by Martin Suter
“What is something like this worth?” she wanted to know.
“With a bit of ‘auction luck,’ two or three million.”
“Wow! Just the fact that someone will pay so much for it makes the painting genuine.”
After a short pause Weynfeldt admitted, “I’ve never thought about it like that.”
“See!”
He shook his head slowly, as if he wanted to bar access to a thought.
“Why don’t you do it?” This wasn’t a question, it was a dare.
“It just wouldn’t be okay,” he answered, collected himself quickly, and, without managing not to go a red, delivered the lady-killer sentence he’d been saving up: “The guided tour isn’t quite finished yet.” Now she had to ask: What’s left? And he would answer: The bedroom.
But she said, “Let’s save the bedroom for the next tour.”
“Pity.”
She tried to imitate his tone, as she added, “It just wouldn’t be okay.”
In the elevator he asked, “Would you give me your address?”
And again she echoed him: “It just wouldn’t be okay.”
But she gave him a kiss that was slightly more than a polite, social kiss and gave him hope that there would actually be another tour.
Back in the apartment he refilled the ice bucket and retreated to his study with the remaining champagne. He enjoyed the tingling sensation of the bubbles in his mouth in a new way as he gazed at the Vallottons. The doubled Vallotton. The Vallotton and the Strasser. The same and the similar.
It took him awhile to find it: it was in the cast iron relief on the salamandre stove. Not all forgers let their vanity get the better of them. But Rolf Strasser did.
He stood for a long time facing the Vallotton in thought. Finally he walked to the black tool cupboard with its red shiny handles and opened a drawer. Mixed up inside lay boxes and tubes of paint, brushes and other painting things from the time when he still secretly tried refreshing what he’d learned at art school, perhaps even developing it.
He found a fine brush and carefully mixed a little tempera in the deep reddish brown of the paneling in the top right-hand corner of the painting.
20
TO THE LEFT—A STORE THAT BOUGHT, SOLD AND repaired old TVs, stereos, radios and cell phones; to the right, a store offering “Bankruptcy Bargains.” Between the two, the entrance to number 241, Lorena’s building. The door was made of wire mesh glass with a metal frame. In the top half of the pane a transparent plastic patch with the name of a glazing firm had been stuck over a small hole the size of a pickaxe. It had been there when Lorena moved in.
She opened the door and entered the hall. To the left and right were twelve mailboxes and milk-bottle holders, the labels changed many times by hand, with scraps of paper taped on to the metal. To the right were the stairs to the basement; to the left, the stairs to the four floors; in the middle was the elevator shaft, the elevator door a slightly smaller copy of the front door. The hall had an indeterminate smell of filth and the products used to tackle it.
The elevator was dominated by the smell of grease used to lubricate the cables extending down the shaft. Lorena had seen them as she left earlier, through the open door to the elevator, where a sign had hung saying, “Safety check, sorry!”
She took the stairs to the second floor now; the elevator technician had done nothing to inspire her confidence.
Her apartment door led straight into the room that served as both bed and living room. It opened just far enough for Lorena to slip through. If her provisional living arrangements continued much longer, there would be no space for her to move between the boxes, suitcases and clothes.
She switched the light on and sat on the edge of the unmade bed. The effect of the champagne was wearing off and what she saw now sobered her up completely. Why hadn’t she stayed? She could have drunk a few more glasses of that champagne, which she’d never be able to afford herself as long as she lived, then sunk into his big, soft, freshly made bed. She wouldn’t have had to make out with him; he wouldn’t have insisted. But maybe she’d have wanted to?
Sure, it would have been a tactical mistake. But whose tactics were we talking about? Baier’s? As if Weynfeldt were the kind of man you could seduce into accepting a forged painting for an auction. No, Weynfeldt was what she’d called him: straight. His world was divided into what was okay, and what just wasn’t okay. She could just as well have slept with him.
She climbed over her possessions to the kitchenette and looked in the fridge. As she thought: nothing. Nothing except a beer. A two-pint bottle of cheap store-brand beer from a low-cost supermarket. She left it there. She hadn’t degenerated to drinking cheapo beer after Roederer Cristal.
The Spotlight purchases hung from coat hangers hooked over the open door of the only built-in closet. There was more to be had from someone who was prepared to pay twelve thousand francs to get her out of an unpleasant situation. There were other unpleasant situations she could get into. Lorena knew about unpleasant situations. She didn’t need the old man’s help there.
Lorena thought of the various chances she could give Weynfeldt to get her out of a tight spot and soon came up with a great many. Matching each to a sum of money, added up it made a figure which more than equaled Baier’s fifty thousand.
Then there was plan C. When would she ever come across a man like Adrian Weynfeldt again? Money and manners were a rare combination. And for someone possessing both to be interested in her—late thirties, her best years clearly behind her, nothing much to hope for in the ones to come—for someone like Weynfeldt to be interested in someone like Lorena … When had that ever happened?
Why not try the most obvious thing and become his girlfriend? Make him her rich boyfriend: like in Spotlight. He didn’t seem to object to the role. Quite the opposite. Why shouldn’t Lorena Steiner move in with Dr. Adrian Weynfeldt? The apartment was large; the mother dead.
She went into the bathroom and removed the wet towel wrapped around the leaky faucet. She washed her hands and started removing her makeup.
She knew exactly why she wouldn’t be moving in with him, even supposing that was what he wanted: because she would never ever, ever again move in with a man. She had sworn it—not for the first time, but certainly for the last—two months or so ago, when she moved out of Günther’s.
Günther Walder was the man who was supposed to bring calm into her life. He was a scientist from Berlin. An authority in the field of cell biology. He spent his days trying to reprogram the cells of fruit flies. With the aim, one day, of reprogramming human cells so that they could become skin or muscle or liver or something else useful.
She had met Günther at an after-work party which the organizer sometimes mobilized her to attend for a discreet fee, because of the notorious imbalance of men. Günther was standing with a glass of orange juice in the midst of all the forced good cheer, a head taller than anyone else. Like a fish out of water, as she told him later. He was the only one wearing jeans, along with a baggy tweed jacket and a yellow T-shirt with the words in red: “4th International Sand Sculpture Festival Berlin.”
She had asked him what he did with his life, and he had answered, “make fruit flies mate.” She found that funny, and let him buy her a couple of glasses of champagne. It turned out he had moved here three months ago from Berlin and hadn’t eaten out anywhere except the university canteen. She took him to Mistral, the best fish restaurant in the city, and when they came to order she discovered he didn’t eat fish.
“I think they have a few meat dishes,” she said.
And he replied, “I don’t eat animal cells of any kind. I program them.”
Günther didn’t drink a drop of alcohol either, which made Lorena moderate her consumption that night. And the decision to go home with him wasn’t taken under the influence of alcohol. He took her to his three-bedroom apartment in a modern block on the edge of town. He owned a bed, a desk with a computer, a sofa and a TV, which sat on the f
loor. His clothes were hanging from a wheeled clothing rack of the kind found in stores. Half empty boxes of books lay all around, and in every room there were books piled according to a system only he understood. The kitchen contained crockery for just two people, and a huge stock of spaghetti and pelati, with a dozen pots of basil growing outside on the balcony. He was very proud of his spaghetti al pomodoro e basilica and ate practically nothing else.
Günther wasn’t particularly good looking, nor was he an amazing lover. It would remain a mystery to her why she fell so completely in love with him. After barely three weeks, she abandoned all her good intentions and moved in with him, taking everything she owned. She set herself up in one of the rooms with her few pieces of furniture, cooked complicated ovo-lacto-vegetarian recipes from her hitherto unused cookbooks, and got ready to live a normal life from now on. She stopped drinking alcohol and started enjoying life without parties.
She was so smitten, she accepted his foibles with unconditional, blind faith. The telephone foibles in particular should have given her cause for concern. She was forbidden, for instance, from answering the telephone in the apartment. And when she made a call, she had to use her cell phone, for which he paid the bill. He didn’t own one himself, and when he was traveling, which was often, as he had another project in the works in Berlin, he never left a contact number and almost never called her.
Till one day Ilsa stood at the door, and showed her the photos of Rebecca, 11, Klaus, 8, and Gabi, 3, and suggested, not entirely without sympathy, that she find herself another place to live as soon as possible.
When Lorena demanded to hear this from Günther’s mouth, Ilsa led her to the window with the words, “Unfortunately my husband isn’t very good at things like this.”
Standing there next to a mustard-yellow Volvo wagon, he looked up at her and raised his shoulders helplessly.
When Ilsa had gone, Lorena emptied Günther’s boxes of books and filled them with her things, cleared her room, called a moving van and took the housekeeping money from the kitchen drawer. It would pay for the transport to a storage facility and a few nights in a hotel.
Before she went, she emptied sixteen cans of pelati onto the bed and decorated her offering with all the basil she could harvest from the kitchen balcony.
So much for Günther.
Lorena turned off the faucet, wrapped the towel back around it, went to the fridge and took out the beer.
21
THE STORE WAS BIG AND BRIGHT AND FULL OF PEOPLE. At its many counters, salespeople stood serving customers. The walls were lined with cell phones.
Weynfeldt had drawn the number 418, and was waiting to see it light up on the electronic display.
Was he in love? Lightly smitten, certainly. He had never met a woman like Lorena. So direct. So nefarious. And yet so … innocent? Nonsense!
Obviously she was playing games with him. But he was playing along, letting her play her games. It brought back feelings he hadn’t known since his youth, his teenage years. Back then the girls played games with the boys. Kept them guessing. Didn’t show up to dates. Got their girlfriends to say they didn’t love you anymore. Asked for time to think. Denied you kisses, and the few other things you dared to do back then.
He felt like he had back then: soaring between hope and fear; sky-high one minute, despondent the next.
Every so often there was movement among the people waiting, as a salesperson finally finished serving someone. And from time to time the electric ding-dong from the number display forced its way into his daydreams.
The similarity to Daphne faded the more he saw Lorena. It was her hair, her pale skin, and her mouth, above all. Her mouth, which looked almost the same if one looked at a photo of it in reverse.
But otherwise? They behaved so differently the superficial similarities paled into insignificance.
The display went ding-dong again. Another six customers till his number.
“You really should buy a cell phone,” Véronique sighed, as Adrian arrived back in the office, two and a half hours late. “Herr Baier called four times; it is extremely urgent. You know what it’s about apparently.”
“That’s why I’m so late,” Weynfeldt replied. “Because of this bloody cell phone.” He put the carrier bag with the phone on her desk. “Don’t ask me how it works.”
“By the time you leave this office, you will know,” Véronique beamed, and began unpacking the device.
“What does Herr Baier want so urgently?” she asked.
“Do you know Vallotton’s La Salamandre?”
“The nude from the back, by a stove?”
“He inherited it from his parents and now he’s selling it to finance his last years. It’s coming in the auction.”
“A Vallotton after all. Gauguin was right.”
Weynfeldt was saved from responding to this as Véronique squealed, “Jeez! They’ve sold you a brick!” She held Weynfeldt’s new cell phone up.
“It’s the most user-friendly model available, according to the salesman,” Adrian said in his defense.
“Do you know what this is? It’s a granddad phone. You acted so dumb they sold you an old fogey cell. How are you going to schlepp it around? In a man-purse?”
“I’ll have Diaco sew a phone pocket in the lining of all my suits.”
For the rest of the afternoon he took an intensive course from Véronique on the use of his old fogey cell.
In the evening he stayed in the office to catch up on the day’s business. And called Baier to tell him his decision.
First thing Monday morning he would make an appointment with the reproductions photographer. The copy deadline for the catalogue had passed, but it wasn’t too late to put La Salamandre on the cover.
Weynfeldt had never felt out of place in a morning suit at a funeral before. Gray and black striped trousers, black jacket: it was surely the correct attire for any formal occasion before midday.
But at Dr. Widler’s funeral he seemed to be the only one maintaining the tradition.
It was not a fitting funeral congregation for a man who had placed such emphasis on dress.
In the church Weynfeldt sat between Karl Stauber and Paul Schnell, whom he had last seen at the White Turf in St. Moritz. Right in front of him sat Mereth Widler, flanked by daughters, themselves already around sixty.
The widow wore a high-collared black costume she’d undoubtedly had made in advance, solely for the occasion. Once the rest of the congregation was seated, she was led in by her daughters, like a bride by her bridesmaids. Adrian saw her face before she reached the front seat. She was wearing perfect, mask-like makeup, white, without rouge, with heavy eye-shadow and dramatic wine-red lipstick.
He gazed down throughout the service at the old lady’s well-groomed, blonde, bouffant hair. She had probably been encouraged to lie down for a few minutes before the funeral by her family. At any rate there was a random parting at the back of her head, revealing her pale scalp. If he had been fighting back tears throughout the ceremony, it was because of this single, touching flaw in her impeccable appearance, visible perhaps only to him.
Guarded by her corpulent daughters, she stood at the edge of the grave during the burial, delicate and vulnerable, but upright, like a member of the Chinese terra-cotta army. Adrian remembered his father’s burial. He had stood at the open grave, his mother’s arm in his, and as she threw down roses and her spade-full of earth she said softly, with a smile he had never seen on her face before, “Licorice stick.”
He was the only one who heard it, and he didn’t mention it ever again during her remaining twenty years. But since that day he first had to banish the image of a licorice stick before he could think about his father.
The priest asked all those present to say the Lord’s Prayer. In the midst of the murmuring, a chirpy, silly cell phone melody sounded out. A few people reached into their jackets and handbags, but the melody played on. Several heads turned toward Weynfeldt, who waited indignantly for the disru
ption to cease, with folded hands and lowered gaze.
Only then did he realize the extent of the catastrophe. He went furnace red, fumbled in his pocket, retrieved the device, stared at it helplessly, pressing various buttons, till someone took it off his hands, silenced it for him and returned it.
Mereth had not turned her head during the whole incident.
Once everyone had dropped their spade-full of earth onto the coffin, the widow led the congregation at an appropriate pace to the cemetery exit. In the bright spring sunshine around eighty mourners walked along the crunchy gravel, making a concerted effort to maintain a serious, composed expression, the graveyard sprouting and budding all around them.
At the exit, Mereth Widler received their condolences. Her daughters whispered the name of the place everyone was meeting afterward: Vue du Lac, an old-fashioned gourmet restaurant serving ancienne cuisine in the hills outside town. A row of taxis was waiting for guests who had not come in their own car.
Now and again the widow tried to live up to her reputation as a porcelain doll with a shocking tongue. As she embraced Adrian, she hissed in his ear, “He’s kicked the bucket on me.” He saw tears in her eyes for the first time.
In a dining hall with a view down to the lake stood a cold buffet of the old school, with hors d’oeuvres, butter and ice sculptures and attentive staff, continually refilling the platters and keeping them appetizing.
As Weynfeldt returned to his place with a full plate, Baier stood in his way. “Yesterday your secretary claimed you didn’t have a cell phone. Today you sabotage the whole funeral with it.”
“Yesterday I didn’t have one.”
“And why today?”
“Availability.”
“You’re really starting to see sense,” Baier grinned, and hobbled off.
Back home Weynfeldt remembered the phone which had got him in such trouble. He succeeded in switching it on. But although he spent a good half hour tapping around the menu options, he couldn’t figure out who had called him.