Read Online Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page A

to him and asked, “Have you been thinking about me, Frank?”
    He didn’t do anything to her. He just slipped his hand inside her blouse because the day before, at the Lido, his mind wasn’t on her breasts and he still didn’t know what they were like. The question had crossed his mind at night, when he was in bed with Minna, who hardly had any.
    Was that it, curiosity, that had prompted him to knock at Sissy’s door and ask her to come down?
    He had seen her again today at the same time, but today he said, “I only have a few minutes.”
    She didn’t question him, though he knew she wanted to. Making a little face, she murmured, “Do you think I’m ugly, Frank?”
    Again, just like all the others, though he would have been at a loss to say whether he found any young girl ugly or not.
    Well, it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t promise Kromer anything, but he wouldn’t say no. He would wait and see. Minna insisted she was in love with him, that she was ashamed now of what she had to do with the clients. She hadn’t been lucky with the first one. More complications! Frank had done his best to calm her. On top of everything else, she was worried about him. She had seen the gun, and it had terrified her.
    Today he had had to promise to wake her up, no matter what time he came in.
    â€œI won’t go to sleep before then,” she promised him.
    She already smelled like the other women in the house. Probably due to the regime Lotte put them through and the soap she provided. Whatever the case, the transformation was quick. And all morning she had wandered around the apartment in a black chemise trimmed with lace.
    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.
    â€œYou know Peter Ressl?”
    â€œI know his name. Everyone does.”
    â€œMy friend Frank.”
    â€œDelighted.”
    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