Free Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann

from next door; I listened but nothing came of it.
    I had to proceed systematically. This was Miriam’s workplace, her father probably hadn’t been here in years. First I would go through all papers that were lying open, then I would work my way through the desk drawers from bottom to top, then the cupboards, from left to right. I could be very tidy when I had to.
    Most of it was financial records. Bank statements and deposit receipts, involving much less money than I would have thought. Contracts with gallerists: Bogovic had gotten forty percent to begin with, then it came down to thirty, remarkably little, whoever had done the negotiating with him back then had done a good job. Records for private medical insurance—fairly expensive—plus life insurance, for Miriam, oddly enough, but not for that much money. I turned on the computer, it chattered itself into action and asked for the password. I tried
Miriam, Manuel, Adrienne, Papa, Mama, hello,
and
password,
but none of them worked. Crossly, I shut it down again.
    Now for the letters: carbon copies of endless correspondence with gallerists about prices, sales, transport of individual paintings, the rights for prints, postcards, illustrated books. Most of the letters were from Miriam, a few had been dictated and signed by her father, only the oldest of them were in his own handwriting: negotiations, proposals, demands, even requests from before he was famous. Back then his handwriting was a scrawl, the lines sloped off to the right, the dots on his
i
’s were all over the place. Carbon copies of various responses to journalists:
My father is not and never was a representational painter, because he thinks the concept is meaningless, either every painting is representational or none is, and that’s all there is to say on the subject.
A few letters from Clure and other friends: arrangements to meet, short replies, birthday greetings, and, in a careful pile, Professor Mehring’s Christmas cards. Invitations to lecture at universities; as far as I knew, he never gave lectures, obviously he’d turned them all down. And the photocopy of a curious card to Claes Oldenburg: Kaminski was thanking him for his help, but regretted he had to admit that he thought Oldenburg’s art—
Forgive my candor, but in our business friendly lies are the only sin
—was worthless nonsense. Underneath everything else, on the bottom of the last drawer, I found a thick leather portfolio, closed with a little lock. I tried without success to unlock it with the letter opener, then set it aside for later.
    I looked at the time: I had to be quick. No letters to Dominik Silva, to Adrienne, to Therese? I heard an engine and took an uneasy look out of the window. A car had stopped downstairs. Clure got out, looked around, took a couple of steps toward Kaminski’s house, then turned aside, I let my breath out, and he opened his own garden gate. Next door I could hear Kaminski’s dry cough.
    I got to the cupboards. I leafed through fat document files, copies of insurance stuff, copies of land registers, he had bought a piece of land in the south of France ten years ago and sold it again at a loss. Copies of trial documents from a court case against a gallerist, who had sold paintings from his early Symbolist period. Also old sketchbooks with detailed drawings of the lines of reflected light between various mirrors: I calculated what they must be worth and struggled for a few seconds against the impulse to pocket one of them. I was on the last cupboard already: old bills, copies of the last eight years’ tax returns; I would have loved to go through them, but there wasn’t time. Hoping for secret compartments or false bottoms, I tapped the rear walls. I lay down on the floor and peered under the cupboards. Then I got up on the chair and took a look on top of them.
    I opened the window, sat on the windowsill, and lit up a cigarette. The wind carried away the ash, and I carefully blew the smoke into the