Читать книгу TheodoraLand - Malcolm James Thomson - Страница 17

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.