TheodoraLand

A legacy, a plot and a loner’s dangerous quest…

A bookshop closes and there is blood…

TheodoraLand
by Malcolm James Thomson
Copyright: © 2014 Malcolm James Thomson
Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin
www.epubli.de
ISBN 978-3-****-***-*

Contents

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part 2

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Part 3

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Author's notes

Part 1

One

SATURDAY 26 MAY 2012

There wasn’t what anyone would call a crowd. It wasn’t what anyone would call an event. It was the Whitsun weekend and many of Munich’s inhabitants were out of town.

I lingered at a table under a parasol, sheltered from the sun (promising a decent summer to come) outside the café on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz, Trinity Place, in the heart of the Bavarian capital. The small square is dominated by the large, popular and quite expensive restaurant Brasserie Stadtschreiber on one side. The inevitable church is at one end, a new shopping precinct at the other. Between them, across from the café, is the colonnaded frontage of what once had been a monastery. There in shadow of the arcade, was Manduvel Bookshop. Until yesterday it was the place where I worked.

And today it would close its doors forever. The premises had to be vacated completely by the end of June, emptied of fixtures and fittings and the inventory of books.

Yes, Bookshop, not Buchhandlung. The specialization in English language books had been a recent development, an experiment. It was an attempt to maintain a Manduvel presence in the premises where the bookselling family had opened a business in 1893. But now there was a normal Manduvel branch, the thirty-seventh in Germany, in the nearby urban mall. Maybe there was not that much demand for English books in Munich.

“Hi, Thea!”

I couldn’t tell him that I would prefer to be alone with my thoughts. Dirk Seehof and his fiancée, Bea Schell, were probably my closest friends. And I had, after all, had a brief affair with him the previous summer. At least he called me Thea and not Dora. At Manduvel old Herr Lessinger called me Theodora sometimes. The others spoke of Dora even if I was addressed by them in front of customers as Frau Lange. Dora sounds dumb and I am not dumb. Nor am I Dora The Explorer except when it comes to sex.

“A sad day, Dirk.”

For him it would be, too. Addicted to British and American thrillers, he had long been a Bookshop regular. He repeatedly complained that his own life as a free-lance web journalist lacked any of the thrills and perils faced by the protagonists described in the pages of paperback crime and mystery fiction.

Neither Dirk nor I were to know that this deficit would soon be remedied.

“Pity there are no demonstrators... nobody with a loud-hailer crying ‘Save our Bookshop’. No story for you, I guess.”

Dirk shrugged and took a long draught of his beer.

In spite of the holiday Trinity Place was quite busy this Saturday. But few passing along the colonnade spared a glance for the display windows still full of books, still promoting best-sellers written in English as if on Monday business as usual would continue. One window was devoted to the antiquarian section of the shop where old, rare and valuable books gathered dust in an a cluttered alcove. They were from time to time examined by those who approached them with the utmost reverence but in most cases without the means to make any purchase. Although Herr Lessinger was the manager of the branch as a whole, it was the ancient volumes which had kept him working for Manduvel long beyond retirement age. His instructions had been that until the very last minute the shop should be operational and welcoming.

“You didn’t want to work on the very last day?” Dirk asked.

“I’ve never worked Saturdays, Dirk.”

There had been two Saturdays and the week in between that we had spent in bed. We had not so much surprised or shocked one another. It had been more about satisfying a kind of mutual curiosity. Just ten days, about a year ago. Been there, done that, got the teeshirt.

My teeshirt today was meant to be ironic. ‘So many books, so little time!’ in bold italics. Sammy Cohen was the Manduvel Bookshop exemplar of gender diversity. He had reminded me of the Miquel Brown song in which it had been about men, not books. He assured me that the track remained a popular dance anthem for the queer community.

No, I am not gay. I had thought I might be for about three months until Dorthe went back to Copenhagen. I had been younger then, just turned twenty-one, finished with university and starting my three year training at Manduvel. A Chamber of Commerce certificate states that I am now a Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau. That’s one of those pseudo-qualifications our German society is addicted to. Theodora Lange is now officially authorized to sell books!

Where, or indeed whether, I might be selling books in future was a question still open. Sure, I could move to another Manduvel branch, but none has the atmosphere of the little Bookshop on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz. There will be no other branch which will make room for the antiquarian collection. We had been told that branded e-book readers are the shiny future. Spoken word recordings on memory sticks would be the next big thing. I wasn’t sure.

Herr Lessinger had said that the remaining rare books were to go to an Austrian dealer for a fraction of what they are worth. And so I didn’t have any serious twinges of conscience on account of the three volumes I was keeping quite safe in my flat.

When the explosion happened I was on my way out of Trinity Place and already on the receiving end of judgmental glances. In Munich one is supposed to be seen at the wheel of a BMW manufactured locally. Or another German premium marque. If female, then driving an open convertible or a monstrous SUV is very okay. It is also tolerable to be astride an expensive all-terrain bicycle when one wears to good advantage (as I was frequently told I did) cut-off denim shorts. Equally acceptable is to be the young adult piloting a high-tech push-chair with a trophy baby inside, who could be a future Porsche driver. Less well viewed is a wild young woman carving through city traffic on a skateboard (Plan B deck, Element wheels, Tensor trucks and Reds bearings) which I had bought from a place in Cologne. They build Fords in Cologne, too, although for a Bavarian they do not count as German cars.

The sudden blast from the colonnades distracted me and caused me to smash into a Mini driven by a lady-who-shops. Her expressions of indignation meant that it was a few minutes before I could get back to Trinity Place, an elbow bruised once again, my board under my arm.. I arrived at the same time as the first emergency vehicles.

Dirk did file a story, claiming implicitly to have been an eye-witness to the incident. It was assumed that due to the impending closure of the business a defect in the gas powered central heating system had been neglected. Ninety percent of Dirk’s observations were in truth provided by me. He had left a good hour before everything went bang. Why did I linger? As always I had something to read with me. Today it was the latest issue of the cooler-than-thou bi-monthly Monocle magazine (it weighed about a kilo). The publisher had named Munich the most liveable city in the world a couple of years earlier and so I had become a subscriber. The day was very warm, the café chairs outside the see-and-be-seen Brasserie Stadtschreiber were welcoming and I reckoned that I looked quite good.

A very pompous francophile (who didn’t last a full weekend) had once claimed that I could best be described as jolie laide. Quirky, then, no beauty but also not horrible looking. He had asserted that my comportment was tolerant of gymnophoria (the sensation that someone is mentally undressing you) if not conducive to apodyopsis (admiration by one inclined or provoked to imagine me naked). I tended to prefer shorter words.

“Good legs! Great arse!”

That was a verdict I was okay with. Skateboard riding is good exercise. So is roller skating. Or racing on inline blades. I have even been known to resort to a Razor kick scooter. Mercury had wings on his heels. I simply like having wheels underfoot, self-propelled rather than motorized.

So, yes, Dirk got his information from me. Why did I call him? One reason is that I feel comfortable with the notion that those with whom I have shared intimacies, even if the episode was short, should remain somehow part of my life. I still enjoy infrequent, only half-serious but nevertheless lurid and stimulating online chat sessions with Dorthe Larsen. Some might find it odd that Dirk Seehof and Bea Schell and I remained good friends after I had borrowed Bea’s fiancé last summer. Part of the reason is that I am a very good cook.

Dirk’s article would appear buried deep on the website of the least read Munich daily newspaper and would not, to my regret, include my characterization of Elsa, the woman who was the day’s sole fatality.

“Frau Elsa Brundt was the assistant manager of Manduvel Bookshop, with the charm of a traffic warden, the sincerity of an estate agent, the human kindness of a robot and the personal odour of a basket of laundry long overdue for washing.”

My descriptions of the other colleagues were kinder. Jane Gallagher and Jock Bain were Brits, although to be precise Jane hailed from Ireland where her name could be given as ó Gallchobhair which meant ‘lover of foreigners’. Which might explain Jock, who tended towards outspoken Scottish nationalist politics. They were low-budget preppy types, recently graduated students in Germanistik. They chose for some reason to deny that they were co-habiting. Neither were injured. Jane reacted to the emergency by making lots of tea, the British response to anything short of the Apocalypse. Jock got in everybody’s way as he recorded video on his iPhone.

Frau Peine, a quiet, sad woman in her mid-fifties, suffered what might be a broken hip when the blast of the explosion toppled her off the step-ladder she had been using. On the stretcher she was cursing her misfortune in perfect English (all Bookshop staff were bi-lingual) but Frau Peine was using turns of phrase which might have been expected of a foul-mouthed sailor. That was a surprise. Jock got the audio.

Herr Stemm, our notorious hypochondriac, at long last had ailments which were not imaginary, a fractured wrist and nasty burns on his scalp. Middle-aged and a proponent of Prussian virtues, he was also a vain man. His bouffant toupée had gone up in flames. Jock got a close-up of the charred remnant.

Frau Hopkins, whose English was far from perfect in spite of being married to a Welshman, was carried off unconscious to an ambulance. She was the sympathetic, motherly type although without any children of her own.

Dear Sammy Cohen seemed more concerned at the loss of an earring rather than the earlobe to which it had been attached. Jock almost fainted when he identified the small lump of detached flesh.

One of the passers-by injured by flying glass was, it transpired, a bishop. Clerics have a minatory ubiquity in Munich. As do visitors from the rich states of the Arabian Gulf. Three dark ladies laden with shopping bags from expensive boutiques needed attention to their wounds, insisting on waiting in some discomfort for the arrival of female paramedics. That Dirk also mentioned in his piece.

What I didn’t like was his pathetic attempt to add further human interest to his report. He implied that Herr Lessinger had died of a broken heart, felled by the enormity of the Bookshop’s impending closure. The old man had in truth passed away three days before in a clinic on the other side of town. His demise followed months of illness and he was sad only that he would not be able to visit his grand-children in Florida. Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger was otherwise sanguine with regard to the inevitable outcome of the affliction he preferred to call consumption.

I quite enjoyed the fact that Dirk had used my snarky reference to the fact that the shelves at the far end of the Bookshop housing all the bodice ripper, vampire and zombie titles (genres I had scrupulously avoided even when I had belonged to the target age group) had survived the explosion and the conflagration that ensued unscathed.

Two

TUESDAY 29 MAY 2012

The funeral was more interesting than I had anticipated. This was partly due to the fact that I used public transport instead of my skateboard. I had misread the tram timetable and arrived at the Nordfriedhof cemetery more than a half hour too early. Seated on the low wall surrounding a nineteenth century grave, in the shade of Gabriel’s huge outstretched wings, I smoked a spliff in funereal tranquillity. And so it was that later…

A Whiter Shade Of Pale.

(Procol Harum, it had been my Dad’s all-time favourite song!) And so it was that later I was super-alert to the sudden atmosphere of contempt, hurt and undisguised hostility when Vera and Agnes at last met.

Neither, Herr Lessinger had admitted to me, should know of the other’s existence. Philanderer he might have been, but the old man had never revealed the surnames of his lady-friends. Both were somewhere in their mid to late sixties, well-situated widows, their sexual appetites almost undiminished, each convinced that the aged bookseller was hers alone. I recall Vera described as insatiable although Agnes was praised as the more inventive.

Such frank, revelatory and intimate conversations with Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been few and far between. They often coincided with the days when I wore a dress or a skirt instead of my customary ultra-skinny jeans to work. The late unlamented and officious Elsa Brundt (as the Bookshop’s moral guardian) spoke to Herr Lessinger quite often of a suspicion she harboured. According to her, from time to time I wore a dress or skirt without the requisite underwear. The old man protested earnestly that such unseemly temerity from young Frau Lange was quite unthinkable.

Sure.

When the mourners assembled for the non-denominational service I confirmed that I was both the youngest person present and the best dressed. Vera, Agnes and others of advanced years had in their wardrobes ensembles which they wore with increasing frequency for funerals. My black knitted cotton dress from Comme des Garçons was more often worn for clubbing nights, bloused over a belt to be very short indeed. But unbelted it fell almost to my knees. My hat was a black straw trilby. I had bought three, the other two chrome yellow and cherry red respectively, for twenty euro at a market in Ibiza. My black flat-heeled ankle boots (I also owned them in neon green and silver) were more or less okay, I thought. Yes, I have the habit of buying in threes and I alternate between gleeful bargain hunting and self-indulgent extravagance. Anyway, in the chapel at least I was not on the receiving end of the kind of tight-lipped frowns which had been Elsa Brundt’s specialty.

It took me a moment to identify the man whose glance (no, repeated furtive glances during the pastor’s anodyne eulogy) could be deemed interested. Or at least curious.

Rudiger Reiß is in his late thirties, looks fit and has an upright posture. He’s taller than me and I am quite tall. I had seen the man in charge of all the Munich branches of Manduvel just once, at the beginning of the year. He had announced then in glib management-speak to the assembled staff that the branch on Trinity Place was to be abandoned by the concern. His timing, we had all agreed, sucked. It had been the Monday following the weekend which had been lengthened by the Epiphany holiday on the Friday. On the twelfth day of Christmas he had probably rehearsed.

Twelve drummers drumming.

Drumming us out of our jobs. Then as now Reiß had worn a smart black suit and looked a bit like the aloof duty manager of an expensive hotel. And on Saturday he had turned up, too. I had seen him in earnest discussion with someone from the gasworks emergency crew.

“You seem to be the only one here today from the Bookshop,” Reiß said, next to me in the graveyard. We laid flowers on the spot where in due course the ashes of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger would be interred. I mumbled something about the others nursing their wounds. I wondered if he noticed that my floral tribute was one of the largest. In fact it had been ordered by my Aunt Ursel and the card was in her name as well as mine.

If we are being precise Ursel Lange is, in fact, my very elderly great-aunt. She is strict but very generous. The latter quality explains how it is that I can live much more comfortably than if I had to make do with the pittance paid to a trainee Buchhandelskauffrau. Aunt Ursel sets great store by qualifications. Her expectation is that my framed certificate will go on the wall of the small but still profitable bookshop, Brunnenbach Bücher, in the middle of the little Swiss town of Weinfelden. This is an enterprise which has been in our family’s hands for almost a century. I am supposed to take it over eventually.

“But for his illness, he would have been there to the very end, I suppose.”

I nodded. He would have been in the Bookshop where he could well have died. I reckoned that Elsa Brundt had speedily installed herself in the cubby-hole which passed for Herr Lessinger’s office in the chaos of the antiquarian section which had born the worst of the explosion.

Rudiger Reiß looked more worried than sad.

“You don’t plan to stay with us at Manduvel, Frau Lange?”

I chattered on about Weinfelden and Aunt Ursel and Brunnenbach Bücher (feigning enthusiasm for the promised legacy) as we processed down the paths of the Nordfriedhof. We made for the street where on the opposite side there was an Italian pizzeria. It was supposed to be quite a lively place in the evenings but during the hours when burials took place it was happy to welcome thirsty people dressed in black. Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had with typical attention to detail arranged for a sum of money to be deposited with the manager. It was enough in fact to ensure the alcoholic stupefaction of the few following Vera who strode ahead, possibly much in need of a schnapps. Agnes marched with similar energy about ten metres behind her erstwhile rival. Then came Rudiger and I and a handful of others.

He still looked worried.

“Are you in trouble with the gasworks people? Negligence resulting in death? Proceedings of some kind?”

“You are very direct, Frau Lange!”

“Call me Thea. Herr Lessinger used my full name, Theodora. You may not, however, call me Dora. And, yes, I am very direct.”

I had the feeling that my straightforwardness came as something of a relief.

“To be quite frank, Thea, it wasn’t a gas accident. It was an incendiary device, a bomb if you like, so positioned that the antiquarian section would be devastated. It is a matter for the police now. The only trouble I am in now arises from my inability to deliver the antiquarian collection to our Austrian associate.”

“For a laughable price!”

“I have heard that Herr Lessinger was of that opinion.”

Then he said something which almost caused me to gasp. Reiß would have noticed were he not concentrating on the fast traffic which makes crossing Ungererstraße a fraught undertaking.

“Three quite intriguing books could have survived, you know. But Lessinger stipulated that they should be placed in his coffin and… I dare say at this very moment … they are being consumed in the crematorium as he is by flames.”

Three books?

“I saw you twice at the clinic. But I had no idea you’d been visiting Louie.”

Agnes looked tearful. She and Vera had taken the window table next to the one where Rudiger and I sat. And, yes, we were eavesdropping.

“He was a very orderly man. Quite adept at scheduling his affairs, it would seem,” said Agnes with a sniff.

Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger. Funny how the given names of some people seem almost superfluous. As for the affectionate diminutive, Louie, I wondered whether the old man was any happier with that than I am when someone calls me Dora. I had briefed Rudiger Reiß (Rudi? Maybe not) about the two ladies while we waited for our beers to arrive. Vera had indeed ordered an Obstler with her coffee. Agnes stayed with mineral water.

“So Herr Lessinger’s life did not consist only of a passion for bibliophile rarities?” Rudiger said, with the faint trace of a smile.

“No. Books and sex. Both were very important. I liked that in him a lot.”

Reiß obviously wondered whether I shared Louie’s priorities but simply nodded.

I suppose it was inevitable that Vera and Agnes would sit together. They seemed to know none of the other mourners. They did, after all, have something in common.

“The books that were to be burned with him… did he mention that?” Vera asked after some hesitation. Agnes nodded.

“I thought it an odd gesture, even for him. And… how pointless. They would have been cremated in Trinity Place on Saturday with all the others! Although the poor man was not to know that, of course.”

“I wonder what their importance was.”

Rudiger Reiß and I took our second beers outside to one of just two tables. The pavement on Ungererstraße, so close to speeding, stinking traffic, is not conducive to dolce far niente.

“You are, I suspect, as curious as I am,” said Rudiger Reiß.

“Does it show?”

“To me, yes. It is my job to know what catches people’s imagination, what intrigues them, what engages their attention. My field is retailing, not books. I always take a book with me when we go on holiday, but mostly I don’t manage to finish it.”

“We?”

“It used to be ‘we’. Not any more. The divorce became final last month.”

“Okay, I am intrigued… by the business with the books, I mean. Your marital status is neither here nor there.”

A decrepit truck from Bulgaria crawled past belching diesel fumes and making so much noise that conversation was for a while impossible. It gave me time to think.

“You can’t know exactly which three books went missing, I guess. The inventory of the antiquarian section was never computerized. Herr Lessinger was in two minds about that. On the one hand he resented your penny-pinching. On the other he was quite proud of his old fashioned card index and hand-written ledger… now presumably reduced to ashes.”

“True. But when it became know that the prognosis for Herr Lessinger was… very unfavourable… then the late Frau Brundt stepped in. She was determined to demonstrate her efficiency. She reported what looked to her like an anomaly. A ‘three volume lot’… no more precise details given… was checked out of the Bookshop in Herr Lessinger’s name. But at a time when he was already immobilized in that place where he died. Odd, wouldn’t you say?”

It was the moment for me to resort to distraction. Removing my trilby meant that my bunched up dirty-blonde hair (perfectly clean, in fact, but the colour is commonly so described) could fall loose onto my shoulders. I took a moment to gather it together at the nape of my neck. Axilla display, the presentation of the naked armpit, is something men tend to notice and Rudiger Reiß was no exception. He cleared his throat and continued.

“My thought was that Lessinger might have taken the books to show to a potential buyer… part of the service, you know… and that maybe a sale was in the offing. Our computers do record sales and acquisitions. Proper bookkeeping makes that imperative.”

“But there was no sign of any mysterious ‘three volume lot’ having found a buyer?”

Now Rudiger Reiß grinned. It made him more attractive. He reminded me of somebody.

“No, none. You know, Lessinger was very good… he became quite clever about selling books on to wealthy collectors before we even had to pay for them. He was often just a middle-man on our behalf in a quick-turnaround transaction, but the practice generated enough revenue to keep the antiquarian section just about viable.”

“Goodness! That goes a bit against my picture of him. Okay, an aging Lothario but also an ardent and serious book lover… at the Bookshop and with his own collection which was limited to incunabula in Latin. Did you know that the world’s largest collection of incunabula is here in Munich? Twenty thousand of them in the Bavarian State library.”

Rudiger Reiß nodded as I explained that incunabula were books not handwritten by scribes but produced in the ‘first infancy of printing’ prior to the year 1500.

“That was Lessinger’s passion,” I concluded. Not one of the three volumes in my stewardship was in Latin or printed prior to the sixteenth century. But of course I did not mention that.

“Ancient books and two merry widows?”

Rudiger gestured to where Vera and Agnes had come out to take the two taxis they had ordered. It looked as if at the last minute they decided to exchange cellphone numbers.

“The beginning of a beautiful friendship?” I suggested.

“Who knows? And… who knows whether there were in truth three precious books in the old gentleman’s coffin?”

Three

WEDNESDAY 30 MAY 2012

Books in Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger’s coffin? It was a question the funeral director might be in a position to answer. That Reiß and I had agreed.

“Strange business, for sure. I could, I suppose, make time for an undertaker visit tomorrow. Perhaps you might like to join me?”

Late the next afternoon he collected me from where I’d agreed to meet him, on a street corner close to my flat. He was very punctual. I got into Rudiger’s car, a new but very small Volkswagen Polo.

“She got the Audi,” he said with less bitterness than I might have expected. Maybe I was supposed to say something. He threw me a glance but learned little, since I had donned my RayBan Aviators. I had slung a belt (seventies vintage von Lehndorff) around the black dress I had worn the day before, hiking it up to a non-funereal length. Often people assumed that my shoulder bag was a Chanel copy. It wasn’t.

On the subject of fakery, nothing could have been more obsequious or spurious than the excruciating piety of the funeral director.

“We take great pains to respect the wishes of the departed. Often special costuming is requested… or keepsakes are to accompany the deceased on his or her onward journey. For reasons of hygiene, of course, we are unable to fill requests that the casket should contain food or drink.”

Hygiene? A danger of posthumous food poisoning?

Yes, there had been items contained in a cotton bag for insertion into the coffin of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger.

“The nature of the items will, however, remain a secret. Not because it is knowledge I am unable to share, but if books they were…” The dapper little hypocrite tailed off.

The problem was that the mortal remains of Herr Lessinger had been laid in the coffin, an expensive one, by an efficient, reliable but almost illiterate Transylvanian.

Grigor was short, rotund and surprised us a bit with an angelic smile. His German was as minimal as the funeral director had suggested, but in his own tongue he chattered almost without drawing breath. After lengthy confusion and much sign language it was clear that he feared he was being accused of purloining the coarse cotton bag in which the three books had arrived.

As for the books themselves, we learned a goodly amount. Grigor had some talent for drawing. His cubicle had samples of his work pinned up on the wall. Some of these I chose not to examine too closely, since it was clear that the little man found his artistic inspiration in his work with the deceased. If the anatomical sketches seemed to mimic the cold Renaissance objectivity of da Vinci, Grigor’s memento mori portraits were serene and almost affectionate.

“Keepsakes, ja, ja,” he had understood and rummaged through a fat portfolio. One drawing I found very poignant, a toy carousel which had been placed in the coffin of a child. The pencil strokes were quite faint in Grigor’s work, but in this case he had given the merry-go-round dabs of jewel-like colour. I could see that Reiß found it heart-rending, too.

“Lessinger, ja, ja.”

He showed us three drawings he had made. The first had the very sketchy outlines of a book, but he had devoted care to the cover which featured a cross, its arms of equal length. I gave a slight shudder when I saw that Grigor had used a red felt-tip pen to fill a scarlet field surrounding a white cross. The Swiss coat of arms. I had a slim volume of similar appearance at home, after all, about the size of a normal ring-binder as the Transylvanian confirmed with precise gestures.

Grigor mimed the suggestion that the line of text embossed on the cover below the white cross might be a telephone number. But he merely hinted in his drawing at what could be as easily letters as numbers. Reiß gazed at a spot on the ceiling in dismay.

My pretence of intense interest in subsequent revelations must have been convincing for Rudiger Reiß. The second cover was emblazoned with the standard of the Third Reich, the eagle’s wings outstretched, a swastika in the wreath grasped by the talons of the stylised bird of prey. I prevaricated with regard to the size of this book, suggesting it might be small, maybe pocket-sized. Grigor disagreed. It was square-ish, and almost as big as a vinyl record album.

Of course it was.

I made no effort to clarify the matter of the illustration on the cover of the third book, leaving Reiß thinking that it was a representation of the Virgin Mary. If memory served it was in reality a Black Madonna, the dusky Miriam of Magdala. I hadn’t bothered to take a look at my three books for weeks. While Rudiger Reiß struggled to understand Grigor, who was, we thought, trying to declare how fervent was his personal embrace of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, I wracked my brain in an effort to recall just how and when the three books had come into my possession. That was an easier task than speculating as to why three books burned with the remains of Herr Lessinger had covers which appeared to be faithful facsimiles of those cached in my flat.

“Why did Grigor make drawings of the three books, though? The sentimentality of that child’s carousel I can understand. But… old books?”

Rudiger Reiß nodded, and made an effort to frame the question in a way that the Transylvanian could perhaps comprehend.

Suddenly Grigor beamed broadly. He bent over his sketch pad and drew the quick portrait of a man with a bald head and a full beard, using a marker to give the fringe of the beard an orange tint.

“Draw for he!” said Grigor.

Early March, mid-March, late March. Three months ago. On the first Saturday of the month there had been drinks after the Bookshop closed for the day to celebrate Herr Lessinger’s birthday. I had made a point of being there, shuffling out of my warmest quilted winter coat to reveal the kind of mini-dress (it was tweed, and the hold-up stockings were very, very long) which gave Elsa Brundt apoplexy. Knowing that the end was coming (the closure of the bookshop) and that no future birthday of his would be observed on the premises, Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had splashed out on a premium champagne (Veuve or Dom, one or the other). At the time he had hinted that in a couple of weeks he would be going into hospital. For observation, he assured the staff.

Beware the Ides of March.

By the end of the month some of us had became aware that the prognosis was gloomy, that Herr Lessinger had weeks at most to live. But my only visit to the clinic had been before that terrible news came.

“Check those three books out for me, Theodora. I’ll let you know when I want you to bring them to me in this depressing place.”

But no such summons ever came. And after learning that his condition ruled out any hope of survival I never went to visit him again. I knew it was cowardice. At the end of April, when there were the first new leaves on the trees, I had summoned up my courage. I had a friend ink a simulated tattoo, Ex Libris Lessinger, so positioned that even a very unwell old man might be momentarily cheered by the sight. And, although he had not asked for them, I had the three books in the bag ready to deliver. But I got cold feet at the last minute.

The tattoo hasn’t altogether faded even today, although it is now little more than a shadowy smudge on my mons veneris.

“What are you thinking, Thea?” Rudiger Reiß asked after a while.

That I liked his after-shave, Dior’s Eau Sauvage. I had accepted his offer to drive me back to where I lived.

“About asparagus,” I said.

“Asparagus?”

“Yeah, easier to think about asparagus than about the significance of books with the Swiss flag, the Nazi symbol and the Madonna on their covers. And about who else might have been as interested as we were and just a bit quicker off the mark!”

At the open-air market there was organically grown asparagus, the grand cru. I bought enough for four. The ham from a neighbouring stall was presumed to come from pigs who had been deliriously happy prior entering the slaughter-house. Rudiger Reiß seemed quite happy to accept my invitation to supper.

“I am moderately intelligent. I am very opinionated and tend to provoke in a variety of ways. But I am such a good cook that even Bea is prepared to put up with me. She’ll like you.”

Bea Schell needed to be explained. Dirk Seehof’s fiancée often disliked any fourth person invited to my table. Granted, the pierced punk who was also a sensitive poet and had been in raptures after a dinner at the beginning of the Spargelzeit had been odd. He quoted Proust, who claimed that asparagus ‘transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume’, and was the kind of person the fastidious Bea would usually cross the street to avoid. The anarcho-rastafarian albino musician had proved a tedious table companion, his efforts to disguise his thoroughly middle-class origins pathetic. Then there was the graffiti artist, Zachary. His grunge-erotic work would permanently embellish one of the walls of my flat. The lingering acetone whiff of his colour sprays had spoiled the delicate aroma of the loup de mer on that occasion. And then there had been the film student whose sole topic of conversation was pornography. I found some of his work really great. Bea did not. She suspected that if I had been asked nicely to appear before his camera I might have said yes. Which was quite perceptive of her.

Bea assumed that all of these occasional guests had not only shared my table but also my bed, including the jolly lesbian who had entertained us with stories of the adventures of her ‘dykes on bikes’ sisterhood. That evening we had enjoyed baked oysters. But Bea Schell was quite wrong. Bea knows me quite well, but only up to a point. My sex escapades were mostly at his place, where I would be the one delivering the exit line. Dirk had been an exception.

“To Bea you will appear normal and unthreatening. She will be reassured!”

As we reached the fifth floor and while I fumbled to find my key (Rudiger Reiß carried the shopping) I wondered where I had stashed those three damn books.

Four

Reiß had left early, claiming a crack-of-dawn flight to Frankfurt the next morning, after thanking me for what he pronounced to be the best asparagus he had tasted this year. Then the incriminations began.

“Bea, you were flirting with him… quite openly,” said Dirk.

She and Reiß had chatted as he examined my bookshelves. I would not be buying a further Billy unit now that I had the ManduvelPlus e-book reader app on my cellphone. Quite why my friend Bea had drawn the attention of Rudiger Reiß to a certain category of my shelved volumes I hadn’t understood.

Palindromic Polysexuality by Kane Archibald I hadn’t even had the courage to finish.

The business with the three books of more immediate concern had been discussed. Bea and Dirk heard about the funeral, about the strangeness of wanting to take something to read into the hereafter, about Louie Lessinger’s two lovers.

That it had been my Aunt Ursel who had prompted her good friend Lessinger to admit me to the Manduvel trainee program was duly noted.

But Dirk Seehof was right. His fiancée now blushed. Now this I had never seen before. Colour! The girl has a pallid complexion, longish ashen hair most often held back with an Alice band. She always dressed in shades of beige and grey which do nothing to contradict those who call her the ‘greige ghost’. Her style might be called preppy, her appearance that of the conservative daughter of a good family. If she could have afforded it there would be a triple-strand pearl necklace to emphasize the stringent respectability of her dresses, blouses, skirts, sweaters and cardigans. Bea Schell does so not do jeans.

For the Munich diner en blanc in July last year I had persuaded her that white could be seen as palest beige. Wittelsbacherplatz had been transformed into a sociable wonderland, even in the shadow of the word headquarters of the Siemens concern. The picnic I had packed was delicious and the wine more than enough to ensure that a taxi would be needed to get us to our homes afterwards. It had been great fun and we planned to be there for this year’s edition of the flash-mob event.

Bea generally claims to be a junior bookkeeper in her firm’s accounts department. It is tacitly accepted that she is rather more than that. She has serious computer coding skills, although her appearance and comportment put her far away at the very opposite end of the spectrum from the cliché of the unsavoury digital nerd. Granted, she wears geeky glasses when working at the computer, but the thick frames are not black but almost translucent tortoiseshell. Bea is finicky, self-effacing, often asked to repeat herself since her whispering speech is often unclear. Her one hobby is obscure. She dismisses it as experimental digital fabric design but the show leaves us speechless when she lets her creations (psychedelic fractals swirling and resembling Paisley or Jacquard patterns) be displayed on my big screen.

On the other hand, Dirk insists that Bea is also formidably competent in a range of martial arts skills.

“My employer, Segirtad GmbH, specializes in security of all kinds, including advanced niche areas of cyber expertise.”

I do think it had come as a surprise to Rudiger Reiß when he saw with what expertise Bea had dealt with the bong which had been brought to the table while I was making our espressos. She knew where I kept it, in the second oven under the long granite kitchen worktop, one never used for baking. Yes, that’s where the books were, too, tucked beneath the lowest baking tray.

Segirtad Home Security - Safe As Switzerland

The lock on the door of my loft, that of the gate at the bottom of the drive at Säntisblick, Aunt Ursel’s home in Switzerland, were all products of the firm which was well on its way to become a leader in the field. But there were corporate divisions whose clients were not simply prudent home owners. Bea had always been reticent about that, even when she had smoked.

“I wasn’t flirting. I was just more talkative than I sometimes am here at Thea’s place.”

Getting high together was a second major pillar of my friendship with Dirk and Bea. The three of us shared an appreciation of good marihuana. Bea and I also shared a respect for Dirk’s qualities as a lover, my esteem of his prowess restricted, of course, to that brief affair a year earlier.

I was, to put it bluntly, hesitant about whom I welcomed into my personal space.

No man is an island.

Maybe not, but I’m a woman, Master Donne. My isle floats sovereign and free where I will it to be, TheodoraLand, its beach as rarely trod by any Man Friday as Crusoe’s.

Those invited to make up a dinner foursome in my loft were chosen for their immediate entertainment value. Hardly any would ever show up twice. This was in part because my flat was for me still something of an embarrassment. A twenty-four year old Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau was not customarily the owner of what had once been the studio of a famous painter on one of the best streets in the bohemian Schwabing neighbourhood of the Bavarian capital.

Thank you, Aunt Ursel!

When I thought I could get away with it, I’d swear that it was the atelier where Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky had once painted. It was a claim made by many owners of similar properties in the neighbourhood. Some rooms on the same top floor had long ago been converted to become a separate self-contained apartment. In six years I had five different neighbours with whom I exchanged little more than nods of greeting. What remained of the studio, what I own, is the atelier itself. Its ceiling is over four metres above the floor, there is a huge north-facing window and in the corner a tight spiral staircase leading to a hatch giving access to the roof. Had I made a bit more of an effort with the furnishings and decoration (had I not settled to a large extent for Ikea) my home could have qualified for a photo story in a lifestyle magazine.

Loft living in Munich.

My bed is not hidden away. It is neither two metres wide nor is there a mirror on the ceiling. It is well positioned for watching the Sunday night thriller on television and sex is much more often on the screen via the web than on that mattress.

When I am asked about the wall painting I do not take the trouble to dissemble. Anyone grievously shocked shouldn’t count among my friends or even acquaintances. That the giant mural adding vivid colour to one of the three walls (the others remained pristine white) is a faithful rendering of my own pudenda was a fact I made no effort to deny.

The same does not hold for the dog.

The Mighty Quinn.

It is a painting of a dog, a slim and tawny hound with perfect posture, forelegs straight and a strange look in its eyes. It sits erect, watchful, surrounded by an ornate Baroque frame. It might be said to be life-size but only if it were a very big dog indeed.

I explain, with brevity, that my grandfather had been very attached to his dog. Then I can steer the conversation back to the banal and much less complicated, confessing to a modicum of exhibitionism in my comportment.

“Makes sense of a kind… puppy on one wall, pussy opposite!” A frequent conclusion.

Bea concentrated on the bong.

“Talkative, sure. And always bringing the conversation back to sex!” Dirk insisted, more bemused than annoyed.

Bea’s flush had subsided. She held the sweet, aromatic Alaska Thunderfuck smoke in her lungs for an eternity before exhaling.

Dirk Seehof was not wrong. And it was odd to hear Bea being so single minded in conversation that she was speaking quite distinctly rather than whispering or mumbling. Not that she spoke of any sexual quirks or improprieties of her own, she just recited a few of mine.

That the narrow door to the bathroom (dissimulated in the fleshy folds depicted in the mural) would spring open when the shiny clit was hit…

I had gazed into the distance and decided not to whip up a quick dessert…

That the fidelity of the representation could be verified quite often in summer when I ventured forth nonchalantly knickerless…

I had taken off my belt so that Comme des Garçons permitted no such confirmation…

That image-matching software could be used to find on the interwebs photos of me which were both deliciously and explicitly indecent…

I had begun to consider an interesting idea…

That the roof on which I sunbathed was overlooked by the staff-room of the Technical College…

I had pointed out that any plumbing or electrical problems I had in the flat were resolved by experts from the Berufsschule which backed onto my building. Whether instructors or trainees they were polite and efficient. But my idea was developing. I would mention it when Rudiger Reiß left.

“Okay, you were using Thea as a reference, but it was you talking about sex! And Reiß found you fascinating! He didn’t even glance in Thea’s direction!” Dirk concluded, still miffed.

Not quite true. Before Dirk and Bea arrived (while I was instructing Rudiger Reiß in the fine art of peeling asparagus) I am pretty sure my sitting position was such that he noted my fading ink.

Ex Libris Lessinger.

I am, I suppose, a child of the raunch culture. The very first photo I took when I got my first cellphone with a camera was a blatant nude self-portrait. In that respect I know I am by no means alone.

“Image-matching software… that could be very helpful!” I declared, loud enough to cut short the minor bickering between Dirk and Bea, my back turned to them as I took from the refrigerator another bottle of Saran Nature.

And from the lower oven I took out three books.

The cover with the Helvetic cross, scanned in on my MacBook Pro, generated no direct matches even when Bea ran the software she herself had improved. But there were some close results. The format, the typography and the texture of the cover, field grey but with a coarse linen finish, was that of many bound volumes in various Swiss national archives. The title, Projekt Fortezza, meant nothing to any of us. And there was also what Grigor had suggested was a ‘cellphone number’.

“Civil engineering… archaeology… something along those lines,” said Dirk after flipping through a few pages.

“Makes a change to be dealing with a tangible mystery, not a virtual binary conundrum,” Bea whispered, pushing her glasses up from where they had slipped to the tip of her nose.

The Nazi emblem produced thousands of hits. But I suggested that none would be helpful. What I had in my hands had once been an album of blank pages. These were now filled with dense handwriting in the old Germanic style, the Suetterlin script no longer taught after the war. They would demand time to decypher although Bea thought that there might be an OCR program which could help.

Notre-Dame de Champbasse.

The image of the Magdalene again returned thousand of approximate hits.

“A hundred and eighty Black Virgins in France! But none in the tiny village which was once known as Champbasse,” said Dirk. He was using his own smartphone to consult Google and Wikipedia.

Bea looked disappointed. But I assured her that it was real progress to determine that the Swiss volume was some sort of official record.

“Switzerland… are these books quite soon going to be on their way to your aunt?” Bea Schell wondered.

I though that might be a very good idea, particularly if others in Munich apart from Rudiger Reiß and I were taking an interest. We had not been the only persons sufficiently curious about the contents of the coffin of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger to seek out the Transylvanian mortician. I re-filled empty glasses with Saran Nature.

“Cheers!”

Five

FRIDAY 1 JUNE 2012

Before leaving for the station to catch the Zurich express which I would leave in Weinfelden I checked a local Munich news blog to see if there was anything more about the fire at the Bookshop. The theory now was something of a compromise; less innocent than a mere accident caused by faulty gas heating but not quite as laden with menace as a wilfully introduced explosive device. A large number of cardboard cartons had been delivered to the Bookshop by a removals firm which would have the job of clearing the shelves and allocating contingents of the English books to other Manduvel branches in the city and elsewhere in Germany. The crates were not, it was stressed, flameproof. There was also mention of very inflammable items stored recklessly in the basement below the antiquarian section. A spokesman for Manduvel (I wondered if it might have been Rudiger Reiß) had confirmed this.

Those items, I was pretty sure, were the colour spray aerosol bombs and markers used when we organized a Bookshop event to promote a coffee table volume dedicated to urban art. ProZax was the tag of a trio of graffiti artists and indeed it had been the founding member, Zachary, who had embellished the wall of my flat to such good effect. He would have removed his stuff from the basement had he not been detained by the police. The biggest piece Zack had scribed was deemed politically sensitive, drawing attention as it did to the cover-up of the activities of clerical paedophiles by prominent Bavarian church leaders.

I could, I suppose, have removed the ProZax gear myself.

But was this not a moot point? However flammable the cached aerosols might have been it could hardly have been a matter of spontaneous combustion.

“It’s not a cellphone number, in my opinion. ‘39’ at the beginning is probably not the Italian international calling code… that system is relatively recent. What we have here is more likely an indication of the year.”

Okay, I thought as I concentrated on entering the sixteen digits into the Google search window while listening to Bea on a Skype connection.

“Also… and this is a bit spooky… the suffix ‘Gs5’… may be slightly ominous.”

Almost as she spoke I finished my entry, ‘…Gs5’.

Google failed to return a single hit. I told Bea of the result.

“Fuck!” said Bea, out of character. Her expletives tended to be less vehement and not often vulgar.

The train entered a long tunnel and for a while there was no reception.

“Tunnel!” I explained to Bea who sounded impatient. When the connection was restored she announced that she had been using a very different search engine, one which delivered useful metadata.

“That’s information concerning the search term itself, before showing any list of files found. And your entry gets a ‘ping’… triggers a red flag and the warning that this precise search term is on somebody’s watch list! Whose… I don’t know.”

“Fuck!” I agreed.

“Funny, that ‘Gs’ extension… quite archaic. Geheimstufe… ‘secrecy level’… some of us still use it when we want an old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger frisson.”

Bea confirmed that the confidentiality scale ran from one to five.

I sighed. A top secret Swiss file, not where it belonged in the Confederation, although it could be said to be on its way home. The train was now moving out of the station at Bregenz, the single stop in Austria.

My sixteen-digit, case-sensitive, alpha-numeric search string had alerted someone to my interest in something which was not only not my fucking business, not only highly confidential but something which was not where it should be, conceivably in a vault protected by formidable Swiss security. There was still time to toss my laptop (perhaps geo-tagged or otherwise device-identified) out of the train before it crossed the Swiss frontier at Sankt-Margrethen.

Modern air conditioned trains do not have windows which can be opened.

I was in possession of an electronic device which had been used to ask a question which should not have been rightfully posed! Not good. I was also carrying with me the item of apparent interest, with a number on the cover which was not that of a telephone somewhere in bella Italia. And that. I suspected, was a lot worse.

Sankt-Margrethen. It was worth a try. I wondered where my laptop’s journey would end. When the doors of the train hissed open it wasn’t too hard to hurl the lightweight notebook towards a freight train heading in the opposite direction on the track across the platform. A pity that there was nobody with who I could exchange a fist-bump or a high-five when the computer landed on an open waggon. It caught the light for a moment when it came to rest on the green netting covering the whatever loose cargo was being exported from Switzerland. Garbage, refuse, trash, I speculated unfairly, on its journey to some accommodating Eastern European destination.

A next-generation MacBook had been on my shopping list anyway.

At Weinfelden I left the Zurich express feeling safe. Bea had called and found a complicated way of informing me that my Google indiscretion had not set the Swiss authorities in hot pursuit. Although how on earth could she know that? No, it was Italians who were the interested party. ‘39’ was pure coincidence.

Well, Fortezza did sound Italian after all. I had jumped to the conclusion that the reference might be to the Italian-speaking Swiss canton Ticino.

Bea said that she and Dirk would be on their way in a few days, not to Tessin, but to Weinfelden. I needed their help, she said. Dirk Seehof typically found the whole book mystery compelling. While he saw it immediately from a Dan Brown perspective, Bea claimed she was due some leave. I found wouldn’t mind their company. Aunt Ursel would be the fourth at table.

My great-aunt had not shown surprise, although I had never before invited anyone to join me in Weinfelden. Ursel Lange insisted that not only she but also her housekeeper, Frau Steinemann, would be happy to welcome my guests to the big house, Säntisblick, on top of the hill overlooking the vineyard slopes. Although many homes with a view of the majestic mountain had the same name, the Lange residence was very grand, slightly forbidding behind high walls ensuring total privacy. Although it had the steeply pitched roof to deal with winter snows there were round towers at each end. The sloping site meant that below the main entrance floor there was one more, and three storeys above. For one elderly lady it had been for a long time far too big. It would be until the day she died.

I assured Frau Steinemann that Dirk and Bea were engaged to marry and that they might well find the Arvenholz pine panelled turret bedroom to their liking. It was as far removed from my own room as the house allowed. Dirk tended to shout encouragement with the vociferous enthusiasm of a football fan supporting his team when engaged in sexual congress. This Ursel would find most amusing, given that I had told her last summer that Dirk was also markedly well endowed. The term ‘porn star dimensions’ (fully warranted, I promise) had not crossed my lips, but I left my great-aunt in no doubt whatsoever. I never thought she would meet him, did I?

Why did I not prolong my affair with Dirk?

Why did Ursula Lange break off her liaison with Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger when she was in her mid-forties?

At this point in my story (for it is one of intrigue, criminality and peril, the sort that Dirk loves to read) there should already be a corpse lying somewhere. That of Herr Lessinger doesn’t count, does it? But, no, I feel I must digress and get a couple of things clear about my family.

My Swiss great-aunt, Ursel, née Ammann, was briefly married to Heinrich Lange, a German bookseller originally from Leipzig who settled in Weinfelden. There was, as they say, no issue.

After the divorce Heinrich then married Ursel’s older sister Erika. My grandmother was never called anything but Omi. My Dad turned out to be an only child, as did I. He was given the middle name Nestor, meaning ‘the traveller’ according to some sources. His first name, Adolf, was pointedly ignored and after a while forgotten.

Omi and Ursel were both of a generation of women not generally known for their independent spirit. However neither had any doubt that they were the equals of men. I cannot recall any stories told about their own father, Herr Ammann, who may have been quite insignificant to them. But there was no doubt that for the sisters it was the maternal lineage which counted. There was a very ancient photo of their mother, a woman with the same shine in her eye as my great-aunt. There was sometimes mention of the wealthy and powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine, the twelfth century successor in the Merovingian bloodline who (and this was significant) married a man nine years her junior.

“Young boys are an important part of my life!” Ursel still announces with a twinkle in a smoky voice. She is in her nineties.

Ursel loves the raised eyebrows her declaration causes. Then with perfect timing she explains that she is, of course, referring to her support of the football team, Young Boys, from the federal capital, Bern. She goes on to point out that the name is no more stupid than that of one of the Zurich clubs, Grasshoppers. If pressed Ursel admits that her true allegiance was to the very successful German club, Borussia Dortmund, whose team colours they shared with Young Boys, yellow and black.

Yellow and black diagonal stripes also decorate the shutters of the big house with a superb view of the Alps. Heinrich Lange had bought Säntisblick before the war. It had been home to Heinrich and his Ursel, then to Heinrich and his Erika, my Omi (although with Ursel still in residence), then to the two sisters on their own and in the end just to Ursel. And, in a way, it was home to me.

Aunt Ursel’s monster high-definition television set (almost always tuned to Sky Sport) was the sole modern touch in the cosy parlour, the Bauernstube, which was otherwise dominated by the traditional tiled stove. Not that Ursel Lange is an inactive stay-at-home football-crazed crone. Far from it. She had a weekly bridge evening with friends who were not all her contemporaries. She was very active in an association which had as its mission the promotion of traditional and ethnic music. Until her eyesight began to fail she enjoyed target shooting and still liked nothing better than to clean her Sig-Sauer and show off by loading it while blindfold, a trick she had insisted on teaching me as well. I was a decent shot, too.

“You never know, child. You never know!”

Her upright gait and leathery complexion speaks of plenty of fresh air, inhaled on long hikes in the hills of the neighbouring cantons, Appenzell and Sankt-Gallen.

Ursula Lange is the only family I have really. I have a very vague recollection of a father who when I was seven vanished to darkest Africa (to Burkina Fasso, Equatorial Kundu, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or perhaps in some land even poorer and more benighted) where Dad subsequently did laudable and selfless things out of the goodness of his heart.

“Drunk on do-goodery… reading Plato to Picaninnies,” Ursel once pointed out with typical political incorrectness. Adolf Nestor Lange’s do-goodery had rarely included affection for his daughter, as I recall.

Over the years, although not for the last four or five, there had been an annual calendar which had always taken weeks to get from Africa to Weinfelden. My great-aunt explained that the delay was in part due to the fact that the calendars came to Germany in a parcel from Africa and were then sent on individually by post.

The calendars were nothing special, just a single image with small tear-off pages underneath, one for each month of whatever year. Usually it was a photo documenting some praiseworthy good work, the inauguration of a newly bored well, of a small clinic where there had been never before been any health-care facility, of a schoolroom crowed with shy, eager children.

The calendars had been issued by the Queen Sarah Foundation and in a few of the photos there was my Dad in the middle, flanked by villagers with a new source of clean water in Uganda, by a small group of grim-faced medics very much aware of the massive task before them in Equatorial Kundu or by little kids on their very best behaviour in Rwanda.

Sometimes Dad had almost smiled, but it was always strained.

I had kept one of these annual signs of life, the only one which was not a photo. It was a child’s drawing. She (somehow I intuited that it was a girl) had depicted my father in a way I found preferable to any photographic likeness.

Her drawing was similar to the ones I had made at an age when Dads are always unconditionally loved by their daughters.

We see people not as they are, but as we are. At least for a few years.

My mother was also a strong woman. Ursel had never elaborated on how she and Dad had come to marry. But Christine’s strength was obstinacy. She was self-centred, self-obsessed, just plain selfish. She had hung around until I was eight and installed in a grim German boarding school whose fees were paid by Aunt Ursel. Then Christine Lange buggered off with a wealthy Swiss yachtsman of no fixed abode and a preference for the waters of the Caribbean. Oddly enough I did see my Mum a few years ago. She and her sailor were still together, they were holding hands and answering the questions of the television reporter on their boat moored in the luxury Renaissance Marina on the island of Aruba. I remembered that the waters were deep blue. The reality series had something to do with escapist fantasies. Aruba is a very small island only twenty-seven kilometres north of the coast of Venezuela, a hundred-and-thirty east of Colombia, its Dutch colonial past preserved in the name of its capital, Oranjestad. It could be a great place for getting away from it all.

Christine Lange was a long way from Baden-Baden.

That had been the last city where we had lived in the years when we were what passed for a family. My parents had moved home twice before. I was lonely. I wanted a dog for companionship.

When my mother decamped, our household effects went into storage. It was only when I set up home in Munich that I picked out from the detritus of family life my father’s armchair, his old vinyl records of the pop and rock of the sixties and seventies and that old painting of a dog which had belonged to Heinrich Lange, the painting, not the dog.

The Mighty Quinn.

My dog in Munich which needs neither feeding nor being walked.

The upshot is that Weinfelden still feels something like home, even after my university years and Manduvel apprenticeship, The Mighty Quinn and my loft notwithstanding.

My affection for my great-aunt is not expressed in hugs and kisses, but I think that each of us derives satisfaction from the presence of the other, reassurance that the alpha-matriarchal line (notwithstanding my mother’s deplorable dereliction of duty) remains intact, resilient and eccentric.

We seldom share confidences.

For instance, Ursel has no idea who deflowered me or when. I think she presumed that my loss of innocence coincided more or less with the onset of puberty, maybe because for her this had been the case. Indeed I had planned to cede my virginity (make a Christmas gift of it in fact) to Hans-Peter Danner ten years ago. But it was not to be and my virtue remained unsullied for several years more.

My aunt’s sometimes devious form of discretion meant that it took me a long time to complete the jigsaw of rumour and gossip and to conclude that there was more to her joking about ‘young boys’ than just provocative badinage. At the time Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been almost ten years her junior. Then he had a luxuriant mane of long wavy hair. By the time I came to know him the remnant of this shaggy glory existed only as a frieze surrounding a pink and bald pate, although vanity demanded that what endured should be tied back, like mine at the nape of the neck, with a scrap of black ribbon. It took a little while for me to learn that almost all of Aunt Ursel’s dalliances were with younger men. It’s a predilection I have not yet (unlike Eleanor of Aquitaine) found compelling, with a couple of exceptions.

In truth Dirk Seehof was a month younger than me. But is his case the gauge of time was less significant than other measurements. I think Ursel Lange disbelieved my that big fisherman’s gesture. ‘Hung like a horse’ I had blurted out to one of the girls I had studied with at the end of one of our drunken girls-only get-togethers in Munich.

Six

Since I gave no advance notice of my arrivals in Weinfelden and Frau Steinemann could not be given cooking instructions, Ursel and I had the habit of dining out on the first day of my visits. The Wystübli wine bar was next to Brunnenbach Bücher on what passed in the town for a central square. I was not good company. Three books in the big bag with my skateboard lashed to it, propped up in the corner of my room, pre-occupied me.

But the plat du jour, whitefish with saffron and capers, was delicious and the local white wine helped me to relax.

“When the people who know me here in Weinfelden started dropping like flies about twenty years ago I let it be known that… while I might send flowers… I no longer attend funerals.”

Aunt Ursel was nothing if not frank.

The people who know me… not the people I know… a hair I might have split myself. But those who know me, or think they do, have a knowledge which is neither profound nor comprehensive and to a large extent constructed by me. I have kept in touch with half a dozen of the girls from university, meeting up with them from time to time. In one respect their knowledge of me is accurate; I can hold my drink. But otherwise none of us, even when pissed, give much away. Most of us had gained our bachelor degrees in Amerikanistik. Interdisciplinary American Studies are the academic examination of a culture little more than two centuries old, its society, its language, its literature. By the end of the second year I was fed up. The only American literature I enjoyed reading had been written in Paris.

In a paper I had suggested that the Americans should number their years from the signature of the Treaty of Paris which confirmed their sovereignty as an independent nation. As precedent I cited the Islamic calendar which counted from the year of the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and gives us the current Hijri year 1433. This allows commentators with a certain agenda to imply that Araby is living through its own Dark Ages. I postulated that those living between Maine and Hawaii were thus experiencing the year 229. That year, 229 AD according to a different calendar, saw the renewal of Greek philosophy through the formulation of Neoplatonism. Rash and with gusto I wrote that outposts of the mighty Roman Empire were under threat in 229 with Germanic tribes marauding southwards, even as far as Bavaria!

I was on a roll, of course. Equate Washington with imperial Rome. Throw in allusions to Tigris and Euphrates.

“Ridiculous, Thea! The Romans counted from the foundation of the city, ad urbe condita. Welcome to their year 2765… in which your paper is a miserable fail,” my tutor had admonished. As an American he had found my aspersions offensive. He was a man few of us took seriously, so Ivy League that he had a first name which sounded like a surname. Huntingdon was an invitation to abbreviation and subsequent consonantal alliteration. Only a semester of not infrequent blow-jobs changed the Hunt the Cunt’s mind about my grade. I passed the oral.

That story I didn’t tell to the other girls of our little group. In general I think we mostly lied about our sex lives. Our erotic fantasies were preferable to the our honest recollections of the mostly mundane and were far more entertaining. We did profit from our studies to the extent that we followed much of what was happening in the United States with a smugness that being in Munich permitted. Most of us were for Obama, although Franzi played devil’s advocate by appearing to agree with Fox News from time to time, both then and now.

Studying law and pre-destined for an early partnership in her father’s highly respected Munich law firm, Franzi also informed us that in the year of the American Declaration of Independence the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society was founded. In more modern contexts the name refers to a purported organization which is alleged to mastermind events and control world affairs through governments and corporations to establish a New World Order. Franzi was, I thought, straying rashly into Dirk Seehof global conspiracy territory.

Three years after graduation Astrid was the only one married, something she thought she regretted, and had become an English teacher, which she regretted even more. She tried so hard not to look like an English teacher but failed. Her husband taught French and it was assumed that he had that Gallic approach to marital fidelity.

Franzi, who had been the cleverest of all of us, had greatly disappointed her father. She insisted she totally loved her job delivering parcels for UPS, smugly reminding us that her shit-brown van was electrically powered. Franzi didn’t laugh, she cackled, she was unpredictable and mostly fun to have around. A big girl, she was equally likely to turn up in deep-house grunge or Palm Court vintage. She had a boyfriend, Leonard, whom none of us ever met and who may or may not have been a professional musician.

Heidi did not have long blonde braids since she had been born in Ethiopia before being adopted by a couple who were devout Catholics and proud Bavarians. She had flirted with the idea of rebelling by joining an abstemious Evangelical Christian sect but we had saved her, reminding her of her predilection for Chardonnay and Chablis and other Bacchic deities. Neither her sexy style of dancing nor her casual amorous conquests would please the ‘born again’ crowd. Now she worked at a five-star hotel where her back skin and brown uniform harmonized with shiny granite and soft suede of the hotel’s dramatic lobby.

Hannelore Ibbs was known as Lore. Her much older brother, Janis, was a typographer with an irresistible sense of mischief to which I succumbed for six autumnal weeks. Janis had decided that his sister should be called Lore Ipsum. This appellation Hannelore sometimes used in her cunning manipulations of the German social benefits system. To this source of income she turned with regularity when yet another of her highly imaginative business ideas turned out to be a fanciful non-starter.

Jenni found herself so captivated by the hyper-American mystique of Route 66 that she became passionate about highway building and dropped out to study civil engineering instead. To be candid, she quite quickly became a mono-thematic bore. She developed Tea Party leanings but was clever enough to keep quiet about it. To our relief she rarely joined our group’s bar-hopping extravaganzas any more.

Astrid, Margrit, Heidi, Hannelore and I, five fellow travellers on the yellow-brick road of Amerikanistik, all of us too cowardly creatures to exit the highway when we saw that it led, if not to hell, then to a certain dead end even after passing the toll-booth manned by Hunt the Cunt.

Foolishly, the rest of us thought, Margrit had moved in with the aforementioned Hunt who, she soon discovered, was an opportunistic unfaithful bastard, but of the American rather than the French kind. I should have warned her about the man. Although, since she now worked in insurance, she should have been able to figure out the odds.

Eva was tiny, androgynous and studying pre-med. She would one day resolve her gender dystrophy, or so we all hoped. She was a good-natured girl, ingenuously impudent at times. She had been notably touchy-feely in our college years, tending to throw some of us adoring glances which we were not supposed to notice. But we presumed that she was still not even close to coming out.

All of us agreed that it was admirable that three years after gaining our degrees we kept in touch rather than drifting off when our studies ceased to be a common experience. With only one of our number distracted by matrimony it appeared that our posse could last a good few years more.

Marriage! I had a view which I kept to myself, that as the autocratic ruler of TheodoraLand (population one) I would have no husband. A consort, perhaps. One day.

What I also told none of the others was that I stood to inherit Brunnenbach Bücher and the big house overlooking Weinfelden.

“You are not fucking listening to me,” said Ursel Lange, loud enough to alarm the very Swiss middle-aged couple at the table next to ours. As I said, blunt.

“Sorry! I was thinking abut my Munich crowd.” Our last drunken tour of the bars and clubs had been just before Herr Lessinger’s demise. I had needled some of the others (no, not Astrid) who this year wore very brief shorts, mostly in denim, although Eva’s were boyish Lederhosen. The summer before I had been the only one in extreme cut-offs. Heidi called it ‘mirroring’ and said I should take it as a compliment.

“God, they’re not all on the way here, are they?”

“No, just Dirk and Bea.”

“You did tell me a bit about Dirk, made mention of his manly magnificence,” said Aunt Ursel with a little gotcha smirk, hoping I might cringe.

In other respects he’s quite normal, I countered, omitting to point out that he tended to live much of the time in a fantasy world of cops and robbers and other ne’er-do-wells. And I elaborated upon the utter ordinariness of the ‘greige ghost’ and Bea Schell’s determination to be as good as invisible.

“Hah!” Ursel would say a few days later.

Fairouz, Ursel’s preferred Weinfelden taxi driver, responsive whenever speed-dialled, took us back up the hill. He talked as usual non-stop on his cellphone with some of his numerous children, friends, acquaintances and relatives in melodious Tamil.

I had confirmed that our joint floral tribute had been one of the largest at the funeral of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger.

“But not… well… conspicuously big, I hope?”

Strange question.

“His two more recent lady friends… who of course met for the very first time at Nordfriedhof… had ordered smaller wreaths which were almost identical.”

I explained Vera and Agnes in soap-opera terms.

“I think both of them were miffed that none of the books he… took with him… were from their own collections.”

Aunt Ursel made no comment about the odd notion of wishing books of any kind to be put in one’s coffin.

“Three of his precious Latin incunabulae, I suppose, to read on his crossing of the Styx.”

I had not said that there were three books involved, had I?

Dirk Seehof would have spoken of ‘tells’. He rejoiced in the jargon of the clandestine worlds, the vocabularies of policemen and agents, detectives and spymasters. There were tiny tells, almost imperceptible out-of-character reactions, changes of posture, evasive glances, as Ursel listened to as much of the story as I was prepared to reveal. Bea’s speculations about interested Italians and Dirk’s involvement I kept to myself although I did admit that they were as intrigued as I was. When I finished my aunt knew as much but not more than Rudiger Reiß, whom I also had not mentioned.

“Piqued your curiosity, I suppose. Quite understandable,” said Aunt Ursel, frowning at the microwave. She had never been quite convinced that the device provided a better way of preparing her bedtime Ovomaltine.

“The books, then, have been cooked… incinerated… cremated,” she said, watching her mug spin behind the little oven’s window.

“So it would appear,” I said.

“Yes, so it must appear. Good night, Thea.”

Unusually I gave her a quick hug, careful not to cause Ovomaltine spillage. I think Ursel saw my awkward embrace as a big fat tell.

WEDNESDAY 6 JUNE 2012

I find it easy to slip into a laid-back Säntisblick mode. There were strenuous but enjoyable hikes with Aunt Ursel, meals prepared by Frau Steinemann or by me when I could persuade the housekeeper to vacate the kitchen. There were a couple of rainy days when the television in the Bauernstube showed more than football.

There was much impassioned discussion between talking heads about the morality of drone strikes in Afghanistan. Bea, I thought, would have concerned herself only with the advanced technology involved in this new way of slaughtering innocents. Pundits painted a gloomy picture of what the crash of the Japanese stock market could mean for us all. Queen Elizabeth, honoured in lavish Silver Jubilee celebrations, provided further gracious proof that Aunt Ursel’s generation could be very resilient indeed. Dirk would have commented on unresolved plots and conspiracies involving British royals.

He and Bea were on their way.

My room in the house on the hill has an en suite bathroom, which is cool, and last year I had invested in a top-of-the line Turmix espresso machine, made in Zurich by a company founded in 1933 by Traugott Oertli, a name I find kind of cute. It was well worth the price for it meant that I can have my first shot of caffeine without the need to leave my quarters. Years ago Frau Steinemann made it quite clear that she was uncomfortable with me wandering around the house in the nude, although I know it didn’t bother Aunt Ursel at all.

A sepia tinted photo in an Art Deco frame at the foot of the stairs in the entrance hall, not easily missed by any visitor, announced that the high-walled garden of Säntisblick, at least, had been a ‘clothing optional’ enclave back in the very late forties. I chose to make the same assumption, particularly when the weather was as inviting as now. Anyway, the espresso machine in my room had been a good idea. Decaffeinated manque avoided. Propriety preserved, at least indoors during the earliest hours of a new day.

However perched on my chair on the narrow balcony with my double espresso today I felt not just naked but also defenceless.

Bloody Dirk!

His follow-up piece on the blog of the Munich newspaper that few read started out innocuously enough as a reasoned discussion of ‘grave goods’, personal possessions, supplies to smooth the journey into the afterlife or offerings to the gods, interred with a person deceased. King Tut’s little chair made of ebony inlaid with ivory. The American who in 1899 requested that he be dressed in a hat and warm coat with the key to the tomb inside his coat pocket. Movie star Humphrey Bogart was buried with an inscribed silver whistle. In 1944, he starred in To Have and Have Not with Lauren Bacall, who became his fourth wife. A famous line from the movie, delivered by Bacall to Bogart, was, “If you need anything, just whistle.” When California socialite Sandra Ilene West died in 1977 from a drug overdose, she was buried in San Antonio, Texas, in her 1964 Ferrari 330 America. She asked to be clad in her favourite lace nightgown with the driver’s seat positioned at a comfortable angle.

So far, so Google.

But in his closing paragraph Dirk insisted on originality. Having argued that the inclusion of grave goods was by no means a practice which had died out after Christianization Dirk Seehof went on to refer to the more recent and local example.

“The distinguished old gentleman who might well have been a further fatality when an explosion devastated Manduvel Books on Trinity Place last week was cremated with grave goods. It was his wish to depart with three precious Latin manuscripts, either from his own collection or perhaps the three items missing from the antiquarian inventory, as reported by his successor at the Bookshop.”

Elsa Brundt was never Lessinger’s successor. She had only chosen to sit in his cubicle and pretend that she was.

Lessinger collected no handwritten manuscripts, only incunabulae, precious examples of the earliest secular printing. He would never dream of letting any one of them be destroyed.

Oh, for sure it made a half-decent story. I wondered what Rudiger Reiß would make of it. At our asparagus dinner I had had the impression that the Manduvel man didn’t take Dirk seriously, almost yawning when our boy detective went off on a long rant about the merits of Scandinavian noir and its influence on contemporary crime fiction.

Dirk. Cute, yes. Big dick, smaller brain.

The colour of Bea’s old Toyota could be called a kind of grey or a kind of beige and could be seen as fitting.

But for two things.

The engine of the Corolla had been tuned and equipped with new motor management electronics (tweaked with confident skill by Bea herself) boosting its output from 90 to 120 horsepower. That I had long known, and that Bea Schell was inclined to drive like a demon.

But new that morning as Bea climbed out of the car in the short driveway of the Weinfelden house was the look of the driver. She was the ‘greige ghost’ no longer.

Somehow I expected her to shout. She spoke a bit louder than before, though.

Her drop-crotch sweatpants (smiley yellow with an aqua strip down the legs) hung low beneath angular hip-bones. The cropped teeshirt was inky black, printed in white proclaiming an affinity with the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, the four big initials boldly legible when her bottle-green and very long grungy cardigan fell open.

Chucks? Red? Whither the always-shiny Bea ballerinas?

Long ash-blonde hair? Now urchin short and a full shade lighter, with faux-Versace sunnies where there had always been her Alice band. We were on the far side of the Looking-Glass now. Bea is as tall as I am, she has the broader shoulders and I the narrower hips. I knew she had formerly resorted to cleverly engineered underpinnings to emulate a cleavage more opulent than either mine or her own when not artificially boosted. No more. Today she looked incredibly sexy, I realized.

“I know what you all used to call me. Meet Bea ‘two-point-zero’, Thea!”

Dirk’s appearance also called for explanation. When he lowered the top of his grey hoodie I saw that while his face was not quite as colourful as his fiancée’s outfit it wasn’t far off. A laceration shone red. A closed eye was almost black and extensive bruising had hues of dark green and blue. The bandage on his jaw was a pale aqua colour and yellowish tincture of iodine had been applied to places which looked as if they might hurt quite a lot.

“Ouch! Partner look… colour coordination taken a step too far. What the hell happened to you?”

He drew a deep, uncomfortable breath and concentrated on getting out of the Toyota.

Bea’s account delivered on his behalf was succinct.

They had arranged to meet for a pizza. Bea had driven from her workplace on the south side of the city. Dirk had rode on his cherished fixie bike, on which he was the scourge of pedestrians, other cyclists and motorists alike. Using their respective modes of transportation they had headed after dinner for home and bed, the latter destination stressed by Bea Schell.

Right. Still possessive, even if two-pont-zero.

“There was a collision.”

But it had been a very minor one, enough to unsaddle Dirk, but not more. Except in that it left him dazed and tottering when fallen upon by three young thugs who proceeded to give him a thorough beating. The punishment could have continued but for the arrival on the scene of two buffed gays walking their Staffordshires. They turned out to be medical students.

Maxvorstadt, the university neighbourhood next to the district where I live, is not a hotbed of crime, not a place where muggings are commonplace. Munich is proudly Germany’s safest large city. And nothing, not even Dirk’s fixed-gear velocipede (which was almost as valuable as he thought although I mocked it as beacon of pretentious hipster fad-following), had been stolen.

“There are a lot of haters of guys who ride fixies. Or… were they the infuriated brothers of some girl…”

“Very funny, Thea,” said Bea.

Dirk sighed.

“I know you think I have a runaway imagination. But… it could have been a warning… well, maybe I shouldn’t have posted that latest story.”

“It is no longer online. I saw to that,” his fiancée added.

“You can do stuff like that?”

I had always suspected that Bea could do devious digital things of which most of us were incapable. Her high-tech employer, Segirtad GmbH, was in Pullach, cheek-by-jowl with firms in the avionics sector, pioneers in green energy, as well as a well-known cutting-edge sound recording studio where I once attended a session with my earnestly anarcho-rastafarian albino musician. The building where Bea worked was bland, modern and very secure. Programs for automated stock trading, for actuarial computation, for number-crunching of big data involved a high degree of confidentiality, Bea had pointed out, adding disingenuously that she was a mere nonentity in the accounts department. Sure. The ‘greige ghost’ was (among other things, I guessed) a wicked code jockey, whatever else her new iteration might turn out to be.

The intelligence agency of the German government, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, is also headquartered in Pullach.

Bea Schell laughed.

“And now I even look like a hacker! How cool is that?”

Not so cool, I thought. She’s a year older than I am but Bea now looked like a teenager. She was edging into the spotlight I had always considered my own personal space, reserved for someone flamboyant, kick-ass, intelligent, sexy, although at the moment also apprehensive.

Seven

The turret bedroom that old Frau Steinemann had prepared pleased what the housekeeper took to be the engaged couple, although she did give a young people nowadays sigh. Their balcony had room for a small table and four chairs.

From the elevation at which Aunt Ursel’s house stood the view when the Föhn wind blew was breathtaking. Under a blue sky of unbelievable clarity distant peaks seemed miles closer than they were. I pointed out Säntis, rising two-and-a-half kilometres above sea level. Bea nodded, shading her eyes with her hand to admire the stupendous vista.

Closer there was a lawn below and to one side of the house, bisected by a driveway big enough for cars to turn round to face the tall gates. At the top of the upper lawn were three beehives.

“What’s that?” Bea asked, pointing to a quirky landscaping feature, a low box hedge. It was cruciform, the planting outlining a nave, chancel and transepts, although it took up little more space on the lawn than a decent sized summer house might have required.

“My grandfather never got round to building the chapel he had in mind…”

Dirk was not to be distracted from his Kindle. How many thrillers and crime stories were held in the digital archive of the device I did not know. But I knew he was currently collating examples of beatings inflicted as ‘warnings to people not to meddle in things which were not their concern’. Did he seek kinship with fictional figures thus horribly maltreated, their suffering described sometimes in graphic detail by Child or Deaver or Harvey, Brookmyre or Jardine or Rankin, Larsson or Larsson or Larsson and God knows how many others? If warning it had been, he had got off lightly. A tooth was chipped but only his face had been punched. The bruising on his hip had been the result of his fall from his bike. Had his assailants known what splendour lurked there, his crotch might have been deemed worthy of a kick or two out of pure envy. What a dreadful pity that would have been.

“Of course, after such a thrashing the resolve of the protagonist is always reinforced in his resolve!” Dirk suggested.

“Provided he survives his ordeal,” Bea added.

“Hah!” said Aunt Ursel, when she returned after spending the day in Zurich (her charitable committee supporting musical education) and was confronted by a Bea Schell who did not at all correspond to my description.

Dirk’s blessures she overlooked as if they were the normal scrapes and scratches of an adventurous schoolboy. And at times he did have a kind of goofy, juvenile thing about him. He was not quite as tall as his fiancée (if that she still was), wiry in build, unruly hair often held in the seminal fixie-riding hipster accessory, a snood.. Earnestly boyish, with something of that Formula One racing driver of whom we Germans were expecting so much again this season. It might have been the second thing that attracted me last year.

Since it was Ursel Lange’s weekly bridge evening the three of us would be left to our own devices although we were commanded to be ready for a hike the next day.

There was no mention of books of any kind.

Weinfelden may have a historic centre, always depicted in the tourist guides, but it is not the pulsating heart of the town. Nor indeed is the Marktplatz. Opposite Brunnenbach Bücher and Wystübli is an example of the kind of ugly civic renewal which was prevalent in the sixties and seventies. The architecture was without merit and the complex tried to be a destination shopping centre in spite of one supermarket and then another failing to prosper in its precincts. The town’s young people used to gather in the shade of the tree in the middle of Marktplatz although recently the Swiss kids had moved on and those who remained tended to speak in Balkan tongues.

“Already in the year 124 AD there was a Roman bridge over the river Thur here in Weinfelden… Quivelda, they called the settlement,” I pointed out as we entered Wystübli. Frederico’s welcoming smile for Bea two-pont-zero was broader than the one I had been given on my last visit.

“It might have been more lively then than it is now. I would have thought it a bit too sleepy and provincial for someone like you, Thea,” said Dirk, ignoring the expression on the face of Frederico who looked askance at his battered visage.

“Maybe I never told the two of you that I’m supposed to inherit the bookstore next door.”

I made this sound like a fate worse than death.

“That big house, too?” Bea Schell wondered, always conscious of matters financial, not infrequently complaining that her job was underpaid.

Säntisblick with its turrets; few private houses were more imposing other than Schloß Bachtobel further along the ridge overlooking the town.

“Doesn’t sound like you at all,” said Dirk.

“Oh, I don’t know. Zack could cover the walls with obscene graffiti and I could hold court and repeatedly tell the tale of how we solved the case of the three burned books!”

Both Dirk and Bea gave me a long, almost pitying look.

Frederico recommended the quiche.

I insisted that the locally brewed effervescent Zwickelbier was very good.

“So… ‘grave goods’! What were you thinking of, Dirk?”

“It was a story I had drafted. All it needed was to be given a current ‘hook’. Lessinger’s Agnes was easy to find. She put a condolence announcement in our newspaper. I had a brief chat with her. She assumed that three of his fifteenth century manuscripts were what Lessinger had chose to take with him to… the other side.”

“And then you reckoned that a bit of disinformation could do no harm… pointing at books very different from the three we identified.”

“It seemed like a good idea…”

“At the time,” Bea concluded, throwing me a look which begged me to be merciful.

“Did I ever say how I met Rudiger Reiß?” I asked Dirk.

“Sure! You promised us at dinner that you don’t make a habit of picking up men at funerals.”

“But there was no mention of details about the damn books until after he had left, right?”

Bea gave an exaggerated shrug.

“No. Foremost in his mind was the question of whether you were flashing your lovely lady-bits with intent or not. ”

My smile took some effort, my sigh was one of resignation.

“About the books… I guess there could be people who want no further questions asked at all. But others also quizzed the strange but helpful Transylvanian at the undertaker’s place. To satisfy themselves that the books are gone for ever? Or, suspecting a trick, to trace the ones that are the real thing?”

Bea and Dirk exchanged a look.

“Yes, some serious effort was made to… give the impression that three specific books had gone up in smoke,” said Bea.

“So it must appear,” said I, choosing the way Aunt Ursel had put it.

“Lessinger must have found a bookbinder willing and able to replicate the covers. And the inside pages would have had to be good enough to satisfy the passing curiosity of a mortician,” Dirk said, wincing either from a twinge of conscience or from the discomfort of his wounds.

“Brain functioning once more. Reassuring, that!”

Bea Schell bristled.

“Dirk’s story wasn’t such a blunder. It spread the news that three books were consumed by fire. Period. Your Rudiger has an inkling of what books they were. But more important… he and anyone else will now presume them to have been destroyed.”

“One interpretation, Bea. Another is that some could suspect that a cunning cover-up is being attempted… like some Italians made aware of my Google search for the cryptic title of the Swiss file.”

“So what is so important about three old books anyway?”

Dirk’s question I found naïve. And it was not his question to ask. It was mine, to ask of Aunt Ursel.

Would it make a difference if Aunt Ursel and her partner had emerged as winners after their card playing evening? I gave that some thought as I waited for her to return. It was only after Bea and Dirk went up to their turret that I took the books from my rucksack (with a longboard attached by ballistic rip-stop nylon proclaiming my hipster innocence of anything remotely conspiratorial) and placed them, as if on museal display, on the ledge below the big television set in the Bauernstube.

Before Ursel Lange showed up I was able to discover that she had not just archived all the matches played by Borussia Dortmund during the previous season on her Sky box. She also had every episode of the series Dirk watched over and over again, Veronica Mars.

My great-aunt said nothing when she came in and saw the books lined up and begging for a reaction.

She poured a measure of Pflümli to go with her Ovomaltine.

I rolled a spliff. Bea had at first felt slighted when I insisted on taking a taxi home. But Fairouz was also one of the local suppliers of weed and he could spare me the makings of a few small joints. No, I strictly do not carry any hash or grass with me on a train which passes through three countries.

What I didn’t know is how I was supposed to have found out about what Herr Lessinger had chosen to take with him for what was, after all, a very short journey. Yes, it was predictable that I would attend the funeral. I was fond of the vain and often cantankerous old man who had once been Ursel Lange’s lover, who had at her bidding found that the Bookshop needed another trainee.

But had it not been by accident that I’d learned that the coffin contained more than just fleshly remains? Had I not overheard Vera and Agnes I would have been none the wiser.

Although I guess I would have become inquisitive about the nature of the three books which, in my guardianship, safe in my second oven, were in something of a bibliophile limbo. They were quite unrelated, with their obvious age and the German language the sole common attributes. How probable was it that I should share my awakened curiosity at some point with close friends who happened to be, for one, an ardent if erratic investigative journalist and, for the other, no longer ghostly greige but, with ever diminishing doubt in this respect, a spook of another kind.

“So they’re back again, I see. Forty years ago we decided to stop looking for answers. For a while we had become obsessed. I had a tiny black-and-white television set in 1972, but I had missed a lot of the live broadcasting of the Olympic Games in Munich. The coverage of the killings by the Palestinians… that I saw. I was almost fifty at the time. I thought that was very, very old.”

“Not old at all,” I exclaimed, for a moment concerned at my aunt’s forlorn, almost fearful look.

“Louie… Herr Lessinger… had just turned forty. We both reckoned that we were nevertheless far too young to die. Enough lives had been lost, you know.”

I didn’t think she meant the unfortunate Israeli athletes.

Aunt Ursel played with the remote control. I saw her features relax when the big screen was filled with yellow-and-black jerseys as a goal was celebrated with a boisterous homoerotic group hug. Well, maybe the strapping lads were just cold. There was snow on the ground around the pitch; it must have been the recording of a mid-winter game.

I shivered.

Every now and then, not looking away from the television, Ursel divulged disjointed fragments of forty year old memories. Later, when I wished her goodnight, there was no reply. Maybe she had fallen asleep.

SATURDAY 9 JUNE 2012

Two days of foul weather discouraged us from venturing beyond Säntisblick. I was fascinated by the way that Bea Schell, in spite of her new persona, seemed to fit in well with the lifestyle implied by staying in a grand mansion. Frau Steinemann treated her with deference, in contrast to her ill-concealed distaste for the man she could hardly accept as a fitting fiancée.

Dirk kept himself busy speculating with biting sarcasm on the news from Spain. His blog post would assert half-seriously that the huge bailouts of Hispanic financial institutions could mean that certain regions of the Costas should be annexed as German extra-territorial states, given that the financial aid was coming via Frankfurt.

Over meals Aunt Ursel had nuggets of background information for us.

In the early seventies Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been a travelling man, often absent from his tiny one-room flat in Munich for long periods. In pursuit of his incunabulae he was often in Paris where there were many collectors among the bouquinistes who shared his passion.

“Everybody knows about Gutenberg’s Bible, but many, many of the first printed books were not only secular but bawdy, lewd, scurrilous and… as far as Louie was concerned… the more licentious they were, the better.”

At the time his commercial dealings in antiquarian books were very profitable as a result of his bold forays into countries of the Eastern Block. Cracow proved very lucrative, as did Prague.

“He was quite daring, you know. Daring and dashing. Didn’t care much for niceties such as export restrictions, customs formalities or things of that sort.”

And he spent a lot of time in Weinfelden.

I pictured Lessinger translating from the Latin juicy passages of fifteen-century purple prose, stanzas of coarse erotic verse, reading them to Ursel Lange. A bit like spending an evening nowadays watching amateur porn on the internet with a special friend or two.

Although they corresponded and even had the occasional telephone conversation, Lessinger never came to Weinfelden again after 1972.

“We spoke on the cellphone for the last time just after he had been given… the bad news of his prognosis. He was sorry he could not join you to celebrate the completion of your training.”

Bad timing in every sense. Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau a month or so prior to redundancy. We did celebrate after the final oral examination, almost a dozen of us and several from other Manduvel branches in Munich. There was a lot of sympathy expressed for my predicament, suggestions that a transfer to another branch would be the ideal solution.

Trinity Place had been my home for three years. But the Bookshop closure should not weigh too much on my mind, I was told.

We all got quite drunk. There were three girls for every boy in our little group. But I chose to ignore the possibility of a quickie with Christian, whose apprenticeship had been at a strait-laced Christian book store and who had detected an absence of anything of note underneath my Stella McCartney shift. Not that I was in a bad mood; I am Teutonic enough to appreciate having a qualification rather more useful in the real world than my degree in Amerikanistik.

But our training had not given me the slightest clue about dealing with books like the three lined up under Aunt Ursel’s television.

Dirk’s shoulders were deemed broad enough to carry the heaviest rucksack, the one loaded with all that would be needed for a copious Brotzyt picnic which would mark the half-way point of the day’s hike. Knowing Ursel, the way back would not re-trace our earlier steps. She preferred tours which involved no repetition but constant new discoveries.

Nor would we be heading south to the more serious mountain trails. The Seerücken is a range of gentle hills between the valley of the River Thur and Lake Constance to the north. Dirk and Bea would not be over-taxed, Aunt Ursel promised. I suspected that we would take the route would which included the former gravel pit, now full of rain water, where skinny-dipping was forbidden but practiced by young and old, nonagenarians not excluded.

Aunt Ursel and I practiced a kind of reciprocal respect when it came to direct questions. If interrogated she would go off on a tangent and expound at length on something to do with football or tell some tale of the activities of the music charity which was her other pet theme.

“We had the Amriswiler Stadtmusik playing Smoke On The Water with the guitar parts played on alphorns. Quite memorable, and a wonderful way of getting young people to take a second look at our musical tradition…”

This flummoxed Dirk, who thought of himself as a passing good interviewer. He had only asked how Ursel Lange first became involved with our three books.

“Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple, released in 1972,” Bea interjected to my astonishment. She went on to add that the college band had played it at football games.

1972, I thought.

“College band? American football?” Ursel asked with a small frown.

The Fightin’ Aggies Marching Band, composed of over three hundred men and women from the Corps of Cadets of the Texas A&M University, is the largest military marching band in the world. Although I was no longer sure what to believe when Bea Schell was generous with information. Had she studied in America before joining Segirtad GmbH, the software firm in Munich’s south? At a college where, as I discovered later, military training is part of the curriculum?

Bea had been assigned a slouchy sun-hat, found on a shelf in the Säntisblick cloakroom, which advertised a Swiss discount supermarket. In hiking shorts with multiple pockets and an old sweatshirt which shouted ‘A&M’ rather than ‘A&F’ Bea two-pont-zero cut a good figure. Her legs, previously never revealed above the knee, were slim but well muscled.

Dirk’s baseball cap was emblazoned with the initials LAPD. He was not often without some sartorial allusion to his fascination with the netherworld in which thrillers are set.

“It was the tune the German defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg requested for his military farewell from office, played by the brass band of Berlin’s guard battalion,” said Ursel, warming to her theme.

“Well played, too, considering that they had only two days to practice it!”

Bea sang the riff a couple of times at the top of her voice, to the consternation of a pair of walkers who were descending the path we were climbing and who likely expected a companionable Gruezi rather than strident seventies heavy metal.

I happen to be unable to carry a tune with any accuracy. I have, however, been known to sing at the top of my voice when bombing downhill on my board from Säntisblick to the valley floor a kilometre below.

We Are The Champions!

That had been my choice for my once-only just-after-midnight naked run, an excruciating rendition. Hans-Peter Danner was a local admirer of long standing. When we had both been just thirteen or fourteen he had turned my head with his obvious and precocious ‘bad boy’ posturing. With him his moronic but loyal best friend Rico Bley last year I had that night drunk far too much Obstler. Hans-Peter had captured my exploit on his camcorder, leaning over the boot of his Golf GTI convertible while Rico drove the car down the hill ahead of me. I was told afterwards that we had reached a speed of eighty kilometres an hour. A tumble would have had serious consequences. It had been unforgivable recklessness, but also tremendously sexy. YouTube found the graphic documentation of my mesonoxian madness too explicit but it was present on a few other video sites, fortunately with my dire singing replaced with some dismal Swiss synthy-pop. I thought I might ask Bea if she could take the clip down.

That was within her capability, I was certain.

“The firm has a policy which is inspired by Google. Segirtad allows us to devote a percentage of our time to projects of our own. So I thought… hey, maybe there’s stuff I can do with those books… I can call on tools which didn’t exist forty years ago, use analytical models which are still in beta.”

Ursel nodded as if she understood what being in beta meant and then moved on from the alphorn to the Schwyzerorgeli (a Swiss accordion with a diatonic right-handed keyboard and a chromatic left-handed one) and its suitability for the playing of Alpine melodies in the Lydian mode.

Poor Dirk! He might have given up and decided to find a story idea in the nexus between football and musicology.

Eight

We had stopped at a tiny café in an even tinier village for refreshing Süßmost, cloudy apple wine. From Aunt Ursel Dirk was learning much about the singing of football supporters, specifically the musical taunts exchanged by fans of teams whose rivalry is more than sporting, an expression of racial or sectarian allegiance.

The sun was high, summer had returned, the shade of a parasol welcome and the view down to Lake Constance and across to the German shore in the far distance worthy of a picture postcard. Both Bea and I decided that our legs called for the application of sun lotion.

“So coming here… to help me… is part of your work?” I asked her.

“In a way. Although it’s a wonderful excuse to see you in your Swiss hideaway… which is something far beyond what I might ever have expected. As for my work… it’s about solving puzzles. You know about 1972?”

“Sure… Deep Purple… you mentioned it earlier. And it was the year when Ursel and Louie Lessinger split up, I guess.”

1972 was also the year when the premises adjacent to Brunnenbach Bücher on Marktplatz in Weinfelden had not housed an establishment as ambitious or sophisticated as Wystübli. The Golden Bowl had been as disreputable as the food served was inedible. It was said to be a front for all manner of illicit activities profitably perpetrated across Canton Thurgau by a Chinese clan which had no lack of gangland enemies.

It had been the conclusion of the Kantonspolizei that one such hostile grouping had not merely opted for overkill but had also demonstrated remarkable stupidity. The hit had devastated not The Golden Bowl but the bookstore next door. Brunnenbach Bücher was well insured and was soon refurbished and modernized. The Golden Bowl was closed down for repeated contravention of hygiene regulations, but many years later.

Life goes on.

“You did some homework before coming here. Weinfelden 1972? As well as shopping for the new two-point-zero look,” I suggested.

Bea frowned at the frayed hem of her hiking shorts.

“Contact lenses again, rather than glasses. Shopping was not involved, Thea. Unlike you I am not well-off, far from it. I just went back to how I was before I took on the goody-goody ‘greige ghost’ persona. That was… seen as needed for my work with one particular… client.”

“Lost a client, have you?”

“The project was productive and then terminated. So I can move on.”

“Feel free to rummage through my wardrobe. There’s some gear from last year which is very two-point-zero… borrow what pleases you. Tell me… being so prim and engaged to Dirk… was that all play acting, too?”

That got me a very no-nonsense look.

“Marriage may not be on the cards. But he’s not available for borrowing this summer. Okay?”

I supposed it was. I didn’t feel much like arguing the point with someone who might have undergone military training in Texas and had so compellingly impersonated the greige ghost, who had gone undercover for a long two years for reasons I dared not even begin to guess.

We had reached the spot where we would picnic after a liberating al fresco dip.

The gravel pit had last been worked in the fifties and early sixties and had been almost completely reclaimed by nature. Only the forlorn, rusty jib of a crane had been left behind to remind of earlier commercial exploitation. The northern lip of the depression was shaded by large oaks and a flat shelf just below was a popular picnic spot. Charred bricks were scattered around begging for re-assembly as an improvised barbecue grill.

At the far end of the excavation there were still traces of where motocross bikes had disturbed the tranquillity of the clearing. But this activity had been more strictly dealt with than the transgressions of shameless unclothed bathers.

Dirk had our attention. After his abject failure to extract from Aunt Ursel any answers to his questions he now sought to cover himself with glory by reciting some highlights of his still young journalistic career. He could not cover himself with much else, nor did he seem much inclined to. Nor would we have wanted him to. He also had a very well formed arse.

He had in truth shown precocious investigative promise by ignoring the maxim which adjured that one was ill-advised to shit on one’s own front doorstep. The door in question was that of the posh boarding school (even more snobbish than my own) where Dirk had been in his final year.

That for sons of Gulf state princelings passing grades could be had for a pecuniary recognizance was to be deplored. Dirk did so with a couple of thousand well chosen words in a malicious and snarky exposé.

Thus it was that (together with sundry carefree sons of Araby) he failed to pass his Matura, the Austrian equivalent of the Abitur, the German certification that secondary schooling had been satisfactorily completed.

There followed Dirk’s first success as a junior reporter, the dismantling of a Munich edifice, that of a very wealthy club owner who was as much part of the Bavarian jet-set Schickeria as his clientele. Sepp was outed as a supplier of recreational drugs on a grand scale, looking after the needs of the rich and infamous. The three-part story was praised by the Polizeidirektion München although thereafter Dirk himself was obliged to find a new dealer.

That the marriage of two socialites served only to mask the fact that both husband and wife also had long-standing and ongoing same-sex liaisons was story the tabloids took up and ran with for weeks. I forget which of the protagonists was a cousin Dirk loathed.

Then there was the well researched investigation of the manicure salons proliferating like rabbits all over Germany. Hot button issues like human trafficking and illegal immigration were touched upon. That story had occasioned Dirk’s first experience of being ‘warned off’. It had cost him the painful extraction of a toe-nail.

My old friend Hans-Peter had come to be the proprietor of La Belle, the single cosmetic salon in Weinfelden. He had girls from Laos and Vietnam to do our nails although he was quite happy to handle intimate waxes himself. He also owned Cherie-Bar just outside the town limits where the girls hailed from Central Europe, served drinks and fulfilled the erotic fantasies of relatively undemanding Swiss men of little sophistication. An enterprising rogue, Hans-Peter Danner.

But back to Dirk. The water in the gravel pit had been neither as deep nor as cold as might have been anticipated. Splashing around in it had been invigorating but it had done nothing to diminish the distinctive dimensions of Dirk.

“Oh, my goodness!” Aunt Ursel had exclaimed. She might have protested that her reaction was to the sight of Dirk’s mangled left big toe.

Bea Schell looked self-satisfied and proprietorial. But she thanked me for my tip that Hans-Peter’s ministrations could help her to complete her transformation to her two-point-zero iteration. She had had no hesitation about stripping off. It came as something of a surprise to me that she had two neat and presentable tits. I suspected that artificially enhanced cleavage belonged now to the past.. As ‘ghost’ she had tended to present what I would call a mono-mammary bosom, like a transverse bolster across her chest, a rounded presence beneath grey or beige blouses, shirts or twin-sets, a pillow for a weary head.

Nice breasts and a full Brazilian to come.

“You took your prissy good girl cover to extremes, did you not? I mean… who was to notice whether or not you were clean shaven?”

The look she shot me was large calibre, for elephant, for bear, for a Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau prone to spontaneous articulation of any passing thought. The cellphone in one of the many pockets of her shorts chirped. I found it odd that such a geek would not have the latest iPhone but instead a much bulkier, older looking device. She read text on the display and gave a quick nod.

“We are, I think, of interest to a snooper, Thea.”

Bea’s cellphone was not a smartphone. It was a super-duper smart cellphone.

“Side-burst pattern encryption, among other features.”

Okay. Another feature I understood better. The cellphone could scan wireless frequencies being used in the immediate vicinity. Bea’s guess was that there was a transmitter installed on top of the abandoned jib arm, and that the data stream was originated from a video camera with a perfect view of any illicit nude bathers.

“Law enforcement?”

“I doubt if they would go to the trouble. More likely a local electronics buff with voyeuristic bent. If he’s gay then he must be enjoying the sight of Dirk a whole lot.”

Dirk Seehof rose in my estimation, remaining steadfast and unwavering as he unpacked our Brotzyt from the heavy rucksack he had carried without complaint. Frau Steinemann had included Cervelat sausages which seemed quite puny. Comparisons are odious. Ursel Lange amazed me by throwing me a surreptitious wink.

My aunt had the beginnings of a very slight stoop but could best be called sinewy. And leathery, but in the sense of fine old gloves, cherished, still serviceable and with a distinguished patina. Her grey hair was thinning, I noticed. A vanity undiminished had moved Ursel to install a solarium couch in the lower floor of Säntisblick. I think I used it more than she did. Gravity had not spared the old lady’s breasts and buttocks but on the whole I hoped I might look as good if permitted to live to such an age.

We lit no fire. The rucksack Dirk had carried contained a one-time grill contraption which sufficed to get the Cervelat sausages spluttering. Bünderfleisch, big crispy radishes and Appenzeller cheese and whole-wheat bread, all washed down with a single bottle of local beer for each of us. More would have made Dirk’s burden much heavier and us more sleepy than we should be with the rest of the hike to be completed.

Three pairs of eyes (and maybe the camera on the jib) watched Dirk get back into his trousers. Which I found horrible; not the observation, which was quite diverting, but the trousers themselves. Such as terminate below the knee but well above the ankle I simply find hideous and emasculating, even when they contain redeeming grandeur.

I expected Aunt Ursel to be more forthcoming on the way back. She often was, sharing her knowledge of flora and fauna, of the history of the region going back to the Romans and beyond, of the predilections of the local foresters. One whose cabins we passed had the reputation of being odd.

Bea confirmed as we went by that the video signals from the gravel pit were in fact being received by the cabin’s high-tech Peeping Tom occupant.

Then Ursel Lange was minded to touch on the subject which had brought three of us to Weinfelden.

“What do you know of your grandfather, Theodora?” she asked.

Not much, to be honest. Omi had mostly avoided mention of the husband born in 1910 who died in 1968. Who else had there been to tell me anything more than my aunt herself had divulged in dribs and drabs over the years? I knew that old Heinrich, although German, had settled in Switzerland when his father bought the town’s bookshop in the late twenties, that Heinrich had been married to Ursel in 1937 when she was nineteen and he was two years younger. The divorce was in 1942 and then Heinrich then wed my Omi, whom I remember with affection for her kindness and understanding of a difficult girl growing up. I had been thirteen when Erika Lange died.

My aunt had never denied that there was a whiff of scandal surrounding the divorce. Nor had she made any effort to disabuse me of my assumption that any éclat stemmed from her attitude towards sex which was for the times radically permissive. As indeed it had remained.

Young Boys for ever!

“You know, 1972 was not the first time that Brunnenbach Bücher was attacked. There was a very violent incident in ’39… maybe ’40.”

Bea and Dirk had moved ahead on a stretch of the trail wide enough for four to walk abreast.

“Nazi sympathisers! Swiss copycats inspired by the book burnings promoted by Goebbels back in ’33!” said Dirk.

“And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.”

Aunt Ursel gave Dirk a long look.

“Quite the opposite, young man. This was years later and the books on display in Marktplatz… in German, French and Italian… all echoed the themes elaborated in Mein Kampf, spoke of Lebensraum and Aryan supremacy… the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings of Nazi dogma.”

I almost tripped on an exposed root.

“In Heinrich Lange’s shop window?” I said with a slight squeak.

“Yes. Like his father, Heinrich was a true believer. In 1936, the year before we married, he and his father attended the Olympics in Berlin. As soon as he came back Heinrich became a member of the Swiss National Front. That was the organization convinced that the ‘ethnically compatible’ populations of the north-eastern cantons of Switzerland should be citizens of the Greater Germany.”

So that had been the opprobrium bringing shame to the Marktplatz, shame and retaliation.

A gate blocked the path ahead. Dirk opened it when the train had rushed past, speeding up the flanks of the Seerücken on its way to Kreuzlingen, the town divided by the frontier on the other side of which was the German city of Konstanz.

“But his… Nazi politics were no problem for your sister, my Omi?”

Once across the railway line it was a short downhill stroll to the outskirts of Weinfelden.

“She was clever. She pushed him gently but firmly in a different ideological direction. Different, but just as fraudulent, dangerous and perverse. He became a fervent convert to fundamentalist Catholicism. My sister was religious but not fanatical. In fact it may have led her to question her own faith when she saw that Heinrich’s new zeal was just as excessive and obsessive as his former one. She was a loyal wife, though, but I think one of the happiest days of her life was when Heinrich Lange was buried in 1968.”

For a minute or so Aunt Ursel trudged ahead, dealing in silence with memories which were still painful. I remembered Omi’s funeral. I’d been thirteen. When Heinrich Lange died I had not even been born.

“Well, one way or another that explains two of the books, doesn’t it? One Nazi, the other religious.”

Ursel whipped round.

“Wrong, Dirk. The notebook with the Nazi emblem on the red leatherette cover only reached us much later, long after old Heinrich was gone.”

Aunt Ursel was not sure how the Fortezza file and the Black Madonna monograph had come into the hands of Heinrich Lange.

“During the war years, I imagine. They were entrusted to him for safe-keeping. His will stipulated that both Erika and I must do likewise. They were to be given every protection. It was our duty, not open to question.”

Not that they were locked in any safe. Heinrich Lange had believed that best hidden was in plain sight. At Brunnenbach Bücher the two volumes were shelved in the antiquarian section among a miscellany of books devoted to Swiss historiography. Each of these dusty tomes, seldom examined and even more rarely bought, trampled anew across the Rütli meadow where in 1307 three ‘oath-takers’, Eidgenossen, swore allegiance to the earliest confederacy of cantons.

“The Nazi stuff had all gone?” Dirk ventured.

“From the shop, yes, and Notre-Dame de Champbasse was right there with the Fortezza file guarded, one might say, by William Tell.”

“Heinrich Lange’s flirtation with Nazi ideology… even the fact he was German… the good people of Weinfelden forgave him?” Bea wondered.

“He kept a low profile during the war years. And he had not been alone in his beliefs, after all. As a holier-than-thou follower of the Church of Rome in its most restrictive form he became something of a recluse. He took up bee-keeping and planned to build a chapel in the garden of our house…”

Aunt Ursel shook her head.

“The chapel never happened and Heinrich Lange died leaving his magnum opus unfinished, the definitive account of St. Guinefort’s miracles.”

Even Dirk was lost for words when we learned that St. Guinefort was a thirteenth-century French dog revered as a saint after miracles were reported at his grave although the hound was never in fact canonized by the Church.

The Mighty Quinn

I wondered for a moment if I had inherited any of my grandfather’s madness as well as the painting.

St. Guinefort. A couple of type-written pages taken at random were more amusing to read than the Notre-Dame de Champbasse text. In my mind’s eye I kept on seeing Snoopy wearing a halo, although the doings of those who conducted blood thirsty rituals at the holy greyhound’s shrine were far from edifying.

“Could there be a Disney movie in it?” Dirk wondered. The holy grail of an investigative journalist was to have his story bought by Hollywood for filming.

Who Let The Dogs Out?

I read more of my grandfather’s meandering tale of cynocephalic superstition and his contorted musings about the infallibility of canonizations. Aunt Ursel had probably thought that it would be a welcome distraction from the three books I had brought back to Weinfelden and had given me the pile of pages before retiring for a nap.

Bea and Dirk were more focussed, Dirk awestruck by the menu listing the crime series stored on my aunt’s Sky Box, Bea cautious in her appraisal of the three books on the ledge.

Caute, sed impavide, so goes the Latin maxim. ‘Cautious but without fear’. It is the motto of a Scottish baronial family but also of Segirtad International. I hadn’t known that the concern was Swiss, with world headquarters in the mountains of the Engadin. The name of the outfit was in the regional language and meant ‘security’. No messing about, none of the coyness of Blackwater, Alba, Greystone, Titan, Sandline or Aegis, firms inclined to resort to such euphemisms as ‘situational awareness’ when speaking of plain old espionage.

Noble words can be the disguise of base intentions.

The new Bea took some getting used to. She had wanted to change when we got back to the house, the invitation to plunder my wardrobe on her mind.

Halter-top, backless, sky blue, quite short, quite sheer, two years old, suited her. In that dress from the Brazilian designer Osklen I had thought I looked fragile and submissive.

Bea 2.0 looked fragile and authoritative.

Impavide.

Dirk protested that the dress was diaphanous enough to allow her black thong to show through. Bea shrugged. Later when we went into town the panty problem was resolved. I heard the rumble of my thunder being stolen.

“The man who was your grandfather, Thea, may have been a bit of a nut case but that is not relevant to the books he was asked to look after. He was a man who would tend to obey orders given by men in black… either the black of the SS uniform or the black Jesuit cassock.”

“I don’t think Heinrich Lange was a Jesuit…”

“No… more on the lunatic fringe, the frantic faithful. He would feel at home there after his espousal of Nazi thought. Fact remains… two of these books were given to him to guard. The third was added later. When? How? Was it the new arrival which prompted Lessinger and your aunt to start probing, asking questions which led to the 1972 warning? And how was it that the three damn books once again survived?”

Until Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger asked me to get my hands on the damn books my biggest problem in life had been my effort to exude the ‘I’m in charge’ coolitude which Bea now radiated.

“Aunt Ursel will tell us more… but in her own sweet time. As Dirk learned, she does not respond well to direct questioning.”

Bea shrugged.

“Her own sweet time, fine. But remember… when you entered the Fortezza file number as a Google search term there was interest from Italy. Because of the Black Madonna? I think not. What does Fortezza mean to you, Thea?”

A file missing from the official Swiss archives, I wanted to say. I thought an answer like that might have seen me sent to stand in the corner of the classroom.

“Not that Pizzeria in Locarno…”

Nor the Florentine makers of men’s outerwear with design based on the benefits and principles of a fortress.

Nor Hotel Fortezza… on the island of Crete.

There’s a Fortezza Winery in the beautiful rolling Sierra foothills of Auburn California.

Apart from a couple of bed-and-breakfasts and the aforesaid pizzeria, there is no significant Fortezza in the Swiss canton of Tessin. So why a Swiss file?

Not a much better response to judge from Bea’s look.

“Correct. I also thrust aside any thoughts of the Fortezza Crypto Card, which is something I happen to know well.”

This, I learned, was an information security system that implements cryptographic algorithms to create a computer-based based security token. Each individual who is authorized to see protected information is issued a card that stores private keys and other data needed to gain access. The Fortezza card has been used in government, military, and banking applications to protect sensitive data.

“Aha! Not around in 1939, though!” I said brightly.

Dirk cleared his throat as he plugged his laptop into the big forty inch monitor.

“No, you need to go back a century earlier, to 1838.”

There was nothing clever I could say.

“Franzenfeste!” Dirk announced

It is called Franzenfeste in German but South Tyrol is Italian territory, the autonomous province of Alto Adige where a majority of the population are German speaking. Built by the Austrian Emperor Franz I, Fortezza was once considered to be Europe’s strongest fortress. The defensive fortification never experienced a real battle, though, and was soon technically obsolete. Beginning in 1890, the fortress served as a powder magazine, first for the Austrians, and then for the Italian army after 1918. The fortress, built of massive granite blocks, has shaped the landscape of the narrow valley right up until the present day. The fortification comprises three separate levels: the lower fortress, the middle fortress, and the upper fortress. Planned as a hideout, the upper fortress is accessible through a steep tunnel with 451 steps. There are caverns, narrow passages and broader corridors that interconnect the different areas, forming a real labyrinth. There is a neo-Gothic chapel in the large courtyard behind the main entrance to the middle fortress.

The photos Dirk had downloaded from Wiki and Flickr were impressive, and some of the architectural plans looked very similar to those in the Fortezza file from 1939. A Swiss file concerning an Italian fortress?

“It has been renovated and given extensions by a daring post-modernist architect a few years ago. It is now the venue for cultural festivals and avant-garde art events. We should visit…” Dirk concluded.

“I’m not sure if Thea actually wants to be visiting Italy at the moment, Dirk.”

True. I wanted to visit the toilet, or maybe a bar. Aunt Ursel kept little in the way of drinks apart from her beloved Pflümli. Most guests passed when she offered it. I think that’s one of the reasons she stocked the potent sweet plum brandy.

Nine

It was as if the three of us after being cooped up together needed an alternative to each other’s company. At Wystübli I introduced Bea to Martin, one of the regulars and a nice guy whose problem is that he is a total petrol-head, unable to talk for long about anything unrelated to cars. The photos on his cellphone were impressive, loving portraits of the vehicles he had created, power-enhanced versions of automobiles which were already quite devastatingly potent. Bea knew her stuff when it came to something called engine remapping which (I learned before leaving them to it at the bar) had to do with fuel supply, ignition timing, injector opening times and other alterations in order to provide a more efficient combustion. I think they were glad not to be obliged to explain stuff to an ignoramus. Inevitably, on the eve of the Grand Prix in Canada, they would be sharing their enthusiasm for Formula One racing.

Not that I have anything against wheels, but I prefer them to be on my skateboard or inline skates. At the far end of the bar I spotted Renate and her new husband, Eddi, who always had an oafish grin when he saw me. Renate, the owner of a shop selling lamps and electrical fixtures, was also the captain of the local women’s rollerblading club, Weinfelden Gone Wild. There were enough members to field two five-a-side roller derby teams. Once a year we ritually watched the 1975 movie Rollerball, horrified by its ultra-violence but also thrilled by it. I made a favourable impression when I informed the girls that much of the action had been filmed in Munich.

I had run often with Weinfelden Gone Wild during previous summers. Renate was disappointed when I said that my stay would be a short one and that I could not be counted on for the upcoming flat-track derby against the crew we called the Floozies, although our local rivals were officially the Frauenfeld Furies.

Eddi Zimmermann was an incomer from Zurich, assistant manager of a small Weinfelden hotel. His smirk was explained by his familiarity with and frank appreciation of the video of my nude downhill chase.

I drifted across to give Dirk some moral support. Chatting up the nubile hairdresser, Vroni, was not going well. Wheels again! Dirk was trying to get her to understand the rush of riding a fixie. There was a moment when Vroni showed interest, but she had misheard. The word fixie sounds very much like a vulgar German term for copulation. I wondered if I should allude to Dirk’s hidden asset. Aunt Ursel had apologized for not believing me about its signal merits. Vroni complemented me on my skin-tight black jeans; she had a pair which were similar, also with rivets liberally applied. I nodded my thanks. My jeans were decorated rather garishly with Swarovski rhinestones, not rivets made of plastic looking like metal.

Martin ‘the Motor’ passed me in a hurry to get to the men’s room. I wondered if he had become conscious that Bea wore the blue dress and yellow high-top Chucks and nought else. He would understand; I thought. His track race cars were stripped of anything superfluous to reduce their kerb weight.

Bea joined me.

“Martin reckons I can get even more push out of the Corolla.”

Ridiculous! Only the first and last few metres of the drive from Säntisblick to the Marktplatz had been below the speed limit.

“You’re a very good driver, Bea. Did you have special training?” I asked, making conversation while Martin was gone.

No tell. Bea two-point-zero, avid tuner of engines, owner of a super-duper smart cellphone, was as inscrutable as the greige ghost had been bland.

“I did. Advanced driving courses are available for civilians as well, you know.”

Now that was a tell. Although, I felt, no accident.

“Tell me something of your work. Dirk had his moment, recounting for us the milestones of his career. Aunt Ursel was fascinated.”

Less by his stories, though. And I had heard them all before, in his bed. The ‘old’ Bea had insisted that her job was too specialized and so very boring that it was not worth speaking of. The relevant section of the Segirtad website gave nothing away apart from windy platitudes about ‘leadership in the knowledge business’ and ‘full spectrum dominance’ in ‘advanced niche areas of cyber expertise’ which remained unspecified.

Bea still seemed reluctant.

“You’re something of a spook, right?”

“Only very vaguely,” she dissembled.

“You’ve learned to drive fast and shoot straight!”

“Basic skills,” she said modestly.

“Of course. Your weapon of choice is the computer!”

“Things are changing fast, Thea. People communicating with other people using their laptops… that’s so yesterday. There was no panting Peeping Tom with old-school binoculars at the gravel pit, right? More and more we have things communicating with other things, artificial intelligence learning much faster and much more than any human could ever equal or deal with. Segirtad keeps pace with all that and watches how in parallel humans themselves are changing, interfacing with the world through augmented reality, escaping in large numbers into virtual existences, simulating vanishing human relationships with digital avatars. Inanimate companionship is enfolding us, grasping us in its binary embrace.”

Did Bea know of my inanimate Bob? That stands for battery-operated-boyfriend, like the Duracell bunny untiring and never unfaithful.

“Hold on! You lost me at ‘binary embrace’! But… just to keep things simple… what I am faced with is a mystery concerning three old books. Each one is very different, all three are inanimate. They are not able to tell us their story, however, nor are they able to communicate with each other.”

A look of sympathy crossed Bea’s features.

“Maybe they do communicate! You might find the idea far-fetched but it intrigued my supervisor enough for him to approve my request for leave.”

Martin was on the way back. Might he spare a glance for Bea’s derrière, so tight and shapely and veiled by mere gossamer? No!

“You know, Bea, I think there might be a compressor which is compatible. But it would call for a slight dome on the car’s bonnet.”

MONDAY 11 JUNE 2012

A trinity? A trifecta wager? Three books. One message?

I had slept badly and endured a lurid, swirling dream. The setting was my wardrobe, which had expanded to assume vast proportions. My sisyphean task seemed to be to remove from the rails any garment which might look better on Bea than on me. Which might have resulted in an empty wardrobe but I was constantly having to deal with Renate and Eddi Zimmermann, both naked on inline skates, Eddi with an erection as well as his oafish grin. Martin made a blindingly fast drive-through on my skateboard which he had motorized. Vroni the hairdresser sat weeping in a corner. The person who loomed in front of me wearing the single long evening dress I possessed (by Chloé) turned out to be Rudiger Reiß, of all people. I was throwing my clothing into Bea’s Corolla which was driven by Louie Lessinger who was trying to tell me something but the sound of the engine was too loud.

The alarm tone on my cellphone was the infernal clatter of a skateboard on cobble-stones.

The perfecta bet needed first and second to be in order. The red notebook had been added later. But what was the right order for Fortezza and Champbasse? The file of interest to some party in Italy seemed so very ordinary, much detail was in respect of rostering of troops, the dispositions made for their accommodation and provisioning. Kitchen equipment was to be procured from the Zurich firm Techag AG. That provided an aha moment. It was the firm which later became Turmix, the maker of my espresso machine which I pressed into service as I asked myself an important question.

“Do you or do you not have a hangover?”

We all did. What had started as a lazy Sunday became a tediously boring Sunday and then a day darkened by frustration. Dirk was furious when he received the verdict from his editor. His post postulating a Teutonic take-over of the part of the Spanish coastline most favoured by German tourists would not go online. Ostensibly the reason was that the Munich newspaper was hoping to win a big campaign promoting Iberian tourism. Dirk, however, knew his editor well.

“Damned hypocrite! His grandfather was with the Condor Legion during the Civil War!”

It had been my idea to call up Fairouz and have him take us to Cherie-Bar, the establishment which was emphatically not in Weinfelden, if a mere hundred metres beyond the town’s limits. This was now the second enterprise owned by my old friend Hans-Peter. The premises had once housed a factory producing bonbons, but it had been closed when lawyers deemed that the colourful sweets infringed on the intellectual property of the makers of Gummy Bears. The garish bonbon colour scheme of the single story building had been left unchanged. Hans-Peter had decided that all that was needed was some neon to evoke sinful Las Vegas in the leafy depths of rural Thurgau.

Dorfpuff!

Not quite that, not exactly a ‘village brothel’, more a tease, a promise which generally would not be kept. I’d spotted a place of comparable mendacious allure, Tittty Twister, just outside Frauenfeld.

I wouldn’t count Ludmilla and Yulia as friends. We exchanged greetings when our paths crossed in Weinfelden where they took pains not to appear unduly attractive. Hans-Peter had told me the back story. They had indeed started by serving drinks to the Cherie-Bar clientele which was almost a hundred percent male. Then, from the girls point of view, everything went wrong. Their looks so impressed the proprietor of a boat-building yard on Lake Constance that he used them as models for a poster. One thing led to another and a Zurich agency saw in them the statuesque sensuality of Central European athletes, the glamour of countless Sharapovas, and had signed them on.

The problem? Walking the fashion shows and posing for photographers was much harder work. They happily returned to the flat above Cherie-Bar, it was their home and Hans-Peter their protector. The bar thrived with a blow-up of an Italian Vogue cover of Ludmilla having pride of place together with a big poster of Yulia in boots made by Bally. Hans-Peter sent lustful drinkers, local farmers and such, looking for more than sultry drink service and barely-there outfits, to places like Titty Twister, where the girls would never, ever be mistaken for models.

Bea loved the story. A baker I knew from town was visibly trying to work up the courage to chat us up.

“But they surely have their price?” she said.

I loved the dresses Ludmilla and Yulia had been given from the current Just Cavalli collection. Such gorgeous whores indeed had their price, paid gladly by lawyers, accountants and business owners from far beyond Weinfelden, even from Italy. Sure!

From time to time Rico would be handling the table service while the girls earned more much money with far less effort in the Veneto or in the little flat above the bar.

Hans-Peter’s champagne was not the best by any means. But he insisted that for old times’ sake it was on the house.

“You and he… have history?” Bea Schell concluded.

I confess that my answer had been an un-ladylike burp. The baker looked shocked.

We had returned with Fairouz in his taxi. He had handed over a matchbox containing the half-ounce of hash that I had requested.

“You do have a hangover, but a spliff would not be the best remedy,” said Bea who was in better shape than I was.

A double espresso had helped slightly, as had the discovery that my wardrobe had resumed its normal size and shape. I hunted for what might be seen as suitable for what Aunt Ursel had in mind. She had left a note in my room.

“Dress for Zurich. We shall leave after breakfast.”

Dirk could look quite respectable when the occasion (or a note from Ursel Lange) demanded. He had spent his school years constrained in a conservative preppy carapace and so it was understandable that his fixie bike, and the collection of outrageous messenger-look hipster clothing it entitled him to wear, was an understandable rebellion. Black stretch Spandex cycling shorts, however, he wore only seldom although he had them on the first time I saw him in the Bookshop. Go figure.

But in a blue blazer and sand-coloured chinos he looked every inch of what he was, the son of a well-situated senior executive in the car industry playing at being an investigative journalist. He looked well dressed for that key interview, or today for an expedition to Zurich which, when planned by Ursel Lange, always included an excellent lunch in the august surroundings of the Kronenhalle, Heugümper or on the Rive Gauche Terrasse of the Baur au Lac hotel.

Bea was unhappy. My shoes didn’t fit her, she had to make to with black ballerinas of her own. They went fine with the black-and-orange checked Max Mara wrap-over dress of mine. Had I not tossed it into the back of the car with Louie Lessinger at the wheel?

No, of course not.

I had expected Bea to go for my big Bottega Veneta bag which was the right shade of orange. Funny that she preferred her well-worn shoulder bag from Mulberry which she wore strapped inelegantly across her body.

We joined the Intercity train which would make two further stops during the hour it would take to reach Zurich, settling in a first class compartment for four. There was some small talk about our evening at Cherie-Bar, giving Aunt Ursel the chance to share gossip about the way Ludmilla and Yulia turned the heads of otherwise upstanding Weinfeldeners.

“Not quite the place for people like us,” Aunt Ursel opined, as if in spite of her years qualified to judge.

“An occasional walk on the wild side, a bit of madness on my board or blades… I quite like a frisson of risk in my life,” I said unwisely.

That got long looks from both Ursel Lange and from Bea, the latter looking disapproving. Her ladies-who-lunch look annoyed me. Seeking to be different I had gone for a two-year-old colourful Prada schoolgirl-ish ensemble. I had had a real shopaholic phase, yes, but that’s pretty much in the past now.

Dirk, not chastened by the failure of his direct questions in the past, tried again.

“After your short marriage to Heinrich Lange did you move out of Säntisblick?”

Aunt Ursel responded with no delay.

“No, I did not. There was tittle-tattle about our ménage à trois, but there always is when three people seem very close. However when Heinrich got religion it was assumed that there could not be anything really wicked going on at Säntisblick. Even our enthusiastic espousal of heliotherapy was accepted after a while.”

Dirk looked puzzled and reached for his cellphone.

“The beneficial effects of sunlight on bared skin. Dr Auguste Rollier at the Clinique La Riondaz in Leysin, his ‘sun cure’… I checked a lot of stuff out to find intellectual excuses for my own love of being butt-naked!” I interjected with a straight face.

“Heinrich was a man of contradictions. He was very much opposed to the notion of celibacy. I think my continued… presence was a help for Theodora’s grandmother, who had a lot to put up with.”

“But staying married to a Nazi… that was something you were not prepared to tolerate… and so you divorced,” Dirk persisted.

“Yes, so it must have appeared.”

Aunt Ursel was not in fact answering Dirk, she was prefacing the remarks she had decided to make. We needed, she stressed, to know what she and Louie Lessinger had found out about the Fortezza file forty years before.

“With war looming as a possibility when the thirties were ending there was a lot of posturing and hand-wringing and even the most preposterous strategies were taken seriously.”

The Swiss plan for the defence of the nation might have seemed mad to many. The idea involved giving up to invading Germans the low-lying areas of the country and retreating to the impregnable fastness of the high Alps. The Réduit strategy meant the reduction of Swiss territory to what amounted to the natural fortress of the highest mountains, invulnerable to attack with miles of underground tunnels and caverns, from which guerilla style actions could be launched to wear down the presumed occupier.

Bea nodded, impatient, all of this well known to her from her conflict studies in Texas.

There had been many other ploys mooted which were in a bewildering variety of ways crazy. The gravity of the condition of the proponents ranged from mildly deluded to almost certifiably mad.

The authors of the Fortezza scheme? Perhaps schizoid, unswerving in their belief in the tenets of National Socialism but also sure that Hitler Germany would suffer defeat.

“Already in ’39 predicting that the Germans would lose?” Bea wondered.

“Nazis, yes, but they were also calculating and pragmatic Swiss,” Ursel Lange emphasized.

The Swiss have lived for centuries in peace and have thus been permitted to think in the longer term, not limited like many of their neighbours to measuring time in terms of the periods between intervening hostilities.

“A ‘Thousand Year Reich’… but vanquished by 1943, that was what they foresaw and they worried a lot about the consequences for Switzerland.

“Call me dumb if you like, but if Germany was going to be beaten how could the consequences for the Swiss be bad?” Dirk asked.

“The gold, of course, the pile of gold accumulating here but arriving from Germany, stolen from Jews, looted from the exchequers of occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Nazi-governed Danzig.”

Wiki confirmed that these three sources boosted German official gold reserves by seventy-one million dollars between 1937 and 1939. The pile was growing to become a mountain.

Aunt Ursel pointed out that the Réduit plan had been conceived by an authoritarian Swiss general who at one time had even been an admirer of Benito Mussolini. But his idea was one which involved taking the high ground not only topographically but also morally. It was patriotic, virtuous and high-minded and most assuredly did not include the evacuation of tons of tainted booty from the bank vaults in Bern, Zurich or Basel.

“And so the Fortezza file was about providing a home for that gold, even if the authors were betting on a German defeat?” I suggested.

“Yes. With Germany beaten, all that treasure moved by the Nazis to a neutral country like ours could become a huge embarrassment, no?”

“My recollection is that it did… and indeed still does,” said Bea, waiting until the uniformed conductor had finished checking their tickets and left the compartment.

“Fortezza was intended to spare Swiss blushes.”

That had been the conclusion reached by Ursel Lange and Louie Lessinger in 1972.

At the time, in ’38 and ’39, there seemed to be little probability that Mussolini and Hitler would make common cause, there was no mighty Axis on the horizon. In retrospect the two dictatorships may seem logically and irrevocably linked, but at the time very different flavours of authoritarianism were in play. Italian Fascism rooted in the presumed glories of ancient Rome was very different from a Nazi dogma which repurposed Nordic mythology and derived from it a justification of Aryan supremacy, the entitlement, even the sacred duty to rule the world. Mussolini had even signed up to a treaty with the British and the French which had been meant to thwart German territorial expansion. Then came the annexation of Austria and Il Duce’s campaign to bring Abyssinia back into the Roman embrace. And Britain and France were still believing armed conflict could be avoided.

“Chamberlain… after his meeting with Hitler,” Bea said to herself.

“We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.”

“But for our clever Swiss conspirators at the time, Italian territory had the allure that an off-shore island has these days for financial tricksters, offering not so much concealment as deniability.”

“The idea was to park the gold with the fucking Italians?” Bea blurted out, casting serious aspirations on the probity of an entire citizenry.

Fortezza was as good as moth-balled, reduced to use as stabling for what remained of the Italian cavalry. The gold would have been guarded by troops who appeared to be Italian but who were in reality fiercely loyal Swiss soldiers from the canton of Ticino.

“Aha!” said Bea, impressed by the subterfuge contemplated seven decades earlier.

Ten

Klee and Kandinsky, Braque and Bonnard, Cézanne, Braque, Chagall , Miró, Manet and Picasso.

Dirk gazed round the Kronenhalle, the world’s only art museum masquerading as a eatery, the most famous luxury restaurant in Zurich.

“We had a Monet at home. With Papa being in the car business it was a painting of an automobile in a snowy landscape. And it was a copy, of course.”

“These are all originals. Amazing, when you come to think of it,” Aunt Ursel said, concentrating on the menu of the day.

Tuna sashimi with sweet and sour ginger appealed to me.

“Don’t even think about stealing a painting, Bea. It could well be that the sweet old waitresses are armed… an automatic under each and every crisp white apron,” I said after giving my order to an efficient and unsmiling serving crone.

Bea Schell’s response was a grunt.

“We can take our time with lunch. Our appointment is not until three,” said Aunt Ursel who had decided on a three-course menu. Not wanting to push his luck, Dirk bit off a further direct question. Ursel Lange smiled, absolution granted.

“At the bank, where the originals are,” she said before consulting the wine list.

“The books Thea brought from Munich… the three now at your house… they, too, are fakes?” Bea asked in a very even tone, sparing me the need to open my mouth. I fear I might have squeaked.

“Rather more elaborate than those in Louie Lessinger’s coffin, but… also copies, yes!”

They had been very careful in 1972. The plan had been to confuse. In each case the cover story had been that faithful facsimiles were needed for a film project. The producer, it was asserted, was a stickler for perfection. Three specialists were engaged, all experienced in the creation of movie props which appeared to be authentic. One had satisfied producers at the Cinecittà studios in Rome since Fellini’s finest hour. Another had turned out convincingly aged ‘wanted’ posters for Sergio Leone in Spain. The third had delivered reams of documents for pseudo-documentary films glorifying the doings of the Résistance in France. One man, one book. Each in the form of several copies.

“Wow!” I exclaimed, thinking that such duplicity was little short of grandiose. The serving crone nodded and essayed a smile, thinking that my utterance was provoked by the arrival of my plat du jour.

Dirk looked baffled.

Bea frowned.

“You left the three… counterfeits… in Weinfelden on the shelf in your Bauernstube! Not a bit careless, though?”

Aunt Ursel shook her head, almost dislodging the bright green cloche hat she had chosen, rather strangely I thought, for today’s outing. In Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger’s office there had been a framed photo of the pair of them. In it she had worn that same hat.

“So it must appear,” she said in an undertone before enunciating her choice of wine with clarity and authority.

I misinterpreted Bea’s sudden scowl. She had earphones on and I thought her reaction was to a track shuffled by her music system which displeased her.

“Dirk honey, will ya look a’ that! You gotta take a photo!”

A shit kickin’ Texas accent. Dirk obedient.

The streets narrowed and rose towards the Lindenhof in the centre of Zurich where once a Roman castle had overlooked the river Limmat. On one wall a cascade of lush ivy fell over a large scale piece executed by a talented graffiti artist, the living plant almost becoming part of the picture.

Why was Bea all of a sudden a visiting American tourist, standing pigeon-toed in a very small square where three streets, one of them an alley with shallow steps on one side, came together? There was a stand selling fresh vegetables, not deemed by Bea worth a photo. Nor did she pay any attention to the two young men repairing their old Lambretta scooter.

“Why don’t y’all jest go on ahead!”

A few steps up the alley a cantilevered sign identified the premises of Bankhaus Daetwyler.

Bang!

Quite loud.

But I’m still not quite sure of the order in which things happened.

It seems certain that the pair pretending to mend the scooter were among the very last to gaze upon Bea’s pubes. I had made the appointment for her with Hans-Peter at La Belle. While recovering in hospital the young men might be cursing the ear pieces they had been wearing. Bea thought that an aging seller of tomatoes and cucumbers and cherries might well be deaf. But the boys in their late teens and early twenties too? The old man had left his stall unattended when Bea fired.

Her target was the petrol canister next to the Lambretta.

Bang!

Bea’s cross-body Mulberry bag had been modified to allow for swift access to her weapon. She confirmed later that it was a Sig-Sauer, a compact P224. She had had one knee on the ground, her non-firing foot stretched forward. Which in the orange-and-black wrap-over gave her targets an instant of distraction.

Bang!

Aunt Ursel was composure itself.

“Take them straight back, Thea. Deposit them in your name now…”

Clutching the aluminium briefcase I re-traced my steps to Bankhaus Daetwyler where our business had taken little more than ten minutes. After a further ten minutes I was assured that I was a valued customer. I was also promised that the bank’s surveillance footage of the alley and the little square would be found useless on account of technical defect. Daetwyler had the ‘what goes down in Vegas stays in Vegas’ philosophy. The young woman receptionist, a plain but helpful girl about my age, showed me an alternative exit from the bank, through a very quiet shoe-repair shop a bit further up the hill. She complemented me on my Prada costume.

Bang!

When a very few people looked down from upper windows their attention would have been drawn to the demolished Lambretta still burning and two young men alive but writhing on the cobble-stones. Few would recall an American tourist pair heading downhill and entering a small ice-cream parlour almost invisible in deep shadow.

Aunt Ursel, now without her green cloche hat, was shouting for someone to cellphone the police.

“I can’t call! I never wanted a telephone I can put in my pocket!” she added, doing ditzy with bravura. The cellphone she quite definitely possessed she used in due course to tell me where to find the ice-cream parlour round the corner, not more than a hundred metres distant..

Bang!

A double espresso was, I thought, preferable to any of the exotic ice-creams on the menu.

Bea’s scanner had detected radio chatter in close proximity, her eyes had spotted three apparent sufferers from unilateral anacusis, wearers of what looked like hearing aids, two rather improbable.

“How could you just hang around for the ten minutes or so that we were in the bank?” I asked.

There had been what must have appeared to be a long and very loud telephone conversation conducted in a glass-shattering Texas twang with someone called honey chil’. Bea had turned her back to the men she was watching but had them well in her field of vision thanks to the reflection in the plate-glass window of a shop selling orthopaedic equipment.

“The instant you two came out of the bank with that briefcase there was a burst of wireless traffic… the two guys fiddling with the scooter straightened up… sort of flexing their muscles, you know? And I decided a distraction was called for.”

And Dirk Seehof in the meantime? Should he not look shaken by what he had seen, his fiancée proficient with a weapon? He seemed to be enjoying his big ice-cream sundae.

“There could well have been a watcher at Weinfelden station. There would have been plenty of time to put in place a snatch team at the bank, just in case that turned out to be our destination. Which makes me think it might be wise to check if my Corolla is clean,” special agent Bea Schell continued.

Washing and waxing the car was not what she had in mind. Aunt Ursel nodded.

“Fairouz’s taxi, too. He’s almost my own chauffeur,” she said.

“Good thought. They might have figured that out as well. They will be concerned about our every movement.”

“They!” I spat out, and let far too much sugar spill into my strong coffee.

“The want-the-books-gone gang… the want-their-secrets-unlocked crowd. Either or both. But we have learned something, I think.”

Both the interested parties with their contradictory agendas, Bea deduced, must be established actors, now prompted into actioning a long-dormant legacy dossier.

Her jargon irritated me.

Dirk looked happy.

“You know, there are times when Bea reminds me of the girl who lived a double life in that book by…”

Before he could identify Bea Scholl’s fictional counterpart his attention was drawn to an incoming text message. After a moment he looked up from his iPhone.

“One of the guys they took to the hospital… quite badly injured and gabbling in Italian… was armed and had plastic restraints in his pocket. Paramedics should not Tweet… he’ll be in trouble if identified.”

Absent Bea’s intervention we might all have been in trouble and the books would have been lost to us. And now they knew that their protection included a resourceful, if unlikely, professional.

“It happens quite often… an ultra-priority operation goes quiet… a file gathers dust. Those who for a while wanted all the stops pulled out, demanding warp-speed progress, abruptly hit the brakes and so do not want to know now what they most urgently wanted to know before. We have cases like that at Segirtad… not open, not closed, just in limbo. There’s sig-int… signals intelligence… stuff from the eighties that has never been fully worked up. Cases that remain in suspended animation.”

Dirk had to butt in.

“But Segirtad GmbH isn’t even twenty years old!”

Bea shot him a glance. I caught a moment of hesitation and then a tiny sigh.

“Stuff from the pre-privatisation era, you know?”

My turn to practice a poker face.

“It was Louie Lessinger’s passing that set the wheels in motion again?” I wondered out loud. Aunt Ursel signalled to the gelateristi her desire for a second scoop of something very pink.

“Not to mention the somewhat predictable involvement of a certain Theodora Lange,” my aunt added, quite unruffled by the recent events.

“Yeah, well the damn books are safe again, back in the bank and now under my name! Just to perpetuate the story in a fourth generation.”

“How clever of us to save the originals from harm once again. That will certainly have been noted!”

I couldn’t understand why Aunt Ursel was smiling. Then all at once I could.

“Back in seventy-two you and Louie made no secret of your business with Bankhaus Daetwyler, did you?”

“No, Louie always stood out in a crowd. I had just bought a hideous green cloche hat. We assumed that if anyone happened to be watching us we would not pass unnoticed,” Ursel Lange confessed.

As so often Dirk was a bit slow on the uptake but Bea Schell chuckled.

“One of the interested parties believes you were intent on withdrawing the supposed originals today.”

“Just as Louie predicted. But a brazen sharp-shooting secret agent would have exceeded even his wildest expectations.”

That earned from Bea a spontaneous hug which my aunt accepted with good grace. But for me Ursel Lange had a sympathetic look.

“Better by far if you lot can bring this all to an end.”

“Privatbank Scheune, in the shadow of the Lindenhof, was the target of bandits whose plan was thwarted when their getaway scooter exploded.”

A second Tweet followed.

“Almost caught by the blast was a tiny Smart, one of the few vehicles able to enter such narrow streets. It drove off at speed.”

Bea raised an eyebrow.

“Real Tweets or ours?”

Complicated. Segirtad had found a way of piggy-backing onto Twitter, co-opting existing accounts while remaining untraceable. The first Tweet had been, Bea and Dirk agreed, damage control by Bankhaus Daetwyler. The second had been imaginative embroidery, disinformation invented by Dirk.

So Bea concluded. Wrongly.

“No, there was a Smart. You were busy with your shooting, Bea, but I saw it. And who was... I think… driving. The guy we met at Thea’s place, who enjoyed her asparagus so much.”

Rudiger Reiß?

There was general agreement that quite often Dirk saw things he wanted to see, things which would fit in the context of the thrillers and spy stories he so admired. Surely it was only this mind-set which allowed him to be so sanguine about the very ambiguity of his fiancée.

“What do you think?” Bea asked me,

I just shrugged.

Although we carried no aluminium briefcase we didn’t leave Zurich empty-handed. There were shopping bags from an avant-garde pop-up boutique whose prices even Bea could afford on the salary she always complained about. Civil service remuneration at Segirtad GmbH? Don’t demon code jockeys and cyber-sleuths command top money?

“That’s cute underwear, Bea!” I pointed out a display of panties with witty slogans.

All this and brains too!

“When you met Dirk in that beer-garden… it was your first date, right? I guess your message was less subtle.”

Read my lips!

The skirt had been short, the night long, my knickers earlier boldly discarded and tossed in a waste basket and the last round had been one too many. I badly needed to pee but had no wish to line up with all the other girls. I solved the problem just at the edge of the pool of light cast by the nearest beer-garden lantern. My gesture had not gone unremarked by Bea’s fiancé.