Read Online The Second Winter by Craig Larsen - Free Book Online Page A

gold-framed glasses. He hadn’t shaved in days, and he didn’t carry his graying stubble well. But there was no question that he was filthy rich. His winter coat was cashmere. Cashmere! And underneath, he wore a sweater that was also cashmere and his collar was cinched with a tie. The old Jew’s wife was equally repugnant, and like her husband she was dressed for the opera, not this trek. She wore a long wool skirt and stockings, shoes with heels — though, true enough, they were cloddish heels, as square and heavy as the head of a hammer. And then there was their daughter. Fredrik measured her breasts underneath her sweater — she wore it tight, as if she wanted to tantalize him. He saw how pale the naked skin of her legs was beneath her skirt. He noticed, too, the way this schoolgirl waslooking at him, sideways, flushed — following him with her eyes. Though she was trying to conceal her interest, perhaps she had even favored him with a shy smile. The amphetamine coursed through his veins, and for a moment Fredrik pictured the prim bitch on her knees in front of him, her skirt yanked above her voluptuous ass, her head forced into the dirt. He would plant her face into the soil, he would clamp his fingers around her throat. But then her father stepped between them, as if he was able to read Fredrik’s thoughts, and when Fredrik looked at her again, she was no longer the coquette he first imagined. Her face had become her father’s. Her eyes were just as dull. Her nose was just the same shape. And her mouth — it was a thick-lipped, repellent hole filled with a jumble of crooked, coffee-stained teeth. “What are you waiting for?” he asked Brandt. “We don’t have time to waste.”
    The farmer was standing a few steps removed from the Jews, engaged in quiet conversation with Axel. Oskar stood in the shadows behind them, watching. “This man is your driver,” the farmer said in broken German to the Jews, raising his voice. “He will take you to the coast.”
    The old Jew’s eyes had lit with a glimmer of hope upon seeing Fredrik, and he still clung to it despite his misgivings. He cleared his throat, addressed the tall man. “Perhaps you can help us.” His German was distinguished. He spoke like a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, because this, until the Germans annexed Austria, was what he had been. “This gentleman here is telling us that we owe him fifty marks each for our last two nights here with him. Our contact told us that we were to pay him fifty marks — I mean to say, fifty marks in total —”
    Fredrik shrugged. “We had better get moving,” he said to Axel. “The storm hasn’t let up. The roads will be muddy.”
    The old Jew turned to the farmer. “I was told fifty marks,” he insisted.
    “It’s a hundred and fifty,” the farmer replied. His German accent was thick, as if he was mocking the language. “Fifty each, or I instruct my friend here to drive you south again. He doesn’t care which direction he’s driving, isn’t that right, Gregersen?”
    Fredrik barely heard him. “Are these your things?” he asked the old Jew, speaking in Danish.
    The professor glanced at him, then turned back to confer with his wife. He wanted to protest longer. “They’re robbing us, Maria,” he insisted. “They’re taking advantage of our situation, when we will need every last mark we have.” But the fear on his wife’s face alarmed him. Her cheeks were taut, her eyes were stricken. They were at these people’s mercy. They had left their home behind. They were running from certain slaughter. When her husband remonstrated, she shook her head. She had heard enough. She bent down to open an elegant leather satchel at their feet. Fredrik’s eyes fastened on the suitcase. The old Jew touched his wife’s forearm, knelt next to the bag himself. He dug around inside, then withdrew a small handful of German currency. “Here you are, then,” he said to the farmer. “One