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