That image-matching software could be used to find on the interwebs photos of me which were both deliciously and explicitly indecent…
I had begun to consider an interesting idea…
That the roof on which I sunbathed was overlooked by the staff-room of the Technical College…
I had pointed out that any plumbing or electrical problems I had in the flat were resolved by experts from the Berufsschule which backed onto my building. Whether instructors or trainees they were polite and efficient. But my idea was developing. I would mention it when Rudiger Reiß left.
“Okay, you were using Thea as a reference, but it was you talking about sex! And Reiß found you fascinating! He didn’t even glance in Thea’s direction!” Dirk concluded, still miffed.
Not quite true. Before Dirk and Bea arrived (while I was instructing Rudiger Reiß in the fine art of peeling asparagus) I am pretty sure my sitting position was such that he noted my fading ink.
Ex Libris Lessinger.
I am, I suppose, a child of the raunch culture. The very first photo I took when I got my first cellphone with a camera was a blatant nude self-portrait. In that respect I know I am by no means alone.
“Image-matching software… that could be very helpful!” I declared, loud enough to cut short the minor bickering between Dirk and Bea, my back turned to them as I took from the refrigerator another bottle of Saran Nature.
And from the lower oven I took out three books.
The cover with the Helvetic cross, scanned in on my MacBook Pro, generated no direct matches even when Bea ran the software she herself had improved. But there were some close results. The format, the typography and the texture of the cover, field grey but with a coarse linen finish, was that of many bound volumes in various Swiss national archives. The title, Projekt Fortezza, meant nothing to any of us. And there was also what Grigor had suggested was a ‘cellphone number’.
“Civil engineering… archaeology… something along those lines,” said Dirk after flipping through a few pages.
“Makes a change to be dealing with a tangible mystery, not a virtual binary conundrum,” Bea whispered, pushing her glasses up from where they had slipped to the tip of her nose.
The Nazi emblem produced thousands of hits. But I suggested that none would be helpful. What I had in my hands had once been an album of blank pages. These were now filled with dense handwriting in the old Germanic style, the Suetterlin script no longer taught after the war. They would demand time to decypher although Bea thought that there might be an OCR program which could help.
Notre-Dame de Champbasse.
The image of the Magdalene again returned thousand of approximate hits.
“A hundred and eighty Black Virgins in France! But none in the tiny village which was once known as Champbasse,” said Dirk. He was using his own smartphone to consult Google and Wikipedia.
Bea looked disappointed. But I assured her that it was real progress to determine that the Swiss volume was some sort of official record.
“Switzerland… are these books quite soon going to be on their way to your aunt?” Bea Schell wondered.
I though that might be a very good idea, particularly if others in Munich apart from Rudiger Reiß and I were taking an interest. We had not been the only persons sufficiently curious about the contents of the coffin of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger to seek out the Transylvanian mortician. I re-filled empty glasses with Saran Nature.
“Cheers!”
Five
FRIDAY 1 JUNE 2012
Before leaving for the station to catch the Zurich express which I would leave in Weinfelden I checked a local Munich news blog to see if there was anything more about the fire at the Bookshop. The theory now was something of a compromise; less innocent than a mere accident caused by faulty gas heating but not quite as laden with menace as a wilfully introduced explosive device. A large number of cardboard cartons had been delivered to the Bookshop by a removals firm which would have the job of clearing the shelves and allocating contingents of the English books to other Manduvel branches in the city and elsewhere in Germany. The crates were not, it was stressed, flameproof. There was also mention of very inflammable items stored recklessly in the basement below the antiquarian section. A spokesman for Manduvel (I wondered if it might have been Rudiger Reiß) had confirmed this.
Those items, I was pretty sure, were the colour spray aerosol bombs and markers used when we organized a Bookshop event to promote a coffee table volume dedicated to urban art. ProZax was the tag of a trio of graffiti artists and indeed it had been the founding member, Zachary, who had embellished the wall of my flat to such good effect. He would have removed his stuff from the basement had he not been detained by the police. The biggest piece Zack had scribed was deemed politically sensitive, drawing attention as it did to the cover-up of the activities of clerical paedophiles by prominent Bavarian church leaders.
I could, I suppose, have removed the ProZax gear myself.
But was this not a moot point? However flammable the cached aerosols might have been it could hardly have been a matter of spontaneous combustion.
“It’s not a cellphone number, in my opinion. ‘39’ at the beginning is probably not the Italian international calling code… that system is relatively recent. What we have here is more likely an indication of the year.”
Okay, I thought as I concentrated on entering the sixteen digits into the Google search window while listening to Bea on a Skype connection.
“Also… and this is a bit spooky… the suffix ‘Gs5’… may be slightly ominous.”
Almost as she spoke I finished my entry, ‘…Gs5’.
Google failed to return a single hit. I told Bea of the result.
“Fuck!” said Bea, out of character. Her expletives tended to be less vehement and not often vulgar.
The train entered a long tunnel and for a while there was no reception.
“Tunnel!” I explained to Bea who sounded impatient. When the connection was restored she announced that she had been using a very different search engine, one which delivered useful metadata.
“That’s information concerning the search term itself, before showing any list of files found. And your entry gets a ‘ping’… triggers a red flag and the warning that this precise search term is on somebody’s watch list! Whose… I don’t know.”
“Fuck!” I agreed.
“Funny, that ‘Gs’ extension… quite archaic. Geheimstufe… ‘secrecy level’… some of us still use it when we want an old-fashioned cloak-and-dagger frisson.”
Bea confirmed that the confidentiality scale ran from one to five.
I sighed. A top secret Swiss file, not where it belonged in the Confederation, although it could be said to be on its way home. The train was now moving out of the station at Bregenz, the single stop in Austria.
My sixteen-digit, case-sensitive, alpha-numeric search string had alerted someone to my interest in something which was not only not my fucking business, not only highly confidential but something which was not where it should be, conceivably in a vault protected by formidable Swiss security. There was still time to toss my laptop (perhaps geo-tagged or otherwise device-identified) out of the train before it crossed the Swiss frontier at Sankt-Margrethen.
Modern air conditioned trains do not have windows which can be opened.
I was in possession of an electronic