The Snow Was Dirty Read online

  Georges Simenon

  * * *

  THE SNOW WAS DIRTY

  Translated by HOWARD CURTIS

  Contents

  Part One: Timo’s Customers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two: Sissy’s Father

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Three: The Woman at the Window

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Georges Simenon was born on 12 February 1903 in Liège, Belgium, and died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life. The Snow Was Dirty was written in 1948, soon after Simenon received news of the death of his younger brother, Christian, who was killed on deployment with the French Foreign Legion in Vietnam.

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  The Snow Was Dirty

  ‘I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov’

  —William Faulkner

  ‘A truly wonderful writer . . . marvellously readable – lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates’

  —Muriel Spark

  ‘Few writers have ever conveyed with such a sure touch, the bleakness of human life’

  —A. N. Wilson

  ‘One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories’

  —Guardian

  ‘A novelist who entered his fictional world as if he were part of it’

  —Peter Ackroyd

  ‘The greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature’

  —André Gide

  ‘Superb . . . The most addictive of writers . . . A unique teller of tales’

  —Observer

  ‘The mysteries of the human personality are revealed in all their disconcerting complexity’

  —Anita Brookner

  ‘A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal’

  —P. D. James

  ‘A supreme writer . . . Unforgettable vividness’

  — Independent

  ‘Compelling, remorseless, brilliant’

  —John Gray

  ‘Extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century’

  —John Banville

  PART ONE

  * * *

  Timo’s Customers

  1.

  If it had not been for a chance event, what Frank Friedmaier did that night would not have been so significant. Obviously, Frank could not have foreseen that his neighbour Gerhardt Holst would pass along the street. The fact that Holst did pass, and recognized him, changed everything. But that, too, and all that was to follow from it, Frank accepted.

  That was why what happened that night by the tannery wall meant more, for both his present and his future, than a loss of virginity.

  Because that had been Frank’s first thought, and it was a comparison that both amused and irritated him. His friend Fred Kromer – admittedly, Kromer was twenty-two – had killed a man a week earlier, right there outside Timo’s, where Frank himself had been a few minutes before taking up his position against the tannery wall.

  Did Kromer’s kill really count? Kromer had headed for the door, buttoning up his fur-lined coat with his usual self-important air, a thick cigar between his thick lips. He was glistening. Kromer always glistened. He had thick skin like the skin of some oranges, skin that seemed to ooze sweat.

  Someone had compared him to a young bull that can never get enough. It was certainly something sexual you thought of, looking at his thick, glistening face, his moist eyes, his swollen lips.

  A thin, pale, feverish little man, the kind you saw a lot of, especially at night, had stupidly stood in his way – to look at him, you wouldn’t think he had enough money to drink at Timo’s – grabbed hold of his collar and berated him.

  Had Kromer sold him something he wasn’t pleased with?

  Kromer had walked on in a dignified way, puffing at his cigar. The other man, the skinny one, maybe because he was with a woman he wanted to impress, had followed him out on to the pavement and started yelling.

  People in Timo’s street are not overly startled by yells. Patrols come that way as seldom as possible. But if any of those gentlemen had driven by, they would have been obliged to take a look.

  ‘Go home to bed!’ Kromer had said to the dwarf, who had a head too big for his body and a shock of bright red hair.

  ‘Not before you’ve heard what I have to say . . .’

  If you listened to everything people had to say to you, you would soon be locked up.

  ‘Go home to bed!’

  Had the red-haired man had too much to drink? Actually, he looked more like someone who takes drugs. Could it be that Kromer was his dealer, and the drugs were too adulterated? It hardly mattered.

  There in the middle of the street, which was dark between two banks of snow, Kromer took his cigar out of his mouth with his left hand and hit the man, once, with his right fist. You saw two arms and two legs literally fly up in the air, like a puppet; then the black-clad form embedded itself in the heap of snow on the edge of the pavement. The funniest part of it was that a piece of orange peel lay next to the head, something that probably would not have been found anywhere else in the city except outside Timo’s.

  Timo came out, without a jacket or a cap, just as he was at the bar. He felt the puppet, and his lower lip jutted out slightly. ‘His number’s up,’ he grunted. ‘He’ll be stiff in an hour.’

  Did Kromer really kill the redhead with a single punch? That was what he said, and the other man would certainly not contradict him: following the advice of Timo, who never wasted time, the body was flung into the old basin 200 metres away, the one the sewers empty into, stopping the water from freezing over.

  So Kromer can claim he killed a man. Even though Timo was also involved, and even though the puppet was not completely dead and had to be thrown up in the air again to get him over a low wall.

  The proof that Kromer does not regard it as a serious kill is that he is still telling the story of the strangled girl. Only, that didn’t happen in the city, or in a place the others know. There is no evidence it even happened at all. In a case like that, anybody can boast about anything.

  ‘She had big breasts, almost no nose, and bright eyes,’ he says.

  That much has never changed. But each time he adds further details.

  ‘It was in a barn . . .’

  Maybe so. But what was Kromer, who has never been a soldier and who hates the country, doing in a barn?

  ‘We’d made love in the straw, and all the time the straw was tickling me and putting me in a bad mood . . .’

  Kromer sucks on his cigar as he tells this story and looks straight ahead with an absent air, as if out of modesty. There is another detail he never changes. It is something the woman said.

  ‘I hope you’re giving me a child.’

  He claims it is those words that set him off, that the thought of having a child with this stupid, dirty girl he was kneading like dough struck him as grotesque and unacceptable.

  ‘Completely un-acc-ept-ab-le.’

  He also says that she was becoming increasingly affectionate and clinging.

  And that without even needing to close his eyes, he started seeing a pale, monstrous head, fair-haired but faceless, that could have been his child and the girl’s
.

  Is it because Kromer’s as brown and hard as a tree?

  ‘It disgusted me,’ he concludes, dropping ash from his cigar.

  He is clever. He knows how to play the part. He has mannerisms that make him interesting.

  ‘I found it easier to strangle the mother. That was the first time. And you know something? It’s very easy. No big deal.’

  It isn’t just Kromer. Who, at Timo’s, hasn’t killed at least one man? In the war, or some other way. By denouncing him, maybe, which is the easiest. You don’t even have to sign your name.

  Timo, who never boasts about it, must have killed lots, otherwise the occupiers wouldn’t let his bar stay open all night without sticking their nose into what goes on there. Even though the shutters are always closed, even though people have to approach by the lane and show their faces through the door, they aren’t so naive as not to know.

  As far as Frank is concerned, his real loss of virginity was no big deal either. After all, he was in the right place. For others, it is a major event which they still talk about years later, adding embellishments, like Kromer with his strangled girl in the barn.

  For Frank, killing his first man at the age of nineteen is a loss of virginity no more remarkable than the first. And as with the first, it is unpremeditated. It just happens. It is as if a moment comes when it is both indispensable and natural to make a decision that has in fact been made long before.

  Nobody has urged him to do it. Nobody has laughed at him. Only idiots let themselves be influenced by their friends!

  For weeks, months even, he has been saying to himself, feeling a kind of inferiority inside, ‘I have to try.’

  Not in a fight. That isn’t his style. In his mind, in order for it to count, it has to be done in cold blood.

  And just now, the opportunity presented itself. Was it because he was watching out for it that it seemed like an opportunity?

  They were in Timo’s, at their table near the counter. There was Kromer in his fur-lined coat, which he always kept on even in places that were overheated. With his cigar, of course. And his glistening skin. And his big eyes that really do have something bovine about them. Kromer must think he is of a different species from the rest of the world, because he doesn’t even bother to put large banknotes in a wallet, but stuffs them, big crumpled wads of them, in his pockets.

  With Kromer was a man Frank did not know, someone who wasn’t from their circle, who immediately said by way of introduction, ‘Call me Berg.’

  He must be at least forty. He is cold, secretive. He is clearly somebody. The proof of that is that Kromer is behaving in an almost humble way towards him.

  He told him the story of the strangled girl, without insisting, as if it were nothing, just a joke, a passing fancy.

  ‘Look at this, Frank. My friend just gave me this knife.’

  Like a jewel that gains by being extracted from a rich casket, the knife was all the more glamorous for emerging from that warm fur-lined coat and being displayed on the check tablecloth.

  ‘Feel the edge.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you read the make?’

  It was a Swedish-made flick knife, so straight and sharp it was as if its blade must have a mind of its own, must find its own way into flesh.

  For some reason Frank said – and was immediately ashamed of the childish tone he unwittingly adopted – ‘Can I borrow it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘These toys aren’t meant for doing nothing.’

  The other man was smiling, a slightly protective smile, as if listening to two kids boasting.

  ‘Can I borrow it?’

  Not to do nothing with it, of course. Although quite what, he didn’t yet know. It was at that moment that he saw, at the table in the corner, under the lamp with the mauve silk shade, the fat sergeant, already crimson – purple because of the light – take off his belt and put it down among the glasses.

  They all knew the sergeant. He was almost a mascot, like a family pet you are used to seeing in the same place. Among the occupiers, he was the only one to come regularly to Timo’s without hiding, without taking precautions, without asking them to be discreet.

  He must have a name. Here, they called him the Eunuch. Because he was fat, so fat that his uniform was too tight for him, forming rolls of flesh around his waist and under his arms. He brought to mind a fat woman revealing the marks made by a corset on her soft flesh when she undresses. He had other rolls of flesh at the back of his neck and under his chin, and on his skull his silky hair was sparse and colourless.

  He always sat in the same corner, invariably with two women, it didn’t matter who, as long as they were thin and brunette. It was said that he preferred them hairy.

  When customers coming in gave a start on seeing his uniform – the uniform of the occupation police – Timo would lower his voice just a little and say, ‘Don’t worry. He isn’t dangerous.’

  Did the Eunuch hear? Did he understand? He would order drinks by the carafe. One woman on his knee, another woman beside him on the banquette, he would whisper stories in their ears and laugh. He would drink, tell stories, laugh and make them drink, his hands shoved under their skirts.

  He must have family somewhere in his country. Nuschi, who had toyed with his wallet, claimed that it was stuffed full of photographs of children of all ages. He called the girls by other names than their own. It amused him. He would buy them meals. He loved to see them eat, expensive dishes found only at Timo’s and in a few other places that are even harder to gain access to, places reserved for high-ranking officers.

  He practically forced them to eat. He ate with them. He would touch them up in front of everyone, look at his wet fingers and laugh. Then, regularly, a moment would come when he unbuckled his belt and put it on the table.

  On the belt was a holster containing a revolver.

  In itself, none of this mattered. The sergeant, the Eunuch, was a fat lecher, and everyone laughed when they mentioned him. Even Frank’s mother Lotte.

  She knew him, too. The whole neighbourhood knew him, because, in order to get to town, where he must have his office, he twice a day crossed the street where the tram runs and walked to the Old Bridge.

  He did not live in the barracks. He lodged with Mrs Mohr, the widow of an architect, two houses further along from the street where the tram runs.

  He was a neighbour. You saw him at the same times every day, always pink and glowing in spite of his nights at Timo’s. He had a very particular smile, which some considered crafty, but might just have been a baby’s smile.

  He would turn round to look at little girls, smile simperingly at them and sometimes give them sweets, which he took from his pockets.

  ‘I bet we’ll see him come up here one of these days,’ Frank’s mother Lotte had said.

  Her profession was legally banned. True, she was allowed to keep a manicure salon near the old basin, even though it was obvious that nobody would ever think of climbing three floors in an overflowing apartment building to have their nails seen to.

  It was known not only in the street, but all over town, so to speak, that there were bedrooms in the back.

  Being in the occupation police, the Eunuch was sure to know it, too.

  ‘He’ll come, you’ll see!’

  Just from seeing a man through the third-floor window, Lotte was capable of saying whether he would come up in the end or not. She could even predict how long he would take to make up his mind, and she was seldom wrong.

  The Eunuch had indeed come, one Sunday morning – in other words, outside office hours – looking stupid and embarrassed. Frank was not at home at the time, and he regretted it, because of the fanlight that allowed him to see if he climbed on the kitchen table.

  He had been told all about it. The only girl there that day was Steffi, who was tall and thin with dull skin, capable only of lying down, spreading her legs and looking up at the ceiling.

  The s
ergeant had been disappointed, probably because with Steffi there was nothing to do except go all the way. She wasn’t even bright enough to listen properly to the stories she was told.

  ‘You’re just a hole, my girl,’ Lotte often said to her.

  The Eunuch must have imagined things would be different. Maybe he really was impotent? He had certainly never left Timo’s with a woman.

  Or maybe he pleasured himself as he felt them up, without anyone noticing? It was possible. Everything is possible with men, Frank had known that since he had learned the ways of the world, standing on the kitchen table, looking through the fanlight.

  Since he would have to kill someone sooner or later, wasn’t it only natural that the idea should occur to him to try his hand with the Eunuch?

  First of all, he just had to use the knife that had been slipped into his hands and which really was a beautiful weapon. He felt the desire to try it out, in spite of himself, to feel the effect it had when it entered a man’s flesh and slid between his bones.

  There is a trick he had been told about: to turn your hand slightly, like turning a key in a lock, once the blade is between the ribs.

  The belt was on the table, with the smooth, heavy revolver in its holster. The things you can do with a revolver! The kind of man you automatically become!

  Last but not least, there was this guy of forty, this Berg, a friend of Kromer’s, in other words, someone who could be trusted, someone important probably. Frank must have been mentioned to him, but as if he was just a child.

  ‘Just lend it to me for an hour and I’ll try it out for you. I bet you I’ll come back with a revolver!’

  So at this point, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Frank knew the place to wait in ambush. On Green Street, which the Eunuch would have to take to get from the basin to the street where the tram runs, there was an empty old building, which was still called the tannery even though no tanning had gone on there for fifteen years. Actually, Frank had never known the tannery when it was operational; it was said that in the days when it worked for the army, it had up to 600 workers.