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

“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