by Martin Suter
Tanner did not invite Allmen to sit on it. He pointed to his desk and said, “Show me what you’ve got.”
The discreet commercial relationship between the two went back years. At the beginning Allmen had been a good customer, mainly buying American silver and Art Deco. Later, when Allmen’s financial difficulties forced him to act, he turned from customer to supplier. He regularly sold Tanner items from his collection. Tanner was stingy, but what he lacked in generosity, he made up for in discretion.
Over the years Allmen’s stock of superfluous pieces had shrunk so low he began to search flea markets and provincial shops for saleable items. The prices Jack offered left Allmen with such narrow margins, he was forced to look for another solution. He found it by chance in an antiques shop in Alsace. He was buying a small statue of the Madonna, and while the shop assistant was busy packing it up, he thought: I could swipe that set of Rosenthal figures if I wanted. No one would notice. And he found he did want to.
Over time he perfected the technique of distracting the sales staff with a purchase so he could liberate something unnoticed. His clothes, his manner, and the fact he was buying something, made him seem trustworthy, remembered as someone above suspicion.
Although he parted with money readily, Allmen guarded his modest working capital fiercely. It financed his decoy purchases and the train journeys. He worked strictly at a certain distance from the city where he lived.
Allmen unpacked the vase and placed it on the desk.
Jack Tanner picked it up, examined it, and said, “two thousand.”
Tanner’s offers were always final. Only very rarely did he provoke Allmen to put up a little resistance. Allmen knew it would earn him nothing but a shrug.
He had no option but to accept Tanner’s offers. He was his only buyer. He must have realized that Allmen’s goods were no longer coming from his own collection. But he never asked about their provenance. And Allmen had never seen one of his items in the storeroom or display area of Les Trouvailles.
Tanner must have had customers he could call who were equally discreet and did not ask questions about provenance.
Allmen nodded, took the money and said goodbye. Till next time.
6
The cast-iron gate to his house had been freshly painted. Glossy black, with gold for the finials on top of the gateposts, which continued along the railings either side of the gate next to the box hedge. Allmen thought it looked a little nouveau riche, but better than the rust it replaced.
On the right-hand pillar were two brass signs, one smaller, one larger. On the larger was written “K. C. L. & D. Trust” and on the smaller “J. F. V. A.”
On the left-hand pillar was an intercom, also made of polished brass, with two buttons. The upper was labeled “K. C. L. & D.” and the lower “J. F. V. A.”
Allmen pressed the lower one.
After a few seconds a suspicious male voice asked, “Yes?”
“Soy yo,” Allmen replied. “It’s me.”
The lock buzzed and Allmen stepped onto the paved path leading to the carved oak door of the villa. About halfway along it he disappeared behind an impeccably manicured box.
He had turned down one of the pathways leading around the villa through its grounds.
A well-kept lawn, here and there ericaceous beds for rhododendrons and azaleas, already displaying their fall color. All of it guarded by imposing ranks of mature trees: grand firs, cedars, maples and magnolias.
There, in the permanent shade of the trees, stood a small gardener’s cottage, with a greenhouse attached to its western façade.
The door was open, and in the tiny vestibule Allmen was met by a man. He had smooth, neatly parted blue-black hair, and the features of a Maya. He was wearing a white waiter’s jacket with a white shirt, black pants and a black tie. Allmen greeted him in Spanish.
“Hola Carlos.”
“Muy buenas tardes, Don John,” Carlos replied, took his wet raincoat, hung it on a hanger and walked with it to a door under the steep wooden steps which led to the attic. Their threshold was two steps lower than the hallway floor.
Behind this was a room that had previously functioned as the laundry for the villa, suitably ample for this role. Now there was just one washing machine and a dryer, with a couple of clothes lines. The majority of the room was filled with boxes and furniture, from floor to ceiling. It was here that Allmen stored the items from his former life that were either indispensable or unsellable.
Carlos hung the raincoat on one of the washing lines and returned to the tiny vestibule. Allmen was standing there in front of the console, above which hung a gilded cloakroom mirror. A letter was lying there, which was unusual, because letters to him were usually addressed to his post office box. He preferred his creditors not to know where he lived.
He tucked it away in his pocket. He would read it later.
The flavors of the lunch Carlos was keeping on a low flame wafted through the open kitchen door. Allmen knew the smell: Carlos’s homesickness food. Black beans—frijoles. They would be accompanied by guacamole flavored with chili, lemon and fresh coriander, fried mince patties—tortitas de carne—and maize pancakes—tortillas.
It was not Allmen’s favorite food, but he couldn’t complain. He hadn’t given Carlos any housekeeping money for ages.
They entered the only room that came close to meeting Allmen’s standards, the library. It had twice the floor space of the gardener’s cottage. Along its walls stood enormous bookcases that on closer inspection had clearly been built to fit a different room. The room was very light considering the weather and its shady location. It was walled in glass. This was the property’s former greenhouse.
Its concrete floor was almost entirely covered with carpets. There was a suite of Art Deco chairs, a lectern, a writing desk, a cast-iron wood burner with two comfortable worn-leather armchairs and a set of mahogany library steps on wheels. There were two standard lamps for reading at night, and a slightly battered candelabra to provide a more festive atmosphere.
On the far side of the greenhouse was a black Bechstein baby grand. Allmen was a talented if slapdash pianist who often used to play bar music to entertain his guests. He still improvised on his own sometimes, to relax.
Allmen sat in one of the leather armchairs and took out the letter. Carlos placed a side table within reach and put the sherry on it.
The envelope was embossed with the crest of the Kingdom of Morocco and the letterhead of its Consulate General. It was addressed with a fountain pen. Allmen ripped it open and took out the letter.
The same fountain pen had been used to write: “12,455 Swiss francs including interest. Final deadline Wednesday!! Or else …!!!”
Signed: “H. Dörig.”
Allmen felt his chest tense, as it did when long suppressed unpleasantness suddenly reared up. He swapped the letter for the sherry on the side table and took a swig. As a matter of principle, Allmen never opened letters he suspected might contain anything unpleasant. This way he maintained the calm necessary in his situation.
He wouldn’t have credited the coarse Dörig with the Moroccan-Consulate-General trick. How had he got hold of the stationery?
Allmen took another swig of sherry and attempted to suppress all thought of Dörig. The man was his most unpleasant creditor. He was aggressive, perhaps even violent. An antiques dealer from Oberland, he had barns full of stock, which he sold to retailers, much of it without receipts. Allmen knew him from the old days. In and among Dörig’s jumble of rough-hewn farmhouse furniture, dusty horse tackle and woodworm-ridden spinning wheels, he would often discover superb collector’s items. In his time as a collector Allmen had been a regular there. And very popular, as he had sometimes paid more than Dörig asked. Not because he liked him, but he didn’t want to be taken for a bargain hunter. Allmen despised bargains. They were beneath his dignity and should be beneath everyone’s dignity. Things should cost whatever they were worth, otherwise it was all too sordid.
Thanks to this attitude, Dörig had let him buy things on credit. Allmen had been making ends meet for some time by selling individual pieces from his collection. Once it had shrunk to the indispensible—from both a practical and sentimental perspective—he had begun to buy objects cheaply and sell them on at a profit. By then he could no longer afford to despise bargains. In his situation, Allmen could not be choosy. One of his suppliers was Dörig, and he had built up quite a debt with him. Dörig had warned him twice verbally, and after Allmen ceased to visit him, had probably warned him in writing a few times. Now he had resorted to threatening letters.
Allmen emptied his glass, leaned his head back and gazed at the ceiling. The drizzle had risen to a persistent downpour, streaming down the glass roof in a restless film.
At the corner of one of the glass panes the mortise joint was leaking. He would inform Carlos, who would mark the spot on the floor with tape and later plug the leaking joint with putty. One of Carlos’s many duties.
Now he called him for lunch. Carlos insisted on punctuality, as he had to return to his paid job as gardener and caretaker at two o’clock on the dot.
Throughout the meal he waited on Allmen, although Allmen had asked him countless times to sit down with him to eat. Carlos insisted on eating in the kitchen.
Once he had cleared the table and piled the dishes in the kitchen sink, Allmen heard him climbing the stairs. A few minutes later he returned wearing his gardening outfit and a rain cape and asked, “Algo más, Don John?”
“No, gracias, Carlos,” Allmen answered.
Carlos wished him an enjoyable afternoon, went back into the library and marked the wet spot on the floor, which Allmen had already forgotten.
7
Allmen habitually rested for half an hour in the afternoon. This little siesta didn’t just refresh him, it also reminded him every day that he was privileged to be a man of independent means. Even after all these years, sleeping while the rest of the country was pursuing productive activity gave him a sense of enormous happiness he knew only from cutting class at school. He called it “cutting life.”
There was nothing more delicious than closing the curtains on whatever was going on outside, slipping under the cool quilt in your underwear and listening to the distant sounds of the world with half-closed eyes. Only to emerge from your afternoon snooze shortly afterward, amazed and invigorated.
His bedroom was filled by a king-size bed, a bookshelf for his nighttime reading matter and two closets for the section of his wardrobe appropriate to the time of year. The rest of his clothes were also stored in the laundry.
He lay in bed, next to him a paperback for the unlikely situation he was unable to doze off. The rain pattered softly against the window, otherwise the world outside kept quiet.
He couldn’t entirely banish Dörig’s letter from his consciousness. Not because of the twelve thousand, four hundred and fifty five francs. He would find them somehow. It was the nature of this final demand which was disturbing him.
However badly Allmen managed money, he was extremely good at managing debt. He had learned that during his time at Charterhouse, the exclusive boarding school in Surrey where his father had sent him at fourteen at his own request. Allmen wanted to be cleansed of his family’s nouveau riche, farmyard whiff, as he put it.
At Charterhouse handling debt was an unofficial part of the boys’ education. Debt was nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it was good for one’s reputation to have some. For pedagogic reasons the school rules set a limit on the amount of pocket money pupils could be given. This led to a proliferation of money lending. Everyone boasted about their debts, looked up to those with the highest, deferred them or serviced them in installments, always paying them off with style and nonchalance.
Allmen had continued this in later life. Right from the start, the income from his inheritance had failed to match his growing need for capital, and his deceased father’s trustees soon lost their patience. They were succeeded by a series of handpicked advisors, whose advice contributed more to Allmen’s expenses than his income. He soon found himself forced to finance his lifestyle and his new acquisitions—alongside the Villa Schwarzacker these included apartments in Paris, London, New York, Rome and Barcelona—by parting with some of the more secure, solid assets his father had bequeathed him. And when he had used up that supply, he maintained himself via sales—mostly rash—of his new acquisitions, first the real estate, then furniture, then collector’s items, then one by one the decreasing number of items which in his former life he had considered indispensible. And finally items acquired in a similar manner to the Kangxi vase.
As a rich man, Allmen had been a highly generous creditor. And now in his role as debtor, he expected the same patience and understanding from his creditors. Initially he was not disappointed. His former solvency stood him in good stead. What he had were not debts; they were outstanding payments, accounts, pending items. Creditor and debtor treated each other with the respect everyone owes someone they are dependent on.
And this was why Dörig’s letter had opened up a new dimension. It was a crude, vulgar fit of rage from a man prepared to use violence, a category he had not yet encountered. Allmen abhorred all forms of violence. Including the verbal form.
He was seriously perturbed. But when he woke half an hour later from his siesta, amazed and refreshed as ever, this perturbation had receded into something quiet and distant.
8
The original owners of the Villa Schwarzacker, then called the Villa Odeon, had used the greenhouse to grow flowers, vegetables and fruit, and over winter potted palms and other nonhardy ornamentals. The owner previous to Allmen had neglected the greenhouse, using it as a shed and storeroom. But when Allmen took over the villa he had it restored because he bred orchids. Or rather, he had orchids bred.
He had acquired the taste while staying at a friend’s colonial villa in Guatemala. They stood on every table, commode and sideboard, in every niche and on every ledge, always fresh, often smelling enchanting—no, it wasn’t true that orchids had no fragrance—in every color and size.
It turned out that Carlos the gardener was also the orchid man of the house. He nursed and propagated them, brought them into the villa when they were in flower then back to the greenhouse afterward.
When Carlos first saw the greenhouse at Villa Schwarzacker, he said, in his formal manner, “Simply an idea, Don John, nothing more.” And so the Villa Schwarzacker became famous during Allmen’s time for the orchids which decorated it.
He had to give up the collection along with the villa. But Allmen was still reaping the benefits of restoring the greenhouse, above all the installation of modern gas heating. It ensured that this large, poorly insulated space was still inhabitable even in winter. The wood-burning stove Allmen now sat in front of was a luxury. And luxury was one of Allmen’s greatest weaknesses.
He was proud of the deal he’d done on the gardener’s cottage. When he was finally forced to sell the Villa Schwarzacker—he had renamed it in honor of the land which formed the cornerstone of the fortune he had inherited—he had the idea to sell only on the condition he was given the lifelong right to dwell in the cottage. Several of the buyers agreed, but he finally sold to the trust company because he liked the idea of having the place to himself evenings and weekends. And because the director agreed to let him have most of the bookshelves from the library. The director was pleased to have the extra wall space for the exhibitions the company put up during marketing events targeting current and potential clients.
Allmen had nearly finished the paperback, a new thriller by the great Elmore Leonard, now mellowed with age. The story consisted almost entirely of dialogue, with none of the violent scenes of his earlier work.
Allmen was addicted to reading. He had been even as a child. He had soon learned that reading was the simplest, most effective and nicest way of escaping what was going on around you. His father, who Allmen had never once seen holding a book, had the great
est respect for this passion of his son’s. He always accepted reading as an excuse for his boy’s many derelictions of duty. And his mother, that gentle, sickly woman, who died too young, leaving Allmen with only vague memories, accepted any excuses her husband accepted.
Even today Allmen read anything he could lay his hands on, world literature, the classics, the latest titles, biographies, brochures, instruction manuals … He was a regular in several secondhand bookshops and had been known to hail a taxi when he saw books in a trash heap so he could take them home.
Allmen had to finish a book once he had started it, even if it was terrible. He did this not out of respect for the author, but out of curiosity. He believed that every book held a secret, even if it was only the answer to the question of why it had been written. He had to discover this secret. So really it was not reading Allmen was addicted to. He was addicted to secrets.
This trait had not just made him a bookworm. It was also responsible for his addiction to gossip. This addiction was passive, however. He loved hearing gossip, but it would never have occurred to him to spread it. Allmen was that paradoxical thing: a discreet gossip.
Out of one of the many small loudspeakers mounted on the bookshelves came Puccini’s La Bohème in a recording featuring Callas and Di Stefano. A state-of-the-art hi-fi was on Allmen’s list of basic needs—a list from which he had recently been forced to delete ever more items. He didn’t think a bankruptcy auditor would see it that way, but things wouldn’t get that bad, he was determined of that.
Allmen had left gaps of a few feet between some of the bookshelves so that some light entered from the sides and the view of the lovely garden wasn’t completely blocked. These gaps could be filled by drawing the drapes, which was what he now did. The afternoon had become even more unappealing; a wind had risen, tearing leaves from the plane trees and driving the rain against the glass façade. If the weather didn’t improve he would ask Carlos to light the stove tomorrow.