The Last Weynfeldt Read Online Free Page A

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 colors 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 disorganization and inability to deal with practical matters bothered her. Weynfeldt and Veronique 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 wind-swept 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 pajamas. And increasingly it took nothing at all to call up the image of Lorena—of Lorena or of Daphne.
    That dramatic