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

Lutz shook his head.

“I’ll wait.”

But Frank had no wish to have Lutz keep him company while he prepared himself for Breitner’s arrival. However protective of Patricia the man had become, Frank did not trust him an inch. He would feel more comfortable sitting in a snake pit.

Frank pulled the gun from his pocket as if about to offer Lutz a cigarette.

“Is there a cellar here?”

Lutz eyed the firearm and nodded. Like a docile dog, he led Frank past the staircase to a door in the darkest, farthest corner of the long hallway. He knew Frank meant business, that Breitner’s time was up, and without any further bidding led him down into the cellar. Lutz moved with a lightness that suggested a sense of deliverance, as if this was the moment he had been waiting for all his life.

“Just tell me one thing,” Frank said before shutting the door on Lutz. “What happened to Achim?”

“Mr Zimmermann?” The expression in Lutz’s eyes displayed a look of cold resignation. “I only know that he was shipped back across the border.”

“Shipped back?” Frank repeated. “Like rejected goods?”

“That’s all any of us are when it comes to it,” Lutz said with a shrug of the shoulders.

“And his family?” Frank asked. He caught the trace of a flinch in Lutz’s eyes. And a hint of tearfulness in the reply.

“His wife became very excitable when they took her husband. Almost uncontrollable. Until Horst…”

“Horst?”

A sense of revulsion filled Frank instantly with nausea as he repeated the name. He knew painfully well what kind of animals Horst and his sidekick were.

“And her little boys?”

Lutz said nothing. But he could no longer mask the tears.

“The baby boys?” Frank repeated. The anger in his voice was seized with a sense of alarm. He tightened his grip on the gun.

“They were there,” Lutz whispered, the words almost inaudible.

“And you? Were you there?”

“I only know what I was told,” Lutz mumbled with a timorous shake of the head.

With a look of disbelief and disgust on his face, Frank relaxed his grip on the gun. There were bigger fish to fry. He turned and shut the door, leaving Lutz with a single naked light to keep him company and a strange look of relief, almost gratitude, on his face as Frank locked the door on his captive.

He pondered Lutz’s words as he returned back up the stairs to the room where Breitner had received him all those weeks ago. At least they gave him the satisfaction of knowing that he had meted out justice of a sort on Horst.

The waiting dragged deep into the night. It left too much space for reflection, a pondering so deep it let the bottle of Bordeaux waiting in St Moritz slip completely from his mind. For in that one room, he was cloistered within the whole limited compass of Breitner’s personality. From Biedermeier to kitsch. There was a temptation to scratch beneath this surface and look for the man. But it was not a search to be encouraged, as the colonel had made plain to him. Better to focus on the rat.

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