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

homosexual.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œI only stopped in for a minute to say hello.”
    â€œHave 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWhere’s the other guy?” Frank asked uneasily.
    â€œBack there.”
    Of course. He had seen the reddish glow of a cigarette in the darkness in the rear of the truck.
    â€œWhere to?”
    â€œCut 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.
    â€œAnd now?”
    â€œTake 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.
    â€œTake 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.
    â€œWhen 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.
    â€œI 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