All About Greti Read online

  About the author

  I arrived late at the realization that writing could be a great way to spend my retirement. After being a travel agent for more than twenty years, and a civil servant for the City of Ottawa, bringing people to court for parking infractions, for another twenty, I wished to do something else in my youthful seventies, than hanging with the ‘oldies’ sipping coffees at MacDonald’s or stupidly driving golf balls at flagpoles. But I do ride my road bike fifty kilometres each day, weather permitting.

  Then it dawned on me that I could try sitting at a computer and write my very own, not exiting, biography. After a few years of unrelenting travail, I had done what I had never done before, finish something that I started with a dubious mindset.

  And now the road is wide open.

  I was born in Coaticook, a small town in the beautiful region of the Eastern Townships in Canada.

  I am on my third book, a work in progress, tentatively titled The Colors of the Butterfly, still about my muse and heroine Greti, who wished I’d take it easier on her.

  Unfortunately, the new book will not do so.

  all about gREti

  Louis Demers

  all about gREti

  Vanguard Press

  VANGUARD EBOOK

  © Copyright 2019

  Louis Demers

  The right of Louis Demers to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved

  No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

  may be made without written permission.

  No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,

  copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

  of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to

  this publication may be liable to criminal

  prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is

  available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PAPERBACK) 978 1 784655 58 7

  Vanguard Press is an imprint of

  Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.

  www.pegasuspublishers.com

  First Published in 2019

  Vanguard Press

  Sheraton House Castle Park

  Cambridge England

  Printed & Bound in Great Britain

  Dedication

  Pour Micheline

  Synopsis

  The story is about a feisty young girl (nineteen years old), rebel in her own ways, who will receive, against all odds, information which will turn her normal, ritualistic daily life on its head.

  The girl will face many decisions, each one more critical than the last, trying to resolve and defuse the whole maddening and explosive situation.

  The story, peppered with savory and unsavory characters, propels like a speeding train with no brakes.

  Hard to describe, it’s part love, lust, sex, murder, sleuthing, friendship, comic situations, violence, rape and revenge among other things.

  “Greti” first appeared in my (unpublished) novelistic-autobiography and will return in my next book (a little older, a little wiser).

  “Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.”

  ― Groucho Marx

  Note from the Author

  It may be of some importance to some readers to take note that physical venues appearing in the book, such as cities, villages, island, beaches, street names, or country roads, even though they do exist in the real world, have been slightly altered to fit the purposes of the storyline. Evidently there is no ‘real’ desert on the island of Spiekeroog, and naked beaches… Well, I’m not really sure about those. Might warrant a little more digging into…

  All characters are purely the product of my imagination, except Greti’s friend, Karlheinz Stockhausen, a great German composer of electronic opuses by the way, which, naturally, I have use in a fictional way.

  PART ONE

  Block One: Chesterfield

  Block Two: Viscardigasse Bookstore

  Block Three: Wienfried

  Block Four: Karlheinz

  Block Five: The Spy in The Ointment

  Block Six: Greti

  Block Seven: Jordan

  Block Eight: The Mob

  Block Nine: The Plan

  Block Ten: All Hell Breaking Loose

  Block Eleven: On A Clear Blue Morning

  Block Twelve: The Unanswerable Questions

  Block Thirteen: The Aftermath

  Block Fourteen: A Little Soiree

  Block Fifteen: Schönau am Königssee

  Block Sixteen: Greti Under the Knife

  Block Seventeen: Again, Under the Lights

  Block Eighteen: One A.M. or Thereabouts

  Block Nineteen: The Funeral

  PART TWO

  Block Twenty: Summit Meeting at Karl’s

  Block Twenty-One: A Very Dead House

  Block Twenty-Two: The Photograph

  Block Twenty-Three: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  Block Twenty-Four: Prelude to When the Shit Hit the Fan (Six Months Prior)

  Block Twenty-Five: Parallel Conversations

  Block Twenty-Six: A Convivial Evening

  Block Twenty-Seven: Greti’s Visit

  Block Twenty-Eight: Olympia

  Block Twenty-Nine: Spiekeroog Island (Months Before)

  Block Thirty: Prelude to Disaster

  PART THREE

  Block Thirty-One: From Riches to Rags

  Block Thirty-Two: Going Home

  Block Thirty-Three: Opera Buffa

  PART FOUR

  Block Thirty-Four: Epilogue (Six Months Later, or Thereabouts)

  PART ONE

  Block One:

  Chesterfield

  München is a beautiful city. It has its Rathaus-Glockenspiel, its Frauenkirche and its Residenz. And this, for the greater pleasure of the many tourists that visit her. It also has the Hofbräuhaus for the thirsty, the Olympiastadium for the sporty, the Museuminsel, smack in the middle of the Isar River, for the brainy. And many, many more attractions that cannot all be enumerated in these pages. After all this is not a compendium for the most beautiful city in Germany. But I already said that, didn’t I? Berlin may boast, but it’s only big talk, you know. In my book, München is the real German bouquet.

  Coming back to the city’s attractions, most of them can be found easily along the wide and sunny avenues of this wondrous city. Let’s call them tourist traps, for want of a better word. These are the ‘must see’ things for the wary tourist staying only for a day or two. You can see them all over the place with their cameras or iPhones taking insipid snapshots.

  But I’m not here to follow the wide-eyed little family cranking their heads waiting for the Marienplatz’s Glockenspiel spectacle. No, I’m here to tell you about the darker side, the underbelly if you wish, of München. Unfortunately, every city has those dark alleys where the sun rarely shines, and here, if you dare escape the guide’s moronic waffling, inside damp crooked cobblestone passageways, you will find its shady and mysterious history, yes indeed.

  But you shouldn’t ask street people how to get there. They will only balk at your request and send you back to the tourist trails. And this you should do. Get yourself a table at one of the many sidewalk cafes and admire the short-skirted girls, the golden glow atop the tiled roofs, and further away, München’s most famous background, the Bavarian Alps. Sip a beer and let it all in. Take your time. There’s no hurry, is there? The city has been there since the year 1158.
Get a load off. Take it easy. Let the sun burnish your face for a while. She won’t mind. She’s an old lady who’s seen it all. You’re the least of her problems right now…

  Alas, this has little or no interest for the man now going down the very un-touristy and seedy backstreet of the Erhardstrasse. It is near the Corneliusbrücke which spans the Isar River. It is also by this bridge that we can reach the Museuminsel (as already mentioned), home of the famous Deutsches Museum. But, then again, this has no interest for our man.

  While slowly walking toward Erhardstrasse 12, he smiles at discarded newspapers dancing ballet with one another, aloft, inside a brisk breeze. He is the only one who sees this as amusing. But he doesn’t care and continues his slow pace. Reaching a cracked portion of the sidewalk, which has not yet disintegrated, he remembers a game played in his long-forgotten youth. He smiles. Yes, he thinks. Hopscotch, why not? He thinks again. And here he is hopping from one foot to the other along a spiderweb of crevices. Turns out he is not very good at this game at all, any more. He’s gained weight, much weight. But he keeps at it. It doesn’t matter. He’s having fun and he starts laughing, loud. “Rhythm, boy, rhythm,” he says to no one. He is now very much inside his own little bubble, and oblivious to the schoolgirls coming his way. They don’t feel threatened at all by this big teddy bear of a man. They find his clownish demeanor and his juvenile antics a little refreshing compared to the ‘normal’ adult attitude. They stop, look and smile at each other, then laugh, unrestrained, delicate hands going over their too bright lipsticked mouths, as they bypass him. There is no meanness in their own tomfooleries. They’re only schoolgirls. And he didn’t even notice them.

  His business office is on the fifth floor. Oddly enough, number twelve has no elevator. It’s an old building that should have felt the weight of the wrecking ball a long time ago but was spared by the very lucrative maison d’affaire still holding the first two floors. It also has a ninety-nine-year lease on the whole building, meaning… Well, you figure it out. So, you could say that our big man was safe way up there just under the (sometimes) leaking roof. But, and there is always a, ‘but’ you see, the remaining floors were kept in disrepair and were in much worse condition than our man’s office. The big business holding the first two floors didn’t much care (they had their own maintenance crew), and the same could be said for the actual proprietor (for which the higher levels could rot to hell for all he cared). So, out of sight, out of mind, right? Well, not for everyone. Especially if you’re a diminutive woman needing to reach the top office every day.

  The upper floors were mostly decrepit ones with padlocked doors, dusty floors crammed with heteroclite objects, and busted ceiling lamps (shards dangerously arrayed under each one). Then, there was the top one (which wasn’t that much better, I must say). But it did the trick for our man. First it was out of the way from vengeful men (husbands caught on film with their flies undone getting serviced by very naked girls either inside motel rooms or in some car’s back seat during, what they told their wives, was ‘lunch’ with the new secretary). Second, it was dirt cheap. No need to explain, right? Business wasn’t booming now. No one wanted to be a private eye any longer. Career-wise, it had gone the way of the hat, the three-piece suit, or the ten o’clock Sunday mass.

  Anyway, you could ‘still’ (if you really wanted too), reach these upper levels by going up a very narrow staircase. It’s right there, on the left. Can’t you see it? It’s way back there under a very dim light bulb. And this is because the big business didn’t want you to wrongly (how could that be) beeline over to the out of the way staircase when their entrance was using as much light energy as some small African villages. Bright it was, to say the least.

  Again, if you had no business with the ‘big’ business with the bright entrance, but business way up there under the roof gables, this was the only way. This stairway to heaven boasted an ‘authentic’ art deco guard that had seen better days, intricate filigrees now bent out of shape or simply missing, and a once-shiny bronze handrail which had fallen ill and was now badly encrusted with a sandpaper-rough greenish patina. For your own good, you would not touch anything and smartly be advised, by common sense, to keep going up, floor after floor, till you reached your destination. The proprietor had seen no reason to do anything about the peeling paint, the burnt incandescent bulbs, the cobwebs (with or without spiders) or the used condoms, cigarette butts, and empty syringes that were strewn here and there, pell-mell, totally haphazard. Men were disquieted by this, while women (but it must be said that they were rare, really) were just plainly freaked out.

  Our man is still outside, thinking about this and that. His hands are empty. He is not working a smartphone or, for that matter, any other of the newest gadgets everyone else seemed to be idolizing. No, he’s just looking at the sky way above the street buildings. These are not skyscrapers – four, five, six stories at most. So, he has a pretty good view of the cloud formations. Sometimes, he would just stop and linger a bit, gazing at them in wonder. He didn’t know their names and frankly didn’t care. Today he sees small puffy cotton balls. They’re very white, very virginal with an electric blue background. The sun is just edging the top buildings. “It’s gonna be a wonderful day,” our man thinks.

  As he enters the pseudo-Renaissance style establishment, also home of the Blaubart Verlags publishers (referred to above as the ‘big’ business), which has the first two floors (also mentioned), our man greets the tall doorman sitting nonchalantly on a wooden bench.

  “Bernhard.”

  “Chester.”

  Let it be known that Bernhard, the doorman, is eighty-two years old and looks it. His face is so creased that you could, if you were topographically nescient, take it for the world map. To see him as rail thin is really a misnomer, because comparing Bernhard’s thinnish frame with that category would be like equating (thin) vermicelli with (fat) bucatini. Bernhard is not even a vermicelli. He is… he is… Fuck, let’s say it, he is a bag of bones, very dry bones. And he has problems, mucho problema. What’s left of his hair is laughable, his eyes are sunk deep inside their sockets, his nose has seen the inside of too many boxing rings, and his mouth has no lips to speak of. Other than that, he’s a very friendly guy. Oh yes! One more thing, he has a bladder problem, an uncontrollable bladder problem. So, this, you’d think, would make him a very poor candidate for the job he’s paid to do, meaning screening everyone who comes through the door. So, what did he do when applying for the poorly paid job? You’re damned right, he lied. Well, not ‘lied’ lied. He just didn’t mention this medical inconvenience. But since his post is in the building’s foyer, quite out of sight from his employer, he can, when needs be, leave unnoticed and clamber stealthily to the third-floor restroom (the only one outside the very plush ones kept for the staff and patrons of Blaubart Verlags), to relieve himself. His sick prostate allows him to piss only a few drops each visit. For him, it’s like standing there, aiming at the toilet bowl, and waiting for a flow (that never comes, really). And he waits and waits. After five minutes he zips up, frustrated, knowing that he’ll have to come back inside an hour to try again. The days when his ‘flow’ was as powerful as a firehose are well gone. At best of times now, he would rejoice if anything came out as fast as a garden hose, hooked to a dripping faucet, trying to fill up a kiddy pool. Exasperating to say the least. Therefore, his post is left unguarded half of the time. Blaubart Verlags couldn’t care less about Bernhard’s little escapades. He’s only the first checkpoint after all, mostly to deter bums, homeless people, and drug addicts from venturing up the staircase. The big business doesn’t care because they have security guards of their own sitting peacefully at ‘their’ entrance. And these would not be thin vermicelli. The muscles displayed would categorize them as large lasagna. Also, unbeknownst to Bernhard the doorman, the big business didn’t even pay his skimpy salary. The welfare organization looking over retirees down on their luck paid it. So why would they fuss?

  With all of
Bernhard’s problems, is it any wonder that the building is left unguarded most of the time and that the front door remains an easy access to anyone who has no official business there? The security here is a sham. People trespass as easily as water goes through a colander.

  But when our man enters the building, Bernhard has his ass firmly perched on top of his high stool.

  They look at each other, Bernhard almost invisible, our man very visible.

  And they repeat their greetings as if this would bond them as friends.

  “Bernhard…”

  “Chester…” and he adds with a pinched smile, “the lovely Olympia has already taken the stairway to heaven.”

  It was him, Bernhard, who started calling the upper levels like the Zeppelin song. He didn’t especially like the group but thought the name fitting. Chester nodded.

  After this short but sociably required interaction, our man goes up all the way to the fifth floor, cursing every step of the way with obscenities that get worse as he reaches the upper levels. Chester has a bad mouth on him, and he knows it. But since no one is around to shoot him dagger eyes, he just let it rip, unadulterated. All this because he is a tad obese. Not fat, mind you, just obese. Obese is a word that is acceptable to him. Fat is not. He sees himself as a tall (six foot two), well proportioned, huge guy. He wears size fourteen shoes and favors suspenders to belts for the obvious reasons. Even though Chester is a big teddy bear (cool, calm, collected), you wouldn’t want to face him in a dark alley after pissing him off, figuratively that is. His hands are near squash racket size.