Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

For a minute or so Aunt Ursel trudged ahead, dealing in silence with memories which were still painful. I remembered Omi’s funeral. I’d been thirteen. When Heinrich Lange died I had not even been born.

“Well, one way or another that explains two of the books, doesn’t it? One Nazi, the other religious.”

Ursel whipped round.

“Wrong, Dirk. The notebook with the Nazi emblem on the red leatherette cover only reached us much later, long after old Heinrich was gone.”

Aunt Ursel was not sure how the Fortezza file and the Black Madonna monograph had come into the hands of Heinrich Lange.

“During the war years, I imagine. They were entrusted to him for safe-keeping. His will stipulated that both Erika and I must do likewise. They were to be given every protection. It was our duty, not open to question.”

Not that they were locked in any safe. Heinrich Lange had believed that best hidden was in plain sight. At Brunnenbach Bücher the two volumes were shelved in the antiquarian section among a miscellany of books devoted to Swiss historiography. Each of these dusty tomes, seldom examined and even more rarely bought, trampled anew across the Rütli meadow where in 1307 three ‘oath-takers’, Eidgenossen, swore allegiance to the earliest confederacy of cantons.

“The Nazi stuff had all gone?” Dirk ventured.

“From the shop, yes, and Notre-Dame de Champbasse was right there with the Fortezza file guarded, one might say, by William Tell.”

“Heinrich Lange’s flirtation with Nazi ideology… even the fact he was German… the good people of Weinfelden forgave him?” Bea wondered.

“He kept a low profile during the war years. And he had not been alone in his beliefs, after all. As a holier-than-thou follower of the Church of Rome in its most restrictive form he became something of a recluse. He took up bee-keeping and planned to build a chapel in the garden of our house…”

Aunt Ursel shook her head.

“The chapel never happened and Heinrich Lange died leaving his magnum opus unfinished, the definitive account of St. Guinefort’s miracles.”

Even Dirk was lost for words when we learned that St. Guinefort was a thirteenth-century French dog revered as a saint after miracles were reported at his grave although the hound was never in fact canonized by the Church.

The Mighty Quinn

I wondered for a moment if I had inherited any of my grandfather’s madness as well as the painting.

St. Guinefort. A couple of type-written pages taken at random were more amusing to read than the Notre-Dame de Champbasse text. In my mind’s eye I kept on seeing Snoopy wearing a halo, although the doings of those who conducted blood thirsty rituals at the holy greyhound’s shrine were far from edifying.

“Could there be a Disney movie in it?” Dirk wondered. The holy grail of an investigative journalist was to have his story bought by Hollywood for filming.

Who Let The Dogs Out?

I read more of my grandfather’s meandering tale of cynocephalic superstition and his contorted musings about the infallibility of canonizations. Aunt Ursel had probably thought that it would be a welcome distraction from the three books I had brought back to Weinfelden and had given me the pile of pages before retiring for a nap.

Bea and Dirk were more focussed, Dirk awestruck by the menu listing the crime series stored on my aunt’s Sky Box, Bea cautious in her appraisal of the three books on the ledge.

Caute, sed impavide , so goes the Latin maxim. ‘Cautious but without fear’. It is the motto of a Scottish baronial family but also of Segirtad International. I hadn’t known that the concern was Swiss, with world headquarters in the mountains of the Engadin. The name of the outfit was in the regional language and meant ‘security’. No messing about, none of the coyness of Blackwater, Alba, Greystone, Titan, Sandline or Aegis, firms inclined to resort to such euphemisms as ‘situational awareness’ when speaking of plain old espionage.

Noble words can be the disguise of base intentions.

The new Bea took some getting used to. She had wanted to change when we got back to the house, the invitation to plunder my wardrobe on her mind.

Halter-top, backless, sky blue, quite short, quite sheer, two years old, suited her. In that dress from the Brazilian designer Osklen I had thought I looked fragile and submissive.

Bea 2.0 looked fragile and authoritative.

Impavide.

Dirk protested that the dress was diaphanous enough to allow her black thong to show through. Bea shrugged. Later when we went into town the panty problem was resolved. I heard the rumble of my thunder being stolen.

“The man who was your grandfather, Thea, may have been a bit of a nut case but that is not relevant to the books he was asked to look after. He was a man who would tend to obey orders given by men in black… either the black of the SS uniform or the black Jesuit cassock.”

“I don’t think Heinrich Lange was a Jesuit…”

“No… more on the lunatic fringe, the frantic faithful. He would feel at home there after his espousal of Nazi thought. Fact remains… two of these books were given to him to guard. The third was added later. When? How? Was it the new arrival which prompted Lessinger and your aunt to start probing, asking questions which led to the 1972 warning? And how was it that the three damn books once again survived?”

Until Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger asked me to get my hands on the damn books my biggest problem in life had been my effort to exude the ‘I’m in charge’ coolitude which Bea now radiated.

“Aunt Ursel will tell us more… but in her own sweet time. As Dirk learned, she does not respond well to direct questioning.”

Bea shrugged.

“Her own sweet time, fine. But remember… when you entered the Fortezza file number as a Google search term there was interest from Italy. Because of the Black Madonna? I think not. What does Fortezza mean to you, Thea?”

A file missing from the official Swiss archives, I wanted to say. I thought an answer like that might have seen me sent to stand in the corner of the classroom.

“Not that Pizzeria in Locarno…”

Nor the Florentine makers of men’s outerwear with design based on the benefits and principles of a fortress.

Nor Hotel Fortezza… on the island of Crete.

There’s a Fortezza Winery in the beautiful rolling Sierra foothills of Auburn California.

Apart from a couple of bed-and-breakfasts and the aforesaid pizzeria, there is no significant Fortezza in the Swiss canton of Tessin. So why a Swiss file?

Not a much better response to judge from Bea’s look.

“Correct. I also thrust aside any thoughts of the Fortezza Crypto Card, which is something I happen to know well.”

This, I learned, was an information security system that implements cryptographic algorithms to create a computer-based based security token. Each individual who is authorized to see protected information is issued a card that stores private keys and other data needed to gain access. The Fortezza card has been used in government, military, and banking applications to protect sensitive data.

“Aha! Not around in 1939, though!” I said brightly.

Dirk cleared his throat as he plugged his laptop into the big forty inch monitor.

“No, you need to go back a century earlier, to 1838.”

There was nothing clever I could say.

“Franzenfeste!” Dirk announced

It is called Franzenfeste in German but South Tyrol is Italian territory, the autonomous province of Alto Adige where a majority of the population are German speaking. Built by the Austrian Emperor Franz I, Fortezza was once considered to be Europe’s strongest fortress. The defensive fortification never experienced a real battle, though, and was soon technically obsolete. Beginning in 1890, the fortress served as a powder magazine, first for the Austrians, and then for the Italian army after 1918. The fortress, built of massive granite blocks, has shaped the landscape of the narrow valley right up until the present day. The fortification comprises three separate levels: the lower fortress, the middle fortress, and the upper fortress. Planned as a hideout, the upper fortress is accessible through a steep tunnel with 451 steps. There are caverns, narrow passages and broader corridors that interconnect the different areas, forming a real labyrinth. There is a neo-Gothic chapel in the large courtyard behind the main entrance to the middle fortress.