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

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.”

The man called Cavegn then stood aside and walked off into the night. It was at that moment that Patricia’s voice fetched Frank back from his nightmare.

“Where on earth have you been? Come on up and have a look. It’s beautiful.”

She was standing on the balcony. The light silhouetted the modest line of her body and invested it with a mature serenity that contradicted her girlish excitement. Her explanations as to how they had managed to miss each other were lost on him, as befitted their unimportance. What tugged most sweetly at his heart was not simply that he had found her, but that she seemed to have found herself again, that thoughts of Léandre appeared to have been banished – bruised and battered, but smiling. She exuded a charm that moved from smoky enigma to girlish effervescence and back again with disturbing ease.

He took her in his arms with the zeal of a missionary holding on to his dream for fear it may evaporate. She winced.

“My ribs took a bit of a beating this afternoon,” she explained.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m the one to say sorry. And thank you,” she added. “Yet I’ve said neither. I’ve been very selfish, and there’s no excuse. Except that I was so upset by the news of Léandre’s death. He was such a dear friend. It’s hard to believe that I shall never see him again.” She paused for a respectful silence that Frank was unable to share. “Have you ever lost anyone very dear to you?”

“I thought I’d lost you just now,” he replied. But his words irritated her and did not even elicit the pretence of a smile.

“Don’t be flippant, Frank. Please.”

“I’m quite serious. I honestly thought something terrible had happened to you.”

His words this time must have convinced her, because she ran a hand through his hair in reply with a look so exquisitely tender it radiated to every pulsatile cell of his body. “Why do you think that janitor said I don’t deserve such a pretty thing as you?”

“Perhaps it was the charm of my French accent. Or maybe you just intimidated him with that awful German of yours. I expect he thought it was you who beat me.”

She laughed at this afterthought. A giggle that played sweetly on his vanity. He held her slenderness just firmly enough to kindle the passion in him and just loosely enough for her to slip away still laughing from him the moment his lips went to caress the bruises on her face.

“So this is what your father’s lawyer looks like,” she said as she span elusively towards the open wooden staircase.

“What do you mean?”

‘Well, he’s left enough clues to his inner self. I’ll ignore the furnishings, they’re the mark of a good Hausfrau; he’d leave decisions like that to her. But the books are definitely his domain, property of the thinking man – Stefan Zweig, current legal issues like corruption in public life by Rudolf Wassermann – awful man, I attended one of his lectures – or Le cas Gustloff (he reads French it seems). Gustloff lived here in Davos, you know, when he was assassinated.”

Her words called to mind the fraught conversation with Achim in the restaurant where they had met for their reunion.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Patricia added. “The Gauleiter for Switzerland living almost shoulder to shoulder with Kirchner, one of your country’s most ‘degenerate’ artists in such neighbourly exile. I wonder if they ever met.”

She savoured this thought for a moment before returning to the examination of his father’s lawyer.

“A man who obviously takes his job seriously. But then…” she said, taking one of the books from the shelf, “just to show that not all is lost, that he’s still a boy at heart, a single volume of Karl May and a copy of King Solomon’s Mines. It must be that romantic boyish streak that compelled him to buy this place in the mountains, because the rest doesn’t fit at all. Just imagine, this whole secret side of him that no one else back home knows about has been carried up to this mountain lodge as a kind of undeclared investment. Come to think of it, as your father’s lawyer he’s made you an indirect investment partner too, hasn’t he?”

At last she paused for breath, became slightly pensive, then asked:

“You’ve never told me anything about your father. What sort of a man was he?”

“You talk the most wonderful nonsense, Patricia. Do you know Rudolf Wassermann?” Frank asked back, ignoring her question. Once again, he was put in mind of his own boyhood, and he wondered whether this man was any relation to the Wassermann he had known, the bane of Volker’s life.

“I just attended a lecture of his once, that’s all,” she said. “But don’t be so evasive. I asked you a question.”

“I’m not,” he replied, thinking of all the evasions that she lived by, but said nothing. “It’s just a name that puts me in mind of someone I was reminded of recently when I returned to the memories of my childhood.” And he described the abortive visit to his mother – but above all, the discovery he had made about his father and the mysterious photo from the young woman calling herself Neeti.

“Goodness knows why, but I brought it all back with me for some reason. It intrigued me I suppose. Unfortunately, the book and I have since parted company, but I still have the photo.”

He fished it out of his wallet, where they had been left to mature, untouched since leaving Cologne.