The Last Weynfeldt (16 page)

She ordered cold lobster and champagne, Baier an Armagnac, double. “I'm sure you don't mind,” he observed, and started lighting a cigar.

“Sure,” she said.

“‘Sure, go ahead' or ‘Sure, I mind?'”

“Sure, I mind but go ahead.”

Baier laughed and continued his incendiary ceremony. He knew women like this. But how had Weynfeldt met her?

“Adrian is a fine lad,” he noted.

“He's nice.”

“Nice like this too,” Baier rubbed his thumb and index finger together.

“I know. I've seen his apartment.”

“You can lose your wallet as often as you want with him.”

“Would you order me another?” She pointed to the empty champagne flute. Baier waved to the motherly, neatly-dressed barwoman.

“He worships you. I can tell.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I thought it might interest you.”

“Financially?”

“That too.”

“I prefer to earn my own money.”

Baier nodded thoughtfully. “I believe I can think of a way to combine the two.”

The barwoman brought the cold lobster and a fresh glass of champagne. When she had gone Lorena asked, “Combine what?”

“Your influence on Adrian and your desire for financial independence.”

She put a piece of the white lobster meat between her lips, without cocktail sauce. “I'm listening,” she said, her mouth full.

L
ORENA WOKE WITH A BACKACHE
. B
UT WITHOUT A HEADACHE.
That might have something to do with the quality of the champagne she had been drinking in the Trafalgar. Perhaps it was true what she had read recently, that people only feel one pain at a time, and that one pain obscures any others. Perhaps she would have a headache if her entire capacity to feel pain wasn't taken up with her backache.

Her clock radio had eased her gently awake. She always set it so she heard the last couple of songs before the news while she was coming to. She hated being woken abruptly by the latest disasters.

The main topic was the weather. Even now, at eight in the morning in late February, it was already 54°F. And there wasn't even a
föhn
wind. Previously unreleased sections of the UN climate report alleged that a climate catastrophe was now unavoidable.

Lorena wondered what she should wear. If she got up at all. She hadn't decided. Another day as a booth babe in the dreary world of motorbike fans wasn't exactly enticing. Never mind seeing the Ducelli asshole again. But she had no intention of letting the agency keep her wages from the day before.

At the end of the news, after a weather forecast fit for a nice day in June, she got up. She touched the sensitive spot and realized the pain wasn't coming from her spine or her back muscles.

She clambered over the suitcases, bags and cardboard boxes to the bathroom and examined the spot with a hand mirror.

Around the kidney area was a dark bruise, almost black, the size of her palm. A bloodshot patch caused by that macho Ducelli idiot's fist. She decided she would go to the motorbike fair after all. The man wasn't going to get away with this.

In the streetcar to the exhibition center she took a free newspaper from the dispenser and sat down cautiously on one of the hard seats.

Her picture was on the cover. Wrapped around the Ducelli in a provocative pose, with a seductive look for the camera. The caption read: “Superbike with ultra-transparent chassis and high-torque motor: the new Ducelli 7312.”

She read the article carefully; she wasn't mentioned anywhere in the main text either. Not even as an accessory, not even as something which stopped you from getting a good look at the bike. It was as if she didn't exist.

At the next stop she got out and took another streetcar, to the offices of the agency which had arranged the job for her. She would demand the fee for her work yesterday, and if they were awkward about it, she would show them the bruise on her back, threaten to make a big fuss about it, naming the agency and their client and giving all the details.

A snotty receptionist led Lorena into the waiting room. She sat down and began leafing through today's newspaper, already tattered.

She came across her photo here too. Now the article was not about the motorbike fair but “The image of women in the world of two-wheeled racing vehicles.” It was a critical article, and she read it keenly; here too she wasn't mentioned here at all.

She stood up, told the receptionist where her boss could shove the fee and left.

This was always happening. Lorena liked making big gestures. Throwing in the towel, telling everyone to go to hell, then finding herself faced with the big question: What now?

She tottered along the pavement past the morning crowd, pensioners with shopping carts, mothers with strollers, unemployed people, schoolkids, traveling salesmen, streetcar drivers before or after a shift. The smell of freshly baked bread and melted cheese wafted from the open doors of a supermarket. She went in and looked for a cash machine among the takeaway stands in the foyer. She found one and luckily it wasn't her bank. That meant that the computer might not know she was hopelessly overdrawn, and she might manage to entice a few hundred franc notes out of it.

Lorena put her card in the slot and tapped her code in. She sensed someone standing behind her. She turned around and saw a pudgy young man with bad skin. He stared at her expressionless. “Would you mind standing a few steps back?” She pointed to a line on the ground marked “Please stand behind this line.”

He failed to move, simply pointing to the cash machine with his chin. The display said, “Card retracted.”

“Shit!” she yelled. And left. She didn't quite manage to ignore the pimply boy's salacious grin.

She bought a coffee and a croissant at one of the takeaway stands. She didn't have money for more. A tray in her hand, she looked for a free table and finally found one, at a distance from the others. But as soon as she got settled, an old lady came and joined her. She too carried a tray holding a coffee and a croissant. Alongside it was a red wallet, a pair of glasses, and a copy of the free newspaper graced with Lorena's photograph.

Lorena didn't look up. Old women in supermarket food halls can be very chatty.

But this one clearly wasn't. She put her glasses on and started reading the paper. Every so often she dipped her croissant in her milky coffee, bit the dripping, soggy bit off and chewed it, audibly.

All at once she said, “Could you keep a quick eye on my things. I have to pay a visit.” Without waiting for Lorena's answer, she stood up and walked off.

She had left the glasses and newspaper behind. And the red wallet.

Lorena looked around discreetly. The next table was several yards away. A group of schoolkids were eating their junk food. A line had formed at a nearby pizza stand. No one was watching Lorena.

She picked up the wallet as if it was hers, opened it, and looked in the section for notes. A few tens and twenties were there. She took forty francs out. Now she saw the small photograph behind the transparent plastic sheath in the wallet. It was of a young Bob Dylan.

The old lady must be over seventy, a normal elderly woman wearing something with big flowers on, dug out of her wardrobe early this year for the muggy summer-like day. She wore glasses that enlarged her eyes slightly; her hair was gray and unkempt.

And she was a Bob Dylan fan. How old was she when Dylan was a young rock star? Around thirty? Younger than Lorena was now.

She imagined the old thing as a young woman. At festivals. With a joint. Topless with a peace sign painted on her forehead. A young woman with dreams and ideals, like she had once had.

Vet. Not in a little veterinary practice for parakeets and Chihuahuas. Big animals. Horses, maybe cows too. A country vet with a Land Rover, who made it to remote farms in the middle of winter. Or even bigger: zoo animals. Elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos.

Lorena had pursued this dream as far as university. Just two semesters. A bit of modeling on the side. And a bit of coke. Then she postponed a semester—she was young and had time. That semester became two. And once she forced herself to go back to college after a third, she had gotten used to a lifestyle she couldn't afford as a student.

Perhaps one day she would be like this old woman: her head full of unfulfilled dreams, and a photo of Robbie Williams in her wallet.

She put the forty francs back and put the wallet on the old woman's tray.

She hadn't sunk so far she had to take from people who had nothing themselves. You took from people who had more than enough.

Like the old man yesterday, for instance. He had offered her fifty thousand, “If you can give our fine upstanding Adrian a shove.”

The man had had a valuable painting he owned copied, and wanted Weynfeldt to put the copy up for auction instead of the original. Weynfeldt had refused of course, because he was much too square. She was now supposed to “give him a little shove.”

She asked how he envisaged that.

She knew full well, he had answered, how to get a man who fancied her to do something against his principles. He only had to look at her.

She asked what made him think Weynfeldt fancied her.

“Oh he does,” he answered. “Trust me, I know him.”

The old woman returned.

“Thank you for watching out,” she said with a smile.

“Don't think twice, it's alright,” Lorena replied, and left.

Back home she called Weynfeldt at his office. He was not at his desk, his assistant informed her.

So could she please give her his cell phone number? Lorena asked.

She was told that Dr. Weynfeldt did not own a cell phone.

In that case please could he get himself one, Lorena told the assistant. She would give him the few francs it cost.

I
T HAD BEEN A BAD NIGHT FOR
A
DRIAN
. H
E HAD FINISHED
the bottle of wine then started on the brandy, which the otherwise conscientious Frau Hauser had left in his study, along with the snifter Baier had used.

He had tried to concentrate on the two pictures and the question of how he should behave in this situation. But another image, Lorena's, kept getting in the way.

She had looked tired. Tired and older than he remembered her. How old was she anyway? Thirty-five? Or closer to forty?

What incredible bad luck. If she had come just ten minutes later Baier would have been gone. He could have taken her home, and however things went after that, at least he'd have known where she lived.

Even if she'd arrived earlier, things would have panned out differently. She would have rung, he would have gone down and might even have been able to persuade her to come up for a moment. Failing that he still would have had the chance to exchange a few words with her in private. To find out her address, or her telephone number.

He had sipped at the brandy, taking care all the time not to drink from the spot Baier's lips had touched, and with every sip his fury at the man grew. First Baier tried to hoodwink him, then to buy his complicity and finally he went off with the first woman Weynfeldt had been interested in for years, right under his nose.

He imagined everything he would do to Baier. The repertoire ranged from reporting him for fraud to the use of violence.

He held long, hard-hitting conversations with him in his head, refilled the glass again and again, and noticed how late it was only after lurching to his bedroom: two in the morning.

He battled with his water pick, with the buttons on his pajamas and the decision whether to call Baier now, despite the time of night. To tell him what he thought of him and—ridiculous as the idea was—to be certain the old man was in fact at home.

By the time Adrian finally made it to bed, unsteadily, it was ten to three. When he woke, thinking he had overslept, it was just twenty minutes later.

He slept in short uneasy bursts, finally appearing for breakfast around nine, with red eyes and three cuts from shaving, annoyed at the double Alka-Seltzer Frau Hauser served him wordlessly alongside his orange juice.

He didn't reach the office till shortly after ten. Véronique also handled him with demonstrative discretion, which he found particularly hard to cope with on this excessively warm morning.

“She called again,” was the first thing she said.

“Which she?”

“The one who called you at Agustoni's that time. Lorena: she didn't say her surname.”

Adrian was suddenly wide awake. “What did she say?”

“That you should get a cell phone; you can get them for a franc. She'll give you the money. I told her I agree.”

“Did she leave a number?”

“No, she'll try again later.”

He went into his office, closed the door and attempted to do something constructive.

After a short while he heard Véronique's hint of a knock before she appeared in the door frame. “I'm going out for a minute; would you take the calls?” It wasn't a request. He owed her this for coming late.

She had barely left when the telephone rang. “Good morning. Murphy's, Adrian Weynfeldt speaking,” he answered.

“The boss in person.” Lorena's voice. “Do you already have plans for tonight?”

“No,” he said, although he had intended to pay a visit of condolence to Mereth Widler.

“Would you invite me for dinner again? I'll come this time.”

Adrian was unable to answer, he was so surprised.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“Yes, of course I'm here. Sure. In Châteaubriand again?”

“Your place would be better. Is seven thirty a good time?”

“Seven thirty? Yes, a perfect time. Seven thirty at my apartment.”

“Then I'll see you then, ciao.”

“Yes, see you then. Wait!”

“Yes?”

“What do you like to eat?”