The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

They adorned lamp posts, hoardings, walls and any other space that could accommodate them. Frank was struck by how politely ineffectual the YES posters appeared. And how brutal the opposing posters were: from pictures of women crying “Leave us out of it” to the shock tactics of babies falling out of prams while women were too distracted “playing politics,” or of anonymous hands groping a woman in silhouette. One that caught his eye in particular was the picture of a baby’s dummy with a fly crawling over it. What kind of country is this? Frank asked himself.

“Are you voting in the referendum tomorrow?” he asked the driver.

“I am Italian,” came the reply.

The man at the wheel was the surly, silent type. And he said no more as they drove in the direction of the Centralbahnplatz, along streets that appeared increasingly and curiously known to Frank: past the grand Romanesque church and Jugendstil residences towards the viaduct and the high-rise Rialto that rose up from the road below and peered over the balustrade; the yawning exit from the multistorey Schlotterbeck garage; and the Grand Savoy Hotel, now home to the Bank for International Settlements. All these images tugged oddly at his memory as they headed towards the main railway station.

He had a room booked at the Hotel St. Gotthard. It lay just across from the station. At the desk, Frank was politely welcomed by a fifty-something man at reception, smartly dressed in various shades of grey, except for his gold cuff-links. In all other respects, there was little to distinguish him from the taxi driver. He was a man of few words.

Once Frank had completed the check-in formalities, the receptionist simply handed him an envelope with his room key and pointed to the lift. Room 202. Frank placed the envelope on the table when he entered the room and went straight over to the window to let in some air. The fuggy mustiness hit him the moment he opened the door. There was a familiarity about the stale atmosphere that he could not put his finger on. It teased him like an afterthought tugging at a synapse buried deep in an untidy archive of souvenirs.

He opened the window. It looked down onto the street that ran past the station. A quiet street that spared the hotel all the traffic noise of a railway station thanks to its location some hundred metres or more from the main entrance. It was effectively a side street that could have been anywhere in Europe.

He had already phoned Ellen from Heathrow to say he had been delayed. But he promised he would call again as soon as he arrived. He dialled 9 for an outside line. The phone rang for some time. But Ellen didn’t pick up.

He turned back into the room, took the file of documents he had brought with him out of his suitcase and placed it on the table next to the envelope. He looked pensively at this envelope for a moment, picked it up and found a handwritten note inside. It was from the editor of the local newspaper, Hanspeter Rösti, welcoming Frank to Basel in almost perfect English and inviting him to dinner. He wrote that he would return to the hotel at 7.30 in the evening to pick Frank up.

Frank could not resist a chuckle. Do they really call people Rösti here? And he contemplated the dinner that might be in store for him.

Thinking it best to take a nap and make sure he was fit for this engagement, he lay down on the bed. It was an old and poorly sprung mattress. But after the early start and the long wait at Heathrow, he fell to sleep almost instantly.

How long he slept he could not be sure. But it was a restless sleep. And every time he came anywhere near the boundary line to wakefulness, he found himself dragged back into an endless and disturbing dream:

The musty smell of damp wheat hung in the atmosphere. A fuggy scavenger of the air he breathed. Suffocating. The harvest would come too late this year. He could feel it. The tragedy trying to get a grip on his senses. Banners seemed to fly from the masthead of every tree proclaiming failure. As if this was something to look forward to. He heard them flutter in the wind high above his head. And every now and then the gusting vestiges of the storm that had flattened down the wheat billowed their bleak message that little bit louder, just to reinforce how close he was. Just the other side of the woods. Just beyond the trees.

He knew how near at hand it was. Could hear the knives being sharpened, taste the cold steel whetting its appetite for the plunge. It had been a long year. And he wondered how much longer it would be before it became last year. Time was pressing.

The solitary figure moving down the road between the wheatfields seemed little more than a sad parenthesised remark on the landscape. Lost in a long black fur-collared coat and black homburg hat, and weighted on each side by an oversized suitcase that bracketed his slow progress to the trees, he punctuated his own horizon with dark precision.

A crow cawed and cackled above the trees, before it was tossed to one side by a flurry of wind. It was the only sound to erupt onto the warm, musty atmosphere. Smothered and puffed away again in the stiff breeze. Not enough to distract the traveller. He continued on his way, shuffling ever closer to the dark tunnel created by the archway of dense, leafy boughs across the road. His progress was so slow it was almost imperceptible from a distance. But he kept moving. Had he allowed himself to be roused from his purpose for only a moment – had he looked up – he would have seen that the crow was not