The Last Weynfeldt Read Online Free PDF Page A

was extremely well known, a bestseller as a poster, yet shrouded in mystery: no one knew who owned it. In all the monographs and exhibition catalogues—and it was frequently exhibited; this enhanced its value—its status was described simply as “private collection.” If it suddenly came on the market it would cause a sensation. Adrian Weynfeldt consistently valued it at a realistic figure, but always added, “Under the hammer it could easily fetch double that.”
    Weynfeldt had soon grasped that Baier’s interest in the value of his collection was purely hypothetical. He never dreamed for a second of selling a single piece. He just liked to know how much money he wasn’t liquidizing.
    So Weynfeldt was rendered speechless for a second when Baier asked him, “Would my Vallotton fit in your current auction, Adrian?”
    After a short pause he answered, “Yes, perfectly.”

3
    H IS CHAIR OF CHOICE WAS AN ARMCHAIR, ITS SEAT, BACK and arms upholstered with a rather sorry tapestry. The other couches and easy chairs in his living room were comfier, but all too low. Thanks to his arthritic leg he was unable to get out of them without assistance.
    He had stationed a glass of port on the flattened lion’s head decorating the left arm. On the right was a crystal ashtray, clean except for the inch-long cylinder of ash, still intact, from the Churchill he had clamped between his lips, his eyes screwed up. He had long-distance glasses on his nose, short-distance ones on his forehead.
    Cigar smoke hung in the upper half of the room, immobile, caught by the beams from the two spotlights pointing at the picture on the easel. The Count Basie Big Band swung, barely audible, from an aging stereo system.
    The picture showed a naked woman, sitting on a yellow kilim rug in front of a fireplace filled by a salamandre , a cast-iron stove with a glass door, through which a glowing fire could be seen. The woman had her back to the viewer. The last layer she had shed, a pale lilac under-garment, lay draped around her on the rug; her dress and petticoat, yellow and mauve, were flung carelessly a little farther away. Her was head slightly tilted, perhaps contemplative, perhaps submissive; her reddish-brown hair pinned up, her waist narrow, hips broad, buttocks and thighs ample. Above the mantelpiece part of a mirror could be seen, reflecting a thin strip of the room. A red armchair protruded into the picture from the right; to the left of the fireplace the door to a recessed cupboard stood half-open.
    Klaus Baier had grown up with this picture. It hung in his father’s study till his death, a room which smelled like this one—of stale air and fresh cigar smoke.
    As a small boy he hadn’t given much thought to the woman sitting in front of the stove. She had obviously taken her clothes off because the fire had made the room so warm. But later he began to wonder what the woman gazing so intently into the flames actually looked like. When his father was out he sometimes sneaked into the study and sat in front of the picture, hoping the woman would look over her shoulder. Just quickly, just once. Later, after he realized that women in paintings never turn their heads, he still slipped into the room and imagined what the woman actually looked like from the front. He was jealous of the painter, who was sure to have seen her from the other side. During puberty the woman in front of the salamandre featured in most of his sexual fantasies. And all of his three wives (the last had divorced him six years ago) were slender from the waist up, broad from the waist down.
    It was more the woman than the painting which had accompanied Klaus Baier his entire life. And now, as an old man, it was her above all he found so hard to part with.
    When it came to the small seascape by Ferdinand Hodler it had been easy. The painting hadn’t meant much to him, aside from the six hundred thousand franc estimated price