Beethoven's Tenth Page 35

  “Call Hilde and ask,” Clara suggested.

  Emil’s wife, her low voice edged with weariness, told Mitch to send on the London letter, which her husband would no doubt welcome as a momentary distraction from his struggle. With due apologies, Mitch air-expressed the troubling document to the ailing musicologist.

  The answer came a few days later while Mitch was at his office desk. Sounding hoarse and drained but still game for disputation, Emil came on the line and instantly denied he was at death’s door. “My Hilde is a calamitist,” he said, “poor darling. But I’ve been better. As to your letter writer, he’s a good storyteller, Mitchell, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over this Ansel fellow. It’s all very well for him to explain his elaborate methodology so graphically, but nobody just sits down and composes music like Beethoven.”

  The nuance of the letter had escaped Emil. “It doesn’t say the letter writer actually wrote the symphony—he’s just threatening to claim he did so—out of spite because Jake Hassler made off with it, so he wants to devalue the Tell and hurt us all financially—unless we hand over the manuscript to the Swiss and let him bathe in glory, at least, for having discovered it.”

  “I’m afraid that’s too muddy for me to sort out,” said the musicologist, sounding tired now. “I suspect this Ansel individual—if he really wrote the letter—belongs in an asylum.”

  Ansel, however, was still very much at large. The extent of the Erpfs’ unhappiness over his seemingly incorrigible bizarre behavior was evident from the first of three items in Johnny Winks’s stimulating phone report to Mitch later in the week. The assistant in Dr. Kohler’s office whose services Johnny had purchased was seeking an additional payoff for a new piece of intelligence: papers approving Ansel’s involuntary commitment for institutionalized psychiatric care “for an extended course of treatment” had just been signed by the London shrink and were being mailed off to Margot as her brother’s conservator, apparently for processing by the Swiss courts. The papers cited the convoluted “confession” letter about the Tell as “the latest episode in an unending pattern of erratic behavior.”

  “Not to be unkind,” Gordy remarked, “but if Ansel gets put away, assuming they can find a Swiss practitioner to consent as well, we’re probably off the hook, too, when it comes to any ethical obligation to make a public disclosure of the London letter since its apparent writer is being put away at least temporarily as a certified loony.”

  Mitch was not elated, however, by the news. “At risk of being tiresome, let me point out that his family’s moving ahead with commitment proceedings fully corroborates Ansel’s claim that his sister wants to get rid of him. Paranoiacs usually have phantom tormentors—maybe poor, drug-dosed Ansel’s got a real one—or several.”

  Mitch’s suspicions over Ansel’s pending exile to the not-so-funny farm at Zug Clinic were compounded by a further item of intelligence from Winks. His operatives had kept mucking around in the Margot-Felix affair, which the principals had trivialized as, at most, a bygone fling, contradicting Ansel’s claim that it had never ended. What added intrigue to the story was the identity of Felix’s lover between his breakup with philharmonic conductor Grieder’s married niece, the first flutist with the orchestra, and the onset of his affair with Margot.

  According to reports gathered by Winks’s crew, Ansel’s ex-wife, Lisa, had had enough of his raging infantilism in the form of self-absorption, temper tantrums, and a chronic need for instant gratification. So she floated around Zurich, a defiant adulteress into kinky bisexuality. No lover better suited her vengeful frame of mind than Ansel’s former close friend, Felix Utley. Former because Ansel had been quick to take up with Grieder’s niece after Felix had cast her aside in the interest of salvaging his career with the philharmonic. It was another way for Ansel to get back at Grieder, and now that Felix had finished using the woman, why should he mind if his close friend took her over? But Felix, brooding Lothario that he was, apparently resented Ansel’s insensitivity and retaliated by avidly bedding Lisa, much to her husband’s annoyance. “And after Felix has his way with Lisa and boots her,” Mitch condensed Johnny’s communiqué for Gordy and Harry’s benefit, “he turns to a far more formidable lover—Margot, the dominatrix in Ansel’s life. Their affair is doubly threatening to the massively insecure Ansel and, according to the scuttlebutt around Zurich, he begins bad-mouthing them all over town, starting at the Platypus Club, where Margot is—or was—a heavy hitter. And, at a wild guess, he threatens to tell Ma and Pa Erpf about sis’s infidelity in hopes of bringing her down a peg or two—and getting her off his back. Do you follow my drift here? We’re getting whipsawed in a very ugly family feud.”

  “You may have a point,” Gordy conceded, “but I’m not sure we can do much about it,”

  “More’s the pity,” said Harry. “This whole thing is wearing me out.”

  The last item in Johnny Winks’s report, while shedding no further light on Ansel’s sanity, introduced a new dimension to the Tell puzzle. The week before, Johnny had attended the funeral of a relative at the Old Grossmünster Cemetery on a lakeside slope about ten kilometers from downtown Zurich. By chance it was the one where generations of Erpfs and Hasslers were laid to rest. At the end of the interment service, Johnny wandered among the headstones of the Hassler plot, with no particular purpose in mind, and stopped abruptly in front of a well-worn marker wedged among its neighbors as if space had been grudgingly yielded to accommodate the remains beneath it. The incised writing had been worn away in places by the strafing wind that came up off the lake, but by filling in the lacunae, Johnny could make out the carved lettering:

  NINA-MARIE HASSLER

  Born 1792, Died 1876

  Home Again

  Surely this was the grave of the Nina Hassler, the very maiden who had rescued the Tell manuscript for posterity. Earlier inspection of Zurich cantonal records for 1792 had confirmed the birth of a Nina Christine Hassler to the family of that name living at Napfplatz in that very year. But no record or sign of her death had been found—until Winks noticed the tombstone. Johnny then rechecked at the cantonal registry office, going over every entry for 1876 line by line, but found no mention of a Nina Christine or a Nina-Marie Hassler. Nor did the cemetery association records, hauled out of a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, list any such burial for that year.

  The news about the headstone raised more questions in Mitch’s mind than it answered. Why had Nina changed—or dropped—the middle name she had been born with? In signing the note describing the Beethoven visit, she had called herself simply Nina Hassler, with no middle name. Where, then, did the “Nina-Marie” come from, and what could it possibly mean?

  A still more perplexing question was why, if Nina had outlived Beethoven by nearly half a century, she had not retrieved the manuscript from her family’s attic and presented it to the world as a posthumous treasure. Was she afraid of being charged with theft and her account of the great maestro’s leave-taking condemned as a lie? After so many years, though, what was the worst they could have done to her? The odds were that, if the work were even half as good as vintage Beethoven, the Tell symphony would have been acclaimed as a miraculous rebirth and Nina’s family well rewarded. But she had kept her silence. Why?

  “I’ll bet she thought about it every day for the rest of her life,” Clara mused that evening when Mitch told her of Winks’s revelations.

  “Could be,” he said, “if we’re sure the letter she left in the Hasslers’ attic trunk is real.”

  “You never give up, do you?” she asked, sounding less exasperated by his mulishness than resigned to it. All their short exchange proved was that they had not morphed into the same person, and likely never would. Maybe not a bad thing, Clara told herself.

  .

  cubbage & wakeham’s senior staff routinely assembled the week before Christmas to firm up the auction schedule and accompanying workload for the first half of the
coming year. At the moment, though, the calendar was clouded by the uncertainty clinging to the Tell sale. Mitch still hesitated to sign off on the manuscript, and until his departmental seal of approval was placed on it, the March auction date remained only tentative—unless Harry overruled him.

  His lingering qualms stemmed mainly, but not wholly, from the detailed nature of the confessional letter that Ansel had denied writing, Mitch told the C&W planning session, as he had similarly advised Jake Hassler and his lawyer earlier that same week. Somebody had written the letter, and whoever it was had expended a great deal of effort to make it sound convincing. Still, describing the modus operandi to pull off a Tell hoax was a far cry from hard evidence that anyone could have managed such a masterful forgery.

  “What troubles me more,” Mitch told his colleagues, “is our reliance on the Nina letter. It’s our only evidence for Beethoven’s really having been in Zurich in the summer of 1814—along with the Archduke Rudolph and Nägeli letters.” Taken together, they dovetailed well enough but had been relied upon by the panel of experts mostly because there was no clinching evidence to the contrary, placing Beethoven somewhere else and doing something else at the time. All three letters could be inventions, beautifully crafted forgeries—“Our forensics people can go only so far,” Mitch cautioned. “And if the letters are fakes, what does that say about the Tell itself? Not necessarily that it’s counterfeit, too—some evil genius could have surrounded the real thing with a cooked-up story, for reasons we don’t know, but presumably to make it all hang together in a convincing fashion. I wish we had more to go on—knew more about Nina and her connection to Beethoven.”

  After the staff meeting, Gordy dropped by Mitch’s office to let him know which way the wind was blowing. “Harry gets all your reservations—he’s definitely paying attention—and admires the way you play devil’s advocate. Me, too—”

  “I’m not playing anything,” Mitch cut in. “I’m doing my job. And if Harry doesn’t like the way I’m handling it, he can replace me—with or without severance.”

  “Take it easy, pal, your stress is showing,” Gordy counseled. “Nobody here questions your competence. But Harry is concerned that you want to have it both ways—and you can’t vote maybe on this thing forever. In this context, ‘maybe’ is a no vote, forcing us to pass up the auction and hand the manuscript back to Jake. Hedging your bet that way may be a lot safer—and if the thing blows up and turns out to be a hoax, then you’re a goddam hero. And if some other house goes ahead and auctions the Tell for a huge score and the music world acclaims it a genuine masterpiece—or even close to it—well, ours would only be a sin of omission, which, Harry and I agree, is a lot less heinous than actively helping perpetrate a fraud.”

  “Then what’s Harry’s problem?” Mitch asked.

  “Your indecision. If you think the evidence, which seems pretty convincing to most of us, is still too shaky, then say so.”

  “But that’s just what I’ve been saying. Even so, Harry’s opted to schedule the auction—it’s his shop—but he didn’t consult me about it.”

  “He’s been consulting you all along—everything’s on hold till you get off the dime.”

  “But who imposed a deadline for deciding this thing? What’s the rush? I say the longer we wait and the more certain we are when we auction the manuscript—if we do—the higher the bidding will go, and then we can all celebrate.” Mitch looked down at his desktop. “If Harry sent you to read me the riot act, please tell him I don’t react well to bullying. This thing is too big to deal with impulsively.”

  On the next to last day of the year, the pressure on Mitch seemed to ease a bit. Word reached C&W’s holiday-festooned premises that they seemingly had one less complication to deal with. Winks phoned to say that Ansel Erpf was no more.

  Johnny’s team had lost track of him for the previous ten days. As it turned out, he had gone to Oia, the Aegean resort village perched atop the northern end of the thousand-foot-high volcanic rim on Santorini, where his ex-wife, Lisa, owned a cavelike dwelling carved out of the cliffside. Ansel’s shattered remains were found on the beach approximately where they should have been if he had jumped—or been pushed—from Lisa’s terrace. But Lisa was nowhere to be found. The island’s small Greek constabulary had not ruled out foul play; the locals, including a contingent of libertarian-minded expatriates, were being notably close-mouthed. More suspiciously, no suicide note was found, according to Winks, who had checked with his contacts on the Zurich and London police forces—not at Lisa’s pad nor Ansel’s parents’ house on Napfplatz nor at their Mayfair flat, where he had been staying lately, nor at the tiny studio he maintained in Zurich’s university quarter, where drugs, his undefeated nemesis, were abundant.

  The news of Ansel’s death hit Mitch with surprising force. Not that he had established any emotional bond with the strange fellow, but during their two encounters, there had been a distinct and appealing vivacity to Ansel Erpf, a sprightliness of thought and expression. For all the testimony about the furies supposedly afflicting him, his seizing upon the Tell manuscript as a lightning rod actually spoke well for him despite the legal and public-relations headaches he had caused C&W. Still, Mitch’s regret, he was quick to recognize, was fueled less by sorrow over Ansel’s demise than by fear that he had taken the truth about the Tell to the grave with him.

  Margot took two days getting back to him after he had phoned to express condolences and ask, as obliquely as possible, if she harbored even the least suspicion about what appeared to be her brother’s voluntary fatal swan dive.

  “None at all,” she said, her grief firmly under control. “I’ve been half expecting this—for years, to be honest with you.” But she conceded that her family may have unwittingly sped Ansel’s self-destruction, if indeed that’s what it was. He had found out about the existence of the commitment papers they had submitted to the health authorities. “I gather somebody in Dr. Kohler’s office phoned him with word that we were proceeding, at least for temporary hospitalization, and then demanded payment from Ansel for the favor.” Putting him away without his acquiescence no doubt struck Ansel as his family’s ultimate betrayal—“but it could not be avoided,” Margot lamented.

  The crowning blow had probably come from his mother, who had let Ansel know in a recent letter that his inheritance would be withheld forever from his direct control and placed under his sister’s trusteeship. “His learning about it just now was the height of poor timing,” Margot told Mitch. “Ansel called me right after getting Mother’s letter and said, more calmly than I’d have expected, that it had been one thing for him to agree to my serving as his conservator while he was in drug rehab, but this trust arrangement was a life sentence that he had not bargained for. Then he called me a few choice vile names, wished me a miserable new year, and rang off. Those were his final words to me.” Her steely grip on herself wavered for the first time. “You may find it hard to believe, but I truly loved him—he had this wonderfully mordant wit and talent that he struggled to nourish but in the end our family saw only as a curse.”

  Ansel’s errant suicide letter, postmarked Thera, the main town on Santorini, arrived a week later in, of all places, Mitch’s mail. The return address stated simply, “A.G.E., Eternity.” Composed in a small, cramped script that trailed off in downward-slanting lines, the rambling letter began with an apology. It begged Mitch’s forgiveness for burdening him, “a virtual stranger and mere commercial functionary (though of a superior sort),” with the final communiqué of his life, “but I need to ensure that it is not suppressed by my family, to whom my ending, like my beginning and middle, will prove a source of persistent embarrassment.” Who the sender had been of the “confession” letter mailed over his signature, he did not speculate, stating only that it proved “I am surrounded by betrayers of various sizes, shapes, degrees, and locations, not all of them related to me, including that notorious quack of a therapist off B
erkeley Square, who has longed to squirrel me away in the nuthatch, and that fat old queen who still presides with off-tempo flourishes over our local philharmonic podium.”

  The suicide letter included instructions that Ansel’s gravestone, “if the family will consent to plant me in its own sacred soil,” carry his full name, Ansel Gottfried Erpf, the years of his lifespan, and two further lines below: on top, “Little Esteemed in His Own Time,” and underneath, “Saviour of the William Tell Symphony.”

  Mitch seized on the words as a coded message. “Saviour” was not “Composer,” which he might well have requested as his parting claim to artistic immortality if he had in fact been its creator. And who could have proven otherwise, given the existence of the “confession” letter to Margot from London despite his denial of having written it? No, Ansel seemed to have been even more certain than C&W’s expert panelists that Tell was genuine Beethoven. And his discovery of it Ansel apparently saw as his ticket to eternal salvation.

  The letter ended with an aside to Margot that registered the full range of his ambivalence toward her. “Ta-ta, dear sis—now Mumzy and Dadalicious are all yours, free of the irredeemable sibling to attend to,” it read. “I have not been entirely unappreciative of your occasional spasms of concern for a hapless brother. Shall I see thee in the Milky Way? What a laugh if there should turn out to be an Orchestra Everlasting, with Zvingli playing first fiddle and me the co-principal cellist with Yo-Yo. Retribution at last! Do not let your spouse douse your spark, old girl.” It was signed just “A.” There was a postscript:

  Crowning irony: I came here to make my peace with Lisa to tell her I knew what an unlovable brute I must have been. But in character she was not where she was supposed to be. Her cave was empty; neighbors said various scruffy bedmates, boys and girls, have come and gone & last they heard she was in Ibiza making a porn film. What was I thinking when I wed the strumpet? Did I ever think? Non cogito, ergo non sum. Kiss-kiss.