The Last Weynfeldt (19 page)

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.

T
HE 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 disruption 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.

He tried to listen to the messages on his answering machine. Also without success. He searched for the instructions, couldn't find them and pressed various bits of the device so many times that eventually a red light started blinking incessantly on the display and couldn't be stilled no matter what he did.

A
DRIAN WAS WAITING FOR
L
ORENA TO CALL, AND WAITING
was not an activity for him; it was a state, not such an unpleasant one. Like flying.

As soon as he boarded an airplane, he was placed in a state of absolute passivity. Of course he ate the food served him, and read a newspaper, or a book. But he was passive as far as flying itself was concerned. He knew there was nothing he could do to influence it and delegated it unconditionally to those who could.

He approached Lorena's call in the same way. He was leaving it entirely up to her and her ability to pick up the phone and call him whenever it seemed appropriate to her. She had done it before, so she would do it again.

Véronique, who happened to be in the office that Saturday morning, had taken a call from her. “From the lady I was definitely to give your new number to if she called.”

That meant it was Lorena who had called during the burial. He handed his phone awkwardly to Véronique. “Could you look to see if she called?”

His assistant pressed a couple of buttons. “You had a call from an unknown number on Saturday morning. And a few missed calls over the weekend, and also ‘number unknown.' If I was waiting for a call I would pick up when my phone rang.”

“It didn't ring.”

Astonishingly slender compared to her body mass, Véronique's fingers darted over the keypad once more. “Rocket science,” she smiled. “You had it on silent mode. Voilà. Now it will ring again.”

It had taken longer till the answering machine started working again. It was two days before Frau Hauser realized that not only had there been no new messages on the machine, the telephone itself had stopped ringing. The technician she called informed them that someone had managed to wipe out the outgoing message then program the machine so it answered before the first ring, playing a silent message.

In the same way that Adrian Weynfeldt could read newspapers and eat when he was in the flying state, he could get on with his everyday life during the state of waiting.

The final preparations for the auction took up most of his time. Adrian and Véronique proofread the catalogue and, for the first time since they had begun working together, it was she who took the proofs to Murphy's headquarters in London.

Normally Weynfeldt took the opportunity to make a few purchases in Mayfair and stay at the Connaught—at his own expense; Murphy's travel budget would not nearly have covered it. The discreet establishment had been his father's favorite hotel. Sebastian Weynfeldt never forgot to mention that the hotel butler there even knew what temperature he liked his bathwater.

The Connaught had lost much of its style since then, and now lured guests with the promise of nonslip mats in the bathrooms and two rooms for the price of one for families with children. But Weynfeldt still liked it. It reminded him of his childhood. He had stayed there sometimes when his parents took him to Royal Ascot.

But now Adrian decided to stay home to wait for the call. He put his mind to organizing the exhibition of selected works from the auction in St. Moritz, only to find that there was nothing left to be organized, thanks to Véronique. He spent a lot of time on the phone to collectors and curators he knew would be interested in certain lots from the auction to add to their collections.

When she returned after three days, Véronique's office was as chaotic as his. He welcomed her with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of lilacs, her favorite flower, and decided it really was time to talk to the director about her salary.

While he was waiting for a sign of life from Lorena, the long awaited cold spell arrived.

Weynfeldt saw the cold front coming. He was at Diaco's for the final fitting of the two suits he'd had made for the unusually warm winter, when it went dark in the fitting room. A dense layer of cloud, like gray felt, slid in front of the sun, which just now had still been shining cheerfully—from an admittedly streaky sky. At the same moment an icy wind billowed through the tulle curtain at the half-open window. Giuliano Diaco shut it.

“I think you can take your time with the suits now,” Weynfeldt observed.

As he got into a taxi outside Diaco & Sons, tiny sharp snowflakes bit at his face.

“Fucking winter,” the driver snarled.

“Good for business though,” Adrian said jovially.

“How's that? Are you a ski instructor?” the driver spat caustically.

“I meant your business.”

“I don't own the business. I'm just a badly paid taxi driver who can't afford custom suits.”

Neither of them said a word for the rest of journey through the dark snowstorm. Weynfeldt punished the man with a humiliatingly big tip.

It was the same as ever: everyone was expecting it, it was a foregone conclusion and yet the cold snap still unleashed chaos. It overwhelmed the city's street-sweeping teams, blocked the roads with the abandoned vehicles of optimists who had changed to their summer tires, caused delays on public transport, formed the main topic of conversation in offices, businesses and restaurants and pushed global politics out of the headlines.