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

was impossible to know. So he kept a cautious eye out for him when he alighted from the tram just a few minutes later and switched to the narrow-gauge railway that would take him out of town. The little station house at the city end of the line in what was once the hay market gave him all the cover he needed to keep an inconspicuous watch while he waited for his train.

He saw no further sign of the familiar, cloth-capped stranger. But his distress gnawed at him too deeply for this knowledge to fill him with any sense of security. The hunter may be anywhere. So, when he alighted from the train at the last stop before the frontier, he took every precaution that a running fox might take.

Only two other passengers got out at his stop – a man and a woman, both rheumy-eyed and plainly on the pilgrim’s path to the basilica that lay at the top of the hill. His cautiousness had evidently been unnecessary. He strode on ahead of these two timidly slow pensioners, up the hill past the restaurant where he had met Gertrude and her two baby boys with Achim. Three lives full of history, full of dreams, full of hope. Three futures that had just ceased to be. Smiles that were no more. The memory pierced his heart to the quick and filled it with a huge, painful sense of loss that was out of all proportion to his fleeting knowledge of them. He tried to banish the images from his mind as he continued up the hill to the castle ruins. To no avail. Perhaps this was the wrong place to be at such a time, but he needed the fresh air and the altitude. He needed that clear vista over the trees, over the city, across the border.

If the demise of Gertrude and her two boys was not down to Breitner, then it was presumably the work of his friends. Maybe the cloth cap. At all events, he was convinced that Breitner had played some part in the butchery. But why? Why such innocence? And what had happened to Achim? He cursed his stupidity for ever having suggested to his friend that he join him in what had seemed such a peaceful haven. They might all be safe and well if he had kept his naive ideas to himself.

As he approached the castle ruins, his thoughts were momentarily distracted by a sound in the undergrowth that startled him.

The cloth cap had found him after all, he thought. Instinctively, he sought cover behind the nearest bush. But when he looked in the direction of the noise, he was made sheepishly aware of his foolishness. Just off a side path some twenty metres to the left of him stood a rather stocky man busily tending what looked like a grave, digging out the few remaining weeds of winter with a trowel and arranging a bouquet of snowdrops in their place.

It struck him as an odd site for a grave and left him feeling uncomfortable, like an intruder at a stranger’s funeral. But the man was deeply enwrapped in his devotional work and did not seem to notice him. Frank was about to leave the man in the privacy of his ritual, to continue up the pathway to the castle, when something held him back. A loud cracking sound that tore through the valley. The sound of gunfire.

The grave tender paid it no attention, as if gunfire was one of life’s everyday sounds which belonged as much to the backdrop of this valley as the birdsong in spring or the wind in the trees.

Frank wondered whether it might be the local huntsman shooting game. Then it occurred to him that the people in this country had a penchant for firearms which was nourished by their fierce sense of independence. He recalled often seeing young men off on their bicycles to do some shooting practice, or military service, with rifles strapped to their backs. Everyone seemed to keep a weapon at home. ‘They’re going to need them if the Nazis ever march across the border,’ he muttered to himself.

Recalling also that every community had at least one shooting range for their marksmen to practise on, he assumed the sound of gunfire that reverberated through the valley now, invading its rustic charm, was a sign that just such a practice session was in full swing. This could be the opportunity he was looking for. He turned and headed back the way he had come, passing the two pensioner pilgrims who were still making their way patiently up the hill.

The continuing crack of gunfire as he reached the other side of the valley told him that the practice session was not yet over. The shooting range was discreetly concealed in the woods, unmarked and not signposted. It was for the initiated only. So every shot served as an acoustic beacon for him to home in on.

Eventually he found the long barrack-like hut at the foot of the limestone rocks that jut out of the landscape in this part of the world like badly kept teeth. And as he stole around the building in search of a door, he felt as small and as mean as the bacteria that bring caries to the impoverished and the ignorant.

He was in luck. When he gently eased open the door, he saw that the marksman was alone and looked to be in the process of getting ready to leave. Pushing the crack of the door gently to again, he hastily took a log from a pile of firewood that was stacked against the building, pinned his body to the wall and waited. His heart pounded so fiercely he was sure that the pulse of his tensed frame must be audible on the wooden boards of the hut. Just as he was beginning to wonder whether the shooter might have slipped out through another exit of the building, the door creaked