The Shadow Warriors Now Available on Amazon Germany

The best news yesterday.  The Shadow Warriors, set in Germany, is now available on the Amazon Kindle in Germany.  See link to the right of this post.  I am nearly beside myself, because logic would dictate that a book set in Germany (Goettingen) should be available there.  And a book set at a university might tempt university students and faculty who read English. 

Other good news this week:  The literary journal Kansas City Lights is publishing  memoir piece about my grandmother.  My grandma was proudly from Kansas.  So is my heroine, Emma.  She always stops to notice flowers and gardens.  

Sometimes the stars do seem aligned.  The lilac has flower buds.  Last year, not one, and the year before only one.  This year, it looks loaded.  A pair of cardinals in the yard, and the cute little swamp (?) sparrow has a mate.  Ducks in the slough.  My cup runneth over.  Spring in New England.  Glorious.  The cats sleep upstairs in the sunlight streaming through the bedroom window.   They sniff spring at the open window.

Now I'm thinking of putting my Ruegen book onto the Kindle, too.  Set mostly on the island of Ruegen in the Baltic in midsummer,  with different characters, and also a computer crime novel (loosely), the story  hasn't found a home in the U.S.  By now it is an historical novel of technology.  Remember CD-ROMS?  That generation.  Before skysat phones. Before lots of technology.  

Here's a scrap of a Shadow Warrior's scene from a somewhat drunken university party on the occasion of Verna's graduation.

Raucous-voiced onlookers toasted Verena as she frugged wildly next to a man with bleached blond parted-in-the-middle-hair and a dark, bored face. Earlier, they had swept across the floor in an inhibition-shedding Lambada. Interesting that Verena celebrated her intellectual achievement with such a blow out. Vivacious and happy, she looked good tonight, with clear skin and legs slimmed by dark stockings. 

Every novel has a crazy party, some skinny dipping and a little weed.  Popular culture reigns.  

Street Sceme in Göttingen in the Weenderstrasse, the Fussgängerzone

Cafe Amalfi

Cafe Amalfi

The original "Cafe Amalfi" was around the corner from Symphony Hall in Boston and served uninteresting food, if I may damn with faint praise.  I did like the name.  I set several scenes in Goettingen at the above cafe.  The scene below is the last time Emma the narrator sees Lumomir Titov, "Luby," the Bulgarian spy and Hacker who has bedeviled her throughout the book, mocking her as "Mrs. Robinson," a reference from the movie The Graduate.  The name "Luby" came from a very nice man at my old tennis club in suburban Chicago, nothing like the real character.  A writer  is a shameless thief and books are all the better for it.  When Luby mentions the Berlin film festival, I had recently been there and he is mouthing my impressions, to a degree, but of course from a East Bloc country's point of view.   Here is the scene.   

The tranquil garden, with orange nasturtiums cascading along the fence, and subdued classical music soothing the diners, emphasized the unreality of this encounter. Later the memory of this lunch would be like a fantasy that rose genie-like out of my wineglass.

            Balakov, sitting as impenetrable and in-your-face as the Wall dividing Germany, continued to talk. "When I first traveled to the West, my earliest business took me to Berlin. February. So cold and dismal, and yet, I wondered if I had arrived in a time machine. Everyone, men and women walked about wrapped in leather or fur. What a wonderful Stone Age tribe! So elegant, so brisk. I was eager and raw then, an underdog hungering for the opulent capitalist bone, so meaty and full of fat. There would, I hoped, be no more gristle to chew.

            "The film festival occupied every theater. I joined the audience, and gazed at the images on the screens until late into the night. In a cafe on the Kurfürstendamm, I ate a bowl of strawberries from California, large red berries with tasteless white centers, completely void of the essence of strawberry. Consider. The illusion of strawberries in winter. A miracle to a man used to cabbage, carrots and potatoes!"            

            "Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

            He didn't answer.

            The waiter cleared the table, and looked mournful when he noticed my barely picked at plate. I ordered a double espresso.

            Balakov lifted his glass again, and with a faint smile said, "And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson..."

            He cut off my protest. "I will always think of you as Mrs. Robinson."

            "That night at the disco…” I began.

            "With your young friends. You danced with that cyber-punk from the Institute. Your little group was very drunk. I envied your camaraderie, your carelessness. The young man was quite enchanted, and I thought, what a dangerous woman, my Mrs. Robinson." 

            Balakov slid two twenty mark notes under the olive oil cruet and stood up.

            "Auf Wiedersehen, Emma Lee Davis-Robinson. Give Mr. Weber my regards. Do not ignore my counsel. Good fortune is a variable, not a constant."

            "I don't understand,” I said, almost pleading.

            His bitter smile conveyed nothing. Later I tried to think if heeding his or Marlies' warning would have changed the progression of events. Nothing would have changed. The clocks ticked on. The daemons waited. Momentum and inertia are forces with their own immutability.

            I never saw Georgi Balakov again.

The University town of Göttingen and The Shadow Warriors

Frau Eisenach, a character in The Shadow Warriors, lives on Geiststrasse, or Ghost Street. She is an old lady in a house dress who wears carpet slippers because of a painful bunion, but she is good to my main character who stops by to visit (and to eat) every now and then. Frau Eisenach cooks up a skillet of "hoppel-poppel", bacon, egg, onion,  boiled potatoes and tomatoes fried together.  An easy, delicious supper, by the way.  The University town of Goettingen is the setting for most of the scenes of The Shadow Warriors.  I made up the "Institute for Advanced Computing," but it was based on a real building.  Over the years, what is real and what I made up have sort of merged together.   Totally weird.



My inlaws lived in the town for years and I visited often, until it was easy to write about.  When I wrote the protest march scene and others I went to the library and found the microfilm of some of the events.  My nephew took me pub-hopping and several scenes resulted from that evening.   It was really fun to put my characters into the scenes and see what they would do. 


In the next post, I'll confess how I found many of my local characters.  

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Here is where the good Frau Eisenach lived. 

A pub in Göttingen

My nephew took me pub crawling when I did research for The Shadow Warriors.  Of all the bars we visited, the one described below was the most interesting.  I changed it's name and I'm sure the interior has changed in the passing years.  I made up the music, the crowd and even the "disco whisperer."

We retreated back along wet sidewalks toward the center of town, for Marcus and Christof had decided we should top the evening off with a visit to a disco. Marcus turned into a wide but dilapidated entryway, which led into a dim, blue-lit cave. Behind a counter, an aging longhair collected a few marks cover charge, and stamped Euclid across the backs of our hands in neat purple letters.

We advanced further into the cave, which had a seedy, disreputable look, with sloppily painted walls and cigarette butts ground into the concrete floor. Now we heard voices over a pulsing beat, and met a phalanx of bodies, noise and smoke. We pushed our way into a large dark room. Above the heads of the mob of drinkers, the skylines of Paris, Moscow, New York and London were painted starkly on the walls. 

Again, with nowhere to sit, we stood together in the crunch of bodies and guzzled beer. Time was a rubber band, stretched taut at one moment, slack the next, and in its elastic intervals, I didn't know if we'd been drinking there for a few minutes or a few hours.

From the dance floor, the music called with demon logic. Marcus had disappeared to order more beer, and Christof asked in his best English, "You dance, Ms. Davis, pardon, you dance, Emma?"

           

"Thought you'd never ask," I cooed.

Christof steered me through the swarm and up a few stairs to a packed dance floor. The number was over, and a few couples left, so we did a crowd swim and squeezed in. The Village People's “Macho Man” started pulsing, and the dancer's began moving. In my dopey universe, I felt a pleasant intimacy in the boozy closeness of strangers. Bodies twisting, elbows pumping, Christof and I were really getting into the spirit. I heard the low voice, but it wasn't until a hand touched my shoulder that I registered that the voice speaking to me.

            "Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. E. Robinson, why do you follow me?"

            Crazies on the dance floor. I didn't turn to look, but a tiny alarm sounded. A moment later, the voice spoke to me again.           

            "You are making life difficult, Mrs. Robinson. Difficult for me. Dangerous for you. Go home and sit on your sofa."

            Goofy English with an odd, non-German accent, succinct and scary. I tried to twist around to look at this joker, but the dancers surged, blocking me. When at last I turned around, I didn't recognize anyone.

            With his knees bent, and his arms flung out, Christof hurled himself about like a crazed St. Vitas.

            "Mrs. Robinson, do you still have the photographs?"

            Soft with menace, the disembodied voice approached my ear again. I tried to bring up some intelligence, but my brain was too deep into the twin narcosis of booze and pot, and I was simply afraid.

            "Get out of Göttingen,  Mrs. Robinson. Go back to Hong Kong. Or Singapore."

            Jesus! I whirled and danced with the stranger behind me. He grinned and gyrated, too friendly to be the Whisperer. The throb and thump of the music stopped, then ABBA started it up again. Trying to find a face to attach to the voice, I stared over the room at hundreds of faces, but they were all intent on pulling the most pleasure out of a rainy Friday night.

            Then I saw him, slipping into the cave that led to the entrance, the man from Stanley Market, the angry man I knew in my mind as “Dark Eyes.” His glance flickered back to the dance floor, and our eyes met. He smiled with his lips and teeth, raised his arm, pointed his index finger right at me, and slowly squeezed an imaginary trigger. Then he disappeared into the blue cave.