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

cynically ushered about half an hour earlier. His clothes landed on top of him where he lay. A wet pool quickly gathered under his head where the blood continued to pour from his mouth.

“You see what trouble you can get into when you find yourself on the wrong side of us.”

All Frank could see through his barely conscious daze were two nameless feet in the doorway, right beside his face. But the two-tone shoes were sharp enough in their vulgarity to pierce even the thickest fog. And the arrogance of the voice that went with them was unmistakable.

“You came off lightly this time, because I asked the boys to treat you with respect. It could have been so much worse.”

The two-tone shoes walked back and forth, mocking Frank as he lay immobilised by his pain.

“You find Lola for me, and you will find I can be a very generous man. But for now, you filthy little fairy, get up, get out of here and stay away from Mademoiselle Roche!”

These last venomous words were delivered with the toe of his right shoe propelled sharply into Frank’s shoulder. A token gesture. It should have been the head. But Breitner would have wanted to avoid getting blood on his two-tone shoes.

Frank was not afforded the time to dress. Having arrived at the bottom of the stairs the slow way, Breitner’s odd-job men now dragged him to the door and kicked him out into the refreshing chill of the afternoon air, tossing his clothes after him once again.

Chapter 10

After Breitner’s crash course in compliance, Frank spent the next few days in his hotel room, nursing his injuries. He avoided the mirror for fear of what he might find. When he ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, he was surprised to find that he still had all his teeth. Loose, but in place. Yet the bruises were slow to heal. And his dignity even slower. He skulked in his room, outraged, scared and vengeful – like a scheming injured rat. The entire negative spectrum of human sentiment occupied his every thought in the four walls of that room from where he had been dragged so rudely into his nightmare. He relieved the lingering pain in his jaw and ribs with a ready supply of wine. But his thoughts remained devoid of any constructive pattern.

His only consolation on getting back to his hotel room was the discovery that the record he had bought for Patricia Roche was still intact. But even this was not enough to lend any meaningful structure to his thoughts. Two strands of thinking preoccupied his mind, each as mystifying as the other: the paradox of why such an obnoxious misogynist as Breitner would insist on always referring to Patricia Roche with such respect as to call her Mademoiselle; and the question who the hell was Lola?

He remained cooped up with these questions wary of venturing out at least until the weekend. His left eye was still swollen, but had become more yellow than black. His mouth too felt misshapen by the multiple contusions and a deep gash in his upper lip. He knew he was not a pretty sight. But after the conversation with Breitner, he sensed that he could not leave it too long before contacting Achim.

It was mid-morning on the Sunday when he called at the hotel. It seemed a reasonable time to catch him in.

“He checked out on Wednesday, sir,” the young lady on the desk informed him. “With his family.”

Frank was stunned.

‘How could he just check out without getting in touch?’ he asked himself. ‘And only two days after we’d last seen each other. Why didn’t he tell me he would be moving on so soon? Maybe Breitner had got to him. Or did it have something to do with the mysterious Silverstone? Or the even more mysterious Lola?’

These thoughts flooded his mind in a torrent made all the fiercer and more urgent by the memory of Breitner’s thugs still fresh in his bones.

“Do you know where they went?” he asked the receptionist. “Did they leave a message or a forwarding address?”

She simply shook her head and continued with the paperwork on her desk.

Having persuaded his friend to join him in this strange exile, as he saw it, Frank felt a sense of responsibility for him. Yet from the first moments of Achim’s arrival, he had found there was no cause for any such sense of duty. On the contrary, he saw in his old friend a steely independence that both mystified and at the same time slightly irritated him. Irritated probably because he wanted Achim’s dependence on him, and found that all along it had been he who was dependent on his old friend. Now, after all the promise Frank had nurtured before his arrival, his old friend was already gone again. And it was he who felt abandoned.

Out on the street, he spent the rest of his Sunday solitude wandering aimlessly through the city trying to fathom Achim’s behaviour, wondering where he might have gone, why he might have gone and, above all, why in such secrecy.

The most constructive outcome of that lost day was the decision he made to move out of his hotel surroundings and to look for less extravagant lodgings. His resources were not unlimited. And with the Hotel Storchen clearly a familiar haunt for Breitner, the case in favour of an alternative had become all the more compelling.

It was when he considered crossing the river in the hope that he might find a room at the Kolping house that he was reminded of Achim.

‘Perhaps that explains his disappearance,’ he thought. ‘Maybe he followed my suggestion and has gone to the Kolping house on the other side of the river.’ This idea encouraged him all the more to head across the river the next day.

He rose early the next morning and, after breakfast, set off with an unaccustomed zeal in his step. Just in case they had no room at