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

another bottle. And they spent the rest of the evening lubricating their taste for nostalgia with a little more of his friend’s elixir.

But after Gertrude politely departed for bed and left them to become hopelessly lost in their nostalgia for the pulsating young arteries of a city that had long since ceased to exist, nagging questions continued to chip away at the back of Frank’s mind. He could still not completely bury his more recent, painful memories of the last few days. And the shock on his friend’s face when he interrupted their reminiscences was plain to see.

“So what was in that rucksack you gave to Silverstone?” Frank asked.

“What?” Achim was taken aback, his lips unable to form another word while his eyes darted from side to side, as if speedreading through all the implications of the question. “Have you been following me?”

“Breitner said you’re in what he called the art business. What did he mean by that?”

“Breitner?” The scampering movement of Achim’s eyes betrayed the deep disquiet of a quarry at bay. “Did he elaborate?”

“He also wondered what you’d done with Lola.”

Achim cast a nervous glance in his friend’s direction. Sipped anxiously from his glass. And said nothing.

Frank simply watched. The furtiveness irritated him, and he was enjoying the obvious discomfort of his friend as Achim struggled to retain not only his composure, but presumably also a deeper secret. Yet Achim remained evasive.

“Silverstone has a position at the Bank for International Settlements. He has a lot of interesting connections. Can put you in touch with the right people,” he said. It was all he was prepared to offer by way of explanation. And it did nothing to allay Frank’s suspicions.

“You do realise what a Nazi-friendly organisation that is?” he asked. “One of the founding members was awarded the Golden Badge of the NSDAP only last month. He’s also great buddies with another keen enabler of the Nazis: the Governor of the Bank of England no less. And they both sit on the board.”

Frank paused to let his words sink in.

“Do you think it’s just possible that the right people Silverstone knows could be entirely the wrong people?”

Achim cast a worried look at Frank. But said nothing.

It was plain to Frank that his friend had no inkling of the hornet’s nest in which Silverstone plied whatever trade it was he pretended to be engaged in.

Chapter 12

Uncomfortably at ease with his rash agreement to go along with Achim’s plans, Frank took his imprudence back to the hotel room with him. Like a ticket he had been given for a concert that held no interest for him, it lay crumpled and forgotten in a pocket of his tipsy tired mind. The lubricated nostalgia they had enjoyed together still had him too firmly in its warm embrace. And the effects of the rapture were slow to wear off. But once they did, the implications of his agreement to attend that fast-approaching ‘concert’ began to seep through. He shivered at the chilling thought of his folly.

For the first time in years, he felt a profound need to talk to someone about the fundaments of his life. To the only person he was interested in talking to right then.

As he stood in the dark stairwell that led up to Patricia’s flat, he sensed a growing apprehension. And when eventually he knocked on her door, disappointment instantly rose from his stomach in a sour mix that smacked of heartburn. Furtive noises escaped from behind the door. But the door itself failed to open for a length of time which, in his impatience, seemed far too long for any comfortable explanation.

Frank began to wish he had not come. And he was about to turn back down the stairs, when suddenly a narrow chink of light appeared in the doorway to be instantly blotted out by the tantalising nuance of her figure. His appearance at her door failed to elicit the welcome he had been hoping for. Indeed, her soft gasp at the sight of him struggled to avoid betraying a slight irritation.

“What do you want?” she asked. “It’s far too risky for you to be seen coming here.”

With these words, she pulled him in through the door by his sleeve. Beside the stove, where he remembered warming his hands not so long ago, there stood a young man he had not seen before. On the table beside the gramophone, in place of the record he had bought for Patricia, lay a camera with the name Exakta inscribed on its brow. Frank recognised it as one of Germany’s hottest-selling cameras. And the three red roses in the vase had been replaced now by a single rose.

With his tousled ginger hair, lean figure and a pale, hungry expression in his eyes, this stranger did not give the impression he might have anything to do with Breitner.

“Frank, this is Léandre. Léandre, Frank.”

They shook hands, but said nothing. Léandre cast a questioning eye at Patricia.

“You can trust him,” she said.

Although Léandre gave a sickly impression – pale and unshaven, tired red eyes, shabby clothes – he carried himself with a self-assurance that bordered on arrogance. It quickly dispelled any feelings of charity or sympathy that may have been lurking in Frank’s mind. He was wondering why she had been so slow to open the door – it was hard to imagine that she might have been enjoying any kind of intimacy with such a picture of ill-health. Yet perhaps it was precisely the knowledge of intimacy that imbued the sickly looking stranger with such overweening confidence. Frank was not sorry when Léandre picked up the camera and announced that he would have to be going. But he was surprised to find this Exakta belonged to the shabbily dressed Léandre. How could he even afford a camera at all? Frank asked himself. And he wondered whether it might have been a gift from Patricia.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Léandre added. The words came with an emphasis that Frank felt was intended for him.