The Last Weynfeldt (8 page)

Weynfeldt entered the store and looked around. Lorena stood at the cash desk alongside a well-dressed woman with a bob and a shaven headed man in an ill-fitting suit. Adrian walked toward the group.

“Thanks for coming so quickly,” Lorena said, and kissed him on the lips.

S
O IN THE END THERE WAS SOME ACTION THAT DREARY
lunchtime. Frau Gabel got tough with the redhead and ordered her to open her handbag; the redhead refused point blank. Pedroni couldn't hear exactly what was said, but you didn't need lip-reading skills to grasp what was going on. He stood on the top step of the spiral staircase to see how the situation developed. If he'd had to choose, he'd have put his money on his boss. This customer was obviously brazen, but Gabel had seen it all when it came to shoplifting. The redhead wouldn't get off lightly.

Now Frau Gabel had waved Manon over, who had been watching the drama unfold from a safe distance. Gabel said something, and Manon went off toward the Prada rack. There she began searching, presumably for the black dress. Then she went into the changing room, stayed awhile, but emerged empty-handed.

The result of the search produced nothing more than a shrug from the redhead.

Gabel gave Manon new instructions, and she walked to the cash desk, probably to make the customer think she was calling the police, which she wouldn't really do. Melanie Gabel wouldn't want police in her store, certainly not during lunchtime.

The redhead seemed to realize this, and kept her cool, waiting to see what happened next. Gabel seemed to be at her wits' end. She looked around the store, caught sight of him and beckoned him down. Shit.

Reluctantly he descended the stairs and joined them.

“Herr Pedroni, we have a small problem. I have asked this lady to show me what is inside her handbag, but she refuses. A dress has gone missing, which she took into the changing room earlier. Please try to persuade her; perhaps you'll have more luck than me.”

The redhead stared at Pedroni in derisive anticipation. Taking a fatherly tone he asked, “Why don't you want to open your handbag?”

“Because then she will think I wanted to steal the dress.”

“So it is in the handbag?”

“Not because I wanted to steal it. I wanted to show it to my boyfriend.”

Melanie Gabel weighed in again: “So why didn't you take the other clothes too? The ones you asked us to reserve?”

“They wouldn't all fit in my handbag.”

Pedroni suppressed a smile. “So what now? Where do we go from here?”

“Do you think I need to steal dresses? My boyfriend would buy up the whole store for me if I asked him!”

“There's no need for him to do that,” Melanie Gabel said sarcastically, “I'd be delighted if he simply paid for the dress you have in your handbag. Three thousand, two hundred and fifty Swiss francs. I suggest you call him right away.”

The redhead scrutinized her coolly. What she did next took Pedroni's breath away: she opened her handbag. The dress, rolled up into a tiny bundle, could clearly be seen. She reached beneath it, retrieved a small wallet, searched briefly inside till she found a visiting card, which she gave to Gabel, replaced the wallet and closed the handbag. “Perhaps you'd like to call him yourself.”

Melanie Gabel was speechless for a second, then took the card, read it, looked up and asked, “Adrian Weynfeldt is your boyfriend?”

“You know him?”

“I know who he is.”

They walked together to the telephone behind the cash desk. Melanie Gabel dialed Weynfeldt's office number, was told that he would only be available after lunch and handed the phone to the redhead, who told Weynfeldt's assistant this was an urgent, private matter. She was given the number of a restaurant, called it, and ten minutes later there he stood, in the store.

He oozed money: his suit, shirt, shoes, all handmade. Pedroni noticed things like that. Weynfeldt was out of breath and very nervous.

The redhead greeted him with a kiss on the mouth, which seemed to surprise him. If he really was her boyfriend then it was probably early days.

Weynfeldt greeted Gabel, who treated him with the kind of respect she reserved for old money, and listened to her summary of events so far. He took no notice of Manon or Pedroni.

The way the redhead put it, it all sounded very simple. She had tried on a few things, put some aside because she wanted to show him and one in her handbag for the same reason. By the time she came to leave the shop she had forgotten about the Prada in her handbag. Simple as that.

Everyone present knew this wasn't true. But with the arrival of Adrian Weynfeldt the story became one of those kind of lies you can accept without having to believe it.

Without asking any further questions he pulled out his wallet and handed Gabel his credit card, avoiding eye contact with her.

But the redhead insisted that he see the dress. She ordered him into one of the leather armchairs, disappeared into the dressing room and reappeared in the black Prada number—slightly crumpled from being rolled to fit in a handbag.

Weynfeldt was pleased. But when the redhead then appeared in her own clothes he remained seated. “What about the other things?” he asked.

She asked for the clothes that had been reserved and modeled them for him, one after the other, with her over-the-top catwalk choreography. Weynfeldt was pleased with them too.

Without batting an eyelid, he paid the bill of nearly twelve thousand francs. Holding four large Spotlight bags he followed the redhead out of the store.

Melanie Gabel, who had accompanied them both to the door, stayed there for ages, watching them walk away. At the register, Manon filled in the alteration form: the white blouse with the starched frills by Emanuel Ungaro had to be taken in at the waist.

Pedroni glanced over her shoulder and memorized the delivery address.

M
EN WITH SIGNET RINGS THOUGHT THEY WERE SOMETHING
special. They talked faster than other people and had a kind of well-bred arrogance that drove Lorena mad. Most of them wore family crests their fathers or, at best, grandfathers had paid a heraldry expert to research or invent. But they wore these insignia as if they were the descendants of some ancient dynasty with the time-honored right to have their wicked way with girls from the lower orders, with no honorable intentions whatsoever. Signet ring men were spoiled: generous when they were coming on to you, stingy once they wanted to get rid of you.

Weynfeldt wore a signet ring. So Lorena knew what she was getting into.

They walked side by side through the busy city center. Excitement over the false spring lay in the unnaturally warm air. They hadn't discussed where they were heading. Lorena didn't know if she was following him or he was following her. After they left Spotlight she had put her arm through his, while the boutique owner was watching, and as far the shopping bags allowed. But then he had started awkwardly swapping sides, walking on her right for a while, then back to the left, till it got silly trying to link arms with him again each time. Now they were simply walking along beside each other, like two acquaintances who had met by chance.

Lorena had thanked him first of all, and he had brushed it off. Then she added, “You didn't have to buy all the other clothes, the dress would have been enough.”

“I'll remember that next time.”

“No need; there won't be a next time.” And because he said nothing to that, she asked, “What am I going to do with all these clothes?”

“Wear them. They look good on you.”

She looked at him, from the side. He was older than the signet ring men she knew. But with the same rounded contours. He had clearly just lost the latest in a series of battles against weight gain.

You could see his suit was expensive if you looked properly. But it wasn't a suit that made this as blatantly clear as the other signet ring men's suits. Weynfeldt wore it with the ease of someone who had never worn anything else. Lorena decided that he was not a typical signet ring specimen.

“Ask me,” she said.

“What do you want me to ask?”

“Why I did it?”

“That's none of my business.”

“It is now. Now it's cost you a load of money.”

“You haven't asked me why I did it.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because you asked me to.”

“Do you do everything people ask you?”

“If it's in my power.”

Definitely not a typical signet ring man.

They walked through a small park. A few people had stopped and were pointing excitedly at something beneath a beech tree. Not an abandoned, ticking suitcase; not a cobra escaped from the zoo; simply a few cheeky crocuses and hellebores sticking their noses out of the humus.

“How have you been since that day?”

“Since I was at your place?”

“Yes.”

“Up and down. And you?”

Adrian Weynfeldt seemed to be thinking. He really needed to think how he had been since then. It took quite awhile till he came up with an answer. It went, “I never get really down, I guess.” And a few seconds later he added, “I never feel really upbeat either.”

The path led out of the park and onto a narrow sidewalk on the left hand side of a street. Weynfeldt shifted the shopping bags from his left to his right hand and placed himself on Lorena's right.

“Why do you keep switching sides?” she wanted to know.

“Normally I walk on the left of a lady. But on narrower sidewalks I walk on the side next to the traffic. It was instilled in me from birth. It throws me off if I walk on the wrong side.

Lorena laughed. “You protect women from the traffic with your body?”

“Strange, isn't it?”

“Kind of cute too.” She linked arms with him. A cement mixer came toward them. Lorena drew Adrian away from the curb. “Come here, you can't take that on.”

They walked through the blazing sunshine. The top button of Adrian's two-button jacket had been done up the entire time. Now he undid it. She noticed there was a monogram on his shirt. A. S. W., like on his pajamas.

What does the S stand for?” she asked.

“Sebastian. It was my father's name.”

“Like the servant in
Heidi
.”

Weynfeldt laughed. “True. That hadn't occurred to me till now.”

They walked on in silence. After a while he said, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Why was it me you called?”

Lorena reflected for a long time. Then she replied, “Because now, ever since that Sunday, you are responsible for my life.”

S
PERLING
S
TRASSE 42 TURNED OUT TO BE THE PINK HALF
of a small semidetached house, its other half painted saffron yellow. The neighbors had clearly been unable to agree on a single color.

Even as he rang the bell Weynfeldt knew he wouldn't like the woman who lived there. It was her fault he had been forced to leave Lorena at twenty to three, put her in a taxi, with a voucher to cover the fare, wave goodbye and hope she would turn up as promised the next evening at Châteaubriand, the tiny, overpriced gourmet restaurant where he was very safe from his younger friends, and pretty safe from the older ones.

A dog with cracked vocal chords started barking. He heard a woman trying to silence it, without success.

The door opened a chink. A small dog's head poked through, teeth bared. “Just a minute, till I've locked Susi up,” the woman's voice said. The door was closed again. Weynfeldt waited.

The tiny front garden smelled of spring. Snowdrops, crocuses and pink cyclamen were flowering in the bed in front of the house. A rusty, collapsing garden table stood under a birch tree, four chairs leaned against it. You could see this hadn't been their first winter outdoors.

It was Frau Schär herself who opened the door. A plump woman who had clearly been to the hairdresser that day; her hair hadn't suffered a night's sleep yet. She was in her mid-sixties, dressed in black, widowed a few days ago.

Taking this into consideration, Véronique had agreed that instead of Frau Schär coming to the office, on this occasion Dr. Weynfeldt would visit her.

She owned a few mountain landscapes by Lugardon which she wanted valued. She was considering parting with them, hard as it would be.

Weynfeldt shook Frau Schär's small, soft hand and expressed his condolences. She smelled of a far too youthful perfume with a very dominant lily of the valley aroma.

Lunch smells hung in the air inside. Something must have been fried on a very hot flame. Weynfeldt walked past the door behind which Susi was barking frantically, into a living room. A large window filled with flowers opened onto a back garden the same size as the front, with a chalet-style structure.

Frau Schär offered him coffee. Weynfeldt declined. He didn't have much time, he said, and suggested they got straight down to business.

Four of the paintings were hanging above the sofa, two leaning against its cushions. One of these was obviously a Lugardon. It showed a perpetually snow-topped mountain range with an alpine meadow in the foreground, painted in painstaking detail, a herd of Braunvieh cattle and a cowherd snoozing with his Swiss mountain dog in the shade of a rough-hewn alpine hut. Albert Lugardon, born in 1827 to a portrait-, landscape- and history painter, was seen as the inventor of “high-alpine realism.” The paintings had recently become fashionable again. Not really Weynfeldt's thing though.

Two years ago a similar landscape to the one on the sofa had fetched twenty-two thousand francs at one of Murphy's competitors' auctions. But that painting had been larger and arguably better. Frau Schär wouldn't make more than ten thousand from this.

The others were simply imitations, painted in the style of Lugardon, and this with little feeling or talent. They were all signed A. L. on the bottom right with dates from the late nineteenth century. To the best of Weynfeldt's knowledge Lugardon had never signed his work solely with his initials. Whoever painted these pictures had clearly created a loophole in case anyone came sniffing around. They were worth nothing. Not to a house such as Murphy's.