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

weary, homeless feet. Down-and-outs and drifters, students and labourers, men on benefits, would-be philosophers and armchair revolutionaries. The place was packed – charged with the kind of atmosphere that drags you with it, holding an ostentatious mirror to your detachment. He found an obtuse, uncomfortable sort of security here. Felt at home in a way that he could not quite put his finger on. A deep sense of belonging in the thick smoke of cheap cigarettes and garbled, broken conversations.

He found space on a long bench seat at the window by the door. A waitress pushed through the crowd and placed a menu on the table as he sat down.

“’ne Stange, bitte” he said without touching the menu, “- und Kalbsläberli mit Röschti.”

The words rolled over his lips with an Alemannic timbre as familiar to him as the beer she placed in front of him a minute or two later.

“’S chalbsläberli chunnt”, she said to reassure him that his plate of calf’s liver and rösti was on its way, then turned and vanished back through the crush towards the bar.

He watched her getting swallowed up by the crowd until he found his line of vision was suddenly obscured. A tall dark figure had swept aside the thick curtain over the door and stood in front of him, surveying the scene. The faces in the crowd turned, descended into a low murmur and made space for him. The man strode through the impromptu path to a table at the far end of the room that had been vacated the moment he entered the tavern. He removed his hat and long black leather trench coat, hung them on a peg beside his table and sat down with a newspaper. He looked about the room, and his gaze caught Frank’s. He had the look of a predator. Steely lupine eyes beneath a head of black, neatly brilliantined hair. And a pencil-thin moustache that highlighted his cold razor-like lips. They exuded a dark conceit about them as he turned his gaze back to the newspaper, opened it out on the table before him and lit a cigarette.

Frank jumped when the waitress slapped the plate down in front of him. The dark figure with the newspaper momentarily vanished from his thoughts. Frank cast his eyes over the calf’s liver and golden, straw-like strands of fried potato. He had heard a lot about rösti (it conjured the fleeting memory of a meeting that never was – with a newspaper editor – and in the hubbub of the tavern around him the recollection was washed away as quickly as it had appeared). But he had never tried the dish until now.

And from the casual way the waitress banged the plate down on the table – producing some cutlery from the folds of her apron almost as an afterthought – Frank sensed it was not about to do a lot for him. But after the nightmares of Jack, Baschi and the clinic, his appetite was ready for anything. So it was not the memory of Baschi and the shrinks in the clinic that put him off his meal. What really did it for him was the cluster of short black hairs. Each one cooked into place in the golden strands of fried potato with a true eye for detail. He felt his stomach heave. And pushed the plate to one side. He ordered another beer instead.

The waitress slopped the new glass in front of him. He watched the handsome head of froth spew onto the beermat. When he looked up, she had already moved on to the next table. And his gaze instead met the predatory eyes of the brilliantined stranger. The eyes briefly turned their attention to the ashtray on the table as he tapped the ash from his cigarette. Then returned their scrutiny to Frank. The conceit on those razor-thin lips had veered now into a new realm of sentiment. It smacked of malice. And instantly set Frank’s heart pounding.

Unnerved by the menace, he looked away. His gaze rested instead on a petite Irish-looking lady who had just entered the tavern, dark anxious eyes peering from under a fringe of jet-black hair. She was selling red roses. Someone even greeted her by a name that sounded to him very much like Molly. But this was a long way from the streets of Dublin. And a long way too from Putney Bridge and Ellen. Frank opened the pouch in his wallet and took her lock of hair between his fingers. The only remaining handle on the world as he knew it.

The rose seller’s fringe of jet-black hair put him in mind of Anna. The clinic. The white coats. And the Valium. He recalled the endless questions by the doctor. The cage of white birch trees. His head ached with every image. Everything began to spin as the noise in the restaurant began to obtrude. The scraping of knives and clacking of forks that cut through the thick curtains of chatter. The screech of knives across cheap porcelain seared through his head. And the spin refused to let up. The entire room appeared to be in overdrive. The crowd of people, the brown nicotine-stained furniture, everything that had been there just a few seconds before now vanished. Only the image of the white coats stayed with him, taunting his every turn, growing steadily black as the spin accelerated.

“Oh Achim, bitte.” The words erupted again. And he reached out for the only anchor in sight that seemed capable of preventing him from being swept away altogether: the coat, now black, around which everything else rotated. He clutched at it. Held it fast. And felt like a lost baby desperately holding on to the only security the little mite thought it knew. He wanted to bawl and yell until the world stopped.

And it did.

He felt the grip on his shirt collar tighten round his neck. Sensed himself reeling through the doorway. And landing face first on the cold hard asphalt