The Last Weynfeldt

by Martin Suter

  He had not been able to muster the courage to ask the barkeeper for news of Lorena. But he undoubtedly realized why Weynfeldt was suddenly here so often. If he knew anything he would have said.

  The telephone rang, and Weynfeldt forced himself to let it ring twice, three times. If it was Lorena she shouldn’t think he was sitting by the phone waiting for her to call.

  But it wasn’t Lorena. It was Klaus Baier, one of his parent’s peers’ children nearly a generation older than Weynfeldt. Baier’s father had run a textile firm which did business with Weynfeldt & Co. The two fathers had remained friends long after both companies were taken over by healthier competitors. They had both been keen hunters, inviting each other to their respective hunting grounds, and traveling to East Africa on safari together in the 1950s.

  The two sons had never had much contact. Initially because of the age difference, later because they had no mutual interests. While Adrian was focused on his passion, art, Klaus was interested only in money. Following his father’s untimely death in 1962, Klaus Baier began making risky attempts to boost his inheritance. He became a daring speculator, someone with a good nose, who frequently gambled his entire wealth, and on more than one occasion lost everything except his assets of last resort.

  These reserves included a few valuable pictures, the remains of the respectable collection of Swiss art his father had bequeathed him. A seascape in oil and two watercolors by Ferdinand Hodler, a portrait of a woman by Segantini, two floral still lives by Augusto Giacometti and a notable nude by Félix Vallotton.

  This modest collection was later to bring them back into contact. Shortly after Adrian had completed his doctorate, Klaus called and asked him to value his pictures. It was the first job of Adrian’s career and he went to great effort to come up with plausible figures. Like many people who speculate with money on a large scale, Klaus Baier was stingy when it came to small scale transactions, and Weynfeldt’s payment was simply dinner. Adrian didn’t care. Even then he was financially secure, and in the course of his research he had come into contact with Murphy’s Swiss art expert at the time, who subsequently engaged Adrian as his assistant for a symbolic salary.

  Baier and Weynfeldt had met for occasional lunches or dinners at irregular intervals ever since, the initiative usually coming from Baier, hoping to avail himself of a free valuation. He would ask Adrian the current market value of his pictures; if the information was favorable he would pay the check, if not he let Weynfeldt pay.

  Baier’s most secure asset was the small Hodler seascape. The artist’s market value had risen steadily over the years with little fluctuation. The Augusto Giacometti was also a blue chip, which could safely be realized at any time. The riskiest item to speculate on was the Vallotton however. Although the artist’s prices had seesawed over the years, an image such as Femme nue devant une salamandre was capable of achieving a sensational price, independent of the artist’s current rating. Nude Facing a Stove was extremely well known, a bestseller as a poster, yet shrouded in mystery: no one knew who owned it. In all the monographs and exhibition catalogues—and it was frequently exhibited; this enhanced its value—its status was described simply as “private collection.” If it suddenly came on the market it would cause a sensation. Adrian Weynfeldt consistently valued it at a realistic figure, but always added, “Under the hammer it could easily fetch double that.”

  Weynfeldt had soon grasped that Baier’s interest in the value of his collection was purely hypothetical. He never dreamed for a second of selling a single piece. He just liked to know how much money he wasn’t liquidizing.

  So Weynfeldt was rendered speechless for a second when Baier asked him, “Would my Vallotton fit in your current auction, Adrian?”

  After a short pause he answered, “Yes, perfectly.”

  3

  HIS CHAIR OF CHOICE WAS AN ARMCHAIR, ITS SEAT, BACK and arms upholstered with a rather sorry tapestry. The other couches and easy chairs in his living room were comfier, but all too low. Thanks to his arthritic leg he was unable to get out of them without assistance.

  He had stationed a glass of port on the flattened lion’s head decorating the left arm. On the right was a crystal ashtray, clean except for the inch-long cylinder of ash, still intact, from the Churchill he had clamped between his lips, his eyes screwed up. He had long-distance glasses on his nose, short-distance ones on his forehead.

  Cigar smoke hung in the upper half of the room, immobile, caught by the beams from the two spotlights pointing at the picture on the easel. The Count Basie Big Band swung, barely audible, from an aging stereo system.

  The picture showed a naked woman, sitting on a yellow kilim rug in front of a fireplace filled by a salamandre, a cast-iron stove with a glass door, through which a glowing fire could be seen. The woman had her back to the viewer. The last layer she had shed, a pale lilac under-garment, lay draped around her on the rug; her dress and petticoat, yellow and mauve, were flung carelessly a little farther away. Her was head slightly tilted, perhaps contemplative, perhaps submissive; her reddish-brown hair pinned up, her waist narrow, hips broad, buttocks and thighs ample. Above the mantelpiece part of a mirror could be seen, reflecting a thin strip of the room. A red armchair protruded into the picture from the right; to the left of the fireplace the door to a recessed cupboard stood half-open.

  Klaus Baier had grown up with this picture. It hung in his father’s study till his death, a room which smelled like this one—of stale air and fresh cigar smoke.

  As a small boy he hadn’t given much thought to the woman sitting in front of the stove. She had obviously taken her clothes off because the fire had made the room so warm. But later he began to wonder what the woman gazing so intently into the flames actually looked like. When his father was out he sometimes sneaked into the study and sat in front of the picture, hoping the woman would look over her shoulder. Just quickly, just once. Later, after he realized that women in paintings never turn their heads, he still slipped into the room and imagined what the woman actually looked like from the front. He was jealous of the painter, who was sure to have seen her from the other side. During puberty the woman in front of the salamandre featured in most of his sexual fantasies. And all of his three wives (the last had divorced him six years ago) were slender from the waist up, broad from the waist down.

  It was more the woman than the painting which had accompanied Klaus Baier his entire life. And now, as an old man, it was her above all he found so hard to part with.

  When it came to the small seascape by Ferdinand Hodler it had been easy. The painting hadn’t meant much to him, aside from the six hundred thousand franc estimated price and “at least a million under the hammer” which Weynfeldt had said he could have expected. It was painful only in so far as he couldn’t put the work up for auction, for business and family reasons; he didn’t want to create the impression he had cash-flow problems, and it was better if his two children, from the first and second marriages, didn’t find out about the sale. He was forced to make a discreet private deal, and to accept the price of five hundred and forty-two thousand dollars offered by a collector from Detroit. He was truly up the creek.

  He’d had a reproduction made—a facsimile on canvas in the original frame, entirely convincing to the casual observer—but not for sentimental reasons, simply to avoid questions being asked on the rare occasions his heirs visited.

  Much the same had happened, during other crises, to the Segantini, the Hodler watercolors, the two Augusto Giacomettis and the other remnants of his father’s collection. All discreet emergency sales below their potential auction value. And top quality reproductions of all of them hung in the familiar spots around the house.

  He couldn’t sell off his Vallotton so cheaply however. Weynfeldt’s last estimate had been between 1.2 and 1.4 million francs. If the work fulfilled its full potential at auction it could fetch two or three times that. There was no question of a private sale this time. He would auction the painting officially, very offic
ially, heirs notwithstanding. He needed the cash more urgently than ever.

  Klaus Baier had lost a substantial sum on the stock market, yet again. But while he had previously used the discreet sale of paintings to aid his recovery from financial indisposition, to bridge a brief insolvency or to raise the funds for particularly promising speculations, now he needed the money to survive.

  His financial situation was grim. The house he lived in had long belonged to the bank. If he wanted to satisfy all his creditors and avoid personal bankruptcy, he would be left with somewhere between one and two hundred thousand francs. In the old days that would probably have been enough to get him back on his feet again. But he just didn’t have the energy this time. Nor the optimism. For the first time in his life he felt old.

  Seventy-eight had been a number till now. Although he knew that, among other things, it represented the number of years he had been alive in the world, it never had anything to do with the way he felt. He knew lots of people with that number of years behind them, and they all seemed old to him, yet the number had no significance to him personally. The old man he sometimes saw in the mirror, when it couldn’t be avoided, had nothing to do with him.

  But a ridiculous flu last winter had flattened him. For almost a month he was bedridden, with recurring bouts of fever, shivering fits and aching limbs which had made his body, already far from agile, leaden and over-sensitive. He lay in bed, in a foul mood, testing Frau Almeida’s patience so far she threatened in all seriousness to hand in her notice. There were nights when he was convinced he would never stand on his feet again, when he reflected on his life and realized it wouldn’t make much difference to him if it was over.

  To his own surprise he recovered. But he wasn’t the same person. He had lost his enthusiasm. And annoyingly, along with it, his money. The little he still had was nowhere near enough for him to spend his twilight years in the manner he had planned.

  A few years ago Baier had registered with the Residenza Crepuscolo, a palazzo on the shores of Lake Como that had been converted into a luxurious old age home. There he had the option on a spacious two-room apartment with a view of the lake. Now of all times, when he could no longer afford it, it had become free, for the reason places in old people’s homes typically do become free. Including full board and all costs, it would cost around a hundred thousand francs a year. That meant that he had enough money for a year at most. He was under no illusions about his life expectancy—high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, prostate problems, type 2 diabetes, arthritis and a taste for unhealthy living—but he gave himself more than a year. Around ten, in fact.

  His twilight years in the Residenza Crepuscolo between now and his eighty-eighth birthday would cost between 1.5 and 2 million francs, allowing for a little travel, some unhealthy living, and the resulting rise in the costs of care. Pretty much the figure he hoped to make from the Vallotton after tax.

  A short coughing fit forced Baier to remove the Havana from his mouth to the ashtray. He suppressed the coughs with the practiced ease of someone who had smoked for most of his life and coughed for at least half of it. Then he took a large sip of port. Not his favorite drink, simply his favorite compromise between something advisable and something stronger.

  Count Basie played “This Could Be the Start of Something Big.” Baier heaved himself up with the help of the chair’s arms and grasped the ivory-topped walking stick leaning against the next chair. He hobbled over to the easel, swapped the long-distance glasses for the short-distance ones and studied the work close up.

  There were few things more familiar to him than this painting. The woman’s hair, which his father had called “chestnut brown,” pinned up and parted down the middle into two coifs. The curve of her right cheek, noticeably redder than the rest of her skin, suggesting a young, oval face. Her right arm, pressed tightly to her body, suggesting that, despite the fire, she was in fact chilly and had folded her arms against her chest. The lilac petticoat, which on closer inspection appeared to have been painted afterward to avoid dealing with certain questions of anatomy and perspective. Where were her calves? Her heels? If she was sitting on them, why couldn’t you see that from the shape of her buttocks? The unexplained reflection on the shiny wooden mantelpiece just at the point where the reddish brown of the hair needed to stand out from the brown of the wood. The contrast between the upper half of a three-paneled screen reflected in the mirror, painted in broad strokes, and the more realistically painted silver cachepot on the mantelpiece. The piles of vaguely defined objects which could be discerned in the shadows of the open cupboard. Table linen? Sketchbooks? Boxes of painting utensils?

  Baier touched the picture with his fingertips. He knew every patch of paint, every brushstroke, he knew how its surface felt and he would have been able to identify the painting by its smell. Which, given the speed at which his eyesight was deteriorating, he might soon be forced to do.

  His Neuchâtel clock struck seven. In precisely five minutes he would hear the doorbell ring, followed by Frau Almeida’s voice as she greeted Adrian Weynfeldt. Weynfeldt was a punctual man, as his father had been before him. Weynfeldt senior had called this “kingly courtesy” and had instilled it in his son, raising him along with his wife to believe that, if not a king, he was very much a Weynfeldt. Which was nearly the same thing.

  At home Baier’s father had often joked about the snobbish standards the Weynfeldts upheld. The awareness of being something special had been passed down to poor Adrian so forcefully it was part of his flesh and bones, making him use excessive politeness to dispel any suspicion of superciliousness.

  For a long time it had looked like Weynfeldt senior would be the last Weynfeldt. Till his wife, approaching forty-four, bore the late arrival Adrian, a triumph of gynecology and genealogy.

  Baier remembered Adrian as a little boy. The Weynfeldts were great hosts, always giving lavish dinners and receptions, and at every event he was paraded around like a trophy. A shy child with a disproportionately large head and—even then—tailored suits. In summer in shorts; in winter in knickerbockers.

  The child had disappeared from his radar, and he first took notice of him again at Luise Weynfeldt’s seventieth birthday party. Although really it was Adrian’s guest Baier took notice of: a red-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned English girl with the old-fashioned name Daphne, the important girlfriend for whom Adrian Weynfeldt had actually left home and moved to London. Baier wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed either, as he observed later in the proceedings, after the birthday banquet in the Lisière, the pleasure palace on the outskirts of the city which Sebastian Weynfeldt had booked for the occasion.

  Now Adrian was the last Weynfeldt. His father was not granted time to see his son ensure the continuation of the family line. His mother was denied this too, although she clung to life for nearly twenty further years after her husband’s death. Baier sometimes suspected Adrian had refrained from marrying or procreating to get back at his parents for something they had done to him—whatever that might be.

  Or perhaps he was gay. It wouldn’t be surprising for a bachelor who lived with his mother till her death at ninety-four, surrounded himself with beautiful things and took such care of his appearance, despite the serious affair with the English art student. That sort of thing featured in every homosexual biography.

  Baier couldn’t care less. Adrian was good company, well mannered, helpful and useful. The latter above all, now.

  He took the painting down from the easel. Without his stick, his teeth clenched, he carried it across the room and compared it to the one hanging above the bureau.

  Perfect. Every detail correct. Even the smell.

  He slid the painting into the narrow space between the bureau and the wall. At that moment he heard the doorbell and Frau Almeida’s voice as she greeted Adrian.

  4

  FRAU ALMEIDA, BAIER’S PORTUGUESE HOUSEKEEPER, opened the door before Weynfeldt’s finger had left the doorbell.

  “Boa tarde,
” Adrian said, “como esta?”

  “Tudo bem, obrigada,” Frau Almeida said and, knowing that was all the Portuguese Weynfeldt knew, added, “He’s waiting for you in the salon.”

  Fernanda Almeida had taken over Baier’s housekeeping after his last divorce. She was a tall, slender woman, and lived with her husband and their nine-year-old twins in the little servants’ apartment in Baier’s villa. Her husband worked shifts in a canning factory and made a little on the side as Baier’s janitor, running errands and working in the garden, much too small for the huge building. Baier’s villa was hemmed in by other villas, all indistinguishable, all with gardens much too small, with a view of the city and the lake obscured by overgrown firs and pines it was now illegal to fell.

  Frau Almeida took his Burberry and the gift-wrapped bottle of port he’d brought. Weynfeldt followed her to the cloakroom while she hung up his coat, and out of habit checked his appearance in the mirror.

  Although his face was not sharply chiseled his skin was still very smooth for his age, and he had a straight, even nose with a broad bridge, a “Weynfeldt beak” as his mother called it, blue-gray eyes, generous lips, chin neither protruding nor receding, with a dimple tricky to shave and thick, brown hair streaked with gray. He had it trimmed every fortnight, his neck and the area behind his ears shaved every Tuesday. He wore his hair parted, shorter on the left, longer on the right and combed to the side. From midday onward, as it began to lose the elasticity from its daily, morning wash and the long part increasingly began to fall over his forehead, he would smooth it back to its proper place in an unconscious gesture, like something precious.