'Elegant and original... beautifully crafted, without a word out of place or a sentence too many.' - Time Out
Part One
THERE WERE RULES, of course. Rigorously defined and to be strictly followed. The laws of self-interest policed the game without need for external arbiters. It was an agreement made in a world where social conventions could not participate. And they had stuck to it. George alone knew her as Adele. Her mother's name. To everyone else, and to him when they were in public, she was Monika. He was permitted to tell his friends - their friends - about their experiences together, but he was not allowed to refer the stories to the Monika they knew. Adele existed on the periphery of their understanding, though she was often central to their thoughts. The mystery of her identity intrigued them, enticed them, seduced them.
The form was always broadly the same: Adele would go to Harry Lime's, the bar which George owned on the Neubauguertel, by the Westbahnhof, and sit there alone, drinking coffee and reading a copy of the International Herald Tribune, something she never did otherwise. This was the signal for him to meet her the following day at the time and place they had arranged on their last meeting. In theory, by bringing her a glass of mineral water, George could indicate that he was unable to come. He never had, however. He was obsessive in this respect. It was impossible for him to refuse to meet her. Out of fear, she supposed, that it might upset her and prejudice the future of the affair. This despite her repeated emphasis that he was not obliged to come at her convenience. Adele was aware that she had the upper hand in the relationship, though she asked only for equality and mutuality.
When she picked him up in her car she would blindfold him and drive him to the street where she lived, taking as roundabout a route as possible. This was not because she distrusted him, but because she felt that if he knew his precise location in the city it would undermine his concentration on the work to hand. It was important, too, that he trust her completely when he was with her. Just as she trusted him when he was back in his bar with their other friends. It was their shared vulnerability which was of prime importance to the success of the venture.
When they reached her block she would take him, still blindfolded, into the courtyard and up the iron staircase to the attic where her apartment occupied three rooms. Once inside she would remove the blindfold. George would take off his clothes and lie on the bed and usually sleep. Adele would leave him there until morning when, upon her return, she too would undress and tell him any news she had before putting on her smock and starting to paint. For the duration of the sitting, usually some days, George was not permitted to leave the apartment, to wear his clothes, to drink alcohol or to smoke.
"TEXTURE, George. It's all down to texture. You square off your canvas. You do what Camus said: you isolate your subject. Sort out your perspective. That's where Leopold went wrong. But after that it's all down to texture. That's where I've been going wrong."
She was lying naked on the bed. Beside her George was asleep. They were not quite touching, but she could feel the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stand up. He stirred and shifted his left knee towards her when she spoke, but she moved away quickly before contact could be made. A touch would destroy the tension between them, the suspense required for the work. This was another part of the deal, another rule.
It was late. Nearly two. Adele got off the bed and gently draped a blanket over George before putting on some clothes. She had arranged to meet Reid in Harry Lime's at midnight and he would leave soon if she did not arrive. She wrote a note for George and put it on the desk in the other room before leaving the apartment and driving out to the Guertel and round to the railway station where she parked. Reid was sitting with Peter, his Danish friend, and Januz, George's Yugoslavian assistant, at the management Stammtisch at the back of the bar, by the office. Apart from them Harry Lime's was nearly empty. Unusual, but to be expected on a Sunday night at the end of the tourist season. Reid slapped the table in an exaggerated gesture of annoyance when he saw her walking in.
"Shit, Monika, you get worse, I swear."
"Out of here, Reid, I made it."
"Yeah, well, you want a beer?"
"Funny man. Melange please, Januz."
While Januz made her a coffee Reid and Peter resumed their conversation without speaking to her again.
"I don't give a damn about Januz's theories. I just want to know where the shit thing is. Story of the century if I found it."
"I don't know. I think Januz is maybe right in some ways: if you can work out how this Adele woman's mind works maybe you can find a place to start. As it is we know nothing about her or the painting. Did you try speaking with George again?"
"Yeah, like talking to that wall. I asked him to describe the thing last time. He said it was small and rectangular. Helpful man, you know."
It had become common knowledge amongst George's regulars at Harry Lime's that his friend, Adele, owned a painting by Egon Schiele. Strangely for Schiele, a painter who was obsessed with his signature, the piece was unsigned. But there was no doubt that the nude study hanging over the desk in the sitting room of her apartment was genuine. She had sufficient documentation which proved that, including a letter from Schiele to the former owner of the work. There was some question, in fact, regarding the ownership of the painting. Leopold Mahler had died intestate and without apparent heir some seventy years before and since that time, until Adele moved in a year ago, the attic rooms had been kept sealed. Neither Adele nor Leopold's half-sister, Gertrude, had been certain what the legal situation was and nor did they wish to find out, in case the picture was confiscated by the tax office. When Adele had acquired the lease on the studio she had also bought all the furniture and effects. These in themselves were valuable: a table and chairs designed and made by the Wiener Werkstätte, antique lamps, an old medicine chest with its contents - including cocaine, morphine and cyanide - intact, an old abacus, shaving equipment and hairbrushes. And there was the painting which was listed on the inventory as "Picture of naked woman lying on bed". This complicated the issue further in that Adele was apparently the picture's legal owner. But she doubted the validity of her purchase. Gertrude was well aware that the work was worth millions of schillings but had said that the painting should go to someone who would appreciate it. Why she imagined that Adele, more than any of the other students in her daughter's art class, should appreciate the picture was unclear. But Adele had fallen in love with the Schiele the moment she saw it and had never questioned Gertrude's motives any further.
When Januz returned with Adele's coffee he interrupted Reid and Peter:
"But it was Cesare Pavese who stated that the act of writing poetry is like making love: one may never know if one's own pleasure is shared. This may be true of a certain dimension of writing poetry or of any creative work, but to my mind it is painting, of all the arts, which comes closest to making love. There are subtleties and details of erotic experience. It is possible, through repetition or near repetition of any given act of lovemaking, to explore those subtleties and details and, for the sensitive lover, this can be rewarding. Similarly I suspect that a sensitive artist could be rewarded by painting the same scene, the same still-life or portrait, using the same light and the same tools, over and over. Ten times, a hundred times, each one rewarding in ways that its predecessor was not. It would be impossible, I believe, to repeat or recreate a work precisely in terms either of form or content. George has told us that his friend, Adele, only ever paints him naked, reclining in the same position on a bed, always under the same conditions. I imagine that each painting is different only in the slightest of respects - a brush stroke here, a shade there - but each one will be noticeably different, despite the fact that the material context is always the same. Adele is not trying to copy something, though - this Schiele of hers, for example. But to recreate something."
"You do go on, my man."
"Shut up, Reid. Let Januz finish. I'm interested. What I think is amazing is how there was so much suspense in that picture George showed us. He looked as if he was about to jump up and run away. As if he was scared, you know. Did you see that Monika?"
"I don't know a damn about it."
"I think you are correct, Peter. Though the fear which Adele painted on George's face was almost certainly not there in reality. I think it exists exclusively in her own mind. Like Schiele, she paints her own emotions quite explicitly onto the face of her subject, reflecting them there. George has not spoken to me of this, but I believe this fear which Adele has is connected with a hope on George's part - a naive hope in my opinion - that at the end of the sitting she will walk across the room to him and take him, make love to him. What George does not realise is that Adele, like all artists, has her particular fetish. With Adele the fetish is her own virginity. It is what sustains her work. Her fear, then, is not that her subject will leave her, but that he will rape her. Or, if I am exaggerating, that he will at least succeed in seducing her."
"But really, my man, you do go on. How can you say all that when we've never met the girl and the nearest we've got to her painting is a lousy Polaroid."
"Since you think yourself an arts critic I had imagined that you might have greater respect for the craft of interpretation, Reid. Knowing you as I do, however..."
"I just think there's got to be a better way of finding out who this Adele woman is and more to the point where she lives."
"And what you going to do when you find it, Reid?"
"Take a fucking photograph, I don't know. Seriously, Monika, I want to find that picture and I want to write it up."
"Write it up anyway."
"No evidence. I have been through every piece of paper there is on the subject. I've read every letter Schiele ever wrote or received, I've done everything I can. I just don't see what else I can do except maybe threaten George with a knife."
"Better make it a machine gun and never turn your back on him again. Hard man, George. Memory like an elephant."
"You said it, sweetheart. Anyway, I don't think he does know where the place is. Even if he would tell us. Which he won't. Stubborn shit."
"George is in love with her. He's not going to spill the beans. It would ruin his chances."
Adele yawned loudly. They were supposed to be going dancing and, though she was not in the mood, she knew she ought to let Reid know that she had not forgotten. In truth it amused her to hear them talk about her and George. Reid was determined to find the painting. The last time she had arranged to meet George, Reid had tried to follow him from the bar in Peter's car, an old Audi. George's new Mercedes was too fast for it and, without even knowing it, he had lost Reid on the Westautobahn. But the fact that Reid had tried to follow George worried her because it showed the lengths to which he was prepared to go to get his story. He had little enough information and since Adele had realised the extent of Reid's interest it had been agreed that George would say nothing further about the picture and only little about Adele and the sittings.
Reid was right. They would never find the painting simply by interpreting the photograph they had seen or analysing what they knew about her relationship with George. Januz's theories interested her, challenged her intellectually and artistically. But they were no threat. Unwittingly he helped her with her work, was on her side, the side of the artist. This she found intriguing: he was a brilliant musician as well as a barman - every night he played blues in Harry Lime's from ten until one. Reid on the other hand was a critic, a Macher in Vienna's cultural establishment, albeit a minor one. A minor Macher who wanted to be a big-shot. Where Januz had an intuitive understanding of what Adele was doing, Reid was rational in his approach. He had started in the Albertina, in the archives. He had spent weeks there. Then he had visited numerous collectors of Schiele's work in Austria asking if they had any documents, if perhaps they had heard anything about a painting which was thought destroyed by Hitler but which had survived and was hidden by its owner when the Nazis came. He had developed a scenario as a result of his enquiries which was remarkably close to the truth: a friend or patron of Schiele received the painting as a gift, died and the painting, because it was unsigned and unidentified, or perhaps because of some scandal, had been stored and forgotten until Adele found it. His search had been fruitless which was why he was now resorting to cruder methods. She wondered how long it would be before she slipped up. Spilled paint on herself and failed to clean it up properly, or before George said just too much about her. They were careful to cover every angle but simple mistakes could still be made. She had considered involving Reid, taking him into her trust and preventing him from writing his story in that way. But she needed that secrecy in order to Paint George as she wished. The process of excluding the outside world from the studio was as important to the work as anything else - the choice of model, the paints, the light.
Reid noticed the yawn and said:
"Hey, Monika. You're two hours late. Let's give U4 a miss. Next time maybe."
"Sure, Reid. Give me another coffee though."
"There's got to be a logical way of looking at this. Something I've missed. We've tried the painting angle: the way I see it I've got to go for George or Adele or both. What do we know about her?"
"She's pretty."
"Yeah, but pretty is relative. George is the ugliest shit this side of Mexicoplatz, what's he know about pretty?"
"I'm going to tell him you said that. But you have a point."
"How many Adele's do you think there are in the phone book?"
"What are you going to do? Call every one of them and say 'Hi, are you the Adele with the undiscovered Egon Schiele in your attic studio? My name's Reid and I'd like to blow your whole story."
"I just say 'Is George there?' See what response I get."
"You're insane."
"Well, do you have any better suggestions, my friend?"
"Personally I am enjoying the mystery. I have no desire to see it solved."
"You guys are useless. Anyway, I'm going home. Have to be up early to see a man about an apartment tomorrow. Hey, Monika, you want to meet me? Help me decide on this place."
When she had left school she studied for two years to be a surveyor, so she was often asked to give friends free advice on whether an apartment was a good deal and how much work would need to be done.
"OK, Reid, if you buy me lunch."
"Deal. Meet me here at nine."
"I'll be here by eleven."
"Fair."
After Reid had gone Adele and Peter talked for a while and Januz did the books for the week. She liked Peter. He had an innocence similar to that which she saw in George, but with it he was laconic and sensitive as well. He was a frequent visitor to Vienna - had an apartment in the second district - but since Adele had met him he had been spending much time in Denmark where he had his own business.
"It goes in cycles. Sometimes I have to stay there for six months, sometimes I can work here for six months. One day I'll give up the work here and stay here, I think. Two or three years maybe."
"I don't know why. This place is boring. I want to leave for a time. Go and live in Spain."
"Serious?"
"Sure. There's a little village I visited once, near Segovia. Be great. Except the bullfights. I hate them."
"Have you been to one?"
"Yeah, lousy. It was one with the guys on horses. Very clever, you know, the way they rode them, but really fucking pointless. Those guys were just on some ego trip. Even though they're all ugly, the women love them because they get in a ring with a stupid bull. I was on the bulls' side."
"I never went to one, but I have a friend, in Copenhagen, who was a bullfighter. He told me it's all a racket. The managers where he worked, in one city, were very bad. He was a good bullfighter because when they fight, the bulls aren't supposed to suffer too much - I think one of the knives should go into the top of the spine and paralyse them so they don't feel anything, but they still move, and that's the most important bit. He was good at that and he said real Spaniards appreciate it, because that's where the art is. But the people he was working for didn't like it because all the tourists, they want to see some action. So they'd bring in bad bullfighters, guys who missed the spot on the spine and made the bulls go really wild. Lots of blood. Lots of action. Suits the tourists. Quite a few fighters got hurt, so he left and started working at the small fiestas again. He said he didn't want anything to do with the big shows because it was all too corrupt. He's OK, I think."
"Don't think I'd like him. But yeah, Spain, I'd like to spend a while there. Got a good feel to the place. People talk to each other. Know how to live."
After another coffee she went back to the studio where George was awake, reading a book. There were no clocks in the apartment and the windows were blacked out so even after one day his sense of time became confused. For Adele this was unimportant. The adrenalin high she experienced during the sittings prevented her from sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time and she felt fresh as she undressed and gathered together her equipment to continue painting.
JANUZ was quite right. Recreate was precisely what she was trying to do. The Schiele was covered with a sheet while they worked, to stop it distracting her. Nevertheless, it consumed her thoughts as she worked. Leopold, too, had tried to recreate it, in a different way. She hoped that for her it was an artistic, or intellectual exercise. For Leopold it had been a pathological obsession. He had been a pathological person, that much was clear from his diaries. They were beautifully bound in leather, written in immaculate Gothic script, in high German without a trace of Viennese idiom. One hundred pages for every month of his adult life, to the last. Adele had read each volume twice since she moved in, some of them many more times. For the most part they were laughably anguished, adolescent almost in their claims to artistic genius and integrity. But at other times her heart had gone out to him and she empathised with him until she remembered what he had done. Leopold had been born a victim, had lived and died a victim of the circumstances under which he came into the world. But he had killed for his art. For that she could not forgive him.
In 1906 he had attempted to gain entry to the Academy of Fine Arts, the foremost art school in Vienna. It was the same year that Egon Schiele, also sixteen years of age, had succeeded where Leopold failed. That had been the beginning of an obsession which drove Leopold until his death twelve years later. He had not understood from the start how the "scrawny child" he had met outside the Academy on the day of his examination had persuaded the tutors that he could do what Leopold could not. He had felt usurped, betrayed by his past. The resentment stayed with him but, rather than avoiding Schiele, he sought him out, bought his company, friendship even, with patronage and flattery. The artist had responded readily. And when Schiele did what only the artist can do for his patron, presented him with one of his works, Leopold's inadequacy as a patron, as an artist and as a man finally came to the fore. Convinced, as he had been for twelve years, that he was the equal of Schiele as a painter, of every man in every respect, Leopold attempted to recreate Schiele's masterpiece. The attempt resulted in his own death and in the death of the model he had chosen.
George was asleep again, now. She was sitting outside, on the landing of the iron staircase, wrapped in a blanket and sipping cold coffee, watching the dawn gather. This session had been a good one. Always, after the first full day in the studio, George started to relax, to lose touch with the world outside, to stop worrying about how his business was going or what his friends were doing. His attention focused on Adele, the attic, his own feelings. And she in turn grew more intuitive in her approach to the painting, had to think less about proportions and lines, hues and shades.
He was a beautifully simple man. Harry Lime's was his pride and joy, his masterpiece. He had worked all his life as a barman and had dreamt of owning a place somewhere, not in London but in Europe. A place where there would be no company executives telling him what to sell and at what price, no government insisting that he open at this time and close at that. It was Reid who had suggested the name for the bar. It was a crass suggestion in some ways, but Adele had to concede that it was a good choice, the masterstroke. In the summer George sent people to St Polten to distribute leaflets on the trans-European express trains coming into Vienna, advertising the bar and the fact that it ran an accommodation agency - and exaggeration because all it meant was that hotel touts frequented the place. But the younger tourists came and, finding a warm welcome and other travellers, they came again every night, attracted by the friendly atmosphere and the spirit of occupied Vienna which George contrived to summon up. And in winter, when the tourists were gone, the pimps and their hookers and the black-marketeers would return, drawn by the name of the place, by the atmosphere of seediness which George and Januz set out to create, an atmosphere of illegality, of being beyond the reach of law and order, on which allowed the guests to indulge their fantasies of being on the fringes of society, of being underworld bosses, sharp operators with the city at their feet.
The police put up with it for George was a consummate dealer himself, though his trade was goodwill, tolerance. He was an expansive storyteller, a bon vivant with a magnificently disarming approach. If someone took the slightest offence he would place an arm round their shoulder with a "You have to be so careful with words. Slippery things and they get slipperier the more you drink. Have an Irish. On the house, my friend." And in any case, Vienna had not changed so much since the days of the Habsburgs: there was a house commission, voluntary, on any deals that were made. George's clientele celebrated everything they could so they had an excuse to present him with gifts: a crate of cigarettes for Christmas, some electrical goods for his birthday, half a pound of grass because it was Saturday night and the weather had been nice. Some of the gifts inevitably found their way into the homes of bureaucrats and police chiefs who soon came to share George's attitude of live and let live. No one died as a result of a deal made in Harry Lime's. George's world was one of potential: "Everything is possible, friend. Everything." He would survey his kingdom with a benevolent smile, breaking up fights if he had to, though never throwing anyone out if they cooled down and settled their differences in a calm and reasonable way. And if someone was ejected they were always welcome to return the next night, or whenever they wished, and start again.
The one thing Adele did not know about Leopold's death was the identity of the model he had killed. She knew some things about her: that, in Leopold's words, she was a young, beautiful, red-haired girl with jewels for eyes. Adele supposed that in real life she must have looked like the girl in Schiele's painting, with sharp features, a sullen expression, thin lips. Leopold was a fool. He had imagined that by finding a model who looked like the girl in the picture he needed only paint exactly what he saw before him. He had failed to understand how much of the work had to come from inside himself. The doctor had said that probably she would have died anyway, of the flu which killed him within days of the murder. But for Adele that was beside the point. He had killed someone who was innocent, who had nothing to do with his obsession. Perhaps that was why she had chosen George as her model, the Lebenskünstler as they called him, the "artist of life". It was her rejection of Leopold's ethic which held that anything may be done in the name of art: an ethic which Adele considered absurd when she did not find it simply repugnant.
It was light, now, and she decided to sleep for a couple of hours before meeting Reid. She enjoyed pushing herself in that way: working for six, eight hours, sleeping for two and then leaving the apartment and living life as she normally would when she was not painting George. And she enjoyed Reid's company in a perverse way, despite being contemptuous of him and the way he saw the world. But he had a point. "Gotta squirm, baby," he'd say, "that way they know you're alive and no shit about it. Accentuate the positive and crash when you can." It was one way of living your life.
"MONIKA, you're on time. I don't believe it."
"Funny man, Reid. Fairly damn funny."
"OK, it's like this: the place was built in 1840 or so. One of these typical cutesy old-fashioned places, you know..."
"Biedermeier, Reid."
"Probably, so anyway, it's a good Hauptmiete. No strings, full rights. The works."
"Whose place is it?"
"Some old guy. I mean really old, you know. He's being chucked out by the council. They reckon he's a bit off his head or something. Probably senile. Thing is, he hasn't done any work on the place in years and they'll give me a good grant to fix it up. Structural stuff. Sound OK?"
"Sounds great if the price is right, but it could be pretty high, area like that. They're not meant to, but still... Who is this guy?"
"Name's Lasker. Sounds cool, actually. Used to be a waiter in Museum before the war. Before the first war, too. I thought he might have known Schiele. Maybe ask him about it, see if there are any new leads. Anyhow, let's get over there."
They walked down the Mariahilferstrasse and turned left along a side street where the apartment was on the top floor of a four storey building in the seventh. When Reid rang the bell a young woman answered and told them she was Nadia, Mr Lasker's home help from the council, until a room was found for him. He was asleep, she said, and she did not want to wake him. But Reid insisted that he had an urgent appointment. Adele always loved the way the Viennese responded to the word "urgent". They were let in and Nadia showed them to the dining room and left them to wait. Adele walked around the room looking at the state of the walls and examining floorboards wherever they were visible. The place would need a lot of money over the next couple of years, she told Reid, but it was quite sound from what she could see. She liked it herself. The ceilings were higher than normal and the dining room was huge. Probably every room would be. She opened the French windows and stepped out onto the large south-facing balcony which was in an even greater state of disrepair than the inside. There were terracotta pots lying everywhere, some intact but most of them broken and spilling soil onto the floor. In the middle of the balcony was an old red, metal table with matching chairs around it and a mildewed Coke umbrella slotted through a hole in the centre. Rust was creeping up the table legs and the paint was flaking off.
She went across to the cast-iron railing and leaned over, staring at the ground. When she was a child she used to love going to high-up places with bottles and jars filled with paint which she would drop, just to see the patterns she could make when they broke. She had stopped doing it when she was a teenager and went to the Secession where she saw some bohemian artist throwing pigs' blood and entrails onto a huge clean canvas and, eventually, over sections of the audience. Januz was right when he said all artists have their fetishes. She was pleased that her fetish, as Januz had described it, was relatively innocuous. Reid joined her a moment later and they sat down at the table.
"So, what do you say?"
"It's great. Couldn't put a price on it exactly, of course. How much can you afford?"
"Up to a hundred."
"You're talking fifty just to put up some new plaster on the walls and sort out some of those boards. Probably needs rewiring, too."
"Thought maybe I'd take the plaster off. Have bare brick. Perhaps paint that, probably not. The council should cover some of it anyway."
"Yeah, would be cheaper in the short run I guess. You should find out when they last had a new roof. What's the ground rent?"
"Thousand a month. Not bad at all."
"I love this balcony. Be great in the summer."
"I know. And see: we're not overlooked at all."
At that moment the sitting room doors swung open and Lasker hobbled out onto the balcony. Adele was amazed by his face, like an old monkey's, all shrivelled up and crinkled into a confused frown. He squinted at them and said:
"Greetings, greetings. Are you Reid? And your friend..."
"Monika."
"Welcome, welcome, let us return inside where it is warmer and we can drink some tea before Nadia shows you the apartment. Or would you prefer to look around first, Reid, while the tea is being prepared?"
"Perhaps that would be best, Mr Lasker. Then we can discuss things."
"Very well, very well."
Nadia showed them around, watching them carefully as if they might steal something. Then they went back into the large sitting room and sat down on the sofa opposite Lasker. They sat in silence for a few moments as Lasker packed a pipe. While they waited Adele looked around the sitting room. It was like a junkyard, filled with broken ornaments, ancient and unidentifiable machines with springs and gears erupting from their insides, battered books, photographs and postcards from around the world. Over the fireplace hung a framed photograph of the inside of Café Museum as it had been a long time before, and on the mantelpiece another photograph in a frame, but the image so faded as to be almost invisible against the yellowing paper on which it had been printed. Only the faintest outline of three figures could be seen, a man and his two children, she thought.
"Well?"
"How much?"
"Let us have some tea first. After a fashion with which I imagine you are unfamiliar."
Nadia handed each of them a small cup of dark, strong looking tea and Lasker intoned:
"The first cup has no sugar in it because life, at times, can be very bitter."
They drained their cups in one swallow and Nadia took them and handed out a second cup each.
"The second cup contains much sugar because life at times is very sweet."
Adele nearly retched because she hated sweet things anyway and the cup contained more sugar than tea.
"The final cup contains just the correct amount of sugar... Need I say more? I thought not. You are intelligent people. Unusually so for young people today."
She liked him, she decided. He was not senile and anyway she liked people who talked about the nature of life with complete strangers. He smiled at her and said, in a loud but conspiratorial aside:
"Are you lovers?"
Adele opened her mouth to reply but Lasker laughed and said:
"I am only teasing. When you reach my age you too will seek humour wherever you can find it. There is little enough to laugh about in the world. So, Reid. You like it."
"Yes, if the price is fair."
"Fifty thousand and cheap at the price. No discussions, take it or leave it. I could get more. Fifty thousand and it's yours."
"OK. Deal."
Reid reached over and offered his hand to Lasker and, after a moment said:
"My word not good enough for you? Very well."
Before Reid could answer Adele asked:
"Mr Lasker, Reid told me you worked in Museum. Is that right?"
"Indeed. For many years." He waved his hand in the direction of the photograph over the fireplace.
"It was better then, of course."
"Did you know Schiele? Egon Schiele?"
"Schiele? Of course. Schiele, Klimt, many others. I served them all. Though you should understand, Reid, that I was a waiter. It was not my place to know these people intimately."
"But could you tell me anything about the people Schiele knew?"
"Very little, Reid. There were so many of them: many would-be artists, people who wished to be seen with him and the others. With Klimt I had more contact, through a friend. This..." he jabbed a bony finger at the faded photograph on the mantelpiece "...this photograph was coloured in by Gustav Klimt himself. The colour has long since bled from it, of course, but still..."
"Tell us about it."
Reid glared at her, annoyed that she was asking about something he considered irrelevant. But she shrugged, refusing to be intimidated.
"Tell you about it? It is a long story. I shall ask Nadia to bring us coffee before I start. If you are sure you wish to hear it."
"Yes, we do. How long did you work in Museum?"
"Nearly thirty years. From 1909 until Hitler came. Then I went with my family to America for the duration of the war and the occupation. I returned on the very day the State Treaty was signed. Nadia, we should now like some coffee."
The social worker frowned but she went away and duly returned a few minutes later with a cup of coffee for each of them.
"She kept trying to bring me decaffeinated coffee at first. And hid my pipe. These people have no imagination. They fail to realise how they would feel in my position and no amount of reasoning seems to help them. I showed her how difficult old people can be, however. I went on hunger strike until she agreed to give me real coffee and let me smoke my pipe in peace. You can imagine the scandal were I to die of starvation whilst under her care."
Adele wanted to ask why he was being moved into a home, but she was unsure whether it would be rude: for all she knew he was simply incontinent. He packed his pipe again, lit it and began his story.
Copyright © Steven Kelly 1991/1995
Steven Kelly is the author of the short story collection Invisible Architecture and the novels The Moon Rising and The War Artist. By day, he maintains web sites for a living - including his own on-line literary magazine The Richmond Review. By night, he writes. Contact Steven Kelly via The Richmond Review.