The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

Yet it was more than this that stopped him. Much more. For although it was Patricia who had taught him to be inquisitive, she also guided him in other ways. And it was she who now gave him the motive to suppress his curiosity, because he knew only too well that – if he scratched too deep – he would run the risk of finding her here as well between these walls of degradation.

  So Frank let this room become his own cellar. And he plumbed the darkness with a brooding sense of vengeance. Listening out for the sound of rats.

  He could already sense the night beginning to recede when at last he heard the sound of the door. He must have just been nodding off to judge by the way the noise drove a painful wedge into his semi-conscious state. He fancied that he heard talking. But Breitner was alone. He seemed unsteady on his feet as he passed the door and made his way upstairs, the arrogance washed away in the drunken privacy of his home. As rats go, he cut a pathetic, tired figure. Frank’s grip tightened on the gun that still lay faithfully in his hand. His palm felt sweaty on the metal. He was about to follow his target when Breitner’s erratic progress up the stairs came to a halt. Frank heard him turn and clumsily retrace his steps, almost falling back into the hallway. He recalled his own fall into that hallway and smiled at the trivial show of justice, watching with satisfaction as Breitner stumbled into the room where Frank sat. He groped for the light switch, but missed it, and cursed his way uneasily towards the desk on the far side of the room, where he fumbled for some minutes in the dimness of what little light reached into that corner from the hall. It was not until he returned, with a file in his hand, that he saw Frank.

  Frank’s finger by now was on the trigger. His aim on the narrow space between Breitner’s vermin eyes. He saw the rats gnawing at the flesh of Gertrude and her boys. Fighting over Achim.

  “What…?” Breitner’s eyes were still not focusing. He squinted through the two metres of drunkenness that separated him from Frank. “Eigenmann!” he blustered.

  Frank allowed him just this split second of recognition. There could be no hesitation beyond that. The first bullet blew a hole in his chest and contorted his face with pain. The second was a chance hit that smashed into his skull as he crashed behind the sofa. So easy. So still.

  Frank edged cautiously around the sofa to examine his handiwork and found him where he had fallen. Crumpled and motionless. The blast still rang in his ears. And the blood still flowed from the gaping wounds. But it was over. And as the colour drained from Breitner’s face, the quiet countenance of death reminded him of his mother the last time he had seen her.

  Frank licked the sweat from his upper lip. The saltiness mingled with the sweet satisfaction of seeing this evil expunged forever not only from his own life, but from the lives of countless others. It was hard to imagine this man had enjoyed such influence. He looked so ordinary and forgettable in death. His eyes even emptier now. And his body more vulnerable than it must have been since his first few minutes as a new-born infant. Now he lay at Frank’s feet like a meaningless overgrown afterthought, parenthesised by the blood that trickled from the gaping wound in the promontory of his skull and onto the file caught half-open under his head when he fell.

  Like a nightmare, it screamed from the slowly filling claret lake. Patricia’s photo staring up at him. The unmistakable beauty of her eyes mocking his revenge and crying through the sickly, congealing pool of Breitner’s blood. This was her file that he had fetched from his desk. But before Frank could do anything with the discovery, his mind took another jolt when a heavy pounding on the door seemed about to bring the walls down around him.

  “Mr Breitner! Mr Breitner!”

  The voices rang in his ears and came with the desperate sound of breaking glass. Instinctively, he pulled the blood-wet file out from under Breitner’s body and ran. By the time he reached the hallway, the first intruder was already through the door. Frank recognised him instantly as one of the two German sports youth louts who had been so suspicious of him in Davos. The other one was close behind. Elated by the power of the weapon in his hand, Frank fired another indiscriminate blast in their direction. He saw the first of his pursuers go down and turned tail through the kitchen door. Once again, his presence of mind took him by surprise when he scooped up a briefcase that lay on a chair in the hall and slipped the file inside it as he went. A freshly blood-soaked document was not the kind of thing to be seen carrying through the streets in the early hours of the morning.

  He did not sense any attempt to pursue him out into the darkness. But he would not feel safe until he was on the train back to St Moritz and Patricia. He was late. He had long since missed their dinner together. It was a knowledge that left him with the uncomfortable image of her sharing their Chateau Haut-Brion with the colonel. The earliest he could be there now would be early afternoon. At least this had the advantage that the colonel should have left to return home by then, Frank told himself. And above all, he had accomplished his mission. He was beginning to feel that time was on his side again.

  The feeling was confirmed when he saw the early tram into town coming down the line just as he approached the tram stop. It was not until the doors were closing behind him, and he looked back, that his growing sense of security suddenly cracked. He watched in despair as both his pursuers slipped into the last carriage just before the tram moved off.

  ‘So I missed,’ Frank muttered to himself, recalling how the first of the sports youth louts slumped to the floor when he turned the gun on them as they burst into the house.

  He knew this tram would not take him directly to the station. At some point, he would have to get off and either change trams or walk. He fancied that taking the side streets to the station from the centre of town would offer the best chance of giving his predators the slip. So, when the tram was about to leave the market square, he leapt out through the closing doors and into the side street that led up to the wine tavern where he had arranged in vain to meet Patricia all those weeks ago, and encountered Lutz instead.

  Frank glanced back to see the tram carrying off his pursuers. They had not even noticed that he had jumped off. He could relax. Could now make his way to the station without the need for furtive backward glances. But to be on the safe side, he kept to the side streets anyway.

  When he reached the station, the next train was due to leave in ten minutes. He found an empty compartment at the front of the train, put the briefcase he had snatched up on the seat beside him and took a deep breath. He smelled the cordite still clinging to his memory of that moment. His heart still pounding from the execution of Breitner, from the sight of his prostrate, bloated body.

  The solitude of the empty compartment was the first opportunity he had had to catch his breath since the crushing tension of that moment. He closed his eyes and contemplated the clear, crisp mountain air that lay ahead. The gentle crunch of snow underfoot. And above all the snug warmth of Patricia in his arms and the fragrance of her unique perfume enveloping his senses.

  He was not prepared for the scene that greeted him when he felt the train begin to move and opened his eyes. Leaping onto the train several carriages back were the new bane of his life: the two youth sports louts in their forage caps.

  ‘They clearly have an idea where I’m heading,’ he told himself. The palm of his hand rested on the gun in his pocket for reassurance. There was no way he would lead them to Patricia. He knew he would have to find some way of shaking them off.

  When the train pulled into Zurich about an hour later, Frank jumped out, made for the ticket office and bought a single to Como. A quick glance back told him his stalkers were following his every move. But with the ticket to Italy in his wallet, he was confident that he could shake them off around Lake Como at the very latest. If necessary, he would draw them into the forests along the lakeside and finish them off there. He would then take a ferry to the northern end of the lake and hope to hitch a ride up over the Maloja Pass. If all went well, he could be back with Patricia the next day.

  Settling into his
new compartment with these thoughts as the train pulled out of Zurich, his attention was drawn to the briefcase beside him. He had not dared open it until now for fear of what he might find inside. But he knew it contained a record of Patricia’s life.

  When he slipped his hand inside the briefcase and removed the file, he saw at once that it was still smeared with dried traces of Breitner’s blood. He glanced nervously at the corridor outside the compartment. He was alone. It was a thin file and, when he opened it, he found only two pages inside. Frank took some comfort from this; he saw it as a sign that she had not played such a big part in Breitner’s life as he had feared.

  The first page was a potted family history that contained little Frank did not already know – aside from the names of her parents, which were recorded here as: “Father: Roche, Léon (J)” and “Mother: Sommer, Ingeborg”, together with details of the schools she had attended in France, Stuttgart and now at the University of Basel. Alongside her father’s name was an inscrutable reference in parentheses: (See File D7LY.MK3-RL). Other than this, the only surprise was a short paragraph devoted to a year spent in London as an au pair with a family that suggested some kind of association with the corridors of power. She had never once mentioned this to Frank. He wondered why.

  The other page was simply a long list of names, many of which were suffixed with the same designation that followed her father’s name: (J). Frank assumed this was to identify them as Jewish. The names meant nothing to him until he reached the bottom of the page, where he found Zimmermann, Joachim (J) and Eigenmann, Götz. A line had been ominously drawn through Achim’s name. Against his own name there was a bold question mark.

  Attached to the back of this page with paperclips Frank found two photographs. One was of Patricia. Her hair was longer, which lent an added layer to her intriguing beauty. He gently eased the photo out from under the paperclip and sensed a warm thrill as he slipped it into his right inside pocket. The other photo was a group picture of half a dozen men in SS uniform, all except for one; this man wore a black homburg hat and a black coat that seemed almost too long for him; he looked decidedly uncomfortable in the company of all those uniforms. Frank assumed this to be Patricia’s father.

  He folded these two pages with the remaining photograph and tucked them into the left inside pocket of his coat, intrigued to see what Patricia would make of these two pages when he showed them to her. Then he slid the now empty file back into the briefcase and placed it on the rack above the seat opposite in an effort to disown it.

  These thoughts of Patricia and the image of her father preyed on his mind like clusters of doctor fish nibbling at every corner of his brain. But eventually the movement of the train carried him off into a deep sleep that kept his overactive imagination quiet. Even the stops between Zurich and the Italian border, with their whistles and the bustling activity of people getting on and off the train, were not enough to rouse him.

  It was not until the train lurched to a stop at the border station of Chiasso that Frank finally woke. Before he was even able to get a grip on his surroundings, still dazed and disorientated as to his whereabouts, he was rudely stirred into action by a Swiss border guard demanding to see his passport. Fumbling around in his coat pocket for the document, Frank was aware of the border guard’s growing impatience. And when he finally produced his German passport, he sensed this impatience turn instantly to suspicion.

  The border guard looked Frank up and down and carefully scrutinised every entry in the passport. Frank felt his heart begin to race. Was it possible, he wondered, that news of Breitner’s demise had already reached the southern border of the country? Was he already the subject of a manhunt? His fears appeared to be substantiated when the border guard disappeared down the corridor with his passport.

  Frank sensed panic threatening to take hold as he considered his rapidly vanishing options. But he knew it was pointless trying to get off the train. He would have to bluff his way through somehow. A full ten minutes passed as he attempted to rehearse a credible story against the backdrop of a pulse rate so high that he could almost feel his heart pounding against the wall of his chest. All to no avail. The rehearsal proved unnecessary when the border guard returned. He handed the document back to Frank without another word and moved on to the next compartment. Frank slipped the passport under the cold metal of the firearm that still lay ready in his coat pocket.

  After a further ten minutes or so, the train slowly pulled out of the station, across the Italian border and Frank started to relax. Until the train lurched to a stop again. It was the turn of the Italian border guards to demand his travel documents.

  When the official in his navy uniform and jackboots appeared outside his compartment, Frank instantly reached into his coat pocket. But he was a little too ready to please. A touch too eager for his own good. In the meantime, the passport he had slipped into his pocket now cradled the barrel of the firearm between its covers. Unaware of the shifting landscape submerged inside his pocket, he pulled out the document to show it to the border guard, dragging the firearm with it. The weapon crashed to the floor.

  In a flash, the right boot of the border guard trapped the firearm underfoot. Suddenly Frank found himself staring into the barrel of another gun. Its owner was yelling back over his shoulder in an incomprehensible rapid-fire barrage of Italian. It took just a few seconds before two more dark navy uniforms appeared behind him. They instantly trained their own firearms on Frank, as the first border guard kicked Frank’s gun out into the corridor, pushed him head first down onto the seat and slapped on a pair of handcuffs. Frank was dragged to his feet, wincing as the metal cuffs cut into his wrists.

  By now, the commotion in his compartment had attracted an audience around his carriage. His captors had to manhandle him off the train and force a way through the throng that had gathered on the platform. Beyond the crowd, further up the platform, Frank caught sight of the sports youth louts who had tracked him all the way from Breitner’s house. They stood watching the spectacle from a distance. The expression on their faces betrayed a look of disappointment that they had been deprived of their opportunity for vengeance.

  They watched in silence as Frank vanished from view behind the crowd.

  Chapter 24

  As the wintry brown meadows and lowland streams slipped past them on the train, Ellen could not escape the feeling that Frank too was fast receding from her life. It was a sentiment that stayed with her for the entire journey, as the meadows gave way to a looming horizon of white mountain peaks, and she and Marthe changed to the narrow-gauge railway up through the twisting snow-covered landscape to St Moritz.

  When eventually they stepped off the train into the crisp, cold air, Ellen took a deep breath, enjoying the freshness of the Alpine atmosphere. She was struck by the way the fading sunlight sparkled gently in Marthe’s dark hair, revealing shades of auburn she had not noticed before. It lent a new dimension to the beauty of her companion.

  “The chalet is a little way out of town,” Marthe said. “So we’ll need a taxi.”

  “Your hair glistens so beautifully in the sunlight,” she added, running a hand through Ellen’s strawberry-blonde locks as they climbed into the car. Ellen smiled. The coincidence of their thoughts both teased and unnerved her.

  As the taxi carried them up through the town, past the luxury hotels and out to the more sparsely developed, snow-covered slopes, Ellen pondered Marthe’s remark with a growing sense of excitement intermingled with wariness. She could not help seeing in her words a confirmation of the intimacy between them that Marthe seemed keen to keep alive. The thought sent a tingle of anticipation coursing through Ellen’s body.

  The drive up to the chalet took little more than five minutes. But already the sun was dipping behind the mountains when Ellen stepped out of the car and felt the crunch of snow underfoot. She was struck by the intense quiet. The deep snow around them seemed to absorb every sound – from the noise of the car as it disappeared back down the moun
tainside to the crack of a twig that succumbed to a squirrel darting up into the trees.

  The chalet itself lay in splendid isolation close to the forest. It was a cosy little lodge. More modest than Ellen had been expecting. The perfect place to put the events of the past few weeks behind her, she told herself, when Marthe took her on a short tour of the house and showed her where she would be sleeping. It all seemed so perfect to her. The walls and floors and ceiling all of wood. The red and white gingham curtains over tiny windows that looked out onto the snowy slopes and enhanced her sense of cosy comfort all the more. And in the lounge a stone fireplace just waiting for them to sit by the log fire together in the evening to chat and contemplate the flames.

  Ellen knew of course that any conversation would go deeper than mere chat. But she had come prepared. Throughout the train journey to the mountains, she had mulled over the point of her being here at all. And now, as she unpacked her suitcase and then lay on the bed to relax after the journey, her thoughts began to settle on a decision.

  Marthe had taken the precaution of bringing two packets of soup and some coffee with her.

  “Tomorrow, we can get in some food from the Konsum,” she said, when Ellen emerged from her bedroom and found Marthe in the kitchen opening one of the soup packets. “Or we could go out to eat if you prefer.”

  “I’m happy to eat here,” Ellen replied. “It’s so nice and cosy.”

  While the soup was heating up, Marthe disappeared through a side door in the kitchen, before re-emerging a few minutes later with an armful of logs, lighting the fire and opening a bottle of red wine she had brought with her.

  “I’m sorry it’s only Maggi soup,” Marthe said some thirty minutes later as they settled down to eat beside what by now was a roaring log fire.

  “It tastes fine,” Ellen assured her.

  “It’s not so much the flavour that bothers me,” Marthe explained. “It’s more the image. The idea of consuming products from a company with such a dubious reputation.”