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and ordered to keep quiet.
    That was why Lotte wasn’t really frightened. Did Hamling know that?
    He was sitting in her apartment, warming himself at her fire, drinking her brandy.
    What about Holst?
    It was easy to tell what most of the tenants thought. They detested and despised Frank and his mother. Their lips curled angrily when they went by.
    For some, it was just because Lotte had coal and more than enough to eat. Perhaps they would do the same if they could. For others, especially women of a certain age and fathers with families, it was because of the nature of Lotte’s business.
    But other cases were different. Frank knew it and felt it. They were the ones who never betrayed what they thought. They never looked at either of them, pretended to ignore their existence.
    Was Holst one of them? Was he, like the young man with the violin, a member of the underground?
    It wasn’t likely. Frank had believed it for a moment because of his calm, his apparent serenity. And also because he wasn’t a real streetcar conductor, because he seemed to be an intellectual—perhaps a professor who had been dismissed due to his opinions. Or had he left his post voluntarily because he was unwilling to teach against his convictions?
    Outside his hours at work he never left the building, except to stand in lines. No one came to see them.
    Did he already know the violinist had been arrested? He would hear about it. The concierge, who knew, would tell all the tenants except Lotte and her son.
    Meanwhile, Hamling continued to sit there without saying a word, thoughtfully chewing on his cigar and exhaling little puffs of smoke.
    Even if he knew or suspected something, what difference did it make to Frank? He wouldn’t dare say anything.
    What did count was Gerhardt Holst, who must have returned from his shopping by now and was holed up with Sissy in the apartment across the hall.
    They probably had some vegetables, turnips of course, and perhaps a tiny piece of rancid bacon, the kind that was rationed out from time to time.
    They saw no one and spoke to no one. What could they have to say to each other, the two of them?
    Sissy was always looking out for Frank, parting the curtains to watch him walk away down the street or opening the door a crack when she heard him whistling on the stairs.
    Hamling sighed and stood up.
    â€œAnother little drink?”
    â€œThank you. I have to go.”
    From the kitchen came a tempting odor. He sniffed at it unconsciously as he left, and it floated after him down the hall, perhaps slipping beneath the Holsts’ door and into their apartment.
    â€œThat old bastard,” Frank said calmly.

3
    F RANK HAD come in to avoid waiting in the street, but he hated places like this. Two steps down and then a tiled floor like in a church. There were old beams in the ceiling, wooden paneling on the walls, an ornately carved bar, and massive tables.
    He knew the owner by name, Monsieur Kamp, and Monsieur Kamp must have known him, too. He was a bald little man, quiet and polite, who always wore bedroom slippers. He must have been stocky once, but now his paunch was beginning to hang and his pants had grown too big for him. In this kind of place, which obeyed the regulations or at least seemed to do so to anyone passing by, you were lucky if you could get sour beer to drink.
    He felt like a trespasser. At Kamp’s there were always four or five regulars, the old men of the neighborhood, who smoked their long porcelain or meerschaum pipes and fell silent when you came in. The whole time you were there they kept their mouths shut, smoking their pipes and staring.
    Frank was wearing new thick-soled shoes made out of real leather. His overcoat was warm. Any of these old men could have lived for a month, and his family, too, for the price of his fur-lined kid gloves alone.
    He was watching for Holst through the little square windowpanes. It was because of Holst that he had left the building,