The Last Weynfeldt (7 page)

He asked what she wanted to drink, although he knew it would be Punt e Mes, then ordered a Punt e Mes.

Out of all his friends from the Thursday lunch club, his relationship with Alice was the least awkward. She made sculptures of steel so huge there was no risk he would feel obliged to buy one. Her métier was art for architectural spaces; her target patrons were public bodies, banks, insurance companies and the owners of villas with huge grounds. The material costs of her works greatly exceeded its market value and unsurprisingly she rarely sold.

With Alice Waldner it seemed to be less about selling work than about the discrepancy between her appearance and her art. She was not much over five foot, delicate, frail almost, and spoke with a cute, childlike voice. Her somewhat ungainly works, made of steel girders, railroad rails, caterpillar tracks and turbine parts, were a challenge to her and the few others who got to see them. She lived in reasonable comfort from a small inheritance and the alimony her first husband paid her, a manager in German heavy industry. She made no demands of Adrian Weynfeldt, although he had been known to cover the catering costs, unasked, for her exhibition openings at the former factory which served as her studio.

No sooner had Alice received her drink, than Kaspar Casutt and Kando arrived at the table, with Hausmann in tow. Casutt had “come down from the Grison Alps,” as he reminded people at every opportunity, one of the economic migrants who had descended from the mountains to the valley. He maintained his Grison dialect as assiduously as Agustoni, the restaurant's proprietor, maintained his Italianate German. He was a pretty good architect. Too good, he felt, to waste his life designing vacation homes for dentists.

And so he spent his life falling out with one architectural practice after another, mostly when they demanded things of him he couldn't reconcile with his architectural conscience. This point was reached sooner each time, leaving him forced to earn a living as an architectural draftsman. The private clients willing to work directly with him were few and far between. And he fell out with the few who did commission him—mainly introduced by Weynfeldt—over irresoluble differences of opinion on architectural rigor. His last major private commission was several years ago: the refurbishment of Weynfeldt's apartment. There had been differences of opinion here too, but they were each decided in Casutt's favor.

Kando was Hausmann's girlfriend; her parents were among the thousands of Tibetans Switzerland had taken in as refugees in 1963. Alongside Adrian Weynfeldt she was one of the few people who believed in Claudio Hausmann and
Working Title: Hemingway's Suitcase
, and together with Adrian formed the rest of his small collective of sponsors, by paying the rent on their shared apartment and covering the majority of their living expenses. Kando was a lawyer for a large bank and earned enough for two. She also avoided being seen alone with Weynfeldt at the Thursday lunch club, but this was because she had the reputation for being a tireless fund-raiser for Hausmann's projects.

With witnesses present, there was no reason not to sit next to Adrian, now standing again, buttons done up, both hands on the back of the chair next to him ready to adjust it for her.

The three sat down and continued the conversation they had been having as they entered Agustoni's. Weynfeldt took care of the drinks.

Now Karin Winter arrived, accompanied by Luc Neri. Karin, a head higher than Luc, with cropped blond hair, looked exhausted from a morning of sluggish business and the prospect of a similar afternoon. She owned an art bookstore in a bad location in the historic city center with a name she realized was unfortunate only after she had registered the company.

This company's tacit shareholder, without voting rights, was Adrian Weynfeldt, who bought every art book he personally needed there and most of what he needed for work. This wasn't simply nepotism; Karin was an undisputed expert on art publications.

Weynfeldt got up to welcome her and ushered her to a chair, which she fell into with a deep sigh.

Luc sat opposite Karin: far from constant companion, they had a volatile relationship with separate apartments and incompatible lifestyles. His fine, thinning hair looked electrically charged, and judging by his eyes, he had probably just woken up. Luc was a web designer and mostly worked at night. Anyone hiring him to create their web presence could be sure of getting the most radical design currently available, but only if they had as much patience as Karin Winter or Adrian Weynfeldt, who was so clueless about computers he found his slick
weynfeldt.com
a little embarrassing.

The group got louder; everyone talked over one another and studied the menu as if it hadn't remained the same for decades.

Weynfeldt sat there in silence, in a mixture of polite interest and paternal pride. There were still three seats unclaimed, but only one more guest was expected. The two other places were for unexpected guests—an old Weynfeldt tradition which Adrian had introduced to the Thursday lunch club. The last unexpected guest had been a shy young man Karin had brought and introduced to everyone—including Luc—as “my new boyfriend.” One of countless episodes in the Winter versus Neri relationship war.

The only person missing now was Rolf Strasser, professional artist. “Professional artist, as in professional circus artist, or professional bullshit artist,” as he himself was wont to say. He had years of classical art education under his belt, had studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he won an award among his fellow master students. He was a virtuoso painter of every possible technique and style, adept at copying Old Masters and an astounding photo-realist. But one of his professors in Vienna had once said, “Strasser, you are highly skilled, but unfortunately you aren't an artist.”

Whenever he was drunk—often, in other words—Rolf Strasser would repeat these words, laughing and putting on a nasal Viennese accent. But there was no doubt that he had been scarred by them.

He could claim some impressive achievements: successful exhibitions, prizes, grants, reviews in the art press. But he had never found his style; a perpetual victim of his skills.

For a painfully long period he had put his entire energy into losing these skills. His work had acquired a fake dilettantism, like an adult trying to imitate children's drawings. Then he went conceptual, constructed painting machines, left puddles of paint on quiet streets and stretched canvases over the asphalt so that the cars would leave tire marks on them.

Some while ago he had returned to straight figurative painting, and was working away wildly in the hope that an individual style would emerge all by itself: a look that would make even someone uninterested in art say, “Ah, a Strasser.”

When he wasn't painting he was drawing. Wherever he was, he drew on whatever came to hand. At Agustoni's it was the tablecloths. Throughout the meal he would make sketches and studies on the paper surface, document the ever changing still lives on the table, draw portraits of the others or embellish stains with ornamentations. He was like a nervous office worker who decorates everything in reach with doodles, except that he was a virtuoso. For his part Nunzio Agustino forbade his staff from trashing any paper Strasser had drawn on. When the tables were cleared, the drawings had to be carefully detached and handed to Agustino, who added them to his collection, which he was convinced would one day be worth a fortune.

Weynfeldt and Strasser were united and divided by their shared passion: their love of art. Rolf was the only one of his friends who could hold down a proper conversation about Adrian's area of expertise. But there were no Strassers in Weynfeldt's private collection. Friendship notwithstanding, art meant too much to Weynfeldt for that.

But he supported Strasser's career in other ways: by editing a catalogue raisonné, published by a press Karin Winter founded for this sole purpose, or—killing two birds with one stone—by financing a website designed by Luc Neri.

The waiter was already bringing the starters as the professional artist rolled up and grabbed the bottle of Brunello to fill his glass, before he'd even sat down. As always, he wore a suit with a shirt and tie. As a concession to his identity as an artist—if he was an artist—every item was black.

He nodded once to the whole group, ignoring Weynfeldt. No one would have realized that he had arranged to meet him that night for a tête-à-tête.

Strasser was happy to go without a first course, but not without the Chesterfield he smoked while the others ate their antipasti and salads. Soon he had a pen in his hand and had begun adding something to Agustoni's collection.

Strasser didn't participate in the conversation, which had now turned to
Working Title: Hemingway's Suitcase
. Casutt had raised the subject with the remark: “I once knew someone who was working on a novel for years. Whenever you met him he was either nearly finished, or working on a redraft. He always had to get back home in a hurry because his text was waiting, or he'd arrive late because he couldn't make the text wait. And one day it was all gone. His wife had wiped the hard disk after an argument.”

“Didn't he have backup?” asked Luc, who knew about information technology.

“Apparently not.”

“Then it's his fault.”

“That's not the point. I reckon he had never written a line.”

“And why are you telling us this?” Kando asked suspiciously.

“In relation to Claudio's project.”

“
Working Title: Hemingway's Suitcase
will soon be ready to shoot,” she snapped.

“That's not what I meant. I'm wondering if Hemingway had really put his entire unpublished works in the suitcase his wife lost.”

Hausmann chewed on his marinated eggplant with the face of a highly musical person forced to listen to an amateur orchestra rehearsing. Karin Winter tried to involve him in the conversation. “An interesting angle, Claudio, don't you think? The lost suitcase never contained a single manuscript. Just as an idea to investigate.”

Hausmann sighed. “That's not what I'm interested in. The fact that his wife believed they were in there is all that matters.”

Alice Waldner, the sculptor, chimed in. “I'm sure she knew exactly what was in that suitcase. I don't think Hemingway was the kind of man who packed his own bags.”

Unnoticed by the group, the waiter had approached Adrian. “A call for you, Herr Weynfeldt,” he murmured.

It took a moment for Adrian to realize: the waiter was asking him to come along because someone had called him on the telephone. It could only be Véronique. She was the only person who knew where he was. She would only bother him at the Thursday lunch club in an emergency.

He was led behind the bar to a black, wall-mounted phone of the kind he hadn't seen since the cell phone era began, a rectangular device with a round dial, the numbers faded and barely legible. The receiver had been removed from the phone and hung on a hook below. Servers pushed past him carrying steaming plates. What with the racket from the kitchen and the noise from the bar, shouts in Italian as food was ordered and served, it was hard to understand the voice on the other end of the line. It wasn't Véronique. It was a soft, female voice he recognized from somewhere. “Hello darling,” the woman said, sounding blasé, “could you come by Spotlight as soon as you can and clear up an awkward misunderstanding? That would be lovely of you. They seem to think I'm some kind of … shoplifter.” She laughed as she said the word “shoplifter,” and when he heard the laugh he recognized the voice: Lorena!

“A shoplifter?” Now he laughed too. “Spotlight? The boutique? I'll be there in ten minutes.” He replaced the receiver with a beating heart, asked Agustoni to send him the bill later and returned to the table.

There they sat, his younger friends, immersed in conversation, all approaching forty and unable to hide their fear of this frightening birthday which would mark the end of the last new lease on life.

“An urgent phone call,” he explained. “I'm afraid I have to …”

No one heard him. No one looked up.

“Well, see you next Thursday,” he muttered, and walked off through the smoke, voices and aromas filling the restaurant, out onto the busy street.

It was unnaturally warm for the time of year. City center office workers took advantage of their lunch breaks for a stroll. Some of them were clearly unable to receive the gift of a premature spring without reservations. The media had recently decided that climate change was no longer the bugbear of a few scaremongering hippies, and had finally become a serious global issue.

Weynfeldt took big strides along the sidewalk, stepping into the street whenever he needed to avoid large groups meandering toward him. Spotlight wasn't far, but if he really hoped to get there in ten minutes, he would have to hurry; three had already passed.

She had called him “darling.” No word for weeks, then “darling.” And what was the story with the shop-lifting? Had she forgotten her wallet? Was she over her credit card limit? An awkward misunderstanding? What kind of misunderstanding?

He started to cross the street at a diagonal, but was sent scurrying back to the sidewalk by the furious ring of a streetcar bell. He made an apologetic gesture to the driver and walked swiftly alongside the Number 14 as it moved off again, and waited till it had overtaken him before crossing the road, this time more carefully.

Spotlight was on an elegant shopping street. He had often walked past it, but never entered. Weynfeldt did not buy designer clothes. His designer was Diaco, the third generation of gentlemen's tailors, whose father had made Weynfeldt's father's suits.

As the boutique came into view he slowed his pace. He didn't want to arrive out of breath. The elegant lettering on the façade was adorned with long, painted shadows. Weynfeldt recalled that at night it was lit by halogen spotlights mounted on the wall and cast real shadows. The store had four large plate glass windows in which white, almost faceless plastic mannequins modeled the clothes.