by A. B. Decker
It was too mild for a February, but as early evening began to draw in, the cold air started to bite. And Ellen felt it now on her cheeks. She pulled up the collar of her coat, tucked her long strawberry-blonde hair into the snug warmth inside and did up the top button as she headed on over the bridge towards Fulham. A flutter of trepidation throbbed in her chest. She caught her breath as she turned into Hurlingham Road and took the key out of her bag. Daylight was already fading as she slid the key into the lock and opened the door into the dark hallway of the old Victorian terraced house where they lived. She switched on the light and made her way upstairs. Their bedsit was on the second floor.
The moment she unlocked the door to the room, she sensed the emptiness. She called out. But there was no response. And there was nowhere to hide in this one room with its forlorn pretensions to be more than it was by virtue only of a niche in the far corner which served as a kitchen. On the coffee table in the middle of the room lay Frank’s portable typewriter. Beside it his notebook and a folder with the words ‘Bank of England 1920–1944’ written on the cover in Frank’s spidery hand. Inside she found copies of press cuttings: ‘Controlling the masses by Montagu Norman’, ‘Die Geheimnisse des Mr Norman’ from the Frankfurter Zeitung and countless other articles about the governor of the bank. They were the only evidence that Frank existed. That he was not here at this time of day was neither unusual nor unexpected in itself. But that early evening there was an ominous feel to his absence which made her uneasy. Then she heard a voice.
“Ellen?”
It was Frank. She instantly relaxed. And when he appeared in the door of the bedsit carrying a bunch of documents, Ellen ran over and threw her arms around him. The documents tumbled to the floor.
“Whoa, slow down,” he said, brushing his hand affectionately over her left cheek. “What’s got into you?”
“Sorry, I’ve just been so worried since you phoned.”
Ellen disentangled herself from Frank and stooped to gather up the documents scattered over the floor.
“What’s all this stuff? Where have you been?” she asked.
“Just before I phoned you, I had a call and had to dash up to town. Look, why don’t I make a cup of tea and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Frank went to the kitchen niche to boil the kettle, while Ellen tidied the documents, sifting through them with curiosity before she laid them on the coffee table.
As she continued leafing through the papers, she failed to notice Frank emerge from the kitchen niche. He was carrying a pair of kitchen scissors. Half open.
It was the sudden tug on her hair that caught her by surprise:
“Ow! What are you doing?”
Ellen span round to find Frank smiling down at her, scissors in one hand and a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair in the other.
“Do you realise we’ve never been apart for more than a day since we met?” Frank reached down to the table, removed an envelope from the file of papers and slipped the lock of hair into it. “Surely you wouldn’t begrudge me this little souvenir to remember you by while I’m gone?”
Ellen seethed over this assault. She loved her gloriously thick hair. To have it shorn of even a single curl enraged her. But still she found it hard to resist his wicked smile. And she instantly caved in to the romance of Frank’s gesture.
“Come on then. The suspense is killing me,” she said as he neatly folded the envelope and slipped it into his wallet. With a triumphant smile, he fetched the teapot, set it down on the table, poured the tea and sat down on the sofa beside Ellen.
“You remember Gaynor?”
His question was met with a blank expression.
“She works in Fleet Street. She was assigned to cover a story in Switzerland, where they’re holding a referendum on giving women the vote, but…”
“Giving women the vote?” Ellen repeated in disbelief. “What kind of country is it where women don’t have the right to vote? In this day and age?”
“That’s why they’re having the referendum.”
“And only the men get to vote in this referendum, I suppose?”
“That’s just it,” said Frank with a boyish excitement. “It’s a really fascinating story.”
“Good God, you can be so irritating.” Ellen glowered at him. “It’s not in the least fascinating. It’s grotesque,” she added, then paused for a moment as her eyes widened. “You don’t actually believe in it, do you?” she asked with a look of horror on her face.
“What do you mean ‘believe in it’?” Frank was taken aback by Ellen’s truculence. He was not used this side of her. But for Ellen it was as if she felt she had suddenly shone a new light on him and was shocked by what she thought she had found.
“It’s not about beliefs or opinions,” he said, brushing his hands nervously through his thick brown hair as he spoke. “Anyway, Gaynor was rushed into hospital with appendicitis or something and can’t now cover the story. Since she’s the only staffer who speaks German, she persuaded her boss to let me cover it instead. They really wanted a woman, but they had no one else, so I jumped at it – not sure how I’ll cope with the weird kind of German they speak there though. And of course it means I’ll have to put my research on the Bank of England story to one side for a bit. But anyway, I went up to town this afternoon to collect this stuff.”
He nodded towards the documents on the table.
“Plane tickets, contacts, background material. Stuff like that. And it will be a chance to reinvent myself.”
His flight from Heathrow was booked for early next morning. Ellen was going to miss him. But she tried as best she could to hide her sadness; she wanted them to enjoy their last hours together without any kind of friction. So Ellen spent the rest of the evening attempting to share Frank’s excitement, while he studied the documents he had been given and talked endlessly about the trip ahead.
When sadness and excitement eventually gave way to longing, they entered the night entwined together in a communion deeper than she had ever felt before. And lay that way, in each other’s arms, until Ellen woke again early next morning. She looked at Frank gently breathing as he slept on in her arms, his smell weaving its way into her senses, his early-morning stubble prickling her shoulder. She stroked every curve of his perfect body. Ran her fingers over the muscular arm half-draped around her waist. Brushing them softly over his neck and face, leaving her thumb at journey’s end to explore the intriguing indentation in the buckled bridge of his nose.
She had often wondered whether this feature of his anatomy had anything to do with his sense of smell. Frank had told her of his strange olfactory senses – that some smells he was unable to detect at all and others he was acutely sensitive to – the acrid smell of ammonia in particular. Cordite was also high on his list. Ellen attributed the latter to an overactive imagination fed by a taste for Dashiell Hammett. He put it all down to what he called the landscape of his nose.
As the theodolite of Ellen’s thumb now surveyed the territory, Frank slowly roused. His dark eyes a reluctant pair of witnesses to dawn, yet just as fetching as ever in their sleep-entrained effort to open. Frank’s arm tightened and he drew it firmly around Ellen’s waist to plant an early-morning kiss on her lips. It was a moment that would stay forever in Ellen’s memory. She recalled his last words not long after that moment.
“I’ll be back before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone,” he said as he opened the door. And disappeared.
Sitting now on the Piazza Grande in Locarno, Ellen was not inclined to share every little detail of their last brief morning together. She simply said: “That was the last time we spoke.”
Her companion took a last sip of her coffee, placed the cup in its saucer and looked across at Ellen. It was a look that contained more than just sympathy – it seemed to convey a kind of knowledge and wisdom that Ellen found both comforting and slightly disconcerting at the same time.
“I’m sorry to bore you with my story,” she said.
“It was not at all boring, my dear.”
“But I really must be going now,” Ellen added. “I’m travelling back to Basel this morning.”
“So soon?” asked the elegant lady, looking at Ellen with an expression that bordered on shock, together with what Ellen sensed to be a strange hint of disappointment.
“It was really nice talking to you. This should cover the coffee for both of us,” said Ellen, as she got up to leave, handing her companion a ten franc note, which the elderly lady politely refused.
“Please, the pleasure was all mine. I wish you…” the elderly lady paused for a moment as she looked up at Ellen… “a safe journey.”
Ellen hesitated, pondering the emphasis her companion placed on those last two words. It was as if the elderly lady knew just how perilous the journey had been over the last twelve months and had some kind of preternatural inkling of further trouble ahead.
Or was it simply that months of talking with Marthe’s psychiatrist husband had spawned a paranoid suspicion of the slightest inflection in a person’s voice?
These worrisome thoughts hastened Ellen’s steps as she headed back through the narrow streets to fetch her bags and settle up with Signor Sciarone.
Chapter 2
Frank flew out of London on Saturday, 6 February 1971. The day was too early, too cold and too empty to enjoy. But it was his first trip to Switzerland and, while the country was known more for dull precision and timekeeping than for any newsworthy stories, he felt an inexplicable buzz of excitement. An odd sense of agitation that surprised him.
Ellen was constantly rebuking him for always being so cool, for the way he never let anything get to him. But Frank was a fence-sitter. He knew it. And he tried to justify this to her by insisting how important it was to remain objective about things. This, after all, was what had attracted him to journalism in the first place. It was this part of his argument that incensed Ellen all the more. And recalling her display of passion now as he sat on the tube to Heathrow airport brought a smile to his face.
His heart was still pounding from the rush to change onto the Piccadilly line at Earl’s Court. But it was also racing with a sense of apprehension and expectation. He wondered what Ellen would think about his lack of cool now. Yet it was not so much the prospect of what awaited him in a strange country as the opportunity he felt it offered.
He knew how much Ellen would really like to start a family. In truth, this was not a prospect he relished. He was not ready to commit to the pitter patter of tiny feet. But he also knew that, if it were to happen, there was no way they could contemplate bringing a baby into the world while they were stuck in a Fulham bedsit. So, if this assignment works out, Frank told himself, then maybe it could help pave the way to a staff job, more job security and a bigger flat. It was as much this as the trip itself that set his heart beating nineteen to the dozen.
When Frank arrived at Heathrow, he found that his flight was delayed. He phoned in to tell the newspaper, so they could cancel a meeting that had been set up for him later that morning with a local editor, then took himself off to the bar for a coffee.
Despite the frustration, it was a welcome delay in one sense: ever since depriving Ellen of a lock of her hair, he had been feeling awkward at the thought that the only home he was able to find for it was a shabby envelope. This long wait now gave him time to find something more fitting. He was hoping to find a wallet with a window inside that would allow him to see Ellen’s lock of hair every time he opened it. The best he could manage was a wallet with a little pouch for coins. It was not ideal, but at least Ellen’s hair would be safe, he told himself as he put a ten-pound note into the outstretched hand of the shop assistant.
When eventually he touched down in Basel, it was mid-afternoon. And the dull gloom of the sky told him the end of the day was already fast approaching. The temperature was several degrees lower than in London. Remnants of snow lay around the edges of the tarmac. The airport itself was on French soil. But to the east loomed the mountains of the Black Forest in Germany and to the south the dark hills that marked the easternmost tip of Switzerland’s Jura Mountains.
A state of blurred borders that would come to define his stay. He had wondered, when he was handed his flight tickets, why he was being sent to Basel. He would have expected Zurich or even Geneva. But there were some people they wanted him to meet in Basel before travelling on to Zurich after the vote for some post-referendum coverage.
When Frank was sent on this assignment, it had shocked him to find that there was a country in post-war Europe where women were still denied the right to vote, and he was keen to learn more about this country. But much as he was itching to get his teeth into this mission, he was also deeply frustrated that he had to put his story about the Bank of England’s connections with pre-war Nazi Germany on the back burner.
And yet, as the taxi carried Frank into town, this frustration began to ebb away amidst a strange sense of comfort and familiarity that he could not explain. A peculiar hominess. A spirit of belonging. The only discord in this sense of intimacy with the place was the array of posters that decorated almost every street they drove down shouting NO to voting rights for women!
They adorned lamp posts, hoardings, walls and any other space that could accommodate them. Frank was struck by how politely ineffectual the YES posters appeared. And how brutal the opposing posters were: from pictures of women crying “Leave us out of it” to the shock tactics of babies falling out of prams while women were too distracted “playing politics,” or of anonymous hands groping a woman in silhouette. One that caught his eye in particular was the picture of a baby’s dummy with a fly crawling over it. What kind of country is this? Frank asked himself.
“Are you voting in the referendum tomorrow?” he asked the driver.
“I am Italian,” came the reply.
The man at the wheel was the surly, silent type. And he said no more as they drove in the direction of the Centralbahnplatz, along streets that appeared increasingly and curiously known to Frank: past the grand Romanesque church and Jugendstil residences towards the viaduct and the high-rise Rialto that rose up from the road below and peered over the balustrade; the yawning exit from the multistorey Schlotterbeck garage; and the Grand Savoy Hotel, now home to the Bank for International Settlements. All these images tugged oddly at his memory as they headed towards the main railway station.
He had a room booked at the Hotel St. Gotthard. It lay just across from the station. At the desk, Frank was politely welcomed by a fifty-something man at reception, smartly dressed in various shades of grey, except for his gold cuff-links. In all other respects, there was little to distinguish him from the taxi driver. He was a man of few words.
Once Frank had completed the check-in formalities, the receptionist simply handed him an envelope with his room key and pointed to the lift. Room 202. Frank placed the envelope on the table when he entered the room and went straight over to the window to let in some air. The fuggy mustiness hit him the moment he opened the door. There was a familiarity about the stale atmosphere that he could not put his finger on. It teased him like an afterthought tugging at a synapse buried deep in an untidy archive of souvenirs.
He opened the window. It looked down onto the street that ran past the station. A quiet street that spared the hotel all the traffic noise of a railway station thanks to its location some hundred metres or more from the main entrance. It was effectively a side street that could have been anywhere in Europe.
He had already phoned Ellen from Heathrow to say he had been delayed. But he promised he would call again as soon as he arrived. He dialled 9 for an outside line. The phone rang for some time. But Ellen didn’t pick up.
He turned back into the room, took the file of documents he had brought with him out of his suitcase and placed it on the table next to the envelope. He looked pensively at this envelope for a moment, picked it up and found a handwritten note inside. It was from the editor of the local newspaper, Hanspeter Röst
i, welcoming Frank to Basel in almost perfect English and inviting him to dinner. He wrote that he would return to the hotel at 7.30 in the evening to pick Frank up.
Frank could not resist a chuckle. Do they really call people Rösti here? And he contemplated the dinner that might be in store for him.
Thinking it best to take a nap and make sure he was fit for this engagement, he lay down on the bed. It was an old and poorly sprung mattress. But after the early start and the long wait at Heathrow, he fell to sleep almost instantly.
How long he slept he could not be sure. But it was a restless sleep. And every time he came anywhere near the boundary line to wakefulness, he found himself dragged back into an endless and disturbing dream:
The musty smell of damp wheat hung in the atmosphere. A fuggy scavenger of the air he breathed. Suffocating. The harvest would come too late this year. He could feel it. The tragedy trying to get a grip on his senses. Banners seemed to fly from the masthead of every tree proclaiming failure. As if this was something to look forward to. He heard them flutter in the wind high above his head. And every now and then the gusting vestiges of the storm that had flattened down the wheat billowed their bleak message that little bit louder, just to reinforce how close he was. Just the other side of the woods. Just beyond the trees.
He knew how near at hand it was. Could hear the knives being sharpened, taste the cold steel whetting its appetite for the plunge. It had been a long year. And he wondered how much longer it would be before it became last year. Time was pressing.
The solitary figure moving down the road between the wheatfields seemed little more than a sad parenthesised remark on the landscape. Lost in a long black fur-collared coat and black homburg hat, and weighted on each side by an oversized suitcase that bracketed his slow progress to the trees, he punctuated his own horizon with dark precision.
A crow cawed and cackled above the trees, before it was tossed to one side by a flurry of wind. It was the only sound to erupt onto the warm, musty atmosphere. Smothered and puffed away again in the stiff breeze. Not enough to distract the traveller. He continued on his way, shuffling ever closer to the dark tunnel created by the archway of dense, leafy boughs across the road. His progress was so slow it was almost imperceptible from a distance. But he kept moving. Had he allowed himself to be roused from his purpose for only a moment – had he looked up – he would have seen that the crow was not alone. Gathering overhead was a whole murder of crows with sinister design. And the sky turned black with their menace.