The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and get the tickets.”

  But taking her by the arm, he was still unable to shake off the sighting of his American bugbear.

  “I saw Silverstone just outside the station,” he said. “Did you see him?”

  Patricia shook her head.

  “Do you think he’s following us?” he asked.

  “I think you said he works at the Bank for International Settlements,” she remarked. “So it’s more likely he’s just going back to work after lunch. The bank is just over the road, where the Savoy Hotel was requisitioned for their work.”

  While the sighting of Silverstone still troubled Frank, and he could not bring himself to point out that Silverstone was leaving the hornet’s nest and plainly not going back to work, her matter-of-fact tone at least put his mind to rest.

  Approaching the counter, he took out his wallet and opened it. He failed to notice the lock of strawberry-blonde hair that dropped out and fell to the floor. It caught in the draught of a passer-by and landed behind Patricia’s feet.

  “What was that?” she asked, looking behind her.

  “What?”

  “Something fell out of your wallet.”

  He looked down at the floor around him. But the lock of hair had already been swept up by the feet of another passer-by and disappeared from view.

  “It looked like a lock of blonde hair,” she said. Her eyes flashed a look of quiet confrontation.

  He looked askance at Patricia. Her lips, always a gloriously sensual source of fascination for Frank, betrayed a new kind of vulnerability that disturbed him. But he was as perplexed as she was. There was nothing he could say.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now,” she continued mysteriously, when the silence between them led nowhere. “But you can at least tell me where we’re going.”

  “Let it be a secret,” he said. And after a pause for reflection, then added: “I’ll give you a clue. We change in Landquart.”

  But she was not playing. Her gaze had returned to the innocent games of the children in the square outside. She did not appear to hear his words, and seemed oddly distracted. Her thoughts elsewhere. He had the impression she was not really interested in where they were going, and he began to wonder again whether she even wanted to make the journey.

  On board the train, her mood showed no sign of lifting. Frank watched the rain stream over the window and leave trails of water that obscured the rolling countryside, as if to compete with it as it passed: the trees, the rivers and the tired brownish-yellow pastures waiting for the end of winter. But the countryside won through. And brought a huge sense of relief to Frank as he felt the landscape banish the menacing streets they had left behind. Yet Patricia seemed to see none of these things. Her eyes did not move, or even flicker at the images as they passed. It was as if she was staring at a blank wall. In the reflection of light on the glass, her beautiful dark eyes were suffused with a deep sadness. It plainly stemmed from a private pain that she preferred not to share with him. Her distance troubled him. She might as well have been a stranger, a bewitching apparition caught for an instant in his field of vision as she sped past on the other line. Yet she was here in this compartment, an intimate companion travelling with him to the mountains – and silently weeping into her own mute reflection in the window.

  “What’s wrong, Pat?” Frank asked, leaning forward to touch her hand. She accepted the gesture without response, and sat like this in perpetual silence. It was not until the train was chuntering out of Zurich, and the steely blue of the lake began to drape its deceptively inviting canvas out beside the track, that she ventured out of her privacy.

  “I had some bad news this morning after you left,” she said. Frank waited, his hand still on hers, while another prolonged silence passed.

  “Léandre’s been killed.”

  Frank recalled the pasty, undernourished individual she had introduced to him in her flat. An unhealthy-looking specimen, but with an air about him that more than made up for his dubious constitution. Frank’s suspicions of a liaison between them had seemed unlikely at the time, but he could never completely lay the idea to rest. And now he saw the thrust of these suspicions brutally confirmed in her sorrow. He wanted to express his sympathy. But he found it impossible to let the words cross his lips because – in a way that intensely disturbed him and offended his sense of decency – he was not in the least sorry. Indeed, he even entertained the cynical observation that Léandre looked so close to death when he met him that it could not have taken very much to finish him off.

  “How did it happen?” was all he was able to manage.

  “How?” Her eyes glistened with inexpressible sadness as she spoke. But she would not give in, and stubbornly refused to let the tears come, as if this might be taken as defeat. “What does it matter how? A man is killed fighting for what he believes in – who cares how it happened? Who damn cares?”

  “Where did it happen then?”

  “Please, Frank. Don’t torment me with your stupid questions. Somewhere in that awful mess they call Spain. Guadalajara, I think. Does it really matter?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Finally an expression of commiseration slipped out, beyond any control on his part. Her words had stung. But more than this, it hurt to see her in such turmoil. He moved across the compartment to sit beside her and put an arm around the circumflex of her shoulder. But the gesture plainly irritated her as much as his questions.

  “Please. Just give me a little space,” she said, releasing herself from his clumsy efforts at compassion to slide open the door of their compartment and disappear along the corridor of the train. He wanted desperately to go after her. But the rejection had cast a leaden net of hesitation over every iota of sympathy and desire for her.

  It was the terror in her cry – faint but still audible over the clatter of the train – that had him on his feet and into the corridor in a single move. He was just in time to see the brutish hand come sweeping down, vanish in the dim corner at the far end of the corridor and provoke a scream of pain in her voice. He knew the hand at once. It belonged to Wolfgang, the henchman of Breitner who had taken such sadistic pleasure in inflicting his depraved obsessions on Frank. He reached into the compartment for the gun in his coat pocket and moved quickly down the corridor as the train lurched to one side. This threw Wolfgang briefly out of view. Then, the moment he stepped back into sight, Frank swung a vicious backhand with the iron butt of his weapon down onto the nape of the gorilla’s neck. Horst, his partner in sadistic violence, had Patricia firmly in the ugliness of his fat contemptuous arms. But even before Wolfgang had hit the floor, Frank had the barrel of the gun at Horst’s head and eased Patricia from his grip.

  “Open the door,” Frank growled. He hardly knew his own voice, so distorted was his speech by the tremor of his fury and agitation. But equally new to him was the exquisite pleasure he had in the fear that swam in the eyes of this repellent sadist the moment Horst saw Frank’s intention.

  “The choice is yours,” Frank shouted over the rush of air, as Horst released the catch on the door and let the side wind tear it from his hand. But he hesitated too long on the threshold for his own good. With a sharp boot in the kidneys, Frank helped him on his way. Wolfgang was in no position to offer any more resistance than the dead weight of his body, and with only a little coaxing, he followed his partner without knowing what he had let himself in for.

  Closing the door on the pleasures of vengeance proved a tougher proposition than exacting the revenge itself. But when eventually he swung the door to, his elation was complete. And he was unable to suppress a laugh, which bordered on hysteria. Patricia still stood where he had left her, looking beaten, confused and frightened. She had good grounds for sharing in his mirth, but fear had paralysed her every move.

  “Come on,” he said, putting an arm around her without thinking. “Let’s get you back to our compartment and have a look at you.”

  She accepted his ge
sture without a word. But he sensed that it was not so much a positive acceptance as the resignation of defeat.

  Once in the light of their compartment, he could see that she had been badly beaten about the face. Her left eye was already blue and swollen, as was the embattled line of her bloody upper lip. The trauma lent her face a cruelly misshapen quality that underlined the obtuseness of her beauty. Not certain and not altogether caring whether his attention was appreciated, he touched the bruises lightly with his lips.

  “This is a hell of way to start a holiday,” he whispered.

  The trace of a smile appeared to flicker in the intact parts of her face. But any impression of affection was abruptly censored by her pain. Or perhaps the hint of a smile was simply the flash of light shooting through the trees as they sped past the window. She said nothing.

  “What were they doing here anyway? Were they looking for us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” Her words came out ravaged and warped by the injury, and made her wince as she spoke.

  “Okay, don’t say another word.”

  Frank sat down beside her again, one hand on hers and a comforting arm around her shoulder – more cautiously this time, with the circumspection of a refugee seeking asylum. But she seemed glad to accept the gesture now, and nested herself tenderly in his arms, letting her hair cascade away beneath his coarse unshaven chin. They remained like this, in silence, until they had to change onto a narrow-gauge line up into the mountains.

  Patricia sensed the nervous tension when she took Frank’s arm as they alighted onto the platform in Landquart to catch the connecting train. Like her, he found it hard to believe the incident with Wolfgang and Horst could have passed unnoticed. Even if he had managed to keep his revenge discreet when he bundled them both off the train – which seemed especially unlikely in the case of Wolfgang, who looked as if he had never known what it meant to be inconspicuous from the moment he was born – it struck him as highly improbable that the two of them would be travelling without Breitner. And if that were the case, then he would be wondering where they were right now.

  Since the colourful bruises on Patricia’s face would only add to her glaring presence on the station platform, she covered herself as best she could with her scarf and installed herself in a quiet corner of the waiting room. Frank meanwhile made sure their path was clear and went to locate their connecting train to Davos. Although he could see no sign of Breitner, he felt uneasy. He had convinced himself by now that even a first-class train journey would be below the dignity of a man like Breitner; that he would almost certainly get Lutz to drive him wherever he wanted to go in his Maybach Zeppelin. But he could not shake off a sense of being watched. And he could not escape the feeling that, even if Breitner was not on the train, he was travelling. And that they had a common destination.

  It was already dark by the time their little red Rhaetian Railways train rolled through the sleepy village of Klosters and on into Davos. Even in the railway station, the air was clean and fresh. And when they walked outside, the bracing Alpine chill invigorated the lungs so agreeably that he could appreciate why doctors all over Europe sent their wealthy tuberculosis patients here. As if to reinforce this liberating sense of vigour that came with the mountain air, he felt a sense of relief to find that Breitner was not among the holiday-makers who poured from the train. This made him feel a little easier about suggesting to Patricia that they walk from the station.

  “It’s not far,” he said, taking her suitcase, “and the cold night air will do the swelling good.”

  For the first time on their long journey, she managed something that unmistakably passed for a smile.

  “It already feels much better,” she assured him. “But you still haven’t said where you’re taking me.”

  “It’s a little place that belongs to a friend of the family. My father’s lawyer, actually. After my father died, he said I could have the use of the place whenever I felt in need of a holiday.”

  It was good to feel the crunch of snow underfoot and the cold air in the lungs. It took him away from the oppressive greyness of the last few weeks around the basin of the Rhine. Put him in mind of the times he used to come on holiday to the Alps with his father, who always maintained it was for Frank’s education. But Frank felt his father saw it more as a good opportunity to get away from home whenever he was back on leave. His mother never joined them. The altitude was not good for her circulation, she said. But his father always insisted that the Alps were nothing by comparison with the mountains in Kashmir. So tame, like the difference between a wild tiger and a spoilt hearthside cat, he said. He promised to take Frank with him one day when he was old enough to see for himself. He never did. But the crunching of the snow beneath their feet now as Frank and Patricia walked up the narrow streets at the foot of the Weissfluh mountain recalled these memories of his father, his tales of savage exotic beauty, and filled him with a sense of having been there so real that he began to wonder whether he had. He was transported to another world, just like the dreams Patricia lived so vividly with Bartok.

  The chalet stood modestly alone in darkness on the edge of the forest that draped away up the mountainside. The path that had been cleared through the snow to the front door testified to how thoroughly the place was looked after in the absence of its owner.

  “Just wait here a minute and look after the suitcases,” Frank said, “while I go and fetch the key.”

  He left her standing beneath a solitary lamp that seemed pathetically inadequate for illuminating the length of the road it had been given to serve. What little light it managed to let out appeared to catch only on the initials of Patricia’s name that were emblazoned in brass on her suitcase – and glinted at him through the gloom and darkness.

  The man who played janitor to the property, a certain Gaudenz Cavegn, lived in the next house about fifty metres along the road. Although it lay around the corner, just out of view behind a bank of snow, the still mountain air – crystal clear and cushioned against the sounds of habitation by the freshly laid carpet of white – ensured that it remained within comfortable calling distance.

  When Frank knocked on the solid wooden door of the house, the noise echoed through the valley with a loneliness that seemed out of place, almost sinister, after the bustle of activity they had just left behind at the station. Only the muffled resonance of an occasional vehicle on the main street below competed for the night air. The resounding effect of his fist on the door made Frank slightly self-conscious when he knocked a second time. But still nothing stirred in the house. It seemed darker and more lifeless even than the forest that ran uncomfortably close to the building. Resigned to the prospect of having to search for a hotel room for the night, which would not be easy on a Friday that was enjoying the influx of next week’s holidaymakers, he made his way back to Patricia.

  But she was nowhere to be seen. The emptiness of the road where he had left her tore an instant chasm of terror through his heart. The suitcases too had gone. Their absence lent her disappearance an air of finality. The gleaming initials of her name shone now through his memory with a cruel vengeance. The narrow street lay still and deserted. Like a face with no features. A dumb witness to secrecies it could never betray. Frank stood helplessly in the road not knowing what to do. Or where to look.

  ‘Why had she not called me if she needed help?’ he asked himself. ‘She knew that I was only round the corner.’

  Her absence overwhelmed every fibre in Frank’s body. It was not simply the sudden loss of substance to his life, its meaning cruelly erased. Above all, it was knowing what a shaky frame of mind she was in and the kind of turmoil she had suffered these last few hours. He was seized by a panic that told him the only course left open was to run back down to the main street as fast as the snowcovered road would permit, in the vain hope that he might find some evidence, the slightest trace, of her.

  As futile as it was stupid. He knew she would not even have been able to carry both suitcase
s down that steep slippery slope without help. He thought of Breitner.

  When he reached the town centre the quiet self-contained activity that he found there mocked his foolishness with its indifference. But the image of her that was embedded now in his memory – her dark fragile form against the snow as she stood waiting for him in the lamplight, bracketed by the suitcases one each side of her – stalked his reluctance to believe that she was gone.

  He picked his way slowly back up the road to the chalet that was to have been their heaven for the next two or three weeks. Hoping with the superstition only a madman could entertain that he would find her there just as he had left her, that it had all been a bad dream, he was struck instantly by a new difference that set his pulse racing. The chalet, which had been in darkness before, was now lit up in every window. Frank stopped in his tracks. Dumbstruck by the lights, and by the sinister implications that beamed out over the snow towards him.

  A growling male voice rumbled through the darkness as he approached. A voice that was instantly familiar to Frank. It was the voice of Gaudenz Cavegn. He had the strong, compact walk of a man experienced at dealing with the rigours of mountain life. While his voice was unmistakable, the features of his face were lost to the shadows of the night, until he was close enough for the condensation of his breath to take the chill off Frank’s face. It was a breath that came with more than a hint of his home-distilled brandy. And the fabric of his clothes infiltrated the air with the essence of pipe smoke. Cavegn blocked his way and scowled. But showed no inclination to acknowledge Frank’s presence by either speaking or moving aside.

  “Good evening Mr Cavegn. Have you seen a young lady?” Frank asked, as breathless from the tension as from the climb up the hill. “Small and slim, black hair, wearing a navy coat.” Then he remembered she had a scarf over her head, but his description held no interest for the man anyway.

  “Eigenmann?” he grunted. Then mumbled: “You don’t deserve a pretty little girl like that.”