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

back aching. Must have fallen out in the night, he thought. And dragged himself back into bed feeling bruised and battered. Then recalled that he was due to meet Achim later that day. His mind raced ahead of his discomfort with a buzz of expectation.

By the time he appeared for breakfast, his condition had outwardly improved. The bruising ache in his back remained, but the puffy oedema round the eyes had subsided. And he could now see things with a strained modicum of clarity – something for which he was about to find himself oddly thankful.

He sat at a discreet corner table and waited for breakfast to be served as he took a book from his pocket. Confession of a Murderer by Joseph Roth. It was either that or Rilke’s Duino Elegies. This was the incongruous extent of the library he had with him. And on that bruised and battered morning, murder was a better match for his mood.

Sitting over croissants and coffee a few tables away from Frank were two men in grey suits with a young woman. The two men had their backs to him and were as inconspicuous as the chairs they were sitting in. The young woman told a different story altogether and seemed unlikely company for her faceless companions. She had a natural chic that was captured in the self-assured contrast between the fullness of her raven hair and a silver-white scarf that hung delicately around the collar of a navy-blue jacket. He could not hear what they were saying, but it was obvious that she carried herself with supreme self-confidence. The way in which every so often she threw herself back in her chair. The gentle curvature of her back touching the frame. Teasing it. And tantalising Frank’s curiosity. He placed his book to one side and watched. Captivated by the scene.

A feigned expression of surprise or amusement on her lips. Maybe a look of shock in her eyes. It was plain she was in complete control of whatever conversation they were holding. She was not especially attractive in the conventional sense. Yet an aura of quite exceptional, indescribable beauty was described by every movement she made, every expression she conveyed across the table. When she threw her head back, her hair would catch in the corner of her mouth. And as if deliberately to underline this moment, she would discreetly part her lips and sweep away the black strands with her fingers, leaving the lips pouted in a way that was all the more provocative for their fleeting, innocent sensuality.

But Frank’s enchantment was suddenly trampled all over by the arrival of a newcomer at their table. For all his frustration over this intrusion, however, it proved an intriguing turn of events. The newcomer was wearing a black hat and long black trench coat. Frank recognised him at once.

It was the man with the Maybach Zeppelin from the night before. And seeing him now in the light of day, he realised that he knew the man. He was, or used to be, the owner of a sleazy cabaret in Berlin. Willi Breitner. An opportunist, a fast talker and a womaniser. The type who wore all the danger signals like a bright red carnation in his buttonhole and still managed to soft-soap anyone into doing whatever he pleased. During Frank’s years in Berlin, before the Nazis seized power, he had often seen Breitner strutting around some of the classier establishments, like the White Mouse or the Chat Noir, before setting up in business himself. Frank considered himself fortunate never to have made the man’s acquaintance. He knew a number of people who had. And every one of them had come to regret it.

The aversion that Frank felt towards Breitner was nourished all the more as he watched him take the delicate hand of his temptress, raise it to the loathsome curl of his cold razor-like lips and – with all the charm of a cobra – stoop to kiss it. She smiled and discreetly withdrew her hand before getting up to leave. Breitner stepped back slightly. He deliberately allowed her too little space to pass without brushing against his beefy, barrel-chested frame and bade her an ostentatiously regretful farewell. As he lowered himself into the chair she had just vacated, opposite the two faceless men, his lupine eyes followed her across the room to the cloak stand and watched as she slipped on her coat. Even this she managed to do with an innocent allure that teased away all the layers of cold cynicism that Frank had accumulated over the years. The way she moved her arms back, sliding them into the sleeves of the coat and just briefly revealing the white blouse under her jacket – the warm hint of fragile femininity beneath.

Frank’s curiosity was uncomfortably divided. Who was this woman? And what was she doing here with a man like Breitner so far from his stamping ground? Whatever it was, Frank’s muddled logic told him he would be unlikely to find the answer to the second question here in the breakfast room. So, to satisfy the deeper part of his curiosity, he went after an answer to the first instead.

It was still twilight when he reached the pavement outside. She was already some distance down the street and just turning into a side alley. Frank hurried after her as unobtrusively as his burning eagerness would allow. Once at the alley, he could see her some thirty metres ahead walking almost meditatively, hands in coat pockets, up a steep flight of steps. The higher up she went, the slower her pace became. His eyes never once left the beguiling movement of her slim dark ankles as they flexed effortlessly over the steps, the seam of her stockings tracing the movement with the elegance of a master calligrapher. For all the confidence she had displayed in the company of those two men, these ankles betrayed a poignant vulnerability. Yet paradoxically, the beauty of their movement