The Last Weynfeldt (14 page)

She stopped still and nodded. The driver reached into the back and opened the door. Lorena slumped inside and pulled the door shut.

The driver was older, with tired, friendly eyes. He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Everything okay?” he asked, in a Slavic accent. When he saw that his passenger wasn't capable of uttering a word, he said. “I'll just drive towards the center, okay?”

Lorena nodded. She relaxed. It was warm in the taxi, and smelled the way all taxis did, of the Little Tree air freshener hanging from the mirror.

She took her wallet from her handbag and her suspicion was confirmed: she had less money on her than the sum already displayed by the meter. She had been booked for all four days of the fair, and was to be paid on the final one.

That meant she couldn't go home. She had to go to someone who would pay for the taxi and ideally help her out with some cash too. Right now that meant one of only two people: Pedroni or Weynfeldt.

She gave the driver Weynfeldt's address. She couldn't cope with a man tonight who wanted something from her.

She took a small mirror out of her handbag and sorted her face out as best she could.

“Are you sure this is the right address?” came the driver's voice. “This is a bank.”

Lorena hadn't noticed they had already arrived. “Yes, this is it. Please wait a moment and I'll ring.” She got out of the car and pressed the bell. There was no sound from the intercom.

She rang again. Still no reaction.

Lorena returned to the taxi and called the private number on Weynfeldt's card, holding it under the passenger light. The driver watched her with a look of resignation.

Weynfeldt's answering machine came on. Just as Lorena was about to leave a message, the heavy wooden door opened. Two men came out. One of them was Adrian Weynfeldt. The other an old man with a cane.

A
FTER HIS DISCOVERY
A
DRIAN SAT FOR A LONG WHILE
at his desk, ate Frau Hauser's cold supper mechanically and finished the bottle of wine.

The monstrousness of the whole thing had paralyzed him. He wasn't sure who he was more disgusted by: Baier, a very old friend of the family, who had taken advantage of his trust so shamelessly, fully aware that he would ruin Weynfeldt's good name and his reputation as an expert, or Strasser, someone he thought was a good personal friend, who had let himself be exploited and drawn into this sleazy fraud.

Weynfeldt had picked up the telephone, but couldn't decide who to call first and confront: the forger or the fraudster.

It was nearly eleven thirty before he decided—on the forger. If he was honest, it was only because the fraudster belonged to the generation you didn't disturb with a phone call after ten p.m.

Strasser didn't answer the phone, neither his landline nor his cell.

He overcame his scruples and called Baier, imagining the telephone ringing through the house, Baier clambering out of bed in pain, putting a light on, looking for his cane. Or did he have a telephone next to his bed?

After the sixth ring, he heard Baier's daytime voice explaining he was unavailable at the moment and inviting him to leave a message after the tone.

Weynfeldt did not leave a message. He hated talking to machines. It made him nervous; he could hear himself speak and got in a muddle. He would call Baier first thing in the morning. In the morning it was the other way round: Strasser belonged to the generation you did not disturb before ten a.m.

He went to bed with a lemon verbena tea, and had almost fallen asleep when a sudden realization brought him wide awake again: you have just been deceived in the most underhand way by two people you thought were friends and you're wondering what time of day to call without disturbing them? Why? Irreparable damage due to your upbringing.

He got up, slipped into his leather slippers, pulled on his dark-blue cashmere housecoat, went into the bathroom, combed his hair, straightened the collar of his pajamas where it showed beneath the housecoat and scrutinized himself in the mirror.

The last Weynfeldt.

Adrian wandered down the long passageway, past his museum-like rooms to a door at the end of the corridor. He lifted the painting next to the door frame away from the wall—a landscape by Gustave Buchet—and took the key hanging on a nail behind it, to open the door.

It was the room in which his mother had spent her last years. Weynfeldt had excluded it from the gut renovation, the one point on which he'd insisted Casutt couldn't have his way. Everything had been left just as it was at her death, apart from the hospital bed; he had exchanged that for her walnut Biedermeier bed.

The room was furnished with a Napoléon III sofa, two armchairs and a dressing table from the same era, a bureau and a chest of drawers. Between the two windows, each flanked by heavy curtains, stood a vitrine holding her collection of Venetian glass paperweights. Adrian's only other intervention had been to place the portrait of his mother which had hung in the sitting room for years above the sofa here. It showed her in all her splendor, as Weynfeldt's father used to say, sitting on this very sofa. She had her arms folded, and her watchful eyes on Adrian, wherever he was in the room. Outside of the room too.

The painting was by Varlin. It was done in nervous yet precise strokes, which seemed to begin by chance at the edge of the image, but came together at the center to form an unmistakable, unsparing likeness of Luise Weynfeldt.

Adrian sat on the side of the bed, as he had done so often in her later years. The room smelled slightly of floor polish, and of the lavender bags Frau Hauser hung and hid all over the house to improve the air quality and combat imaginary moths.

He gazed at the picture for a long time, feeling both affection and recrimination. Then he stood up, pointed at himself and sighed: “Irreparable damage.”

He went back to bed, dosed off, but was woken from a light sleep by another thought: What if he had already accepted the Vallotton officially? If he'd taken it to the storerooms and shown it to Véronique? To his boss? To the press? If he had told the other branches, in London, Paris and New York they should contact their Vallotton collectors? The forgery would have been exposed. And even if he had managed to make it clear he had acted in good faith, the dirt would have stuck to him.

He tried to drive these thoughts away. But no sooner had he succeeded in banishing them, others entered his mind and kept him from sleeping: Dr. Widler, his mother's young doctor, old now; he might well take his last breath this night.

And Lorena. Lorena on the wrong side of the balustrade. Lorena in Spotlight. Lorena in bed. In exactly the spot he was now, tossing and turning. Lorena not at Châteaubriand. Lorena not on the answering machine. Lorena not on the telephone.

As on every other workday, by half past seven he was sitting in his breakfast room—bright, and furnished with pieces by Hans Eichenberger from the 1950s—reading the newspaper and eating the two croissants Frau Hauser had bought on her way to work from Schrader's bakery, with her homemade, runny cherry jelly, but without butter. He drank a freshly squeezed orange juice along with them, followed by a caffè latte.

Straight after his breakfast he called Baier. Frau Almeida answered and suggested he try Baier's cell phone; he was at Lake Como right now, but was expected back today. Weynfeldt tried, and Baier did indeed answer. He was upbeat, asking immediately about the weather in Zurich, because on Lake Como it was more than spring-like; on Lake Como it was summery.

Weynfeldt was able to assure him that he too had breakfasted with the window open. Then he fell silent.

“Yes?” Baier asked finally. “What can I do for you?”

Adrian cleared his throat. “I have to talk to you about
La Salamandre
.”

“What about it?”

“You know what.”

Now it was Baier's turn to be silent.

“Frau Almeida says you are coming back today—when?”

“Half past five.”

“Shall we say seven?” Weynfeldt was amazed at his resoluteness.

“Where?”

“My apartment.”

Véronique had two phone message for him. One was from yesterday, after Weynfeldt had left the office. That man who called himself Gauguin again, wanting to know what the Vallotton was valued at; he had laughed at her when she repeated that there was no Vallotton in the auction. So was there?

The other had come ten minutes ago. A Frau Widler. Had asked if he would call back.

Weynfeldt knew what it would be about. He called, expressed his condolences and asked if there was anything he could do. Luckily Mereth Widler declined his offer.

“It is true, isn't it?” Véronique asked. “We don't have a Vallotton?”

“No, no, and once more no,” Adrian said, able to look her in the face as he said it.

He was distracted that day, unable to concentrate. All morning he postponed the decision whether to confront Strasser or not. In the afternoon he decided it would be shrewder to wait till he had talked to Baier. He took a walk by the lake at lunchtime, where it looked like Woodstock without the rain.

He got home early. Frau Hauser and a young Asian woman he hadn't met before were busy preparing the evening meal he had ordered. He changed, got himself a beer—something he seldom drank, as it made one's breath more alcoholic than other drinks, despite being less alcoholic—and withdrew to his study.

The painting stood in the dim, subdued light like something dirty or dangerous. The skin of the kneeling nude had the same shine to it as the bodies in the photos you could borrow from older boys at boarding school, in return for money or cigarettes.

Klaus Baier arrived on time. The doorbell rang at seven and Weynfeldt took the elevator down to let him in. He found Baier waiting at the door in the company of a man holding a large portfolio with strengthened corners. At the curb stood a taxi, its door open and hazard blinkers on.

The man was the taxi driver; he handed Weynfeldt the portfolio and Baier paid him.

They rode the elevator up to the apartment, in silence, and Weynfeldt took his guest straight to his study, where he leaned the portfolio against the wall by the door. He assumed Baier had brought it to transport the forgery away after their discussion. It seemed Baier wanted to keep things brief; he unfastened the black straps and opened the gray cardboard flaps.

But the portfolio contained the genuine Vallotton.

Weynfeldt was not sure he would be prepared simply to accept the exchange and let the matter drop. But Baier took the picture out, hobbled over to an empty easel next to Strasser's Vallotton, also unframed, and placed the genuine one on it. Then he turned to Adrian like someone waiting for a compliment on some great achievement.

Weynfeldt said nothing. But he had to admit, Rolf Strasser had done an excellent job. Even now, side by side with the original, under the merciless spotlight, although his forgery didn't stand up to comparison in every respect, it certainly came off well. The original looked strangely fresher than the copy; Strasser had taken the artificial aging process too far. But the forgery really looked like a clone of the original. Even the expressive quality, essentially indefinable in any artwork, was uncannily similar to that of the original. His Viennese professor's judgment, such a blow to Strasser, was confirmed yet again: he might not be an artist, but he was certainly skilled.

“And what if I hadn't realized?” Aside from a brief greeting, these were the first words Weynfeldt spoke to Baier.

“Then no one would have realized.”

“You're wrong there. The only reason I didn't realize was because it never occurred to me you would palm me off with a forgery. Think about it; I trusted you. I never thought you, an old friend of the family, would abuse my trust so shamelessly.”

There was a knock, and Frau Hauser entered. She would be serving a hot meal later in the Green Salon; would the gentlemen like to take their aperitif here in the study?

Without waiting for Adrian to respond, Baier ordered a brandy and an ashtray, as if it were his house. He sat on the yellow fiberglass shell chair Weynfeldt used at his desk and took a leather case for three cigars out of his breast pocket.

“I'm sure you don't mind,” he observed, bit the tip off a Havana and began ceremoniously to ignite it.

Weynfeldt certainly did mind. He hated it when his study stank of stale cigar smoke. But he would never have forbidden a guest from smoking. He simply expected his guests not to consider smoking in his study.

Frau Hauser returned with the brandy and poured Baier a glass. She gave Adrian a glass of the Château Haut-Brion 2001 he had chosen to go with dinner. Weynfeldt drank good wine even with unwelcome guests.

Bauer dipped the end of the cigar in the brandy. A revolting habit, Weynfeldt thought. They both looked at the two pictures.

“I understand,” Baier began, “that you feel betrayed. But whether or not you believe it, I didn't want to betray you.”

“No?”

“It just happened.”

Adrian waited. He was not going to sit on one of the low cantilever chairs, forced to look up to Baier as he had at their last meeting.

“Doctors and lawyers are bound by professional secrecy. How do you art experts work?”

“We are discreet,” was all Weynfeldt said.

“I grew up with this painting. I have spent my entire life with it. It's hard for me now, at the end of my life, to part with it. What am I saying? It's breaking my heart. Got it?”

“Why are you doing it then?”

“Because I have to.”

“I understand,” Adrian said, although he didn't understand how someone like Baier could have got into this situation. “Why don't you sell one of the other pictures from your collection?”

“You really are discreet, you art experts?”

“Like priests at confession.”

“I've already sold them.”