“We? Who’s we?”
“Gerrit and I, along with Professor Mandelbaum.”
“All three of you? Whatever for? Has someone perished?”
Impatient with his sarcasm, she spoke bluntly. “Why did you break into Gerrit’s apartment and steal those manuscripts? I’m here to ask that you give them back to me.”
“Miss Tavener, how dare you disrupt my class in order to make such a ludicrous claim?” Wittmann rasped, his voice as razory as quills. “First, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And second, you don’t know me in the least. You come waltzing in here, accusing me of crimes that, even if they occurred, are probably a result of your own carelessness—”
“No, I—”
“—and rather than sharing the originals with me in a collegial manner, you tell me of their existence—their in plural, I hear—only when you’ve managed to lose them? Egregious is one word that comes to mind. Egregious, negligent, heedless in the extreme.”
“Aren’t those words equally applicable to a thief?”
“Young lady, let us be careful. I am not without resources. You’d best not be making unfounded accusations after seriously mishandling an historical document of potentially great significance.”
Meta crossed her arms, upset yet holding her ground. “Professor Wittmann, twice you told me it was a fraud. Suddenly it’s of ‘great significance’? You’re really going to stand there and say you had nothing to do with this theft?”
“I wish I did have those manuscripts. At least they’d be in good hands and properly cared for. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a lecture to finish.”
Seeing that some students had begun to filter back into the hall, Meta decided she had gotten all that she was going to get from him. She thanked Wittmann for his time, he bowed slightly, and she left. Most troubling, Meta thought as she rejoined Gerrit, was a nagging feeling that the professor was telling her the truth. Nor did it make her happy to know that some of his more pointed criticisms were not without merit.
Dejected, silent, the two walked back to Jánská to finish putting Gerrit’s apartment back in order. As she went into the kitchen for water, Gerrit noticed that he had failed to completely shut the lid of his misbegotten secretary the night before. Reflexively, he lifted out the leather case to search it again, then stopped, astounded. Had they made a mistake when Mandelbaum was here, or when Gerrit had put it away after the second break-in? Impossible, unthinkable. Each of them in turn had searched the several compartments of the attaché. The score had vanished. Now it had reappeared.
“Meta?” he called, barely containing his confused excitement.
“What?” she said from the kitchen.
“You’d better have a look at this.”
The original manuscript, every page of it, was in just the same condition as when Meta had first placed it inside the case.
“What the hell’s going on?” Clutching the sheaf, she sat on the wooden chair by the secretary, feeling faint.
“No idea whatsoever.”
Dizzy with relief, she carefully paged through both movements again, and again a third time. “You think Wittmann or some underling of his stole it, scanned and replaced it?”
“Anything’s possible,” Gerrit said, flushed with bafflement and doubt.
“All he had to do was ask me,” Meta continued, thinking out loud, wondering if what she was about to say was fully true. “I’d have given him whatever he needed.”
“But I thought Mandelbaum said it was imperative that your role in this—”
“Mandelbaum and especially Wittmann are way more worried about scholarly kudos than I am,” she said, suddenly back on solid ground. “I’m not in this to build my résumé. Maybe I’m as naive as Wittmann and Kohout think. But this”—she held the pages up in both hands—“isn’t mine any more than it’s theirs or anybody else’s. The only exception is Otylie and her heirs, if she has any.”
“Not everybody’s as idealistic as you, Meta.”
“I’m not so idealistic. I’m not pure.” She frowned, putting the sheaf into the briefcase, setting it on Gerrit’s table. “It’s not that I didn’t daydream a little, early on, about getting my name in the paper,” she admitted, continuing in a self-mocking voice, “Front-page headline in the Times, ‘Young Musicologist Makes Historic Find, Awarded Nation’s Highest Honor.’”
They both chuckled.
“But the more I learned about Jakub and all that he and his poor wife and friends went through to preserve this thing, the more foolish that felt.” She reached into her pocket to retrieve her phone, saying she needed to let Paul know the manuscript had resurfaced. While the hotel number rang, she told Gerrit, “This thing was put into my hands for a reason, and the reason is simple. To make it whole again. No more amateurism, no more mistakes.”
Gerrit watched her as she called the hotel, occasionally glancing at the dispatch case and shaking her head with a frown. True, his affection for her colored his perceptions. But if he’d been swept away by her before, the commitment he felt toward her now, witnessing her fierce resolve, was even deeper.
Mandelbaum didn’t pick up. As Meta left a message with the desk, Gerrit found himself wondering why anybody would want to burglarize an apartment in an attempt to steal this manuscript, which brought him back to Margery’s query regarding attribution. There was no way he could ask Meta the question in absolute innocence, but it nonetheless needed asking. When she’d hung up, he continued their talk where it had left off.
“Making it whole is one thing. But I’m curious about who you think wrote it. If someone went to the length of stealing and replacing it, this music must be by an important composer.”
Meta rose and stood looking at the photographs pinned to the wall. They reflected back the muted light of the overcast day. While it was true she hadn’t known Gerrit very long—though it seemed like a long time—how was it possible she hadn’t shared her speculations on this subject? The easy answer was that she hadn’t revealed them to a soul. Not even Mandelbaum knew her deepest conjecture. She refused to share because, if she was wrong, it would be profoundly humiliating, another nasty bit of hubris.
“I have my suspicions, strong ones, about who composed it,” straightening a photo whose pin had come loose. “I’ll tell you what. I even have a feeling when, where, and possibly why.”
“Okay. So who, when, where, why?”
She turned to him, shaking her head. “Suspicions aren’t scholarship. Feelings aren’t facts. I don’t mean to be coy. But there’s still work to be done before anyone worth her salt would throw names around for the record. Now that we’ve got these movements back from whoever took them, I think it’s more important than ever to track down Otylie Bartošová as quickly as possible and pray she still has the opening part. It will tell me the rest of what I need to know. That’s the hope, anyway.”
Gerrit had been making mental notes about the day’s events, that old and ingrained habit, but put them aside for the moment. Yes, this would make a good story, even a great story, he thought. Right now, though, what mattered was to help Meta get where she needed to go. “I have to ask the obvious. How do we locate Otylie Bartošová?”
“I’m not sure. London’s the only other place where I know she lived and worked. If I can find somebody to buy my piano I’ll have enough for the trip there and to get back home. Maybe I don’t stand a chance of tracking down this woman, who’d be somewhere in her late eighties, early nineties now, but—” Here Meta fell silent and simply looked at Gerrit.
“Yes?”
“—will you come with me?”
“Do I have a choice?” he said, a smile breaking out on his face.
“I hope not.”
That afternoon, an unusually subdued Andrea helped them set the apartment to rights, and after a spur-of-the-moment celebratory supper at the Kettles’—“Fantastický!” Sylvie shrieked when Meta called and explained what had happened—they fell asleep at home with the manuscri
pt in its case under the bed, directly below their heads.
Gerrit woke first, out of a dream in which he and Andrea were playing a game of hide-and-seek in a park. She was swift as a fawn, peeking out from behind a huge oak, then dashing, in a lightning-quick blur, to conceal herself deep in a thicket of freestanding ivy. Without going through any conscious process of reflection, he began to piece together what might have happened over the past few days. That puzzling, impish look on the girl’s face as she left the kitchen table, having batted her grape back and forth after grilling him about love, the unwonted shyness in her behavior yesterday—was it possible she opened the secretary with its token lock and took the score herself to delay his inevitable departure?
Rather than going down, he phoned to ask Andrea’s mother if she wouldn’t mind sending the girl upstairs, if she was free and had a minute. Best not to confront her with her mother present, he thought. When Andrea knocked on his door and sheepishly entered the room, he knew he’d guessed right. It didn’t take much cajoling for her to confess to Gerrit and Meta, who was up by then.
“I not want you to go. Very stupid, very,” she said, staring at the floor. “I very sorry.”
Gerrit put his hand on her narrow shoulder. He thought to ask her how she knew the manuscript would be in his secretary, but realized she’d seen him store important things there in the past and knew how easy it was to jimmy the lock. Annoyed as he was, it was impossible not to say, “It’s okay, Andrea. You put it back, didn’t you? You told us the truth. Both were the right things to do.”
The girl hesitated before making a further confession, eyes still fixed on her feet.
“I put back it because that man came here, your friend. I never saw him before. He not very nice.”
“What man? Where was he?”
“In your room, here,” looking up.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, glancing at Meta.
Seeing alarm flash across his face, Andrea switched to Czech to be sure she was making herself clear.
A man who said you’d told him to come get a music manuscript. Said you were waiting for him on Karmelitská. He told me you were friends and that you mentioned me many times. But he got my name wrong, called me Petra. I got scared and ran away.
Gerrit was astonished at such brazenness. What did he look like?
She gave Gerrit an unmistakable description of Petr Wittmann.
“Did you understand any of that?” he asked Meta.
“Only a little,” she answered. “What’s going on?”
As Gerrit recounted Andrea’s story, he watched Meta’s face settle into angry disbelief. “He lied to me. Right to my face in his classroom. We have to report this to the police.”
“The police, I’m sorry to say, will probably be inclined to believe a respected university professor over a young girl. If we point fingers at Wittmann, I’m afraid we’ll end up being the suspect ones.”
“How so?”
“Because, bottom line is, we have no incontestable proof he was here. What’s more, he didn’t actually steal anything.” He and Meta looked helplessly at each other. Then, turning to Andrea, he asked if he could accompany her downstairs and say hello to her mother.
“You going to tell her?”
“I’m going to tell her what a fine young lady you are.”
“But about me taking the music?”
“I don’t see any music missing.”
She shook her head, then walked straight over to Meta to hug her and offer another apology. It wasn’t lost on Meta that the girl, with her childish act, had inadvertently saved the manuscript from really being stolen. Following Gerrit’s lead, she smiled and said, in rudimentary Czech, Apology for what?
After Andrea left with Gerrit, Meta started coffee brewing, then sat at his desk. The question about attribution hadn’t been posed in a vacuum or asked out of turn. Petr Wittmann’s early slight—or perhaps sleight—his growing fixation and competitiveness, and now his unveiled threats made it impossible for Meta to ignore what she’d harbored as a theory from the first time she’d played this piece of unknown music. She had gotten so fully involved in her search for the physical manuscripts that this more purely scholarly issue had been set, at least a little, to one side.
Sure, she’d had those first conversations with Mandelbaum during which they dropped the names of minor and major composers with the alacrity of children tossing knives in a game of mumblety-peg. Well, no, she thought. They hadn’t been that cavalier. But what lay behind Wittmann’s inimical scheming was a possibility of such magnitude that she had to take it at least as seriously as Wittmann and Kohout clearly did. She owed it not only to Irena and Otylie but to the one who composed this work.
Holding pages of the paper up to the sunlight to view the watermarks once more, Meta murmured, “What’s your story, troublemaker? You want to tell me who you are?” Backlit, a fleur-de-lis in a crowned shield was plainly visible. On another quadrant, letters and a number that had initially stumped her: MUI8 H. Turning the page in her hands and candling it in the morning light she saw what it really was: H BLUM. Paper from Germany or Austria? Maybe Basel, she speculated. Certainly not Holland or Italy. This would help with dating the manuscript, and further assist in proving or disproving the theory that was more and more taking hold in her head.
Hearing Gerrit reenter the apartment, she spoke while still peering at the illumined leaf. “There’s coffee in the kitchen. Did it go okay?”
“Andrea’s secret is safe,” he said, pouring himself a cup. “Wittmann’s another story.”
“Let’s talk about him later.”
Her tone of voice had changed, deepened. He watched her studying the manuscript, serious and curiously serene, and waited for her to continue.
“Gerrit,” she said, looking at him now, “since apologies seem to be in the air, I owe you one. I dodged your question last night but I realize you deserve to know why people other than Andrea may be breaking into your apartment.”
“Lunacy is why,” he said, pulling up a chair beside her.
“True enough, but”—Meta gestured toward the paper. “See this watermark? Enough of the letters look the same forward or backward—the ‘H,’ the ‘U,’ and ‘M’—and even the ‘B’ and ‘L’ aren’t that far from mirror images, they just seemed stylized. Hard to believe, but I’ve been misreading the watermark until just now.”
Gerrit found a clear spot on the desk, far away from the sonata manuscript, where he set down his coffee. “Can I see? My hands aren’t washed, so if you can just hold it up to the light for me—”
Meta, who handled the timeworn manuscript with a curator’s care, showed Gerrit what she was referring to. “There in the middle? It’s the name of the paper mill where these sheets were manufactured. Paper wasn’t as cheap then as it is now. And different composers and copyists tended to buy from different paper makers and suppliers.”
“Makes sense. So how do you determine exactly when this ‘H Blum’ fleur-de-lis mill was making paper?”
“That shouldn’t be overly difficult,” Meta assured him, setting the manuscript down. “Before I made up my mind to come to Prague, I spent weeks poring over all the standard texts about the quarter century or so when the piano sonata form crystallized. A lot of the books I already owned and had read. Stuff like William Newman’s The Sonata in the Classic Era and Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style on Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Key biographies too. I read chapters in Jahn, Braunbehrens, Geiringer, zeroing in on the mid-1780s to the early 1790s. Wegeler and Ries, Schindler, Thayer, Lockwood, Solomon. You know any of these?”
Gerrit shook his head, bowled over by this avalanche of authors. “No. I mean, I’ve heard of Rosen, but I can’t say I’ve read any of them.”
“I’ll be the first to admit that none of this was as methodical as it sounds. It was all hunches based on hopes, hopes based on hunches. To tell you the truth, I barely knew what I was doing, hadn’t really gott
en over the shock of this thing that came nose-diving into my life. Anyway, listening to as many piano sonata recordings as I could manage, playing unrecorded scores from the period, I found myself doing exactly what a good musicologist, or any scientist for that matter, isn’t supposed to do.”
“And what’s that?” Gerrit asked, filling the silence that followed her last words.
“Reaching toward a conclusion before having the evidence in place. Cardinal sin.”
“That may be, but it’s certainly understandable.”
Meta glanced with a frown at Gerrit. “It’s not how you’d ever go about investigating a piece of journalism, is it?”
“Well,” he said, wincing invisibly, having no ready answer.
Gerrit knew the time was coming when he would either need to confess that he’d kept working on her story behind her back and risk the consequences, ask her forgiveness and permission to continue, or shelve his notebook once and for all. The closer Meta got to her quarry, the closer he got to his. And if she discovered treasure, a major composer, at the end of her search, he’d have the journalist’s version of a royal flush. Music, war, heroism, politics, intrigue—the narrative moved on so many levels. Gerrit hadn’t spoken about his dilemma to a soul since that night with Jiří, and he’d been more careful to keep his notebook out of sight after Meta had discovered it. Now that they spent their nights together, and most days, he could hardly take clandestine notes, but at this moment the desire was palpable. “So what’s this conclusion you so sinfully arrived at?”
She said the name quite deliberately. “Beethoven.”
After staring at Meta for slow silent moments, Gerrit said, “What?”
“I’m convinced this is a lost early Beethoven piano sonata.”
“Talk about above-the-fold news.”
“You understand I might be totally wrong. But what’s more amazing,” she added, “is there seems to be a decent chance my bastard conclusion has merit.”
“Go on.”
The Prague Sonata Page 34