Free The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman Page B

breakfast. Some of the fellows from the brass band are here.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’d be free for lunch.’
    After a long pause Loeser said, ‘You, Dieter Ziesel, are too busy to have breakfast with me, Egon Loeser.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Ziesel.
    ‘I, Egon Loeser, am assumed to be so eager to share a jolly repast with you, Dieter Ziesel, that I will just hang around for two hours until you are free.’
    ‘If that’s how you want to put it,’ said Ziesel.
    ‘This – this! – is what my life has come to.’
    ‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ said Ziesel.
    After another long pause Loeser said, ‘Right, I’ll see you at one,’ and put down the telephone.
    Since he was still unwilling to pass the time with any of the orphans on his desk, Loeser decided he might as well get dressed and go out to Luni’s, a second-hand bookshop on Ranekstrasse next door to an antique shop with medieval suits of armour standing vigilant in the window like militarised fashion mannequins. This would be his seventh visit in two weeks, and the elegant girl at the counter was treating him ever more warily; she had obviously concluded that he’d developed some sort of forlorn romantic preoccupation with her, since if anyone was really that desperate to read The Sorceror of Venice by Rupert Rackenham they would just pay twelve marks for a new copy. But in fact Loeser would have drunk a pint of toothbrush-mug run-off before contributing one pfennig to the royalties of the man who’d first fucked Adele Hitler, and he couldn’t just borrow the book, even though every passenger on every tram seemed to have it, because he didn’t want anyone else to know that he was so desperate to read the thing. Rackenham’s novel was by all accounts a very thinly disguised sketch of the Berlin experimental theatre scene circa 1931, and since nobody had been willing to answer Loeser’s oblique enquiries about the way he had been portrayed – even Brogmann had been too tactful to take the piss out of him – Loeser could only conclude that his fictional analogue was a golem of spite and libel, the sort of character assassination where they have to have a closed casket at the wake. He felt quite excited to have been the victim of the kind of affair you read about in interesting people’s biographies, and he was already looking forward to confronting Rackenham about it. For two years he’d been trying to persuade everyone that Rackenham was a bastard, but he’d never been willing to explain why he thought so. Now he’d have a proper reason for his hatred that did not involve getting tripped up in pursuit of a kittenish female.
    On the way to Luni’s, he made a bet with himself that he would see Drabsfarben, who for some reason seemed always to be passing by the shop; and indeed he did, but as usual Drabsfarben looked so distracted that Loeser didn’t try to say hello for fear of scaring off some rare harmony that was grazing in his compositional rifle sights. Inside, the girl at the counter tensed visibly at the sight of him.
    ‘Do you have it yet?’ he said, working so hard, as usual, to exclude all emotion from his voice that he slid a long way past casual and in the end sounded more as if he were barely suppressing some grande passion .
    ‘Yes. Someone came in with a review copy yesterday.’
    When he paid for the book she dropped the change into his hand from about eleven inches up to avoid brushing his palm. On his way out he reflected that in spite of it all there was something nice about knowing, for once, precisely where you stood with a girl. Then he sat down on a bench to skim through The Sorceror of Venice , hiding the cover against his knees in case anyone he knew walked past. At first, although no one was watching, the flick of his fingers was ostentatiously unconcerned, but as not one but two outrages arose from the text, it became involuntarily furious.
    First outrage: theft. The novel began in 1677 with the arrival in Paris of the great