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