The Last Weynfeldt (4 page)

He had not been able to muster the courage to ask the barkeeper for news of Lorena. But he undoubtedly realized why Weynfeldt was suddenly here so often. If he knew anything he would have said.

The telephone rang, and Weynfeldt forced himself to let it ring twice, three times. If it was Lorena she shouldn't think he was sitting by the phone waiting for her to call.

But it wasn't Lorena. It was Klaus Baier, one of his parent's peers' children nearly a generation older than Weynfeldt. Baier's father had run a textile firm which did business with Weynfeldt & Co. The two fathers had remained friends long after both companies were taken over by healthier competitors. They had both been keen hunters, inviting each other to their respective hunting grounds, and traveling to East Africa on safari together in the 1950s.

The two sons had never had much contact. Initially because of the age difference, later because they had no mutual interests. While Adrian was focused on his passion, art, Klaus was interested only in money. Following his father's untimely death in 1962, Klaus Baier began making risky attempts to boost his inheritance. He became a daring speculator, someone with a good nose, who frequently gambled his entire wealth, and on more than one occasion lost everything except his assets of last resort.

These reserves included a few valuable pictures, the remains of the respectable collection of Swiss art his father had bequeathed him. A seascape in oil and two watercolors by Ferdinand Hodler, a portrait of a woman by Segantini, two floral still lives by Augusto Giacometti and a notable nude by Félix Vallotton.

This modest collection was later to bring them back into contact. Shortly after Adrian had completed his doctorate, Klaus called and asked him to value his pictures. It was the first job of Adrian's career and he went to great effort to come up with plausible figures. Like many people who speculate with money on a large scale, Klaus Baier was stingy when it came to small scale transactions, and Weynfeldt's payment was simply dinner. Adrian didn't care. Even then he was financially secure, and in the course of his research he had come into contact with Murphy's Swiss art expert at the time, who subsequently engaged Adrian as his assistant for a symbolic salary.

Baier and Weynfeldt had met for occasional lunches or dinners at irregular intervals ever since, the initiative usually coming from Baier, hoping to avail himself of a free valuation. He would ask Adrian the current market value of his pictures; if the information was favorable he would pay the check, if not he let Weynfeldt pay.

Baier's most secure asset was the small Hodler seascape. The artist's market value had risen steadily over the years with little fluctuation. The Augusto Giacometti was also a blue chip, which could safely be realized at any time. The riskiest item to speculate on was the Vallotton however. Although the artist's prices had seesawed over the years, an image such as
Femme nue devant une salamandre
was capable of achieving a sensational price, independent of the artist's current rating.
Nude Facing a Stove
was extremely well known, a bestseller as a poster, yet shrouded in mystery: no one knew who owned it. In all the monographs and exhibition catalogues—and it was frequently exhibited; this enhanced its value—its status was described simply as “private collection.” If it suddenly came on the market it would cause a sensation. Adrian Weynfeldt consistently valued it at a realistic figure, but always added, “Under the hammer it could easily fetch double that.”

Weynfeldt had soon grasped that Baier's interest in the value of his collection was purely hypothetical. He never dreamed for a second of selling a single piece. He just liked to know how much money he wasn't liquidizing.

So Weynfeldt was rendered speechless for a second when Baier asked him, “Would my Vallotton fit in your current auction, Adrian?”

After a short pause he answered, “Yes, perfectly.”

H
IS CHAIR OF CHOICE WAS AN ARMCHAIR, ITS SEAT, BACK
and arms upholstered with a rather sorry tapestry. The other couches and easy chairs in his living room were comfier, but all too low. Thanks to his arthritic leg he was unable to get out of them without assistance.

He had stationed a glass of port on the flattened lion's head decorating the left arm. On the right was a crystal ashtray, clean except for the inch-long cylinder of ash, still intact, from the Churchill he had clamped between his lips, his eyes screwed up. He had long-distance glasses on his nose, short-distance ones on his forehead.

Cigar smoke hung in the upper half of the room, immobile, caught by the beams from the two spotlights pointing at the picture on the easel. The Count Basie Big Band swung, barely audible, from an aging stereo system.

The picture showed a naked woman, sitting on a yellow kilim rug in front of a fireplace filled by a
salamandre
, a cast-iron stove with a glass door, through which a glowing fire could be seen. The woman had her back to the viewer. The last layer she had shed, a pale lilac under-garment, lay draped around her on the rug; her dress and petticoat, yellow and mauve, were flung carelessly a little farther away. Her was head slightly tilted, perhaps contemplative, perhaps submissive; her reddish-brown hair pinned up, her waist narrow, hips broad, buttocks and thighs ample. Above the mantelpiece part of a mirror could be seen, reflecting a thin strip of the room. A red armchair protruded into the picture from the right; to the left of the fireplace the door to a recessed cupboard stood half-open.

Klaus Baier had grown up with this picture. It hung in his father's study till his death, a room which smelled like this one—of stale air and fresh cigar smoke.

As a small boy he hadn't given much thought to the woman sitting in front of the stove. She had obviously taken her clothes off because the fire had made the room so warm. But later he began to wonder what the woman gazing so intently into the flames actually looked like. When his father was out he sometimes sneaked into the study and sat in front of the picture, hoping the woman would look over her shoulder. Just quickly, just once. Later, after he realized that women in paintings never turn their heads, he still slipped into the room and imagined what the woman actually looked like from the front. He was jealous of the painter, who was sure to have seen her from the other side. During puberty the woman in front of the
salamandre
featured in most of his sexual fantasies. And all of his three wives (the last had divorced him six years ago) were slender from the waist up, broad from the waist down.

It was more the woman than the painting which had accompanied Klaus Baier his entire life. And now, as an old man, it was her above all he found so hard to part with.

When it came to the small seascape by Ferdinand Hodler it had been easy. The painting hadn't meant much to him, aside from the six hundred thousand franc estimated price and “at least a million under the hammer” which Weynfeldt had said he could have expected. It was painful only in so far as he couldn't put the work up for auction, for business and family reasons; he didn't want to create the impression he had cash-flow problems, and it was better if his two children, from the first and second marriages, didn't find out about the sale. He was forced to make a discreet private deal, and to accept the price of five hundred and forty-two thousand dollars offered by a collector from Detroit. He was truly up the creek.

He'd had a reproduction made—a facsimile on canvas in the original frame, entirely convincing to the casual observer—but not for sentimental reasons, simply to avoid questions being asked on the rare occasions his heirs visited.

Much the same had happened, during other crises, to the Segantini, the Hodler watercolors, the two Augusto Giacomettis and the other remnants of his father's collection. All discreet emergency sales below their potential auction value. And top quality reproductions of all of them hung in the familiar spots around the house.

He couldn't sell off his Vallotton so cheaply however. Weynfeldt's last estimate had been between 1.2 and 1.4 million francs. If the work fulfilled its full potential at auction it could fetch two or three times that. There was no question of a private sale this time. He would auction the painting officially, very officially, heirs notwithstanding. He needed the cash more urgently than ever.

Klaus Baier had lost a substantial sum on the stock market, yet again. But while he had previously used the discreet sale of paintings to aid his recovery from financial indisposition, to bridge a brief insolvency or to raise the funds for particularly promising speculations, now he needed the money to survive.

His financial situation was grim. The house he lived in had long belonged to the bank. If he wanted to satisfy all his creditors and avoid personal bankruptcy, he would be left with somewhere between one and two hundred thousand francs. In the old days that would probably have been enough to get him back on his feet again. But he just didn't have the energy this time. Nor the optimism. For the first time in his life he felt old.

Seventy-eight had been a number till now. Although he knew that, among other things, it represented the number of years he had been alive in the world, it never had anything to do with the way he felt. He knew lots of people with that number of years behind them, and they all seemed old to him, yet the number had no significance to him personally. The old man he sometimes saw in the mirror, when it couldn't be avoided, had nothing to do with him.

But a ridiculous flu last winter had flattened him. For almost a month he was bedridden, with recurring bouts of fever, shivering fits and aching limbs which had made his body, already far from agile, leaden and over-sensitive. He lay in bed, in a foul mood, testing Frau Almeida's patience so far she threatened in all seriousness to hand in her notice. There were nights when he was convinced he would never stand on his feet again, when he reflected on his life and realized it wouldn't make much difference to him if it was over.

To his own surprise he recovered. But he wasn't the same person. He had lost his enthusiasm. And annoyingly, along with it, his money. The little he still had was nowhere near enough for him to spend his twilight years in the manner he had planned.

A few years ago Baier had registered with the Residenza Crepuscolo, a palazzo on the shores of Lake Como that had been converted into a luxurious old age home. There he had the option on a spacious two-room apartment with a view of the lake. Now of all times, when he could no longer afford it, it had become free, for the reason places in old people's homes typically do become free. Including full board and all costs, it would cost around a hundred thousand francs a year. That meant that he had enough money for a year at most. He was under no illusions about his life expectancy—high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, prostate problems, type 2 diabetes, arthritis and a taste for unhealthy living—but he gave himself more than a year. Around ten, in fact.

His twilight years in the Residenza Crepuscolo between now and his eighty-eighth birthday would cost between 1.5 and 2 million francs, allowing for a little travel, some unhealthy living, and the resulting rise in the costs of care. Pretty much the figure he hoped to make from the Vallotton after tax.

A short coughing fit forced Baier to remove the Havana from his mouth to the ashtray. He suppressed the coughs with the practiced ease of someone who had smoked for most of his life and coughed for at least half of it. Then he took a large sip of port. Not his favorite drink, simply his favorite compromise between something advisable and something stronger.

Count Basie played “This Could Be the Start of Something Big.” Baier heaved himself up with the help of the chair's arms and grasped the ivory-topped walking stick leaning against the next chair. He hobbled over to the easel, swapped the long-distance glasses for the short-distance ones and studied the work close up.

There were few things more familiar to him than this painting. The woman's hair, which his father had called “chestnut brown,” pinned up and parted down the middle into two coifs. The curve of her right cheek, noticeably redder than the rest of her skin, suggesting a young, oval face. Her right arm, pressed tightly to her body, suggesting that, despite the fire, she was in fact chilly and had folded her arms against her chest. The lilac petticoat, which on closer inspection appeared to have been painted afterward to avoid dealing with certain questions of anatomy and perspective. Where were her calves? Her heels? If she was sitting on them, why couldn't you see that from the shape of her buttocks? The unexplained reflection on the shiny wooden mantelpiece just at the point where the reddish brown of the hair needed to stand out from the brown of the wood. The contrast between the upper half of a three-paneled screen reflected in the mirror, painted in broad strokes, and the more realistically painted silver cachepot on the mantelpiece. The piles of vaguely defined objects which could be discerned in the shadows of the open cupboard. Table linen? Sketchbooks? Boxes of painting utensils?

Baier touched the picture with his fingertips. He knew every patch of paint, every brushstroke, he knew how its surface felt and he would have been able to identify the painting by its smell. Which, given the speed at which his eyesight was deteriorating, he might soon be forced to do.

His Neuchâtel clock struck seven. In precisely five minutes he would hear the doorbell ring, followed by Frau Almeida's voice as she greeted Adrian Weynfeldt. Weynfeldt was a punctual man, as his father had been before him. Weynfeldt senior had called this “kingly courtesy” and had instilled it in his son, raising him along with his wife to believe that, if not a king, he was very much a Weynfeldt. Which was nearly the same thing.

At home Baier's father had often joked about the snobbish standards the Weynfeldts upheld. The awareness of being something special had been passed down to poor Adrian so forcefully it was part of his flesh and bones, making him use excessive politeness to dispel any suspicion of superciliousness.