by A. B. Decker
But in the time it took Frank to reach the throng, he had already lost sight of Silverstone. The American had melted into the mass of heads and shoulders marching on ahead of him. He could have been any one of a hundred or more figures bobbing up and down over the river. And by the time the flow of eager faces had carried him with them away from the swirling waters of the river that now held Patricia’s secrets in their grip and into the market square, Silverstone could have been anywhere.
The pavements around the square seemed fit to burst with all the people heaving into it to watch the cortège. The massive lanterns artistically decorated and daubed with obscure satire. The groups of drummers and pipers, like a macabre military parade in their grotesque masks and costumes. And confetti cast by clog-wearing figures in blue smocks and outlandish masks whose huge upturned noses competed for attention with bright yellow straw that passed for hair.
With the appearance and instant disappearance of Silverstone in this babbling current of colour and noise, Frank sensed an unseen menace in the shelter which this crowd had earlier seemed to give him. A menace he felt could strike from any direction at any time. He sought the refuge of a wall and sidled his way around to the far end of the square, where he found the relative safety of a shop doorway opposite the old town hall.
The cortège continued its procession through the square. Turning away from the heaving crowd in front of him, which was completely immersed in the parade, he slipped into the back streets and headed towards the zoological gardens and Patricia’s flat. The very thought of the sparkle in her eyes and the sweet charm of her lips as she opened the door had his heart pounding in expectation as never before.
The let-down came step by step. At this hour, he would expect the light in the window of her flat to be on as she prepared coffee and breakfast. The place was in darkness. It occurred to him that she might be out already enjoying the carnival. He tried the outside door, but it was locked. Frank recalled that, when Lutz had found this accommodation for her, he insisted that the nameplate beside her door bell be left blank as a precaution. But as Frank reached out to ring the bell, he saw that it now bore a name: ‘M. Hunkeler’. He searched the other nameplates. ‘P. Roche’ was nowhere to be found. Had he come to the wrong address?
No. Although Frank had only been to her flat once before their retreat to the mountains, this door was etched on his heart. And to see her nameplate now expropriated in this way overwhelmed him with alarm. As he was considering what to do, whether to ring the bell that should be hers anyway, the door opened. A man emerged. Mid-forties, well-dressed.
“Excuse me, does Miss Roche no longer live here?” Frank asked.
The man looked Frank up and down with suspicion.
“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.
“She lived here a year ago,” Frank insisted. “In the top flat.”
“I only moved in last week. In the top flat,” the man said with a passing smile that betrayed the kind of smart-aleck sarcasm Frank might have expected from Silverstone.
“Mr Hunkeler?”
“Yes?” the man said, who had already reached the end of the path by now. He was plainly taken aback at being addressed by name, and he turned to face Frank, as if to challenge him.
“Do you know where she went?” Frank asked.
“No idea.”
Impatience had driven M. Hunkeler out onto the pavement by now. And he headed off towards town. He had no further time for interrogation by this intrusive stranger.
Frank was devastated. The last time he had stood on the steps to this house, they had offered him boundless comfort. Today they stood for infinite despair. All at once, he found himself swallowed up in a vast gaping hole of fathomless gloom. Irretrievably lost and adrift. Like tears in the rain. No sense of direction. No ties. No attachment. Ineffably alone. Where could she possibly be?
He was barely aware of what he was doing or where he was going as he followed in the footsteps of M. Hunkeler and made his way back through the back streets to the city centre. Drawn towards the sounds of carnival that filtered through the streets ahead. The drums and pipes. The steady hum of the crowd. Would he find her there, among the milling crowd?
When he came to the steps that ran down to the market square, Frank instantly stopped in his tracks. The stairway below was eerily empty except for one solitary figure. Approaching slowly up the steps came a lone piccolo player, dressed in the costume of a jester. The two horns of the cap swayed to the rhythm of the piccolo. A mask covered the face to the tip of the nose. The piccolo player headed straight towards Frank at the top of the steps, seemingly oblivious to his presence. There was something both sad and sinister about that solitary march. A foreboding sadness that was underlined by the dark inscrutable eyes buried deep behind the mask.
Frank moved aside and let the piccolo player pass. He watched the swaying horns of the cap recede to the incessant tune of the flute. Silhouetted against the far end of the street, the diminishing figure was gradually lost in the shadows. The bleakness of the jester’s lone march into the distance perfectly encapsulated Frank’s own condition.
As the sound of pipes and drums rippled up the steps from the market square, Frank was brought slowly back to earth. The constant hum of people on the streets below reminded him that Silverstone was still out there somewhere in the crowd.
Reckoning that his best move for now would be to get a room at the Kolping house, he decided to make for the other side of the river. It may not be open yet, he told himself, but at least it was not on the route of the parade, so he could lie low outside until it opens. Since the only way there lay through the carnival celebrations, he knew he would have to be on his guard all the while as he let himself be jostled to his goal amid a masquerade of oddly earnest frivolity: the grotesque figures with their yellow hair and huge noses forcing confetti on him with a menace that seemed ironically out of place; piccolo players dressed as ducks parading in newspaper uniforms; and smart city gents beating a solemn rhythm on their drums and led by a vast bloodsucking creature with enormous tentacles that rose out of its head. Snatches of the weird procession seemed strangely familiar. But the heaving mass of bodies that pushed him in all directions at once levered open a gap in Frank’s aching skull. His head began to spin. And his disjointed mind had its work cut out negotiating even the narrowest path through the thicket of people that lined the pavement.
He recalled that Silverstone was given to the use of a flick knife, and it struck Frank that this slow progress, cheek by jowl, through the carnival crowds would be just the kind of situation he would relish. An opportunity to slip the blade quietly into his back and vanish in the throng. The closer they pushed and pummelled against him, the more vulnerable he felt.
The bizarre carnival masks only added to the sense of menace, until suddenly Frank caught sight of him. The burly American figure stood sentry on the step of a corner shop which lifted him head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. The twilight of the lanterns gave Silverstone’s face a ghostly quality, but he was distressingly real. And although Frank now had him more safely within his line of vision and could measure the danger, this gave him little comfort as the American commanded a view over the whole street. Frank knew he would never get past without being spotted.
He stopped in his tracks and began to edge back the way he had come. But there was no path back. Only a few steps away and moving hungrily in his direction was one of the two sports youth louts together with a familiar figure looking horribly recovered from Frank’s last encounter with him. It was Wolfgang.
Frank sensed his destiny closing in on him. His mind paralysed by a desperate indecision that had him marking time when time was fast running out. It was a wavering that epitomised every twist and turn of his life. Save maybe one. And no prospect of reprieve – until a group of carnival revellers swallowed him up and bundled him through the doors of a tavern that opened onto the pavement behind him. A typical Basel pub.
As t
he crowd disgorged Frank from its midst to find a table, he saw Wolfgang’s bull neck and head just disappear from view past the window outside. He had evidently not seen Frank. The atmosphere in the restaurant was thick with cigarette smoke and the tenacious aroma of onions and gruel. The place had the unappetising feel of a soup kitchen for the starving homeless. But it was a safe haven for the time being and, although his head still span with the noise of drums and pipes, it gave him a chance to catch his thoughts. In a smoky corner far away from the door, where the air was almost too thick to breathe, he found a spare seat at a table and ordered a bowl of gruel in the hope that it might at least warm him up inside. But his mind was too embattled. Too preoccupied with that gaping hole where Patricia ought to be, with thoughts of their last moments together before they said goodbye. The sweet taste of commitment on her lips.
The sound of knives on the plates, the ostentatious roars of laughter and other desperate signals of enjoyment droned and echoed through his shelter. Scythed their way into his skull, splitting it in two. His head pulsated with the pain. And the vapours of gruel that wafted up from his bowl of soup brought a retching nausea to his throat. He pushed the bowl away from him. And found it instantly shoved back in his direction by an anonymous arm, which pushed a steak knife back in its wake. This disembodied limb was wearing a wristwatch so loud and garish it almost screamed the time at him. But the pain was too intense, the nausea too deep, and his eyes too blurred for it to register. He needed to get out. To find his way to the Kolping house. And then start his search for Patricia once the carnival was over.
Seizing the steak knife for protection, he manoeuvred his way out of the tavern and into the fresh air. On the street outside, the crowds had begun to thin out. Morning had arrived. It proved to be a warm and sunny day for early March. But a dark menace still hung in the air. A chill nipped at his face like hungry crows in search of winter food. And Silverstone still stood sentry across the street some fifty metres from the bridge. But he was not alone. In front of him, staring out over the bridge, stood a woman Frank sensed he knew.
‘Are the two of them together?’ Frank asked himself. And: ‘Who is she? Where have I seen her before?’
This oddly familiar woman had the look of a vulture, as she hovered on the pavement’s edge, her beak ready to tear into the carrion. Frank inched closer, his head throbbing so intensely he could barely focus his eyes. His hand was clammy on the handle of the knife in his pocket. He tightened his grip as he drew nearer to Silverstone and to this woman who was so strangely known to him.
Images of his mother forced themselves on him as his hand gripped the handle of the knife ever tighter: images of the way she had lain there before him, her face drained of colour, or of anything that could be associated with the woman he had known as his mother. All bones. Not even sufficient food for a vulture.
‘That’s it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘The old crow who called herself his mother’s nurse.’
That was the woman he saw before him now, their eyes close enough to meet. But where was Silverstone? He had disappeared. What was his game? In his place now, Frank saw the huge ungainly frame of Wolfgang some distance behind the woman. And could not escape the crazed, burning appetite for retribution in those ugly eyes. He briefly caught the glint of metal. A gun aimed directly at him. Frank pulled the knife from his pocket and lunged past the woman.
Too late. The searing pain that came with the crack of gunfire ripped through Frank’s chest and felled him instantly. Struggling for breath from the clear sky above as he lay where he fell, racked with pain, he saw the sky turn dark from the ugly frame of Wolfgang standing over him. Saw the gun aimed straight at his head. Felt the shot.
Frank lay motionless. A small dark crater between the eyes lay exposed to the elements. A hole quite unremarkable, except for the trickle of blood that ran a steady path down the neck and mingled with the colours of confetti on the pavement around him.
Chapter 26
Climbing the stairs to her Fulham flat after so many weeks away, Ellen was struck by just how alien everything appeared in all its familiarity. And the moment she opened the door to all the memories of life with Frank, she felt instantly engulfed by a deep sense of being totally alone. All the time she had been in the company of Marthe, she could convince herself that Frank would eventually be found. Now she was back in this place that had once been the home she shared with him, she was not so sure.
She put the suitcase down, loosened the silk scarf that Marthe had bought her and let it slip out of her hands onto the coffee table, where it curled around the words ‘Bank of England 1920–1944’. She ran her fingers over Frank’s spidery handwriting. Would he ever get to finish his article? Ellen wondered.
There was a part of her that wanted to look for somewhere else to live at the first opportunity – to put as much distance as possible between her present life and her memories. But there was another part of her that saw this as defeatism, if not betrayal. So, as she settled back into the routine of life in London, the idea that one day she would eventually hear from Frank began to take root again. It was an idea that accompanied her every day on her way to work and back. Across Putney Bridge, where she would stop to watch the wheeling gulls or the passing of an occasional ‘boat beneath a sunny sky’. And think of Frank.
Marthe kept in touch and, true to her promise, invited Ellen to join her for a week or two in the mountains and visit the Segantini hut. But Ellen declined. She preferred to get on with her life and wait until Marthe had tangible news of Frank before returning to Switzerland.
It was not until around twelve months later, in 1972, that Ellen eventually accepted an invitation from Marthe. The call did not come with any news of Frank. Nor was Ellen initially inclined to accept, despite Marthe’s attempts to sell the local carnival as a unique event in the city’s calendar that no one should miss. What clinched it for Ellen was the second call that came some days later. No longer was it framed as an invitation. It now took the form of an urgent dispatch. Frank had been found.
Ellen took the Night Ferry from Victoria that same day, changing in Paris for the early morning train to Basel.
The perfume of Marthe’s warm embrace when she stepped onto the platform in the early afternoon reminded Ellen just how much she had missed her companionship over the past year. Her husband on the other hand offered Ellen the kind of cordial handshake and welcoming words she had long since come to expect of him. Courteous and correct to the last. But there was an air of ministration about the way he took Ellen’s suitcase and guided her out to the waiting car. It suggested to her he was there more as psychiatric support than anything else.
“Where is he?” Ellen wanted to know. “Where did they find him?”
“Let’s get you home first,” Dr Zellweger said. “We can explain everything there before we see the Kommissar.”
“The Kommissar?” Ellen asked.
“He has news of Frank,” Marthe added, placing a reassuring hand on her arm as they climbed into the car.
“News? I thought they’d found him.”
“A man answering his description has been seen,” Marthe explained. “The Kommissar will tell you more when we see him tomorrow.”
The disappointment on Ellen’s face was plain even to Dr Zellweger in his rear-view mirror.
“The Kommissar wanted to see you this afternoon, then phoned to say that he had been called away on an important case,” Dr Zellweger explained. “But he will be there for you in the morning.”
Marthe had initially invited Ellen over to experience the Fasnacht. But this idea was abandoned the instant they heard news of Frank’s appearance. Now that Ellen was forced to wait yet again for any kind of explanation, and Marthe pointed out that the carnival celebrations would already start at four in the morning, she suggested they could at least kill time by seeing some of the parade before their appointment at the police presidium. So they were both already wide awake when the phone rang, getting ready to join th
e carnival crowds.
“Normally, I would take the tram,” Marthe explained. “But no trams will be travelling through the centre during Fasnacht. Of course, it will be impossible to park in the Storchen. It would already be full by four in the morning.”
“That’s where they found Frank sleeping, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.
“Yes. There used to be a smart hotel there many years ago. But they pulled it down in the Fifties to build the car park.”
“It’s strange to think Frank chose to sleep there, isn’t it?” Ellen remarked. “Almost as if he knew that it was once a hotel.”
Marthe looked across at Ellen with a curious expression in her eyes that slightly unnerved her.
“Of course,” Marthe said, as she brought the car to a halt around the corner from the large grey featureless building that Ellen had come to know so well, “one big advantage to be invited to the police presidium, is that we can drive almost to the door without any problem. So it doesn’t matter if the Storchen is full.”
In this respect at least, Marthe was proved wrong. She needed all her charm to persuade an exceptionally humourless traffic policeman that they had an appointment at the police station which entitled them to leave their vehicle there. He wanted to know who they were going to see, why and for how long. Even took their names and registration number to check on the story. It was an officiousness that was completely in keeping with the dull leaden greyness of their uniforms and the building from which they took their inspiration and their orders. It was something Ellen had grown used to on her first trip here. She had met too many grey officials and had to wait too often and too long only to be rewarded with the anti-climax of no news and no progress. Perhaps for this reason, Ellen was not unduly surprised or upset, but simply frustrated, when they were led into an empty side-office on their arrival and told to wait.