Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

TheodoraLand

A legacy, a plot and a loner’s dangerous quest…

A bookshop closes and there is blood…

TheodoraLand

by Malcolm James Thomson

Copyright: © 2014 Malcolm James Thomson

Published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.de

ISBN 978-3-****-***-*

Part 1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part 2

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Part 3

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Author's notes

SATURDAY 26 MAY 2012

There wasn’t what anyone would call a crowd. It wasn’t what anyone would call an event. It was the Whitsun weekend and many of Munich’s inhabitants were out of town.

I lingered at a table under a parasol, sheltered from the sun (promising a decent summer to come) outside the café on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz, Trinity Place, in the heart of the Bavarian capital. The small square is dominated by the large, popular and quite expensive restaurant Brasserie Stadtschreiber on one side. The inevitable church is at one end, a new shopping precinct at the other. Between them, across from the café, is the colonnaded frontage of what once had been a monastery. There in shadow of the arcade, was Manduvel Bookshop. Until yesterday it was the place where I worked.

And today it would close its doors forever. The premises had to be vacated completely by the end of June, emptied of fixtures and fittings and the inventory of books.

Yes, Bookshop, not Buchhandlung. The specialization in English language books had been a recent development, an experiment. It was an attempt to maintain a Manduvel presence in the premises where the bookselling family had opened a business in 1893. But now there was a normal Manduvel branch, the thirty-seventh in Germany, in the nearby urban mall. Maybe there was not that much demand for English books in Munich.

“Hi, Thea!”

I couldn’t tell him that I would prefer to be alone with my thoughts. Dirk Seehof and his fiancée, Bea Schell, were probably my closest friends. And I had, after all, had a brief affair with him the previous summer. At least he called me Thea and not Dora. At Manduvel old Herr Lessinger called me Theodora sometimes. The others spoke of Dora even if I was addressed by them in front of customers as Frau Lange. Dora sounds dumb and I am not dumb. Nor am I Dora The Explorer except when it comes to sex.

“A sad day, Dirk.”

For him it would be, too. Addicted to British and American thrillers, he had long been a Bookshop regular. He repeatedly complained that his own life as a free-lance web journalist lacked any of the thrills and perils faced by the protagonists described in the pages of paperback crime and mystery fiction.

Neither Dirk nor I were to know that this deficit would soon be remedied.

“Pity there are no demonstrators... nobody with a loud-hailer crying ‘Save our Bookshop’. No story for you, I guess.”

Dirk shrugged and took a long draught of his beer.

In spite of the holiday Trinity Place was quite busy this Saturday. But few passing along the colonnade spared a glance for the display windows still full of books, still promoting best-sellers written in English as if on Monday business as usual would continue. One window was devoted to the antiquarian section of the shop where old, rare and valuable books gathered dust in an a cluttered alcove. They were from time to time examined by those who approached them with the utmost reverence but in most cases without the means to make any purchase. Although Herr Lessinger was the manager of the branch as a whole, it was the ancient volumes which had kept him working for Manduvel long beyond retirement age. His instructions had been that until the very last minute the shop should be operational and welcoming.

“You didn’t want to work on the very last day?” Dirk asked.

“I’ve never worked Saturdays, Dirk.”

There had been two Saturdays and the week in between that we had spent in bed. We had not so much surprised or shocked one another. It had been more about satisfying a kind of mutual curiosity. Just ten days, about a year ago. Been there, done that, got the teeshirt.

My teeshirt today was meant to be ironic. ‘So many books, so little time!’ in bold italics. Sammy Cohen was the Manduvel Bookshop exemplar of gender diversity. He had reminded me of the Miquel Brown song in which it had been about men , not books. He assured me that the track remained a popular dance anthem for the queer community.

No, I am not gay. I had thought I might be for about three months until Dorthe went back to Copenhagen. I had been younger then, just turned twenty-one, finished with university and starting my three year training at Manduvel. A Chamber of Commerce certificate states that I am now a Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau. That’s one of those pseudo-qualifications our German society is addicted to. Theodora Lange is now officially authorized to sell books!

Where, or indeed whether, I might be selling books in future was a question still open. Sure, I could move to another Manduvel branch, but none has the atmosphere of the little Bookshop on Dreifaltigkeitsplatz. There will be no other branch which will make room for the antiquarian collection. We had been told that branded e-book readers are the shiny future. Spoken word recordings on memory sticks would be the next big thing . I wasn’t sure.

Herr Lessinger had said that the remaining rare books were to go to an Austrian dealer for a fraction of what they are worth. And so I didn’t have any serious twinges of conscience on account of the three volumes I was keeping quite safe in my flat.

When the explosion happened I was on my way out of Trinity Place and already on the receiving end of judgmental glances. In Munich one is supposed to be seen at the wheel of a BMW manufactured locally. Or another German premium marque. If female, then driving an open convertible or a monstrous SUV is very okay. It is also tolerable to be astride an expensive all-terrain bicycle when one wears to good advantage (as I was frequently told I did) cut-off denim shorts. Equally acceptable is to be the young adult piloting a high-tech push-chair with a trophy baby inside, who could be a future Porsche driver. Less well viewed is a wild young woman carving through city traffic on a skateboard (Plan B deck, Element wheels, Tensor trucks and Reds bearings) which I had bought from a place in Cologne. They build Fords in Cologne, too, although for a Bavarian they do not count as German cars.

The sudden blast from the colonnades distracted me and caused me to smash into a Mini driven by a lady-who-shops. Her expressions of indignation meant that it was a few minutes before I could get back to Trinity Place, an elbow bruised once again, my board under my arm.. I arrived at the same time as the first emergency vehicles.

Dirk did file a story, claiming implicitly to have been an eye-witness to the incident. It was assumed that due to the impending closure of the business a defect in the gas powered central heating system had been neglected. Ninety percent of Dirk’s observations were in truth provided by me. He had left a good hour before everything went bang. Why did I linger? As always I had something to read with me. Today it was the latest issue of the cooler-than-thou bi-monthly Monocle magazine (it weighed about a kilo). The publisher had named Munich the most liveable city in the world a couple of years earlier and so I had become a subscriber. The day was very warm, the café chairs outside the see-and-be-seen Brasserie Stadtschreiber were welcoming and I reckoned that I looked quite good.