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

The dance band was not due to start for an hour, so he whiled away the time exploring the department store. Although he had passed it so often, he had never been inside. He had expected it to be full of ladies’ fashion, so was surprised to be informed they had a tea room with a dance band. A further discovery that thrilled him once he was inside was the record department. It put him in mind of Patricia Roche’s gramophone. With the thought of making a better impression the next time they met, he started browsing through the jazz records. There was an entire section devoted to Vocalion and Brunswick, and amidst the Benny Goodmans and Fletcher Hendersons he found just the thing. Billie Holiday – These Foolish Things. With a broad smile on his face, he took the record to the cash desk, paid the cashier and took himself off to the tea room.

He placed his purchase on one of the few tables still vacant, ordered a pot of tea and felt uncomfortably conspicuous as the roomful of prim ladies’ eyes homed in on the only man in the room aside from Will Hildering and his band when they emerged onto the stage. But it seemed to him that the American would be unlikely to venture into a tea room full of middle-aged ladies in his search for the man who mugged him. So he remained there, sipping his tea for a good hour, until his pot was empty and cold. Then he made his way to the Hotel Storchen.

It was no more than a few minutes’ walk to the hotel. Despite the relaxed interlude of music and tea, the excitement of his crime must have still been burning in his eyes. This at least was the only conclusion he could draw when he collected his key at reception and was greeted with a curious and anxious look from the man on the desk. It was only with the dubious advantage of hindsight that he realised the true reason for that anxious look.

How long the thugs had been waiting for him it was hard to say, but they had plainly made themselves at home in his room: one stretched out on the bed, one in the armchair by the window and another by the door to nail Frank as he entered – a feat the man accomplished with imposing effect. Before he had a chance to appreciate the mess they had already made in the room, Frank was pinned to the floor by a heavy insistent knee in the small of his back, while a rough hand pulled on his hair until he felt his scalp was about to come adrift or his neck about to snap. With the other hand, the man quickly ran through his pockets. If he was looking for a weapon, he was disappointed, but he seemed satisfied with the two wallets he found – Frank’s own and the American’s – which he tossed over to the ape still draped on the bed.

As if they were now done, the hand and knee withdrew. And Frank was just pulling himself to his feet when a crushing boot swung in from the right and sent him sprawling back on the floor with the words: “On your feet, scumbag. Someone wants to meet you.”

No further words were exchanged. The three of them bundled him out of his room, down the corridor, out onto the street and into a car that was standing outside the hotel. The vehicle was all too familiar to Frank. It was the Maybach Zeppelin with those white-walled tyres. He was still a long way from getting the full picture, but some of the pieces in the puzzle were beginning to slot into place. And it was not looking pretty.

Chapter 9

They drove north for about fifteen minutes to a leafy suburb of the city, and must have been a stone’s throw from the border with Germany when the car pulled up in front of a large fin-de-siècle house overlooking a park. It seemed to Frank the kind of place you would expect to see a brand-new Maybach in the drive.

It was an impression that left him feeling no less out of place than the evening in Berlin six months earlier, in the late summer of 1936, when a large section of the audience in the cabaret broke into the Horst Wessel song, and the rest of the audience joined in. That was the moment he decided it was time to leave. And here he was now, equally out of place and just arriving. Time appeared to have gone into reverse in a disquieting way.

The sense of unease was not dispelled when his escort led him into a cavernous lounge looking onto the park to meet his host. Quite the contrary: he grew more ill at ease merely at the sight of Willi Breitner in his white suit and two-tone shoes. There was a flash tackiness about the man who greeted Frank from his garish baroque armchair, right leg crossed over his left, as he puffed on a fat cigar. On the table beside him a half-drunk glass of cognac, a bottle of Rémy Martin and a cigar box.

He smiled a leering, supercilious expression in Frank’s direction and gestured towards the only other chair in the room, the other side of the table.

“Take a seat Herr Eigenmann,” he said. “Or should I call you Mr Silverstone?”

Frank was momentarily puzzled by the question, until he caught sight of his wallet lying on the table behind the cigar box alongside the wallet he had pilfered from the American. He gave no answer, sensing that the uncertainty around his identity gave him a slight edge. So, not wanting to squander this advantage, he said nothing. If this irritated Breitner, it did not show.

“Herr Eigenmann from Berlin or Mr Silverstone from Baltimore. Or possibly neither of those.