For three weeks I heard nothing from him. For three weeks he painted a new left breast. When he came to apply the finishing touches, he found the picture overturned – it had fallen over in the night, struck the small iron table he had set his paint and brushes on, and had been torn.

Gundlach called me. He was beside himself. “First the acid, now this – he may be a great artist, but he’s horrendously careless. I can’t force him to restore the picture yet again. But I have some influence, and I will make sure that he doesn’t get another commission until he restores the picture.”

The threat was unnecessary. Schwind, who came into the agency that same day, was prepared to fix the picture, even if it would cost him another few weeks. But he was desperate. “What if he does it again?”

“You mean…”

“Oh, I know that it was him. You think a painter can’t lean a picture against a wall so that it stays? No, he knocked it over, and he made that tear with a knife. The table’s edge is too dull to make such a sharp cut in the canvas.” He laughed bitterly. “You know where the tear is? Here.” This time he ran his hand not over the woman, but over his own belly and crotch.

“Why would he do that?”

“Out of hate. He hates the picture, because it’s of his wife, and he hates his wife because she left him. And he hates me.”

“Why should he…”

“He hates you because I left him for you.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t hate the picture. He doesn’t care about it in the slightest. He wants to get at you and he gets at you when he damages the painting.”

“Instead of having it out with me, he destroys the picture? What kind of man is that?” Schwind couldn’t contain his outrage and contempt, and leapt to his feet. Then he sat back down, and let his shoulders droop.

I tried to make sense of what I had heard. She had modelled for the painter and run off with him? Traded in the old man for the young one? Squeezed as much out of the old man in the divorce as she could squeeze?

But she wasn’t my client, he was. “Forget about him and the picture. Legally he can’t touch you, and I wouldn’t take his threat to use his influence seriously. Write the picture off, however much it hurts. Or paint it again. I hope, to an artist, that’s not an offensive suggestion.”