Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

The alarm tone on my cellphone was the infernal clatter of a skateboard on cobble-stones.

The perfecta bet needed first and second to be in order. The red notebook had been added later. But what was the right order for Fortezza and Champbasse? The file of interest to some party in Italy seemed so very ordinary, much detail was in respect of rostering of troops, the dispositions made for their accommodation and provisioning. Kitchen equipment was to be procured from the Zurich firm Techag AG. That provided an aha moment. It was the firm which later became Turmix, the maker of my espresso machine which I pressed into service as I asked myself an important question.

“Do you or do you not have a hangover?”

We all did. What had started as a lazy Sunday became a tediously boring Sunday and then a day darkened by frustration. Dirk was furious when he received the verdict from his editor. His post postulating a Teutonic take-over of the part of the Spanish coastline most favoured by German tourists would not go online. Ostensibly the reason was that the Munich newspaper was hoping to win a big campaign promoting Iberian tourism. Dirk, however, knew his editor well.

“Damned hypocrite! His grandfather was with the Condor Legion during the Civil War!”

It had been my idea to call up Fairouz and have him take us to Cherie-Bar, the establishment which was emphatically not in Weinfelden, if a mere hundred metres beyond the town’s limits. This was now the second enterprise owned by my old friend Hans-Peter. The premises had once housed a factory producing bonbons, but it had been closed when lawyers deemed that the colourful sweets infringed on the intellectual property of the makers of Gummy Bears. The garish bonbon colour scheme of the single story building had been left unchanged. Hans-Peter had decided that all that was needed was some neon to evoke sinful Las Vegas in the leafy depths of rural Thurgau.

Dorfpuff!

Not quite that, not exactly a ‘village brothel’, more a tease, a promise which generally would not be kept. I’d spotted a place of comparable mendacious allure, Tittty Twister, just outside Frauenfeld.

I wouldn’t count Ludmilla and Yulia as friends. We exchanged greetings when our paths crossed in Weinfelden where they took pains not to appear unduly attractive. Hans-Peter had told me the back story. They had indeed started by serving drinks to the Cherie-Bar clientele which was almost a hundred percent male. Then, from the girls point of view, everything went wrong. Their looks so impressed the proprietor of a boat-building yard on Lake Constance that he used them as models for a poster. One thing led to another and a Zurich agency saw in them the statuesque sensuality of Central European athletes, the glamour of countless Sharapovas, and had signed them on.

The problem? Walking the fashion shows and posing for photographers was much harder work. They happily returned to the flat above Cherie-Bar, it was their home and Hans-Peter their protector. The bar thrived with a blow-up of an Italian Vogue cover of Ludmilla having pride of place together with a big poster of Yulia in boots made by Bally. Hans-Peter sent lustful drinkers, local farmers and such, looking for more than sultry drink service and barely-there outfits, to places like Titty Twister, where the girls would never, ever be mistaken for models.

Bea loved the story. A baker I knew from town was visibly trying to work up the courage to chat us up.

“But they surely have their price?” she said.

I loved the dresses Ludmilla and Yulia had been given from the current Just Cavalli collection. Such gorgeous whores indeed had their price, paid gladly by lawyers, accountants and business owners from far beyond Weinfelden, even from Italy. Sure!

From time to time Rico would be handling the table service while the girls earned more much money with far less effort in the Veneto or in the little flat above the bar.

Hans-Peter’s champagne was not the best by any means. But he insisted that for old times’ sake it was on the house.

“You and he… have history?” Bea Schell concluded.

I confess that my answer had been an un-ladylike burp. The baker looked shocked.

We had returned with Fairouz in his taxi. He had handed over a matchbox containing the half-ounce of hash that I had requested.

“You do have a hangover, but a spliff would not be the best remedy,” said Bea who was in better shape than I was.

A double espresso had helped slightly, as had the discovery that my wardrobe had resumed its normal size and shape. I hunted for what might be seen as suitable for what Aunt Ursel had in mind. She had left a note in my room.

“Dress for Zurich. We shall leave after breakfast.”

Dirk could look quite respectable when the occasion (or a note from Ursel Lange) demanded. He had spent his school years constrained in a conservative preppy carapace and so it was understandable that his fixie bike, and the collection of outrageous messenger-look hipster clothing it entitled him to wear, was an understandable rebellion. Black stretch Spandex cycling shorts, however, he wore only seldom although he had them on the first time I saw him in the Bookshop. Go figure.

But in a blue blazer and sand-coloured chinos he looked every inch of what he was, the son of a well-situated senior executive in the car industry playing at being an investigative journalist. He looked well dressed for that key interview, or today for an expedition to Zurich which, when planned by Ursel Lange, always included an excellent lunch in the august surroundings of the Kronenhalle, Heugümper or on the Rive Gauche Terrasse of the Baur au Lac hotel.

Bea was unhappy. My shoes didn’t fit her, she had to make to with black ballerinas of her own. They went fine with the black-and-orange checked Max Mara wrap-over dress of mine. Had I not tossed it into the back of the car with Louie Lessinger at the wheel?

No, of course not.

I had expected Bea to go for my big Bottega Veneta bag which was the right shade of orange. Funny that she preferred her well-worn shoulder bag from Mulberry which she wore strapped inelegantly across her body.

We joined the Intercity train which would make two further stops during the hour it would take to reach Zurich, settling in a first class compartment for four. There was some small talk about our evening at Cherie-Bar, giving Aunt Ursel the chance to share gossip about the way Ludmilla and Yulia turned the heads of otherwise upstanding Weinfeldeners.

“Not quite the place for people like us,” Aunt Ursel opined, as if in spite of her years qualified to judge.

“An occasional walk on the wild side, a bit of madness on my board or blades… I quite like a frisson of risk in my life,” I said unwisely.

That got long looks from both Ursel Lange and from Bea, the latter looking disapproving. Her ladies-who-lunch look annoyed me. Seeking to be different I had gone for a two-year-old colourful Prada schoolgirl-ish ensemble. I had had a real shopaholic phase, yes, but that’s pretty much in the past now.

Dirk, not chastened by the failure of his direct questions in the past, tried again.

“After your short marriage to Heinrich Lange did you move out of Säntisblick?”

Aunt Ursel responded with no delay.

“No, I did not. There was tittle-tattle about our ménage à trois, but there always is when three people seem very close. However when Heinrich got religion it was assumed that there could not be anything really wicked going on at Säntisblick. Even our enthusiastic espousal of heliotherapy was accepted after a while.”

Dirk looked puzzled and reached for his cellphone.

“The beneficial effects of sunlight on bared skin. Dr Auguste Rollier at the Clinique La Riondaz in Leysin, his ‘sun cure’… I checked a lot of stuff out to find intellectual excuses for my own love of being butt-naked!” I interjected with a straight face.