Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  It was Felix, Margot added, who proposed an equitable division of whatever riches might materialize once the manuscript was declared authentic—a process that would, to a greater or lesser extent, inevitably involve Emil Reinsdorf as the world’s reigning Beethoven guru. Under Felix’s plan, the Tell manuscript and ownership rights to it would be donated by the Erpfs, as a gesture of national pride, to the Swiss Ministry of Culture, which would license all performance, recording, and publishing uses of the work. The income from these approved uses would flow into a Tell Fund, to be divided equally for twenty-five years between the Erpf family (and through them, in secret, Emil and Felix) and the Cultural Ministry, which would assign its half to the Philharmonia Helvetica National under the baton of its musical director—and Emil’s boyhood pal—Richard Grieder, who would have the honor of giving the premiere public performance of the symphony. And in a side agreement, Grieder was to reinstate Ansel Erpf as a member in good standing of the orchestra, premised on his “appropriate decorum,” and promote Felix to concertmaster within two years.

  “Felix made it all sound quite irresistible,” Margot summed up. There was nothing for her family to lose, no risk of exposure for partaking in any funny business—after all, their coming into possession of the manuscript would have been strictly fortuitous—and there was much to gain by facilitating the discovery of an instant national treasure: enhanced respect for the family’s name, business, and philanthropic standing, a good deal of money, and the rehabilitation of Ansel’s professional career. What could go wrong?

  “But suppose Emil were cracked in the head,” Mitch pressed her, “and the manuscript were dismissed by other experts as counterfeit—did you discuss that possibility with Felix?”

  “It came up, certainly. But Felix said that was highly unlikely since Emil was indisputably first among the world’s Beethoven scholars. And even if worse came to worst, the Erpfs could hardly be accused of trying to perpetrate a fraud—all we’d have done was perform a patriotic act in good faith, leaving the legitimacy of the manuscript for others to decide.”

  Margot placed the manuscript and its “related documents” in the cedar box inside the attic trunk while paying an afternoon call on bedridden Otto Hassler about a year before he died. “He rarely left his room and was hard of hearing at that point, so there was small risk of his detecting my little side trip upstairs,” she recalled. None of the conspirators ever supposed that Jacob Hassler might suddenly appear on the scene for his grandfather’s funeral and, with the unwitting assistance of Margot’s brother, upset the whole carefully arranged applecart.

  Margot tried to salvage the situation by appealing to the Cultural Ministry to intervene on her family’s—and the nation’s—behalf and proposing to donate the Tell manuscript, if it could be recovered from Jake in America, to the people of Switzerland. “I feared it would prove a hopeless quest since you Americans had the advantages of distance and possession,” she admitted, “but I had no choice other than to pursue it. In the end, we had to submit to reality and our government’s meekness—for which Ansel damned me.”

  The letter to her from London over Ansel’s signature she took to be his perverse form of revenge for her abandonment of the Tell fight and Jake’s effort to cash in on his brazen theft. “I was sure the letter was from Ansel—why should I have thought otherwise?” she asked. “The writing sounded like his—it looked like his signature—and the half-baked idea the letter proposed, feigning that he himself had composed the symphony, in the hope of forcing your firm to abandon its planned auction, was just the sort of game his lopsided brain was likely to invent.” And there was Felix, of course, at her elbow, coaxing Margot to have Ansel hospitalized for sustained treatment so he could no longer bedevil his family and embarrass himself. “I decided to show you the letter before things got out of hand—in case Ansel chose to act rashly as he could do when he was disturbed.”

  “Didn’t Ansel’s vehement denial that he wrote the letter give you second thoughts?”

  Margot shrugged. “Not at first, of course—it did rather the opposite. Felix was the only other person who knew him well enough—his mannerisms and mental quirks and the whole situation—to have written that letter, but I never supposed he could stoop to such a thing. I knew he was furious at Ansel, though, for having bollixed up the whole Tell plan by finding the manuscript and telling Jacob Hassler what it was, so I asked Felix about the letter directly, and he laughed in my face. He said I was at it again, in deep denial of my brother’s lunacy and trying to blame it on the rest of the world, just as Ansel did. The meanness of his answer made me begin to realize that I had miscalculated the whole situation. When my brother took his life, still denying he’d written the letter, I finally believed him—but too late. It was the end of my relationship with Felix—I saw that he cared little for me or my feelings—and surely he’d had no pity at all for my brother, otherwise he never would have forged such a letter.”

  She shook her head in dismay. “And now this news from you—that Felix is nothing but a cheap swindler, trying to squeeze money from your firm by threatening to publicly slander my brother and his own uncle after they’re both gone. I have nothing left for him but contempt. I should have come to you long before this, but I was too fearful—after all, I had been Felix’s accomplice in planting the manuscript in old Otto’s attic after convincing myself that no one could be hurt as a result.”

  None of her account, Mitch realized with mingled frustration and relief, addressed the overriding issue he still faced: Did Beethoven compose the Tell Symphony? Or was the manuscript that passed into and out of Emil Reinsdorf’s hands a superb hoax that he’d expertly doctored back to health, able to sustain intense academic and forensic scrutiny?

  “Why exactly are you telling me all this?” Mitch asked her. “My firm will have to disclose the whole convoluted story, which may very well doom the chances of the symphony ever being recognized as Beethoven’s—let alone ever being auctioned for a fortune—and it’s almost certain to complicate your own life. You could be charged as an accessory to an attempted fraud, even if no money actually changed hands.”

  “But I didn’t tell you the symphony was an invention—by Felix’s uncle or anyone else. I believe—I’ve always believed—the account of how Emil got hold of the manuscript. And I considered his cleaning up the manuscript, as far as he got with it before turning it over to Felix to arrange for its “discovery,’ to be a devoted exercise of homage.”

  Margot looked straight at Mitch.

  “I’ve confessed to you because I’ve had enough,” she said decisively. “I’m prepared to tell my family everything about Felix and me—and if it doesn’t suit them and I have to lose whatever position and respectability are left to me, so be it. I’ll be better off without a sham marriage, and the realty business has lost most of its charms for me.”

  “Will you testify against Felix if it comes to that—saying what you’ve just told us?”

  “Gladly.”

  On their drive to the airport, Mitch replayed for Clara his emotionally raw interview with Margot. “Finally,” she said, trying to sound positive, “we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty.”

  “Are we?” asked Mitch, growing more dejected by the minute.

  “Okay, I was wrong about the Reinsdorfs being pillars of integrity,” Clara admitted. “But everything Margot Lenz just told you sounds plausible.”

  “And why is that?” he asked.

  “Because, well, the whole story is so unflattering to her. Why would she paint herself into a corner like that—revealing so many inner feelings—and who could make all that up?”

  Mitch shook his head with exasperation over this whole viscous porridge and how it was muddying Clara’s ordinarily lucid brain. “We need to think straight here, hon.”

  “I’m trying to, but it keeps twisting and turning each time we get closer to—”

 
“First of all, Margot apparently knows only what Felix told her about the Tell manuscript—and why should we believe he was leveling with her?” he asked. “Second of all, if he was being straight with her and she was telling us the truth, then the entire historical background for our authenticated Beethoven symphony goes up in smoke—Emil invented the whole context to make the shoe fit.”

  Eyeing the elaborate graffiti fouling the walls along the expressway to the airport, he felt the Tell was equally corrupted. “Frankly, we’re actually losing ground here, buttercup.”

  .

  “i believe the applicable technical term for our predicament,” Harry said, opening the C&W war council the next morning, “is ‘up shit’s creek.’”

  “The problem is,” Gordy added, “we have five smoking guns—at last count.”

  With just a week left before the auction was scheduled and the office phones going off nonstop, the precious object attracting the world’s attention now appeared to be of dubious origin and fictitious subsequent history. Discovered in a house where it was reportedly created, the symphony could actually have gestated anywhere, it now seemed, and been conceived by black magic—and its foremost (and now deceased) certifier at last report had a vested interest (or several) in its prospective commercial exploitation.

  “The best we can hope for,” Mitch summarized, “is that Emil Reinsdorf sincerely believed that the Tell was composed by Beethoven—and that, by sanitizing its form and tethering it to a plausible time and place, he thought he was accomplishing what no one else had the knowledge and daring to try.”

  “So—is that good enough for you to greenlight the manuscript for auction?” Gordy asked.

  “What do you think?” Mitch asked back.

  Harry, near the end of his rope, had turned testier than usual.

  “Mitchell, tell me honestly—will we ever get to the bottom of this steaming heap of excrement?”

  “I’m not sure. I think we’re getting close, though.”

  “Marvelous,” Harry chided, “and meanwhile we’re getting our chain yanked six ways from Sunday by these characters.”

  “Pardon, chaps,” Sedge Wakeham rumbled over the speakerphone, “we’ve no choice but to hold off the crowd of bidders while it’s all still topsy-turvy. Give Mitchell the time he needs.”

  Reluctantly Harry bowed to his partner’s elliptical wisdom. More or less. “All right, we’ll put everything on standby for two weeks.” He turned to Mitch. “Spend whatever it takes—do whatever you need to.”

  As it happened, he needed to go no farther than his office, where Clara was awaiting him. She was holding the edelweiss painting, out of its frame, that Hilde Reinsdorf had sent her as a gift. “Remember this? I was about to take it to the framing gallery to dress it up a bit.”

  “Sure. But not now, hon—I’ve got a million things I need to—”

  She put an index finger to his lips. “Turn it over and tell me what you see.”

  “Da Vinci’s last will and testament?”

  “Even better. Do it.”

  He turned the painting over. The sheet of heavy paper looked blank. “So?”

  “Look again—try the lower right corner.”

  There, very faintly, running from the center of the bottom edge to the right side edge at a forty-five-degree angle, were two sets of five parallel lines, the ones closer to the corner of necessarily diminishing length, with dim dots and marks on and between them. Mitch held the sheet still nearer to his eyes. “What are they? If they had clefs, I’d say they were bars of music that had been erased.”

  “Not erased—just very lightly pressed on—as if this sheet somehow got folded under or over another freshly inked one and the offset rubbed against it, unnoticed. And then it got gathered up and accidentally bound into an old music sketchbook—maybe two centuries ago or so—”

  Mitch examined the paper a third time. “Christ, it’s about the right page size—the same top decaled edge—similar cream color.” He planted a kiss of commendation on Clara’s bowed lips and hurried off to the basement to retrieve the object of their collective concern from the company vault. In minutes, he and Clara determined, to the extent the naked eye was able to, that the sheet with Hilde Reinsdorf’s floral painting looked identical to the blank pages—in size, tint, and texture—at the back of the second sketchbook found in Otto Hassler’s attic trunk containing the partially orchestrated autograph score of the William Tell Symphony.

  “Emil could have recruited her for his Tell project—who could he trust more?” Clara speculated. “I mean, she’s a highly accomplished artist—remember the incredible millefleur painting of hers covering their vestibule walls, all the minute touches in the petals and leaves, just like in this edelweiss study. And someone who’s mastered that degree of draftsmanship might well be capable of either copying music that Beethoven actually wrote but needed to be cleaned up for legibility—under super-expert supervision—like Emil’s—or…or…”

  “Or of forging someone else’s work—maybe even Emil’s,” Mitch finished the thought for her, “to make it look as if Beethoven had written it—”

  “And when Hilde took time off from the Tell project to do a little fun work of her own now and then—like this edelweiss watercolor she did for me—she may have run short of art supplies,” Clara hypothesized, “and very, very carefully razored this blank sheet out of the second ersatz Beethoven sketchbook—unless it was the real thing, but she supposed that it would never be missed—”

  They burst into Harry’s office with their fresh evidence in hand. “I think we’re onto something solid,” Mitch said, trying—but failing—to suppress a hint of triumph.

  “Well, that was fast work,” Harry said.

  “Fortunately, I’m married to a genius.”

  “Unfortunately,” she said, her smile fleeting, “the news doesn’t really solve the problem.”

  Harry and Gordy heard them out, looked at each other, and then in unison pointed the Emerys to the door. “Get back over to Berlin and don’t come back without the widow lady’s sworn statement about what her husband’s real role was in all this schiess. There either is or isn’t a Beethoven’s Tenth—enough voodoo already.”

  It took another two days to generate a report from Veritas’s subsidiary forensics lab in Boston, confirming the paper matchup between Hilde’s edelweiss painting and a sample swatch from the second Tell sketchbook in the C&W vault. Meanwhile, Mitch drafted a memorandum recounting his long conversation with Margot Lenz at her place and had a copy made of Hilde’s taped phone conversation with Jake Hassler, reminding him of his financial obligation to her once the Tell auction was held. The items composed what Mitch called his in-your-face kit to lay before the widow Reinsdorf as soon as they could book a flight to Germany.

  On their arrival at Tempelhof on a Lufthansa red-eye out of JFK, however, they were greeted at the passport control window by a sleepy inspector who, on examining their documents, was sufficiently alert to buzz for the security police. “Please step over to the side,” the Emerys were instructed and within moments were surrounded by a four-man posse, two uniformed and armed German officers and two plainclothesmen who were identified as Swiss security agents.

  “You’re wanted for interrogation in Zurich, Mr. Emery,” one of the Swiss lawmen said calmly, “in connection with the death of Mrs. Lenz four days ago.”

  Mitch did not have to feign astonishment. “Margot? Yes, I saw her—what?—four days ago at her apartment, yes. But she was fine then.”

  “But maybe not when you left her,” the plainclothesman suggested. “You were apparently the last person to see her alive—the housemaid admitted you and then left for her day off. The coroner’s report on her time of death appears to implicate you—”

  “In what? What happened to her?”

  “She was bludgeoned to death—it may have been a robbery, or t
he scene was made to appear that way. You’ll have to come with us, I’m afraid.” The other Swiss agent, apparently in charge of their capture, turned to Clara. “You’re free to go about your business, Mrs. Emery.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Clara said, “except with my husband. This is an outrage.”

  Mitch looked into the blank face of bureaucratic rigidity.

  “I’ve done nothing—but I’ll be glad to tell you whatever I know about Mrs. Lenz,” he said as non-combatively as he could manage. “Why in the world would I be involved in her death? I have no—”

  “That’s what our police want to ask you. We’ll accompany you to the baggage carousel, or do you just have carry-ons?”

  Mitch declined to move in the direction he was told. “Why don’t you question me right here? I’ll tell you all I can—what’s the point of dragging me back to Switzerland?”

  “It’s how we do things in a murder investigation.”

  “You’re telling me I’m a serious suspect in…Margot Lenz’s murder?”

  “We’ve told you, as a courtesy, more than you’re technically entitled to know.”

  Mitch looked at Clara and shook his head. “I believe I’m permitted to speak with the American embassy,” he said to the Swiss agents, “before I’m abducted by a foreign nation.”

  “Your transfer to our authority has already been cleared with your embassy,” he was told and given a business card. “You’re free to use the wall phone over there to speak with a Mr. Henderson, who’s available at any time.”

  “If I resist these gentlemen,” Mitch said to Clara, “it will look as if I’ve got something to hide. You call Gordy right away and ask him to please get his butt on the next plane to Zurich. But you stay here to do what we came for—then join us down there. Nothing bad will happen.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, clinging to him for a moment. “You promise?”

  {17}