by Andy Conway
Mitch was surprised again at the governess’s thin, pallid skin, like tracing paper, you might fancy you could see through it.
“Ah, die krokodilen!” Alma sang, kissing the girl all over her face. She turned and caught Mitch’s puzzled look. “The American Museum of Natural History is five blocks away. Gucki loves to see the crocodiles.”
The governess pulled the child away and bustled her out of the door. Mitch caught her suspicious glance as she closed the door behind her.
“There’s the doctor too,” Mitch said. “He was strange.”
“Dr Fraenkel is a dear friend,” said Alma. “You shall meet him again tonight. He has been a rock to me since we arrived.”
“And that leaves Gilhooly.”
“My bodyguard? Why would he?”
Mitch shrugged. “In these cases, it can often be an insider. Someone who is so close, you don’t see them.”
What was it he’d said? The last thing he’d spat before walking out with his tail between his legs. What was Alma doing in that part of town anyway? She had been adamant that she’d done nothing wrong and there could be no such letter in existence. Mitch had felt her sincerity.
Alma would have an affair, though, with... who was it? Mitch tried to remember the list of her husbands after Mahler, and the affairs she’d been rumoured to have had.
A name swam to the surface of his mind, something read from the sleeve notes of an old album.
Gropius.
Walter Gropius, the architect. Yes, that was the one. It would devastate Gustav and lead him to write the unfinished Tenth Symphony, expressing his anguish at the death of their marriage, expressing his love for her, scribbling crazed messages to her in the score.
Could Walter Gropius actually be the blackmailer? He would write a love letter to Alma and address it to her husband. That’s what the history books said, but what if they’d got it wrong? What if he’d blackmailed the couple? Was casually trying to torpedo a marriage the same as blackmail? Mitch wondered. The two things seemed quite different in character.
He searched Alma’s face for a sign of it, as she sipped tea. If she had had her affair with Gropius already, it didn’t show. Alma was such a great liar that she believed her own lie to the core of her heart. No one could be that bare faced, could they?
Perhaps Gropius was yet to come.
Still, he scribbled in a corner of the page the letters W.G?
“Gilhooly mentioned another clue,” he said. “A handbill?”
Alma fetched the flyer from the drum table, where Gilhooly had left it.
Mitch turned it over. A simple business card-sized flyer, no picture, just black print on white card.
Hotel MARSHALL, 127 and 129 West 53d Street. Telephone 1873 Columbus. The most Up-To Date Hotel in New York. Cuisine unsurpassed. Finely furnished Rooms with bath. Rates reasonable.
Written along the side in pale blue handwriting, perhaps a woman’s, was a name: Selig Silverstein.
“Does this mean anything to you?”
“We know of no Silversteins,” said Alma.
“And Gilhooly was certain that this was dropped by your blackmailer?”
“Yes. He seemed quite sure of that.”
“Well, perhaps this Selig Silverstein person is staying at Marshall’s Hotel. It will be easy enough to find out.”
“Alma shall not be going to that district again,” said Mahler. “I won’t allow it.”
“But I can go,” said Mitch.
Alma’s wide smile and the reflection of it in her husband’s tired face verified a simple fact.
Mitch had become a detective.
— 13 —
ONCE THE TEA AND BLACKMAIL discussion was over, Gustav informed the concierge that he would be needing another room, a small room for a guest, as close to the Mahlers’ suite as possible.
Within a half hour, Clarence the bell hop, came to say they had found a small room at the rear of the eleventh floor.
Alma came with them to see it. Mitch thought she would grab any excuse to get away from her brooding husband, who was now poring over the score of Die Walküre.
They walked in silence down the plush carpeted corridor for a hundred yards or more. Alma put her hand in the crook of Mitch’s elbow. He breathed the tantalising musk of her perfume and tried to ignore it.
Clarence stopped at a white door marked 964 and opened it.
“Oh,” said Alma.
Mitch suspected it was a servant’s room, or perhaps an emergency room for the concierge if he needed to sleep over. It was simply furnished, nothing of the elegance of the Mahlers’ suite, no Regency drum tables, grand pianos, cascading ferns from ancient vases, Persian rugs, chandeliers.
“But this is a servant’s room,” Alma said.
“It’s cosy and has a bathroom,” Mitch said, smiling. “And besides, I am a servant. I’m in service to the maestro.”
“Are you certain?”
“Absolutely. It’s perfect.”
“You must only sleep here,” Alma said. “At all other times you are to live in our suite. I insist.”
Clarence handed over the key and Mitch pocketed it with a sudden qualm of being trapped.
“Shall I send for your luggage, sir?” Clarence asked.
Mitch groped for an easy lie. “I’m afraid my luggage was lost in transit. As I took the train from Washington. There’s been a terrible mix up with the rail company. I’ll notify them of my whereabouts so they can bring my trunk here. If they ever find it.”
“What an awful situation,” Alma cried. “We must provide you with everything you need in the meantime. Perhaps Gustav will have a spare suit for you.”
They stepped out of the box room and Mitch locked the door.
Clarence left them with a tip of his hat, and Alma took Mitch back to the sumptuous Mahler suite, rushing straight to her husband to tell him Mitch’s situation.
Mahler looked up from the score with irritation. “I’m sure Mitchell does not want to wear my old suits.”
Alma dragged Mitch through to the next room, the room from where Mahler had first appeared: another lounge with a grand piano, music sheets scattered over a table. This must be Gustav’s study. They seemed to have a suite of at least five rooms. Mahler had come from this room, there was the lounge, and at least one, perhaps two, other rooms off that where the governess had been with the child, and where Alma had been recuperating.
Alma led Mitch through Gustav’s study to a bedroom. Two double beds, a space between them. Pristine white sheets and fat pillows. A mahogany dresser with a generous mirror. He glanced and caught himself: Mitch with Alma Mahler in 1908.
She rushed over to one of two doors in the corner of the room, and wrenched one open to reveal a closet. Suits hanging in a row. She flipped through them expertly and picked two out.
“My husband doesn’t really care about his clothes. He would wear rags if I didn’t dress him in the finest English suits. I’ll tell him you bought these and he won’t even know.”
Mitch glanced back at the room next door where Mahler was working. Surely he was listening?
“He doesn’t hear a thing,” said Alma. “I could scream murder in here and he wouldn’t lift his nose from his work.”
She put the suits to his chest, sizing him up, humming a happy tune. A woman desperate for company, who’d been locked in this mausoleum for months, while New York buzzed and crackled with life in the streets below.
She picked out an evening suit, made him try on a pair of Gustav’s shoes, which were a little tight but would do, and packed it all in a suitcase with shirts, cufflinks, ties and an overcoat.
Mitch smiled sadly. Eleanor had done this for him the first time: she had dressed him after he’d told the same easy lie about luggage going missing.
Gustav didn’t look up from his work as Alma showed Mitch to the door with a conspiratorial smile.
“Put on your dinner suit for tonight,” she said. “We leave at seven.”
He nodded and turned to go, but she grabbed his hand and pulled it to her face and kissed it.
“Thank you,” she said.
She shook her head at the floor as if wondering why she’d just done that and closed the door abruptly.
Mitch ambled down the long corridor to his room, wondering if he might wake up from this and find himself back home.
He didn’t want to anymore.
— 14 —
AT SEVEN, HE RAPPED on the Mahlers’ door. Alma cooed over how splendid he looked in the dinner suit.
“Gustav. Don’t you think he looks splendid?”
Mahler nodded, distracted, searching his pockets for something.
Mitch had found a scrap of paper in the pocket of the dinner suit. Unfolding it, he’d found not some secret note of Mahler’s, but music notes, hastily scribbled.
Mahler put on his top hat and they left the apartment, Alma smothering her daughter Gucki in kisses all over her face, the governess watching on kindly.
As they squeezed into the elevator, Mitch nudged against Mahler and slipped the scrap of paper into the composer’s coat pocket. As the elevator descended, he wondered which line of melody would find its way back into Mahler’s work.
They stepped into one of the horse-drawn coaches lined up outside the hotel and it was soon rattling down the gaslit boulevard. No, not gaslight. The ornate street lamps were electric, not gas. The modern world was rushing to them as fast as the motor car that overtook, puttering and belching noxious fumes from its exhaust.
Alma pulled on Gustav’s arm, pointing to it. He scowled and covered his mouth with a handkerchief.
Electric streetlights had already replaced the gaslamps, Mitch thought, and in a few short years, the only horses and carriages in New York would be running tourists around Central Park as a novelty. Every street would be jammed with cars. It was coming to wipe out the old life, but here they were, right on the cusp of it.
The carriage juddered through slush for five blocks and turned sharp left into Central Park down the 65th Street Transverse, which sunk under the park, walls high on either side and trees overhanging. They passed under three bridges, the horses’ hooves echoing in each tunnel, dull because of the snow. Mahler tapped his fingers on his lap to the rhythm.
They came up level with the park and arced round, turning into Fifth Avenue, gliding back up for a couple of blocks. On this side of the park it was so much more built up. The Upper East Side looked pretty much like it did in Mitch’s present, whereas the Upper West Side was little but countryside with a few hotels dotted here and there.
The driver turned right into 68th Street and pulled up outside number eight.
Mitch smirked to himself at the shortness of the trip. They could quite easily have walked across the park. But perhaps arriving by foot was unseemly.
They stepped out, Mitch holding Alma’s hand, as she eased herself down to the curb.
Mitch gazed up at the five-storey building with its elegant curved front. It was a mansion to some, but not to Otto Kahn. This was just his New York bolthole. He wondered exactly how one would broach the subject of a downtown hotel like Marshall’s. Would any of New York’s elite know a thing about it?
Someone connected to Mahler knew all about it, that much was certain. And someone knew who Selig Silverstein was.
“We are entering a nest of vipers,” said Alma, as her husband paid the driver.
“But you said you adored Otto Kahn.”
“Otto only offered Gustav the post at the Met because he wants to replace Conried as director. But the Stockholders’ Company don’t want a Jew running their opera. Do you know that even though Otto Kahn pours millions into the Met, he still can’t buy a box there because they don’t allow Jews?”
“But that’s crazy.”
“The stockholders wanted an Italian director. That’s why Gatti-Cassuzi appointed Toscanini. So now Gustav directs German operas and they do Italian, and there is a giant compromise.”
The impossibility of Mahler’s position here became clear. He was fighting over the wheel of a sinking ship.
Mahler checked his pocket watch. “We are five minutes early.”
They stepped up the brownstone steps and rang a doorbell. A butler in sombre black, straight out of an English country manor, showed them into a grand hallway the size of a museum. A team of servants took their hats and coats.
Otto Kahn, a short man in a dinner suit, white hair and moustache, beamed as he crossed a black-and-white acre of marble tiles.
He hadn’t smiled this afternoon, in the Mahlers’ suite, and seeing his smile now, Mitch realized he was Mr Monopoly. Of course, here was the man whose face had inspired the creators of the board game. America’s archetypal business millionaire. They would caricature him and put him on their board game.
He kissed Alma’s hand, greeting her like an empress, and shook Gustav’s hand and patted his arm.
“So gut to see you looking so vell,” he said, in his thick German accent. “Vot a terrible affair.”
Gustav waved it away. “Just an accident. A street ruffian, nothing more.”
Otto’s wife — a formidable woman who dwarfed her husband, much like Alma did Gustav — came rushing to Alma and took both her hands. “But here, in our dear city. We are so ashamed.”
Otto turned to Mitch and shook his hand with a surprisingly tight grip. “And here is the hero of the day! Our English gentleman! Do you know I am ze President of the English Speaking Union here. I verkt in London for eight years!” He patted his chest proudly. “I am in fact a naturalised British subject.”
“I didn’t know that,” Alma cooed.
Otto’s wife offered her hand. “Mr Mitchell, don’t let my husband talk about dear old England all night. He will bore you terribly.”
“Charmed to meet you, Madame Kahn,” Mitch said, hoping it was the right thing to say.
She laughed and so did Otto. “Oh, he is so English! What beautiful accent. So musical!”
Mitch smiled at the thought of his Brummie twang being thought of as exotic.
“You may call me Addie,” she said. “Just Addie.”
They turned and walked across the hall, Addie lapsing into conspiratorial German with Alma, holding her close.
“I apologize again for the dreadful events of today,” Otto said to Gustav. “Including that man, Gilhooly. He shall trouble you no more. It is often vise to have a rough man of the streets for protection, but they can lack a cultural refinement. I see that you, Mister Mitchell, are eminently qualified in that respect.”
Mitch turned his attention back to the men. “I’m sorry, I just noticed...” He pointed at a painting on the wall. “Is that a Rembrandt?”
“Oh, he has a good eye! Addie, our English gentleman appreciates your collection.”
They stopped and Addie came to his side. “Ah, such a beautiful piece of work.”
It was a Rembrandt. A bloody masterpiece, hanging in the hall.
“I must show you my little collection,” Addie said. “There are more in here.”
They moved through to a drawing room, where serving girls in sombre black waited with silver trays of champagne flutes.
More paintings. He spotted a Franz Hals, a Lucas Cranach, a Canaletto canalscape and, oh god, was that a Botticelli? The Khan’s drawing room was like a hall in the Tate Gallery.
The bell rang again and Otto went to greet other guests. Addie and Alma sat on a plush velvet sofa. Gustav peeled off and faced a corner of the room. Mitch checked Alma’s expression. She didn’t seem to mind. Gustav examined a Ming vase, gazing at it as if it was talking to him, singing to him.
Of course, Mitch thought, he was fascinated by Chinese art, and would compose The Song of the Earth symphony based on ancient Chinese poetry. Was this the moment the idea germinated?
The other guests arrived quickly, and within a few minutes, the drawing room was a lively party.
Dr Fraenkel, the strange physician who’d been in the Mahle
rs’ suite earlier that day, was conversing with an elegant woman whose dark eyes and hair were offset by a disarming smile. Fraenkel stared across the room with that intense gaze. Mitch looked at the parquet floor.
Alma whispered, “You see this Mary Seney Shelden and her deceiving smile. She is pouring money into the New York Philharmonic. Nothing would please her more than the Met failing.”
Mitch looked up and took her in. There really seemed to be no deceit about her at all. She radiated genuine warmth — the kind of person that took you by surprise at how good the world could be.
By contrast, a bitter looking man rolled in in a wheelchair, with a face that looked like it had never cracked a smile.
“This is Heinrich Conried. Gustav’s director,” Alma whispered. “He is here because Otto needs him to accept the terms of his sacking. He’s claiming $300,000 in settlement, but Otto wants to pay only $100,000 over five years. If he goes in the nicest possible way, they will announce his retirement and say how wonderful he is. That’s the deal.”
“But won’t Gustav lose his biggest ally at the Met?”
“Conried is no ally. He thinks only of making money for himself. Poor Gustav, he still hopes that his friend, Roller, will come from Vienna and they can work together. He can’t see that it will never happen.”
Mitch recited Conried’s name to cement it in his mind. Another suspect. One who sounded like he might resort to blackmail if there was easy money in it.
The guests ceased their conversations and turned to applaud the arrival of a thick-set man with a buxom woman on each arm.
Mitch wanted to ask if he were some sort of gangster, but instead said, “Who are these?”
Alma gave a champagne giggle. “You really do know nothing of the opera, Mitchell. It’s outrageous! These are the famous lead singers of Die Walküre. Alois Burgstaller, the tenor. The poor man is losing his voice and it is doubtful he can sing tomorrow.”
“And the ladies?”
“Olive Fremstad,” Alma snorted. “She’s pretty but ridiculously high-tempered. So full of candy-coated praise for the great maestro and how he hypnotizes his leading ladies. Pfft.”