Читать книгу TheodoraLand - Malcolm James Thomson - Страница 15

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.