The Last Weynfeldt (29 page)

Adrian felt himself go red. No, he hadn't known that.

“You shouldn't be going red. I'm the one who should be ashamed. But I can't even manage that anymore—go red.”

Adrian sensed the indifference creeping over his face.

Lorena emptied her glass. The annoying tears she had been wiping away like irritating insects now fell hard and fast. “Shit,” she gasped. And again: “Shit.”

Weynfeldt shook himself out of his paralysis. He mixed another vodka and tonic, took a drink of some of it himself, then handed her the glass.

“Thank you,” she spluttered, and then: “You were always such a gentleman.”

At this she lost all remaining composure and was shaken by uncontrollable sobbing.

“I thought that was what bothered you about me.”

This made her laugh. He waited till the laughing and crying had subsided. Then he handed her his handkerchief. White, ironed, monogrammed.

She blew her nose and took a deep breath. “Pedroni knows.”

“What?”

“About the Vallotton. I told him. I'm such a rat.”

Adrian acknowledged this with a twitch of his shoulders.

“Sure. You're hardly surprised. That's what you'd expect of me. You'd be quite right.”

He made no reply.

“But I retracted it,” she said in her defense. “I said you and Strasser were playing a joke.” And when he still said nothing, she added meekly, “But I'm not sure he believed me.”

“No, he didn't,” Weynfeldt said now.

She looked at him, startled.

“He's demanding 1.2 million.”

It took her a moment to calm down again. “The bastard! You can't pay. Leave him to me.”

Adrian smiled. “Too late.”

As if on cue the doorbell rang. “Don't move from this spot till I come and get you,” Weynfeldt ordered.

It took over an hour for Adrian Weynfeldt to explain the situation to the two police officers, somewhat intimidated by the size of the blackmail sum and the apartment. They agreed to meet next day at the station to sign the statement and take fingerprints for reference purposes.

Before they left, Weynfeldt fetched Lorena from the Von der Mühll room and introduced her with the words, “This is Frau Steiner. Perhaps she should come with me to the station tomorrow. You will find a lot of her fingerprints on the notes as she helped me count them.”

I
T WAS THE WARMEST
M
ARCH DAY SINCE RECORDS BEGAN
, a hundred and fifty years ago. The temperature had officially been measured at 79.3°F. In the taxi Strasser had taken, the air-conditioning was on. As soon as he got out he started sweating in his black suit.

Baier's house looked abandoned. A few of the windows had their shutters closed, the rest were missing their curtains. He rang the bell. The house remained still. He rang again, impatient this time. He still heard nothing.

Baier had been stringing him along with the payment. He hadn't received the money himself yet, he had claimed. And Strasser had been stupid enough to believe this. It was only today, leafing through the catalogue by chance, that he happened upon the terms and conditions. There he read that the buyer was obliged to pay the full sum immediately following the auction.

The old man was trying to take him for a ride. Which is why he was here; Strasser would not be sidetracked any longer.

He pressed the button once more, keeping his thumb on it a long time. As he released it he heard sounds from inside. A door squeaked, then he heard footsteps on wooden stairs.

Frau Almeida opened the door. She was pale and furious. “What do you want?” she asked, without greeting him.

“Herr Baier owes me something and I would like to collect it.” Before she could make any reply he walked past her up the stairs. He knew how to get to the salon where the old man sat.

The house was empty. On the walls were the bleached rectangles Baier's collection of pictures had left. The stair carpets were missing; only the brass rods which had held them in place remained.

The door to the salon stood open. The room was stuffed with furniture. A disheveled bed stood there, and a pile of packing cases.

Frau Almeida had now entered the room. “The things he wanted to take to Lake Como. He would only have had two rooms there.”

“What's going on? Where is he?”

“When I got here today he was lying in bed. First I thought he was sleeping; he'd been complaining he felt tired a lot recently. This crazy weather was playing havoc with his circulation. Then I realized he wasn't breathing any more. They took him away an hour ago.” She paused. “The move was to have been tomorrow.”

The most respectful response Rolf Strasser could find to this was: “Shit!”

He looked round the room. The canvas reproductions of Baier's collection were standing all around. The Vallotton hung in its usual spot above the bureau, as if nothing had happened. “Who will get everything?” he asked the housekeeper.

“There are two heirs. But there isn't much left. And the pictures are all as fake as that one you copied for him there.”

Strasser squeezed between the furniture and boxes to get closer to the picture.

No second period, after Vallotton's surname. Cast-iron relief like a little ass. A little ass seen from the right. Strasser's Vallotton.

I
T WAS ALL TERRIBLY BANAL
.

Pedroni was lying in bed in his apartment, Schraubenstrasse 22b, third floor. He wasn't alone. To his right lay Svetlana, a Russian girl he had met the previous night at Megaherz, a strip club. To his left lay Salo, a Filipina, who couldn't be much older than the Russian girl, although he could never tell with Asian women. He had met her in the same way.

It was six in the morning. He wasn't sure how long he'd slept. They had come home pretty early. He'd extracted the two women from the proprietor before two, along with an extra bottle of champagne each, but of course they hadn't gone to sleep as soon as they arrived at the apartment.

Anyway, when the doorbell rang it was six in the morning. Pedroni didn't respond. He wasn't expecting anyone. Certainly not at this time of the morning.

The bell rang again. He ignored it again. He might not have been home. He might have stayed the night with Svetlana or Salo. Then he wouldn't have heard the bell anyway. So he decided not to move, which was an easy decision.

Now there was a knock on the apartment door.

Till this point he had assumed that whoever it was, was standing at the door to the building, on the street. Now he knew that wasn't the case. So it must be one of the neighbors. Even less reason to clamber over Svetlana or Salo at six in the morning.

There was a louder knock. And now he heard a muffled male voice. It was saying his name. Saying something about “no point” and “know you're in there.” And something about “police.”

Police?

Police.

He decide to get up after all. Climbed over Svetlana, treading on her hair, to which she said something loud in Russian, found his trousers and slipped into them.

The knocking had gotten louder now, and the voice blunter.

The police? This could only be a mistake of some kind. Or it was about his two visitors. It couldn't be about the 1.2 million. Weynfeldt had too much to lose to report him.

“Wait a minute!” he was forced to shout, as the voice was now saying something about “gain entry using force.”

He turned the key and was confronted with the superior strength of a great many police officers. In two seconds he was wearing handcuffs, in ten they had found Svetlana and Salo, and after around fifty, the 1.2. It was still in Weynfeldt's little case. And this was placed at the bottom of his wardrobe. Minus six thousand for the last twelve hours' expenditure.

He took this all in vaguely, through the pulsating haze of his hangover. And distantly he heard himself repeating, “I want to report a serious case of art fraud.”

A
DRIAN
W
EYNFELDT ALREADY SAW REGULARITY AS LIFE
-prolonging; all the more so when it came to the repetition of healthy activity. So of course once the fitness room was finished he spent half an hour there every morning before breakfast.

He had tried each of the muscle-training, bodybuilding machines only once, and decided to continue leaving it to his tailor to improve his figure.

But he had taken a liking to one of the machines: The cross-trainer. A black monster with a huge flywheel you set in motion using two coupling rods, like the wheels of a steam train. The rods were equipped with two platforms, one for each foot, and two poles, one for each hand. Rowing with the arms and stepping with the feet, you turned the wheel and soon fell into a rounded, harmonic rhythm.

Obviously the machine was equipped with electronic devices and displays; it could be programmed for various training schedules, various degrees of difficulty and resistance. But that overstretched Adrian's technical abilities, and he confined himself to binding the heart rate monitor round his chest, pressing the quick start button and walking for fifteen minutes without letting his pulse go under 85 or over 140, the heart rate training zone recommended by his doctor.

While Adrian Weynfeldt exercised on this cross-trainer, the little speakers mounted on the ceiling played a compilation of what Luc Neri claimed was the best classical music to jog to. At the moment it was the overture to Rossini's
William Tell
. It was around seven in the morning, a rainy day in June. The eccentric spring, see-sawing between wintry and tropical weather, had given way to a summer of nonstop rain.

It was barely three months since those events, but to Adrian Weynfeldt it felt like a small eternity. However much they had stirred him up at the time, now he saw them as a tiny bump on the smooth asphalt of his life's road. Although a lot had changed since then, these were changes which, however strangely they stuck out, had not altered the larger contours.

The Thursday lunch club was still meeting regularly. Kando was still militant and unshakable in her belief in the cinematic genius of her Claudio. He in turn seemed somewhat philosophical, which made him nicer to talk to, and a better listener.
Working Title: Hemingway's Suitcase
was now undergoing treatment from a second script doctor and, as Talberger the producer put it, the prognosis was not good.

Karin Winter had plans for a new store in a better location which, as the tacit shareholder without voting rights, Adrian Weynfeldt approved of. Luc Neri saw the possible move as the opportunity for the long overdue relaunch of the bookstore's Internet presence, and had already designed some trial versions. At the moment he and Karin weren't together—or perhaps they were. Adrian couldn't keep up any more.

Kaspar Casutt had put his fee for designing Weynfeldt's fitness room into entering an architectural competition way out of his league, and was reliant again on occasional donations to meet his everyday costs.

Alice Waldner had achieved unexpected fame. Her steel sculpture
Toto and Something Yellow,
which had stood for many years without causing offense, high and mighty, in the forecourt of one of the city's administrative buildings, was ruined overnight by graffiti. Or improved. That was the crux of the argument which began on local radio and TV but eventually made it to the most important arts broadcasting program on public television. Alice had appeared for over two minutes and, as Adrian had continually assured her, looked gorgeous.

Rolf Strasser was in Venice, California. He had only survived two weeks in the Marquesas—island rage. On the way back he had gotten waylaid in Los Angeles, where he made contact with a group of artists, in particular a Chinese performer called Syun, as he told Weynfeldt enthusiastically in his e-mails.

Before his departure he had been able to unequivocally identify the Vallotton from Klaus Baier's estate as his own work, executed as a commission. This and the statement, attested by a notary, from the anonymous collector Number 33 saying he had no doubts that his purchase was genuine, led Theo L. Pedroni to drop the false accusations against both Dr. Adrian Weynfeldt and Frau Lorena Steiner on the advice of his lawyer.

In light of his previous convictions and the severity of the sentence anticipated, Pedroni himself was still in custody awaiting trial.

Weynfeldt had indeed succeeded in getting Véronique a salary increase. She was investing it mainly in her A-wardrobe, as she called the clothes she wore in her slender phases. For interpersonal reasons Adrian silently wished for the return of the B-wardrobe.

The cross-trainer announced that the fifteen minutes were up and the cool-down stage had begun. Adrian reduced his speed.

Within his older circle of friends there were few changes to be noted. Luckily, as for people their age, things seldom changed for the better.

Except for Mereth Widler. Having tried in vain throughout her life to shock her friends, she finally succeeded, just two months after her husband's death, when a man fifteen years younger than her moved in, with whom she freely admitted she had been having a liaison for over a decade.

Adrian's cardio training was over. He toweled the sweat from his face and switched the music off. Now came the best part of his morning workout: the contemplative part.

He sat in the comfortable easy chair by Max Werner Moser, an original from 1931, the only item from his furniture collection he kept in this room, and devoted himself to contemplation.

The yellow and brown patterned carpet, lit by a low light source somewhere to the rear right, outside the picture. The strong shadows in the yellow and mauve turmoil of the carelessly flung dress and petticoat. The piece of lilac clothing from which, very naked in the glare of this sole light source, the woman's torso rose. The warm red of the glowing fire behind the glazed doors of the
salamandre
.