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

Zellweger’s face eventually prompted him to get up and walk with slow deliberation around his desk to where she was sitting. She felt the firm reassuring pressure of his hand on her shoulder.

“I understand. We will talk another day,” he said, and went over to the door. “Marthe, Mrs Goss would like to go home already.” His voice was muffled by the door that he held between them as he talked to his wife. The Swiss German was incomprehensible to Ellen, but she did pick up the mention of St Moritz.

In the car back to her house, Marthe confirmed what she suspected their conversation had been about.

“Urs thinks you need a break. I will telephone to his colleague in Zurich, and we will have a nice time together in St Moritz. Just the two of us. It’s very beautiful there.”

The comfort of her hand on Ellen’s knee as she spoke these words put her instantly at ease.

“I’ve never been to the mountains,” she said.

“You will love it,” Marthe reassured her.

“But we’ll need to find something more suitable for your feet,” she added, glancing down at the thick platform soles on Ellen’s high-heel boots.

“St Moritz,” Ellen repeated. It was a name she had often heard, but it had always been another world for her, a stamping ground for rich playboys. She never imagined for one moment that she would ever spend a holiday there.

“Isn’t that where the Cresta Run is?”

Marthe nodded, and Ellen could see from the smile on her face that she found her ingenuousness faintly amusing.

“That always used to fascinate Frank. He was always saying he’d like to try it again someday.” Her words became lost in the sound of an aeroplane taking off from the nearby airport. It was still very low in the sky, and Ellen could see quite clearly that it was a BEA flight. Presumably on its way to Heathrow, she told herself. At that moment, Ellen felt further from home than ever.

Chapter 21

Frank sensed that Patricia would not go through with their trip to the mountains and would stand him up. But putting these defeatist thoughts to one side, he had dropped into a bookshop on the way to the station to buy a copy of Les fleurs du mal. And to feel the book now resting in his pocket imbued him with a new sense of optimism as he made his way to meet her. Not even the clouds that gathered overhead as he strode to the station could dampen this excitement.

They had agreed to meet at the top of the steps down to the underpass that ran under the station. As he was approaching, he caught sight of a tall figure wearing a light grey fedora. The man emerged from a grand building with a woman unknown to him, but the man himself was uncomfortably familiar. It was Silverstone. He glanced in the direction of Frank, but was too focused on his female companion to notice him. While curious to know who the American’s companion might be, Frank felt a keen sense of relief when they turned and walked in the opposite direction towards the Schlotterbeck garage.

The central square itself resembled a global playground that lunchtime. Children romped and tumbled in a Babel of languages and dialects that were mostly beyond Frank’s powers of recognition. Some he identified as approximately Slavonic. Others betrayed something of the Hungarian cadence he had come to know from his frequent visits to the Csarda restaurant all those lifetimes ago in Berlin. And a number of the children laughed and played with a clearly Yiddish lilt in their voices.

The scene was one of uncommon happiness that defied the dark clouds above. It surprised him, until he recalled that space had been made in one of the station buildings to accommodate the growing stream of refugees in transit. These were plainly some of the refugee children, who had been allowed a lunch-time opportunity to escape from the tedium of their new freedom. But their happiness saddened him. They put him in mind of Achim’s baby boys.

“Refreshing, their innocence, isn’t it?” Patricia’s voice instantly lightened the load on his heart. He turned around to her smoky, captivating smile. He was instantly comforted to see that his doubts had been unfounded and, in that moment of relief, planted a kiss on her lips that almost knocked her off balance. Yet, in his excitement, he had failed to hear the flatness of tone in her words.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and get the tickets.”

But taking her by the arm, he was still unable to shake off the sighting of his American bugbear.

“I saw Silverstone just outside the station,” he said. “Did you see him?”

Patricia shook her head.

“Do you think he’s following us?” he asked.

“I think you said he works at the Bank for International Settlements,” she remarked. “So it’s more likely he’s just going back to work after lunch. The bank is just over the road, where the Savoy Hotel was requisitioned for their work.”

While the sighting of Silverstone still troubled Frank, and he could not bring himself to point out that Silverstone was leaving the hornet’s nest and plainly not going back to work, her matter-of-fact tone at least put his mind to rest.

Approaching the counter, he took out his wallet and opened it. He failed to notice the lock of strawberry-blonde hair that dropped out and fell to the floor. It caught in the draught of a passer-by and landed behind Patricia’s feet.

“What was that?” she asked, looking behind her.

“What?”

“Something fell out of your wallet.”

He looked down at the floor around him. But the lock of hair had already been swept up by the feet of another passer-by and disappeared from view.

“It looked like a lock of blonde hair,” she said. Her eyes flashed a look of quiet confrontation.

He looked askance at Patricia. Her lips, always a gloriously sensual source of fascination for Frank, betrayed a new kind of vulnerability that disturbed him. But he was as perplexed