Dirty Snow Read Online Free

…”
    The knife, carefully wiped, was in Frank’s pocket. Timo paid no attention to it and went on rinsing glasses.
    â€œYou want something to drink?”
    He almost said yes. But he preferred to prove to himself that he wasn’t nervous, that he didn’t need alcohol. Yet he had had to stab the noncommissioned officer twice because of all the fat larding his back. Now the automatic made a bulge in Frank’s other pocket.
    Should he show it to Timo? There was no danger. Timo would keep quiet. But that was too easy. It’s what someone else would have done.
    â€œGood night.”
    â€œAre you sleeping at your mother’s?”
    Frank was in the habit of sleeping almost anywhere, sometimes in the little building behind Timo’s where the girls boarded; sometimes at Kromer’s, who had a nice room with a couch; sometimes with others, if things turned out. But there was always a cot for him in Lotte’s kitchen.
    â€œI’m going home.”
    That was dangerous because of the body still lying across the pavement. It would be even more dangerous to make a detour by way of the main street—toward the bridge—since in that direction he might run into a patrol.
    The dark heap was still on the sidewalk, half on the path, half in the pile of snow, and Frank stepped over it. It was the only moment he felt frightened. Not only of hearing footsteps behind him but of seeing the Eunuch get up again.
    He rang and waited some time for the concierge to push the button at the head of his bed and open the door. He went up the first flights quickly, then slackened his pace, and finally, just as he reached Holst’s apartment, where a light showed under the door, he began to whistle to let Holst know it was him.
    He didn’t go in to see his mother, who was a heavy sleeper. He undressed in the kitchen, where he had turned on the lamp. He lay down. The room smelled so strongly of soup and leeks that it kept him awake.
    So he got up, cracked the door into the back room, and shrugged.
    Bertha was sleeping there that night. Her big, unappetizing body was hot. He shoved her aside and she grunted, stretching out her arm, which he had to move to one side to make room for himself.
    A little later, when he was about take her, since he couldn’t fall asleep, he thought of Sissy, who must be a virgin.
    Would her father tell her what Frank had done?

2
    W HEN BERTHA got out of bed, he woke up a little, opening his eyes just enough to see great flowers of frost on the windowpanes.
    In her bare feet, the big girl went to turn on the switch in the kitchen, leaving the door open so that the bedroom was faintly illuminated by the reflected light. And he could hear her at the other end of the room, putting on her stockings, her slip, her dress, then finally going out and closing the door. The next sound would be the scraping of the poker over the grate on the other side of the partition.
    His mother knew how to train them. She always made sure one of them slept in the apartment. Not for the clients, since nobody came up after eight o’clock in the evening, when the outside door was locked. But Lotte needed company. What she really needed was to be waited on.
    â€œI starved enough when I was young and stupid to deserve a little comfort now. Everyone gets their day.”
    It was always the stupidest and poorest girl she kept in the apartment, with the excuse that the girl lived too far away, that there was a fire here, and that she would have a good dinner.
    For each of them there was the same dressing gown of violet flannel that usually dragged on the floor behind them. They were invariably between sixteen and eighteen. Older than that, Lotte didn’t want them. And, with rare exceptions, she never kept them more than a month.
    The clients liked variety. It was pointless to tell the girls in advance. They thought they’d found a home, particularly the ones who were fresh from the country,