The Last Weynfeldt (27 page)

Thus attired, he entered his study, opened the safe behind the Amiet, counted out 1.2 million francs from the packets of money there, and stashed the remainder in the Paul Artaria dresser. He put the 1.2 back in the safe, then left his study and walked to the kitchen.

The cleaning team had gone, and the corridor was freshly polished. The door to the fitness room stood open. Weynfeldt took a look inside. The machines were positioned somewhat ad hoc, the rubber gym flooring was still strewn with the remains of the packaging material, and the mirror was missing. But Casutt had still come astonishingly close to meeting the deadline they'd agreed upon.

In the kitchen Frau Hauser was talking to two people wearing long waiter's aprons embroidered with the logo of Langoberti, the city's leading catering firm. She noted Weynfeldt's tuxedo with surprise before introducing the pair: “Carla will be helping to serve; Alfredo will open the oysters.”

Adrian welcomed them both, then asked Frau Hauser, “Could we take our aperitif in my study?”

“I've already prepared it in the Green Salon, but if it's important …” She sounded slightly cross.

“Yes, it is important, excuse me. And a few light canapés, perhaps? Your legendary pastries.”

Now she appraised him blatantly from head to toe: “Are you going to ask for her hand in marriage?”

“Something like that,” he replied, and went back to his study.

He felt both sad and excited, as if heading on a long journey: parting and anticipation. And the mania which had taken hold of him reminded him of the feelings you distract yourself with before big farewells.

Frau Hauser knocked and rolled the home bar in. One of his favorite pieces. The architect Alfred Roth had designed it in 1932. A wonderfully simple piece of furniture made of steel tubes, perforated aluminum sheets and spray-painted beech. You lifted it on one side like a wheelbarrow, and pushed it on two spoked wheels with solid white tires.

He knew Frau Hauser found it impractical, preferring the chrome serving trolley she had rescued from his mother's things. So he appreciated her decision to serve the aperitif now on the
Kleinbar
, as Roth had named the piece.

Several small plates were arranged on the serving tray's red linoleum, holding variously twisted and sliced sticks of puff pastry, carefully piled in a range of formations. Alongside that, on silver saucers, were two champagne flutes, flanked by tiny napkins. The ice bucket with the champagne was protruding from the bottle holder.

Adrian thanked her and adjusted the dimmers till he found the appropriate balance between festive and intimate lighting. Then he put
Nabucco
in the CD player, paused it, positioned the remote control close to the bar and stood at the plate glass window.

Across the way a classic end-of-the-day office scene was on display: somewhere a meeting was still taking place, the participants increasingly restless; cleaning crews were emptying wastepaper baskets, wiping tabletops and negotiating table legs with vacuum cleaner nozzles; here and there sat the odd solitary figure in the pallid light of a screen. And a curtain of mist and rain was billowing in the space between the two buildings.

The doorbell startled Weynfeldt out of his thoughts. He left the room, returned again, took the napkins off the home bar, took a look around and then stuffed them in a bundle into his pants pocket.

Lorena looked stunning. She was wearing the steel blue Issey Miyake getup with the high collar and the zipper. Adrian remembered he had liked it that day in Spotlight, as Lorena had modeled it for him in front of the speechless boutique owner.

It had an artificial sheen, and the cut was reminiscent of the crew's uniforms on the Starship Enterprise. This gave Lorena an alien, unfamiliar appearance. Perfect for the role he had planned for her tonight.

She greeted him without commenting on his outfit, as if she was received by men in tuxedos every night. Frau Hauser shook her hand like a daughter-in-law she had become fond of. Adrian took her to his study and pressed play on the remote. The sound system filled the room with the theatrical overture from
Nabucco
.

“What have you got planned?” Lorena asked, as Adrian uncorked the champagne and filled the glasses.

He made no reply, passing her a glass and raising his to toast her. He took a sip; Lorena drained her glass and gave him a frenzied kiss with her cold champagne mouth. The kiss was as alienating as the dress. “What are we drinking to?” she asked.

“To the millions,” he suggested.

“Which ones?”

“Any of them. No, actually: to the Vallotton millions.”

Lorena held her empty glass toward him, he filled it and they toasted again. “To the Vallotton millions.” She gave him another damp champagne kiss. Then she fished a pastry from one of the little plates, careful not to destroy the arrangement. “Who were Number twenty eight and Number thirty three?

“Collectors,” Weynfeldt replied, “collectors who wanted to remain anonymous. Happens quite often. Increasingly often.”

“Four point one million francs,” she munched, “a tidy sum to be paying anonymously.”

“That's just the hammer price,” Weynfeldt explained. “On top of that there's the commission. Twenty percent on the first six hundred thousand—makes a hundred and twenty. Twelve percent on the rest—makes four hundred and twenty. Number thirty three has shelled out four million, six hundred and forty thousand.”

“Wow! Have you ever seen that much money in a pile? Okay, sure you have, silly question.”

“It's smaller than you imagine.”

Lorena fished another pastry from Frau Hauser's fragile construction. “Like Mikado,” she observed. “Have you ever played Mikado?”

“I hated Mikado. I was all fingers and thumbs. Still am.” To illustrate this claim he took a pastry from one of the plates. But the rest of the artistic pile remained intact.

“See,” she said, “you're not anymore.” She took one too. The tiny pastry pyramid on her plate collapsed. She laughed. “But now I am.”

It was left to him to steer the conversation back to the topic in question. He did it fairly crudely: “I certainly have seen a million in one pile a few times. It's nothing.” He demonstrated a small quantity with his hands.

“In thousands?”

“Well not in tens, obviously.”

She laughed, held out her glass and grabbed another pastry.

“Do you want to see one?”

“One what?”

“Million.”

With an incredulous smile, she asked, “Why? Have you got one lying around?”

“Not lying around. But in the safe, yes. By chance. Do you want to see it?”

“Other men want to show girls their stamp collection. With you it's your million.”

“It's not mine.” He pointed to the Cuno Amiet: “In there.”

Lorena walked over. “You've got a safe behind a painting? In the first place burglars would look?” She sounded amused, but excited too. Now she was standing directly in front of the painting, holding it by its frame and pulling at it gently. It opened like a casement window, with a barely audible click. Behind it was the gray safe door with its numerical keypad.

“Zero nine zero eight zero seven.”

“You're telling me the combination?” she said in amazement.

“Indeed.”

“One more time. Zero seven—then what?”

He dictated the combination again. “Now the green button.”

There was a short beep then the safe door unlocked. Lorena's hand disappeared inside and emerged with a packet of notes. “No shit. You're crazy.”

“You see. That's just a tenth,” he replied, unperturbed. “Carry on.”

She took another packet out, and another. When she had five she walked to his desk, deposited them there, then fetched the rest from the safe. “But there are twelve here,” she realized, and put two back.

Weynfeldt filled her glass again and offered her another buttery pastry.

She helped herself, and started arranging the packets in various ways, till she had found the constellation that looked smallest. “That's nothing. A million, sounds so crazy. But then this. Nothing.” Lorena sounded genuinely disappointed. “Who does it belong to?”

“A client. We do sometimes handle cash in our business,” he lied. He offered her more of the aperitif snacks, which she took, absently.

“Pretty crazy, the way something loses its value once you've got piles of it sitting in front of you. Never knew that happened with money too.” She took a packet, waved it about in the air and said, “Hundred thousand? Huh!” She dropped it on the table and took another. She took a note and tugged it out of the currency bundle. It took some effort, but eventually she had a brand-new thousand-franc note between her thumb and forefinger. “A thousand! That's a load of money! But a million? That's like having too much ice cream as a child. You get sick. Talking of ice cream, when's supper?”

She piled the ten packets of notes on her bent left forearm and pressed them against her body. Carrying the money like this, she walked to the safe, waving her right hand with the loose thousand-franc note above her head, and said, “A million. One-handed. It's a joke!”

She replaced the money in the safe, locked it, hid it behind the hinged picture again, stood in front of Adrian and asked, “Is it far to wherever we're eating?”

Frau Hauser had staged the
dîner tête-à-tête
using candlelight and a fire. She was serving oysters for the hors d'oeuvre, followed by a selection of seafood—lobster, shrimps and mussels. For dessert she brought in a selection of homemade sorbets and petit fours, also her own work. She withdrew discreetly before ten.

Once they were alone, an embarrassed silence descended. Like a couple in an arranged marriage meeting for the first time. Till this moment they had both been playing their roles: Lorena—a society gentleman's simple but cute
mésalliance
; Adrian—a benevolent, amused man-about-town having an affair beneath his social stratum.

But now the official part was over, and they were sitting together in private.

Lorena, quite drunk now, spoke first. “I got you wrong.”

He didn't say:
I sure got you wrong
. He said, “How?”

“I never would have thought you'd do it. Never!”

Adrian twitched his shoulders and filled her glass.

“Can I ask you a megalomaniac question?”

He nodded, and handed her the glass.

“Did you do it because of me? Because I said you were too straight?”

“Maybe.”

“And how do you feel now? Now you've done it?”

“Totally okay.” Adrian realized he was already imagining how he would open her zipper. Without any buildup. Just take hold of the chrome eyelet and pull it, dividing the two halves of the top to reveal whatever they had to offer.

“A pity really,” she said.

“What's a pity?”

“I'd rather you hadn't done it.”

“It has no significance.” He was excited by the thought of sleeping with her like a stranger. He would use her, the way she had used him, the way she thought she was still using him. And then he would throw her aside. He would abandon her to her own undoing without wasting another thought on her.

She nibbled at her glass and looked up at him. “Pity. I think I'd prefer it if you were still straight.”

Weynfeldt reached out his hand and tugged at the zipper.

P
UT IT ALL AWAY OR GET IT ALL OUT?
H
ER STUDIO
reminded her of a story she had once read. About an old woman who died at home. When they opened the door to her apartment they entered a system of tunnels made from trash and accumulated objects going back decades. Not only had the woman never thrown anything away, she had collected and retained things other people had discarded.

Lorena didn't collect strangers' trash, but she didn't take her own out as often as she should have. Bottles, for instance. The Veuve Clicquot that Theo Pedroni had brought around that time was still standing there. Pizza boxes too. Various empty boxes, from various delivery services, were piled in various places around the tiny studio.

She wasn't really an untidy person. But to maintain order, you first needed underlying order. A system new things could fit into. And in this room there was simply a varying number of things, useful and useless; there was no system for differentiating them from each other. There was no difference between them at first glance at all. You could only tell the difference between the pizza boxes and the Prada handbag, the soggy dish towel and the Donna Karan blouse, on the second or third glance.

That meant that tidying up was pointless. She needed to get down to the basis, the underlying order. Which is why she was wondering whether to put everything away or get it all out.

She'd had a bewildering, wonderful, strange, erotic night. She wasn't sure what had happened, but Adrian—Adrian, how it sounded suddenly—had changed somehow. She couldn't see him anymore as just her signet-ring-man with his Kennedy haircut; he had gotten to her. Yes, that was it: the distance which till now she'd maintained, carefully, deliberately, but effortlessly, was gone.

Two things he'd done: He'd sacrificed his integrity for her. No one had ever done that. And not just because she'd not known anyone who'd ever had any. And: he had fucked her like no one had in years.

Take out? Put away?

To put anything away, she first had had to empty something. The things in her boxes and cases were all churned up, she couldn't pack things on top of them. She would have to remove everything, increase the chaos and establish order from this basis.

She began emptying a cardboard box.

He had thrown her out of bed at quarter past seven. He had whipped off the quilt, standing scrubbed and groomed in one of his tailored suits by the bed and inspected her with a look which now, two hours later, she felt could best be described as professional. As if he were writing an expert's report on some nude of his. Then he said, “I've got a terrible day ahead. I'll wait till you're ready and order you a taxi.”