verges on provocation, because he has no business there. The regulars fall silent as soon as he enters and conspicuously start looking elsewhere. The owner, Mr Kamp, who is almost always sitting at a table with them – they often play cards – reluctantly stands up to go and serve him.
On the Monday, Frank paid with a very large note which he extracted from his wad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mr Kamp said, pushing it away, ‘I can’t change that.’
Frank left the note on the counter, simply saying as he left, ‘Keep the change!’
On the Tuesday, he could have sworn that the regulars were expecting him, and he felt a little thrill. It happens often now. One fine day, something is bound to happen; it is impossible to predict when, or even what exactly. It can just as easily happen in this quiet, old-fashioned little café. Why did the customers look at Mr Kamp with a knowing air, with barely contained smiles?
Kamp served him without a word, then, as Frank was about to pay, he took an envelope that was in full view on the shelf, between two bottles, and handed it to him.
Just from the touch, Frank recognized banknotes and small change. It was the change from the previous day’s large note.
He said thank you and left. That won’t stop him from going back.
And he almost quarrelled with Timo. It was two o’clock in the morning. He had been drinking a lot. In a corner, in the company of a woman, he saw a man whose face he didn’t like. Frank, who was at the bar, showed Timo his revolver and said, ‘When that guy leaves, I’m going to kill him!’
Timo looked at him harshly, without the slightest friendliness.
‘Are you crazy or what?’
‘I’m not crazy. I don’t like his face. I’m going to kill him.’
‘Take care, or I’ll kill you with a punch to the face.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I don’t like the way you’re starting to behave. Go and amuse yourself somewhere else if you like, but not in my place. I warn you that if you touch that guy, I’ll have you arrested immediately. And another thing. Either you leave your toy someplace else, or you don’t come in here. Now, my advice to you is to stop drinking so much. It makes you show off. Act your age.’
But then, a little while later, Timo came and apologized to him. This time, he tried to reason with him.
‘I may have come on a bit strong just now, but it’s for your own good. Even your friend Kromer thinks you’re becoming a danger. I don’t want to know anything about your business. All I know is that for a while now you’ve assumed you’re home and dry. Do you think it’s clever to show your wads of banknotes to just anybody? Do you imagine people don’t know how you get that kind of money?’
Frank showed him his green card. Timo didn’t seem impressed. Embarrassed, at best. He made him put it back in his pocket.
‘That’s another thing it’s best not to show around too much.’
Later, he went back on the attack a third time. With Timo, conversations happen in several instalments, because customers are constantly calling him from all sides.
‘Listen, son. I know you’re going to say it’s jealousy on my part, but at least I’ll have done what
I have to do. I’m not claiming documents like that are worthless. Only, there’s a way to use them. Plus, there are more complicated things . . .’
He had no desire to explain himself.
‘What, for example?’
‘What’s the point talking about them? People always say too much. I’m on good terms with them. They leave me alone. Some of them bring me merchandise and they never cheat. But maybe because I see a lot of them, and all sorts, there are things I’ve figured out.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Let me give you an example. About a month ago, sitting there at the third table, there was a high-ranking officer, a colonel, a handsome-looking man, still young, ruddy-faced, chest covered in decorations. He had two women with him, and I don’t know what he was telling them, I was otherwise engaged, but they were laughing very loudly. After a while, he took out his wallet, presumably intending to pay. The women grabbed hold of it and started playing with it. All three of them were drunk. They passed around papers and photographs. I was at the bar. It was then that I saw a guy get up, someone I hadn’t paid any attention to, an ordinary-looking fellow, in plain clothes, the kind you meet all the time in the street. He wasn’t even well dressed. He went up to the table, and the colonel looked at him. He seemed annoyed, though he tried to smile. The other man said one word to him, just one, and the colonel sprang to his feet and saluted. He took his wallet back from the women. He paid. You’d have sworn you’d just seen him deflate. He left his girlfriends in the lurch, without any explanation, and went out with the plain clothes guy.’
‘What’s this got to do with me?’ Frank muttered.
‘Apparently the next day he was seen at the railway station, leaving for an unknown destination. That’s what it means. There are people who seem powerful, and maybe they are at that moment. But mark my words, never as much as they like to make out, because however powerful they are, there are always people more powerful than them. And those people are people we don’t usually know.
‘You work in an office where everyone shakes your hand, and you think you’re all set. Only, at the same time, in another office that has nothing to do with the first one, they’re putting together a file on you.
‘You want to know what I really think? They have several sectors. And just because you’re on good terms with one sector doesn’t mean you can take risks in another.’
Frank remembered this conversation the following morning, and it was all the more troubling in that he had a hangover. It’s becoming a habit. Every morning, he vows to be careful, but he immediately starts again, precisely because he needs a drink to pick himself up.
What hits him is a connection that establishes itself in his mind between Timo’s words and something Lotte said once, which he didn’t pay any attention to at the time.
‘You can tell it’s nearly Christmas. The faces are starting to change.’
Which means that her clientele is changing, at least as far as the occupiers are concerned. It is always a difficult time for her, because it is so unsettling. Every three months, or every six months – it usually coincides with the major holidays of the year, but that may only be chance – staff get transferred, both civilian and military. Some go back to their country, and others arrive from there, and the ones who arrive don’t behave in the same way. You don’t know what kind of people they are, and everything has to start all over again. Every time a new man rings the bell, Lotte thinks she is obliged to pretend that it really is a manicure salon, and she doesn’t breathe easily until the client mentions the name of the colleague who sent him.
Without quite knowing why, Frank doesn’t want his general to go. He calls him his general even though he doesn’t know him and has never seen him. Kromer is the one who knows him. There is something innocent, something reassuring about his passion for watches. Frank is like his mother. He feels more at ease with people who have a passion. For example, when you know Otto’s vices, it is no longer possible to be afraid of him. As it happens, he is someone who may be of use to Frank one day. He would surely pay a lot to make sure that some of the things he does didn’t come out into the open.
They have seen the sun again, and the ground is freezing over nicely. The last snow that fell hasn’t yet had time to get dirty, and, in some neighbourhoods, the unemployed people hired by the municipal authorities are still busy making dazzling heaps along the pavements.
He has the impression Kromer is avoiding him. But then Frank is also avoiding Kromer. So what is he worried about? Why even say he is worried when he is perfectly calm, when he is the one who, of his own free will, knowing exactly what he is up to, is doing everything he can to attract bad luck?
Going to Kamp’s, for example. There must be people from the networks and the patriotic leagues among the customers in the little café. There certainly are in the queues, which he passes knowing full well that the mere sight of his clothes and shoes is a provocation.
He has twice run into Carl Adler, the driver of the van that took him to the village the night he killed Miss Vilmos. It’s strange: twice in four days, by chance, both times in unexpected places: the first time on the pavement opposite the Lido; the second in a tobacconist’s in the upper town.
Yet he had never come across him before. Of course, he didn’t know him before, so he might have passed him a hundred times without noticing him.
That’s how to get ideas in your head!
Was it deliberately, out of caution or out of a kind of integrity, that Adler pretended not to know him?
None of this matters. Even if it did, even if there was some trickery behind it, Frank would be delighted. All the same, there is one thing that bothers him. The time he met him opposite the cinema, Adler wasn’t alone. He had with him a man who lives in his – Frank’s – building.
It was someone he has only ever glimpsed on the stairs. He knows he lives on the second floor, on the left, and that he has a wife and a little daughter. He must be about twenty-eight or thirty. He is a thin, unhealthy-looking young man, with hair on his chin that’s too blond and not long enough to be a beard. He isn’t a manual worker. A clerk? Maybe. Actually, no, because Frank notices he doesn’t run into him at fixed hours but at any time of the day. Nor does he look like a travelling salesman.
He is probably a technician, like Adler. If that’s the case, it isn’t surprising they know each other.
You never know who belongs to a network or a league. It is often the most apparently inoffensive people, and the fair-haired man on the second floor, with his wife and little girl, is the very type of tenant that nobody takes any notice of.
Why would these people execute him? He hasn’t done anything to them. In fact, most of the people they kill are their own members who have betrayed them, and Frank can’t betray them since he doesn’t know them. That they despise him is for sure. But, just like his mother, he has much more to fear from the anger of the neighbours, which is based on envy, which is just a matter of coal, warm clothes and supplies of food.
In fact, it is only the neighbourhood that Lotte is afraid of. Since Frank has been left alone up until now, she realizes he won’t be bothered because of Miss Vilmos. Even Kurt Hamling’s attitude, the little phrases he came out with, suggest the danger is only local. Otherwise, there would be no reason to advise Frank to spend a few days in the country or with friends.
He hasn’t managed to run into Holst, as he would have liked, but they have seen each other from a distance. Holst, who must know his footsteps by now, just as Frank knows his, hears him come in and out ten times a day and could tackle him on the landing.
Frank isn’t afraid. It’s not a matter of fear. It’s infinitely more subtle than that. It’s a game he’s made up, just as, when he was a child, he made up games only he understood. It happened most often in the morning, in his bed, while Mrs Porse was making breakfast, and ideally when it was sunny. With his eyes closed, he would think, for example, ‘Fly!’ Then he would half open his eyes, looking onl
y at a specific portion of the wallpaper. If there was a fly on it, he had won.
Now he could have said, ‘Fate!’ Because he wanted fate to take an interest in him; he had done everything to force its hand and he continued to defy it from morning to night. The previous day he had said to Kromer, casually:
‘Ask your general if there’s anything else he’d like apart from watches.’
He didn’t need money. Even at the rate he was going, he had enough for a few months. He didn’t need anything. He had bought himself an overcoat that was even louder than the last one, the kind of overcoat of which there probably aren’t even five in the whole town, a light-beige genuine camelhair coat. It wasn’t quite thick enough for the season, but he wore it out of bravado. Just as he always carried his revolver in his pocket, even though it weighed heavily on him and might still get him into trouble in spite of his green card.
He had no desire to become a martyr, or even a mere victim. But it was good to think, whenever he walked through his neighbourhood, especially at night, that a shot might suddenly be fired at him from a shadowy corner.
Nobody was bothering with him. Even Holst didn’t seem interested in him, and yet Frank had done enough to attract his attention.
Sissy must hate him. Anyone in Frank’s place would have moved out of the building after what had happened.
Fate was lying in wait for him somewhere. But where? Instead of waiting for it to manifest itself when the time was right, Frank was courting it, searching everywhere for it. It was as if he was shouting, just as he had when he held the bag with the key at arm’s length on the stretch of waste ground, ‘I’m here! What are you waiting for?’
He didn’t have enough enemies and he was trying his best to create them. Wasn’t that why he had slapped Bertha? And now, when Minna ventured to be nice to him, or simply kind, he would reply, in order to hurt her:
‘I hate women who have something wrong with their insides.’
He brought chocolates for Anny, who would never think of offering any to the others, or even of saying thank you. He loved looking at her. He could have looked at her body for hours, but it didn’t satisfy him to make love with her. Nor did she have any desire for it. The second time he had climbed into bed with her, she had sighed sullenly and said, ‘Again?’
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