He shook his head. “Did I say that? That sounds more like the sort of thing you’d say, something you’d write in one of your little legal notebooks. I don’t need to have control over my paintings.” He chuckled. “It’s enough that they have control over the viewer.”

Gundlach joined in with a contemptuous laugh.

I didn’t know whether the object of Gundlach’s scorn was me or Schwind. I didn’t want to let him annoy me. “It’s one o’clock, and we’re meeting at five for an aperitif. Don’t you want to dispatch your pilot?”

Gundlach waved his hand dismissively. “Do you want to take care of dinner? He should put it on my tab at the hotel.”

So I went. We flew along the coast with the sea below us, little waves with white crests, which gleamed in the sun and were dull in the shade. To the right there was rock and sand, green and brown land, towns and roads. We could see Sydney from a long way away; the city sprawled up the coast. The flight was loud, despite the headphones with ear protectors, but after our talk over breakfast about our first and last cigarettes, we had nothing else to talk about. Anyway, I preferred to look down. Everything looked cozy from up here: the houses, the gardens, the cars, the parks, the beaches, the yachts with their colourful, billowing sails, the people. Then we flew over the sights of Sydney, Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, the Botanic Garden. People were lying in the grass on the big lawn next to the Conservatory – I could have been one of them.

We didn’t land on the roof of a skyscraper, as I had imagined, but at the outer edge of the airport. In the taxi, it came out that the pilot loved cooking, and he told me all about barramundi, crocodile and kangaroo, about Australian desserts, the country’s grape varieties, its wine-growing regions. He put together our evening menu enthusiastically. Caviar, barramundi with shiitake, kangaroo with macadamia nuts, passion fruit pavlova with Granny Smith sorbet as a palate cleanser between courses, with champagne, Sauvignon Blanc, and an assemblage of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz. Anything we couldn’t have prepared, because it would get cold, he’d finish in Irene’s kitchen – it all sounded fine to me. I left him negotiating with the chef, went and sat on the hotel terrace and watched the harbour.