by Martin Suter
He opened the garden gate, walked along the granite flagstones to the front door and rang the bell.
Nothing happened. He rang again, this time for longer. After the third time he heard Baier’s grumpy voice over the intercom. “Yes,” he said brusquely.
“Rolf Strasser. I have to talk to you.”
“Do you know what time it is?”
“Do you think I’ve come all this way to tell you what the time is?”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“Fine. But first I’ll drop by Murphy’s and tell them who really painted your Vallotton.”
Baier’s intercom buzzed.
11
GIULIANO DIACO HAD DRAWN THE DEEP RED VELVET curtain aside. The sun threw a glaring quadrant onto the worn oriental carpet. In this merciless light they scrutinized the fabrics.
Diaco rolled a few yards of cloth from the bale and draped it over Weynfeldt’s shoulder from behind. Weynfeldt looked at himself in the full-length mirror: over his right shoulder the roll of fabric, over his left the critical eyes of the diminutive tailor; Diaco could barely see over Weynfeldt’s shoulder.
A veil of dust shimmered in the sun’s rays. The room smelled of new cloth. Weynfeldt loved that smell. It evoked childhood memories for him. His father in a new suit. His favorite hiding place in his father’s closet. The measurements and fittings for his little suits with the knickerbockers and short trousers, in this selfsame tailoring workshop.
Giuliano Diaco was the third generation of his family to run the business. His father, Alfredo Diaco, had handed it down five years ago. But he still appeared in the workshop regularly, and the older tailors still addressed him as “padrone” which in practice he remained.
Weynfeldt had been in Diaco’s fabric storeroom over half an hour now, Diaco showing him one fabric after another, all merino wool, all top line plus, plus—the highest possible quality. He needed a suit for this spring they were having in the middle of winter. “Needed” was something of an exaggeration; he had a walk-in wardrobe full of suits. But he liked going to his tailor, and this weather provided a useful excuse for another visit.
“Do you know what a body scanner is?” Diaco asked.
“Something used in hi-tech medicine?”
“In just a few seconds, a body scanner can take several million measurements, which another computer then uses to cut the cloth for your suit. And someone in a sweatshop in the Czech Republic sews it for slave wages.”
Weynfeldt sighed. “So that’s the future of your fine craft.”
“Not even the future. There’s already a company in Zurich using them. They can sell you a made-to-measure suit for under a thousand francs. But they make a big profit on it.”
No wonder Diaco was worried. His suits started at ten times that. “There will always be people who would miss being measured personally, the conversations with you, the time spent thinking solely about their appearance,” Weynfeldt consoled him.
“They can still have all that. The proprietor pretends to be taking measurements, but the machine scans the client in the changing room without his realizing. No, no, Dottore, you can forget us tailors. We’ve had our time.”
“Dottore” was what Giuliano Diaco’s father had called him, even before Adrian had begun his dissertation. The title had been passed down a generation intact. It was indeed possible that Diaco’s days were numbered. Only Weynfeldt’s older friends went there. And they were becoming ever fewer. His younger friends couldn’t afford it. And the really rich people he knew, collectors for the most part, went to Caraceni in Milan or Savile Row in London.
Adrian had registered the first sign that Diaco was in trouble some while back. He had suddenly started stocking accessories. Entering the discreet premises, on the first floor of a retail building in one of the best locations, you were greeted by stands full of colorful neckties. A vitrine held leather articles—key cases, wallets and change purses, belts etc.—and another displayed products from an unknown cosmetics brand, created exclusively for Diaco.
On any other day, the prospect that Diaco’s would soon cease to exist, and that yet another law firm would take over the premises, would have depressed Weynfeldt. But today his mood was not easily dented. The prospect of dinner with Lorena had made him impervious to the grim realities of everyday life.
That morning he had corrected the initial proofs of the catalogue, appalled by the quality of the printing. He had spent over an hour on the phone to the manager of the Grand Imperial Hotel, in whose ballroom their auctions were always held. The date which till now they had promised him, verbally, was suddenly unavailable due to a clash of bookings. And Véronique had bombarded him with questions after he asked her to research Vallotton’s prices over the last decade on the Internet. He stonewalled in response since something still didn’t feel right about La Salamandre. Still, there was no doubt the picture would look better on the cover than Hodler’s Landscape with Telegraph Posts.
Some days that would all have dampened his mood. Not that he would have been bad-tempered; he was much too well bred to let his moods show. But it would have made him slower and more laconic.
Slower, yes. It had taken years for Weynfeldt to realize that his “slow-motion days,” as he thought of them, the days he felt as if he’d run aground, these days were what other people called depression. He had discovered this reading a novel, as the protagonist’s emotional state was described. It wouldn’t have occurred to him otherwise. And he didn’t have anyone he could talk to about his feelings.
But today, although it had all the makings of a slow-motion day, everything felt light and breezy.
To make sure Diaco felt the same way Adrian ordered two suits, “transitional clothes” as his mother would have called them.
He ate a light, late lunch, alone, in a self-service vegetarian restaurant, and spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with the date problem and writing an expert’s report on a Lake Geneva sunrise by Ferdinand Hodler for a colleague in the New York branch.
It was early as he left the office, wishing Véronique a good evening; he wanted to go home and change before going out. He didn’t always, but today he would.
Châteaubriand had only eight tables. It was more like an elegant, private apartment than a restaurant. It was furnished with antiques; dimmed Venetian glass chandeliers provided a relaxing light throughout, and a multitude of table lamps and sconces ensured an intimate atmosphere at the tables and in the niches.
It was a pleasant, cozy place; the pictures hanging on the walls were the only thing not to Weynfeldt’s taste.
The restaurant didn’t have a bar at which he might have waited for Lorena, and he was led directly to the place he had reserved, a four-person table laid for two, in a window-niche, barely visible from the rest of the restaurant. He knew this table from previous meals, mostly business-related, and liked it. You could talk without being disturbed or overheard, and if you ran out of things to say, you could gaze out into the prettily lit garden, or down to the glittering city below, its lights reflected in the lake.
But now he was meeting a woman here, the choice of table seemed slightly indecent. He wondered if he should ask for another, but couldn’t come up with a plausible explanation, and let it be.
He was twenty minutes too early. Five of them were left from the traveling time he had allowed, the other fifteen was the amount of time he liked to be early when he was the host, in case a guest arrived before the time arranged. He ordered a glass of sherry and settled himself, preparing to sit out his fifteen minutes and then hers.
When both had passed, he ordered another sherry; the waiter kept asking if he could bring him anything. For a woman to be half an hour late was unremarkable. But Adrian still began to be nervous. He got up twice and looked around the restaurant, in the unlikely event that Lorena had arrived and was unable to find his table. Even before the unremarkable half hour was up he began envisaging scenarios. She had forgotten the name of the restaurant and couldn’t
call him because he was an idiot and didn’t have a cell phone. She hadn’t forgotten the name of the restaurant, but was stuck in a jam and couldn’t call because she had forgotten her cell phone. Had forgotten to charge it. Had run out of credit. She had gotten the day wrong and was planning to come on time—but tomorrow. Or it was him! He’d gotten the day wrong!
He could have stood closer to her in Spotlight when she was telling the saleswoman the delivery address for the blouse. But that wasn’t his style. If she had wanted him to have her address she would have given it to him.
When the thirty minutes were over, he started to worry. After all, Lorena was suicidal, as he knew all too horribly well.
But even in that scenario she had stood him up. Was there a more radical way to stand someone up than to take your life?
Stood up: he ordered another sherry, as that long forgotten feeling sank over him. He’d been spared it since his youth. The feeling of being abandoned was familiar to him, had made him cry for hours in bed when his parents went out for the night, while a nanny at her wits’ end tried in vain to console him. It had plagued him in the various boarding schools he was sent to. And it had knocked him flat when Daphne packed her bags.
But the feeling of being stood up was different. Not as devastating, but certainly humiliating. Whereas most abandoned people talk nonstop about their experience, people who’ve been stood up stay silent in shame.
Now Adrian was relieved he had reserved a table where he couldn’t easily be seen by the other guests. He didn’t feel like playing the stood-up man in front of a huge audience; how long should this man wait before admitting he had been stood up? And what should he do?
An hour after the time of their date Weynfeldt made a decision; he had the second place setting cleared, ate something small as a gesture and left a tip quite large enough to compensate for the money lost on the second cover.
In the taxi on the way home he realized it had become a slow-motion day after all.
12
AS SOON AS SHE OPENED HER EYES SHE WOULD HAVE TO deal with reality. So she kept them closed. She was getting that champagne feeling, the feeling after the euphoria and before the headache. You could get rid of it with more champagne or Alka-Seltzer, or just ease it with lots of water, or you could sleep it off.
She wanted to sleep it off.
But now her eyes started opening on their own. In the same way they closed themselves when you were very tired, now they were doing the opposite. It took great effort for Lorena to keep them closed and look relaxed. She could force them shut, but then it would be obvious she was awake. She didn’t want that.
She wished he was one of those men who was gone by the time she woke. Sometimes that was insulting, but it was often quite nice actually. You were saved from finding out what they looked like sober, in the cold light of day.
But this one here wanted more from her than he’d had so far. She didn’t know exactly what, but he wanted more; she was sure of that.
He had called to arrange delivery of the Ungaro blouse, then brought it personally. Stood at the door holding a Spotlight bag in one hand, two bottles of cold champagne in the other, covered in condensation. She could hardly not invite him in.
One look at her apartment—a tiny studio with a kitchenette in the recess next to the bathroom, cardboard boxes everywhere, most of them open because she was living out of them—and he knew: “Congratulations. I was very impressed.”
She washed two glasses, not exactly champagne flutes, and they drank the Veuve Clicquot, not exactly her preferred brand, while it was still cold. She didn’t have ice, and her tiny fridge was already feeling the strain.
He was funny. He described exactly how she had caused the dress to disappear, and parodied her performance with Weynfeldt. He was good-looking in a conventional kind of way, with just the right dash of insolence, and she didn’t have to pretend anything with him.
It wasn’t hard for him to get her into bed. It was the only thing to sit on.
“I have a date in an hour,” she told him first.
“With him?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Stand him up.”
“I’ll give him a quick call to cancel.”
“I’ve watched him: you’ve got him eating out of your hand.”
“That’s why I need to call, to keep him interested.”
“Wrong. Don’t call, to keep him interested.”
13
THE SKI SLOPES ABOVE THE GRAND HOTELS AND APARTMENT buildings were a muddy green, aside from a few scraps of snow in the shaded dips. But the lake was frozen, and the sky clear. A city of tents had been built behind the grandstand, white plastic pavilions with pointed gables, looking to Weynfeldt like a faintly oriental version of the plastic summerhouses which had sprung up in gardens and on roof terraces in his country in recent years.
Ever since he could remember, Adrian Weynfeldt had been at home in the Engadin. He had spent all his winter vacations and much of his summers up here, and had attended an international boarding school nearby for several years as a teenager.
The landscape had always been so familiar to him, he never perceived it as especially beautiful. It was only when he saw it through the eyes of Giovanni Segantini that it revealed its beauty to him. His father had owned several Segantinis. Adrian had seen the paintings hundreds of times, but he was twelve or thirteen before he identified one of the landscapes—the view from his hotel room on vacation. Even then it was only after a casual remark from his father that he recognized it. It looked so different, even though every detail was represented.
After that he began to imagine how the things he saw would look painted—first the landscapes, then the interiors, the people and the still lives—by Segantini, later by other painters from his father’s collection.
Beginning as a game, it gradually became a mania, and became Weynfeldt’s way of seeing the world. When he finished high school he started art school, but soon accepted that no amount of enthusiasm could make up for a lack of talent. And so he had to content himself with being an art historian.
The image in front of him now couldn’t be salvaged even by asking how Segantini would have painted it. He was seated on a plastic chair upholstered with white fake fur, under artificial palms with the usual circle around him, all offspring of his parents’ friends.
Karl Stauber was senior director of an old Swiss corporation, his wife, Senta, a woman full of joie de vivre and fire in her younger days, was now a gray, nondescript old thing, hair dull and brittle from an illness her family endured with scant patience, and hushed up with great effort; Senta Stauber had been an alcoholic since she turned forty.
Charlotte Capaul was the third wife of Dr. Capaul, family practitioner to most of those present. She was a dreamy, childlike creature, in her mid-thirties and as such thirty years younger than her husband, who was unsuited to her in every other way too.
Kurt Weller, son of Max Weller, the man who had handled international transport for Weynfeldt & Co, was a dyed-in-the-wool Bavarian. He owned one of Germany’s largest transport businesses and spent most of his time either in St. Moritz or on the island of Sylt. His wife, Uschi, was Munich born and bred, her skin prematurely aged from a lifetime of sun worship—all over, allegedly. A patient of various plastic surgeons, she had an extensive medical history, which she related openly and not without humor, to the present company.
The Widlers were not there, for the first time since Adrian could remember. A sign that Dr. Widler was in a very bad way.
They picked at viande des Grisons from a big platter and drank champagne, which the air temperature kept cold, almost too cold.
The third day of the St. Moritz White Turf races was a fixture in Weynfeldt’s calendar. Even as a small boy Adrian had stood by the saddling boxes admiring the horses, and above all the jockeys and their racing colors, shiny and silky with big checkered patterns, stripes or spots. And while his parents sat with the parents of the people he was sittin
g with now, keeping their temperatures up with mulled wine and their spirits up with champagne, he would run around along the fence by the racetrack, waiting for the muffled drumming of the hooves.
Adrian begged his parents for riding lessons till they finally agreed. Under the vigilant eyes of his overanxious mother, he took a few lessons, but they were stopped immediately following a harmless fall onto the soft sawdust in the riding hall. He abandoned his plan for a career as a jockey and restricted his passion for equestrian sports to learning the names and colors of every stable, and the biographies of all the major jockeys. When he was twenty he took up riding lessons again—secretly—and soon realized that not only did he lack aptitude, he had lost his childhood passion.
But he could always be found here on the third race day. For the long weekend he stayed in the same suite at the Palace Hotel his parents had always booked; he held the same conversations, bet the same moderate sums and did everything he could to structure the passage of time and thus slow it down.
But this time it all felt stale. Karl Stauber seemed to have aged years since the last time, was absentminded and confused, and kept repeating himself.
Dr. Capaul provoked his wife with inappropriate remarks about the scantily clad samba dancers who performed during the pauses between races.
Kurt Weller seemed absent and thoughtful, and his wife, Uschi, tried desperately to keep the conversation going, becoming louder and wittier.
For the first time in his life Weynfeldt wondered whether the people who thought regularity shortened your life were in fact right. It suddenly seemed no time at all since Februaries here meant snow on the roofs, woods and slopes, and before horse races on ice were given titles such as the “Gaggenau Home Appliances Grand Prix.”
Weynfeldt’s face had acquired some color by the time he returned to the office on Tuesday. The city was still in the middle of a false spring. Every day new buds, shoots and blossoms exposed themselves to the frost which might descend on them at random and without mercy at any moment.