The Last Weynfeldt (11 page)

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.

A
S 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.”

T
HE 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 sitting 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.

No word from Lorena. Her name had not appeared on Frau Hauser's handwritten list of answering machine messages. There were none of the question marks his housekeeper placed by unidentified messages. And her name was not among Véronique's stack of notes and printed e-mails.

Instead Strasser had called several times, insisting—Véronique had underlined the word twice—that they meet. Ideally for lunch; that evening at the latest.

It was the third Tuesday of the month, and lunch-time was reserved for a regular meal in the Krone with the Etter clan, a group of aging art historians associated with Professor Etter, his tutor at university. But given his recent doubts about his theory of regularity, and that Strasser was much nicer company at midday than at night, Weynfeldt excused himself from the Etter clan and arranged to meet Strasser for lunch in Es Corb, a small Catalan restaurant which he knew Strasser liked.

He assumed that this was about Rolf's trip to the Marquesas and took his checkbook.

He was early. The air in Es Corb was still fresh; they were just closing the windows. Weynfeldt sat at a window seat for two and ordered a water, then added a
Jerez
, to reduce his vulnerability to attack; Strasser took it personally if someone failed to drink alcohol in his presence.

Es Corb was previously called Raben and had been a bar surviving mainly on its beer sales. Just under a year ago a group of young second generation Catalans had taken the place over, serving a fusion of Catalan and Swiss food.

Unusually, Strasser was almost on time, standing at the entrance while he looked defiantly round the room, before seeing Weynfeldt and making his way to his table.

“Been here long?” he asked Weynfeldt, who had stood up to greet him.

“Just arrived,” he said, and shook his hand. They both sat.

Strasser began studying the menu. Weynfeldt did the same. “The
bacalao
and
saucisson
dish sounds interesting,” Weynfeldt observed.

“Just to be clear,” Strasser said, without looking up from the menu, “I'm paying this time.”

Weynfeldt concealed his surprise and said simply, “Thanks. My turn again next time,” and decided against the
bacalao
. By the time the waiter had come to take their order he had decided on the marinated tuna with onion aspic.

“I thought you were having the
bacalao
,” Strasser said, irritated. “The gentleman is having the
bacalao
,” he told the waiter.

The waiter looked at Weynfeldt.

“Perhaps a little heavy for lunch, don't you think?” Adrian asked.

Strasser didn't give the waiter time to answer. “It's only at night you shouldn't eat anything heavy. Please bring us two
bacalao
.”