“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,