The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

Aryan stock. Apart from his brief spell as a failed courier, he offered no history to arouse the interest of those who make it their life’s work sniffing out causes for persecution. He was a negligible quantity.

Breitner knew it. Yet it was precisely this that made Frank feel especially uneasy. Breitner knew he was not the stuff that diplomatic incidents are made of – an insignificance he would delight in exploiting. He would take the utmost pleasure in repatriating Frank to stand trial for treason as a courier of anti-government propaganda. Not only would it help to ingratiate him with the people of influence in Berlin (it did not matter to them how small the fish were as long as they filled their nets). It would also rid him of a rival for Patricia’s attention.

He looked across at Lutz. His driver was still smiling. Were his thoughts moving in the same direction? Frank wondered. If there was even the slightest possibility of seeing Patricia, it was a risk he felt compelled to take. But this was presumably what they were counting on. These dark thoughts focused his attention on the cold chamber of destruction in his pocket. It had already served him well, and he had not even had to use it. He tightened his grip on the gun for reassurance while the car sped on, curving through a tunnel of trees, to the border with France. The forest on either side was suffused with a curious grey light that made the trees loom like a vast neglected paling erected haphazardly across a wasteland for some long-forgotten purpose. On the other side of the woods at the crossing stood a small customs house. They stopped.

When Lutz wound down the window and let in the cold Bise that gusted through the trees behind them, Frank caught the sound of a shutter flapping on the side of the house. The French customs officer appeared in the doorway. He was alone, and wore the stern expression of a man looking for distraction, anything to chase away the boredom. He walked over to the car and peered suspiciously at its occupants. Lutz gave him the passports, but the officer cast only a cursory glance inside. He was more interested in the car. What was in the boot, he wanted to know. Lutz duly climbed out and opened up both the boot and the bonnet to satisfy the man’s undernourished curiosity. The butt of Frank’s gun became moist with the sweat from his palm. He prayed that the officer would not see the nervousness in his eyes when he returned to the car. But it was Lutz, not the customs man, who came back to the car door and leaned through the window.

“Would you happen to have ten francs with you, Mr Eigenmann? It seems we have to pay for the privilege of driving into this delightful country.” Frank sensed himself scowling at the thought of paying good money for his own abduction. “On the other hand,” Lutz reflected, without waiting for him to reach into his wallet, “we don’t have far to go. It’s only a few hundred metres from here. And it would seem a shame paying good money to avoid a little healthy exercise, so I suggest we leave the car and walk from here.”

The way Lutz used the self-same expression that had gone through his own mind only a few seconds earlier irritated Frank intensely. It was as if he were arrogating some kind of intimacy with him. But he pocketed the insult and climbed out of the car while Lutz backed up and parked it on the side of the road under the trees. The customs man had lost interest by now and ambled around to the side of his office to fix the flapping shutter before returning to his isolation.

Walking side by side with Lutz along that lane into France was not a comfortable exercise. Once again it seemed to him that the world at large was being treated to a declaration of intimacy between them by the very fact of their togetherness, and he kept defiantly quiet in an effort to correct the image.

For all Frank’s distrust of Lutz, however, the man proved to have been reliable at least when he said it was not far. After a thankfully short walk from the border, they soon found themselves descending a dip into a sleepy hamlet with no obvious character to it beyond the fact that it sat on a border. It gave the impression of not really knowing where it belonged. While it was nominally in France, the few houses Frank could see, and the church in the distance, yielded no clue to their affiliations; they could just as well have been in Switzerland, or then again in Germany. This was a part of what Achim had called the Sundgau, stamping ground of his uncle Max and scene of misspent summers. This thought had Frank wondering where Achim was at that moment, what had become of him. If he had fallen victim to Breitner’s evil, then probably Lutz knew what had happened. But Frank hesitated to grill him for fear of the answers he might get.

“Please, Mr Eigenmann,” Lutz said, interrupting the uneasy drift of Frank’s thoughts, as he opened a door to one of the few buildings in the hamlet and ushered him inside. It was an anonymous-looking auberge, and the dark bistre of the restaurant inside was neither inviting nor warm. The red-and-white gingham tablecloths tried to conceal the grimness of the stuffy, burnt sienna atmosphere, but their efforts were thwarted by the hostile emptiness of the place.

“Please, Mr Eigenmann. Take a seat. Is there anything I can get you?” Lutz asked.

Frank said he would gladly take a cup of coffee, at which Lutz disappeared into a back room behind the bar. Meanwhile Frank sat himself at a discreet table in a darker part of the restaurant, trying to estimate the significance of his driver’s nauseatingly