2

Adrian Weynfeldt could see the quay from his office window, the jetties and the white passenger boats, the streetcars, most of them bedecked with flags for some reason, the backed-up columns of traffic, and the continual stream of hurried pedestrians.

It was shortly before five; the rush hour had begun, but the insulated windows kept the street sounds out; the lively scene was like a TV image on mute. He had often wished he could work with the window open, but Murphy’s was equipped with an air-conditioning system which maintained room temperature and humidity at constant levels all year round to safeguard the valuable paintings and works of art held there.

On a day like today, however, Weynfeldt was more than happy to keep the window closed. It was neither warm nor cold, damp nor dry, clear nor cloudy: a depressingly average day. He wished something unusual would happen to make it memorable.

He had worked all day on the autumn auction catalogue, Swiss Art, writing descriptions of the pieces, listing their provenance and exhibition history, researching the secondary literature and valuing the works. There was still time till the copy deadline, but he needed this time. He wasn’t satisfied. The selection was too homogenous. He needed just one lot which would attract attention and perhaps fetch a record price. The best piece was a Hodler, a landscape, oil on canvas, showing a country road with telegraph poles. He had valued it at one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand francs, and hoped for a hammer price of around three hundred thousand. Then he had the sleeping shepherdess by Segantini, a watercolour valued at sixty-eighty thousand. In this price range there was also the mountain landscape by Calame, a village idyll by Benjamin Vautier and some roses by Augusto Giacometti. After that came the oil paintings by less familiar names: Castan, Vallet, Fröhlicher, Zünd, Barraud. The remainder consisted of studies by the big names, Anker, Hodler, Vallotton, Amiet, Segantini, Giacometti and Pellegrini, drawings and watercolours at prices in the one and two thousand category. What he lacked was works in upper middle range, between one and two hundred thousand francs, and one or two ‘conversation pieces,’ as his assistant, Véronique, would put it: pictures and stories they could feed the press.

Véronique was sitting in the outer office, two computer screens in front of her; a square, black take-out box of Thai food beside her. Ever since the Thai place in the next block had opened she was constantly battling the temptation to pop down and get something. She went in secret when she could, hoping Weynfeldt wouldn’t notice her absence. Not because he would object – he was an easygoing boss. But like all addicts, she didn’t want to admit her addiction to herself.

Véronique was in her mid-thirties, with a round, heavily made-up, wrinkle-free face, framed by a blond bob, perhaps intended to make her face look longer and leaner. Her body was big and appeared shapeless thanks to the loose clothing she wore during this phase. Weynfeldt had experienced all her phases during the years they worked together; Véronique was a yo-yo woman. She starved herself as excessively as she ate. She was capable of passing through every BMI classification, from underweight to overweight, in a single year. The latter was more conducive to a good working atmosphere in Weynfeldt’s opinion, but of course he would never say something like that out loud.

He had been embarrassed himself when he caught her returning earlier with her Thai snacks. He had come through his door to the outer office as she came through the main door. Her taste buds had been bored, she said, as she always said when an explanation couldn’t be avoided. Weynfeldt didn’t react, just took the Segantini catalogue from her immaculately tidy desk – his own was submerged in hopeless chaos – and retreated discreetly. He took in the aroma of ginger, coriander and lemongrass as he closed the door behind him and gave thanks for the opening of the Thai takeaway; the nearest food outlet before that had been a sausage grill.

Weynfeldt would have been lost without Véronique. He was a recognised specialist in Swiss art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; he was frequently asked to write expert reports, and even the rival auction houses preferred to have important works in this field valued by him. When it came to the administration, organisation and management side of his job, however, he was clueless. He was by nature an unsystematic and impractical person.

He had never learned to handle computers for instance. At first he hadn’t wanted to; they hadn’t suited his image of himself. Later, when he did want to learn, he had failed. And he was otherwise a quick learner. He had passed his degree with top marks, his PhD with summa cum laude. He spoke French, English, Spanish and Italian fluently – almost too authentically as far as some were concerned, and was currently learning Russian, which he didn’t find difficult even at fifty-four. But he had never been able to make friends with computers.

This was the reason Véronique had two screens on her desk. Computers were an indispensable part of Weynfeldt’s job. It was unimaginable that a Murphy’s expert could not be contacted via email, didn’t use search engines for his research or keep up to date with current prices and trends using the various art-market websites. Véronique dealt with all of that. She printed out his mail and typed up the answers he wrote by hand at the bottom of each message. Very few people suspected that Weynfeldt was useless with computers.

Mobile phones were yet to enter his life either. Each time Véronique tried to help him to make friends with them, he proved to be all thumbs. If she ever suspected him of deliberately feigning clumsiness to retain some vestige of freedom, she never let it show. Weynfeldt simply wasn’t available when he was out and about; but he called Véronique at regular intervals, from the increasingly rare telephone booths or from restaurants, to keep himself in the picture. He did at least have an answering machine at home. He didn’t know how it worked, but Frau Hauser, who managed his enormous apartment, did.

She had been his mother’s housekeeper and was approaching eighty – but still fighting fit. Weynfeldt had only recently been able to persuade her to employ assistants to help with the cleaning and to take his washing to the laundry. Since then he met women of various nationalities and colours in his apartment, who were rarely able to maintain Frau Hauser’s high standards for long and were swiftly and unceremoniously replaced – much to the annoyance of the bank’s security department which was forced to put each new employee through the bank’s complex security clearance procedure.

Frau Hauser was a very small, gaunt figure. Ever since Weynfeldt could remember, her hair had been white with a purple rinse. She entered the apartment every working day at seven a.m. on the dot, and left it at five p.m. – unless Weynfeldt was entertaining, in which case she served refreshments she had prepared herself, or, in the case of large-scale invitations, commanded the brigades of catering staff from the sidelines. She had taken over a former servants’ room adjacent to the utility rooms, where she withdrew for short breaks or, if it got late, sometimes spent the night. She had a habit of complaining half out loud to herself, not with words, but by sighing, murmuring, moaning and the occasional ‘aha, aha, aha,’ as if something she had long predicted had finally transpired. Weynfeldt only ever heard this; he never knew what precisely had aroused Frau Hauser’s displeasure since he avoided being in the same room as her, but he assumed each time that it related to his untidiness. No day passed without her mentioning his mother to him – what she had always said, always done, or was lucky not to be experiencing now.

He found it easier to get on with Véronique. Not only because she never referred to his mother, although she had known her personally; she never gave Adrian the feeling his disorganisation and inability to deal with practical matters bothered her. Weynfeldt and Véronique respected each other enough to overlook each other’s shortcomings.

Weynfeldt was seated on an office chair from his own collection, a comfortable leather armchair on a chrome-plated tubular steel base designed by Robert Haussmann in 1957. He leafed through the Segantini catalogue, unable to remember what he had been looking for. He paused when he came to Sul balcone. The painting showed a young girl in an indigo blouse and a long skirt. Her right hand on her hip, she leaned against the wooden balustrade of a balcony, her back to the windswept mountain village with its church tower, and the milky, translucent sky. She wore a white bonnet, her head bowed, thoughtful, gazing at nothing in particular. She was standing as Lorena had stood, he reflected, but on the other side of the balustrade.

Since that strange encounter it had not taken much to remind Weynfeldt of Lorena; much vaguer connections were enough: a female portrait without the slightest similarity, sometimes just an object, something Japanese because of her blouse, or a piece of furniture by Werner Max Hofer because she had sat on one of his chairs while she waited for him. Sometimes it took even less: similar weather to that Sunday morning, croissants, one of his white Sunday pyjamas. And...