Beethoven's Tenth Read online

  Before air-expressing the letter to Margot, Mitch phoned Winks to check out her alibi for the day Ansel died, and Felix Utley’s as well. If anyone had helped Ansel find eternal rest, they had to be considered among the suspects. But Margot and her parents had spent the holidays together at Napfplatz, while Felix had been in France for the week, auditioning for a place with the Orchestre de Paris.

  Margot called him promptly upon receipt of the suicide letter, poorly hiding her hurt that Ansel had addressed his farewell pensées to a nonrelative in America. “No,” Mitch tried to comfort her, “in the end he was writing to you.” And whatever else his final words expressed, he pointed out to her, Ansel had continued to deny having written the confession letter supposedly sent from London as well as having participated in any chicanery involving the Tell manuscript.

  .

  “oo-la-la—tres soignée!” Lolly cooed approvingly of Clara’s outfit as she swept into the Cubbages’ living room. It was the first time she and Mitch had been invited to his boss’s usual New Year’s Eve black-tie bash, limited to a dozen couples, none of whom (except the hosts) could be repeaters from the previous year. For the occasion, Clara had bought a black silk spaghetti-strap camisole, black satin pants, and a fitted waist-length black jacket trimmed in ivory lace. A thin necklace of small diamonds set in linked platinum lozenges, a thirtieth birthday gift from her parents, completed the ensemble. “Is it really you, Cinderella, under all that finery?” her hostess teased.

  “Don’t tell my wicked stepmother,” Clara said. “The outfit’s rented—except for the Victoria’s Secret thong—which I fully intend to model for your guests at midnight.”

  “Can’t wait, darling,” Lolly said with a laugh and a hug.

  Summoning up her last visit to the Cubbage salon for the dinner party to honor Emil Reinsdorf, Clara reminded Lolly of their shared dread that Hilde Reinsdorf would turn up in a hausfrau frock. “Poor thing’s got her hands full now,” Clara reported. “Old Emil’s smoked himself into an advanced case of lung cancer.” In passing, she mentioned that despite all of Hilde’s worry and woe, “she sent me the loveliest little floral painting as a thank-you gift.”

  “That Hilde’s something,” Lolly said. “And I might as well confess now. That smart outfit she wore here that night—the one with—”

  “No—you didn’t!”

  “I absolutely had to. I pumped you for her size—remember, I asked if she was a regular Brunhild, and you sort of described her height and shape—so I ran right over to Bendel’s and had the outfit sent to her hotel, with a note saying I hoped she’d enjoy this little token of appreciation for her distinguished husband’s efforts. She called me that night to say thank you but that she couldn’t accept such a lavish gift and, anyway, it might compromise Emil’s independence of judgment about the Tell. So I said okay, just wear the outfit to our dinner party and I’d return it to the store the next day—which of course I couldn’t do. The Salvation Army got it—our accounting department says we may be able to write it off as a three-thousand-dollar business expense.”

  “Brilliant!” Clara said playfully and then sobered. “I only hope Hilde is left reasonably well-off if Emil doesn’t pull through.”

  “I’ve heard that all of those European institutional types get fat pensions,” Lolly said airily. “She’ll be fine—how many shabby dresses does she need, anyway?” She drew closer to Clara’s ear. “Speaking of the Tell, Harry’s torpedoed my big idea, did you hear? No pre-auction recital of the first movement, or even three bars of the thing. He says no matter how small a piece of it is played or how carefully restricted the audience is or how tight the security arrangements, some media parasites are sure to creep in and write it up. And if they bomb it and say the thing should have been left up in that old attic trunk, our auction’s a very dead duck.”

  “Harry’s got a point.”

  “He usually does, the smug rat—but if I let on, I’m dead.”

  The two women shared no further intimacies until coffee was served in the living room. “Tell me, m’ love,” Lolly said, cornering Clara, “or don’t tell me—how’s every little thing?”

  Pleasantly high, Clara let her inhibitions go for the moment. “Embryo-wise?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  At their last monthly luncheon, Lolly had elected herself coach and cheerleader for the Emerys’ procreative activities. “Don’t try too hard,” she counseled. “It never works that way—they say all the cells and ducts and whatnot can get uptight and reject Mr. Mini-right. Just go with the flow, babe.” Gross as Lolly could be, Clara found she could talk to her about the supremely personal subject in a way she would never have thought of doing with her mother or a friend her own age. Still, she hesitated to share her first inklings of desperation, even with Mitch, as fear seized her that they might have to resort to heroic measures—clinical interventions, assaults on her anatomical dignity—to make a baby. Thus, Lolly’s words were calming and curiously welcome. But now the subject came up whenever they spoke.

  “Nothing new—unfortunately,” Clara answered Lolly’s New Year’s Eve probe.

  “Never you mind,” said her hearty counselor. “It’ll be a fab year for you two adorables.”

  That night, amid her restless slumbers, Clara decided she would not allow her preoccupation with baby-making turn her into an emotional wreck or derail her professional dreams. The new year, only hours old, would be good to her and Mitch, as Lolly had foretold. She hoped it would be heralded the following week by her scheduled appointment with her doctoral thesis adviser at Columbia to review her stalled application to change her dissertation topic from Schubert’s Ninth to Beethoven’s Tenth—which is how she now conceived of the Tell, without any “alleged” prefixed to it. Time to press her case with Professor Aurelio, who seemed to be dragging his feet instead of promoting her case with his departmental colleagues.

  “You’re quite perceptive, Mrs. Emery,” said Mark Aurelio, a tall, lean, neurasthenically passive academician with a bad beard. He handed Clara back her six-page memorandum applying to the Department of Music’s thesis committee for permission to alter her topic. “Your statement makes a plausible case, but I think you can strengthen it in several places where I’ve made marginal comments. To be frank with you, I’m running into headwinds with my confreres over your request.” Clara understood that as an associate professor, up for tenure by faculty vote that spring and assured advancement to the rank of full professor, Aurelio was not eager to buck his senior departmental colleagues or otherwise roil the system.

  “Naturally I’ll follow your suggestions,” she said, “but what seems to be the problem?”

  “The whole idea, I’m afraid.” However fascinating and seductive the concept of a newly discovered entire symphonic work by Beethoven, its premature acceptance in academia was almost unthinkable, Aurelio explained. “It’s not a comment on you in particular—may I call you Clara?” She nodded with a half smile. “It’s simply that graduate students can be less rigorous in their standards of acceptance than we grizzled types. This William Tell Symphony, which none of us has ever heard performed or seen the music for, is such a stunning development that it demands the most rigorous sort of examination and aesthetic appraisal before it can be considered a suitable subject for a Columbia dissertation. At the moment—unless you care to supply us with a sampling of the text of this amazing find—this so-called symphony is merely a cultural sensation, awaiting authoritative scrutiny. We need more hard information.”

  Clara was provoked. The man was spouting nonsense. “With all due respect, sir, I’m sure you and the committee are aware that this Tell manuscript was painstakingly investigated by a panel of the world’s foremost Beethoven experts, and the physical characteristics of the sketchbooks have undergone the most rigorous sort of forensics analysis. I’ll go into all of that in my thesis, as I’ve indicated in this memo—”

 
“But we only have your word for it, don’t you see, Clara? And that entire authentication process is necessarily suspect, because it was conducted under the auspices of your husband’s company, which I’m sure is aboveboard and honorable in every way but has a vested financial stake in the work’s certification—and subsequent sale to the highest bidder. The vetting process belongs in the hands of disinterested parties without regard for its commercial prospects.”

  “I can assure you, Professor Aurelio—”

  “Mark, please—we don’t stand on ceremony in our department.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not the sense I’m getting from your comments, Mark. I can assure you that my husband’s firm has insisted upon applying the most rigorous criteria in evaluating the Tell manuscript. And, as I’ll discuss in my dissertation, the same points you’re raising about who should be in charge of the authentication process were brought up by representatives of the Swiss and German governments and their cultural ministries—but they had their own vested and transparently chauvinistic reasons that, to my mind, were no purer than Cubbage & Wakeham’s admitted financial stake.” She felt her emotions taking control of her tongue and checked them.

  “Be that as it may,” the professor replied, “the department—this is between us, Clara—views this auctioning off of what should be a priceless work of art as a distastefully mercenary act. What happens if the manuscript winds up in the hands of unscrupulous philistines—people who frankly don’t give a damn how the text might be mangled and butchered just to make it more commercially accessible?”

  “I appreciate that concern—so does my husband’s boss,” Clara replied. “But Cubbage & Wakeham didn’t solicit the manuscript owner—the gentleman approached the auction house and, I’m told, is in financial need so he’s fully entitled to sell it for the highest price it can command.”

  “Okay, but meanwhile, so far as greater academia is concerned, this Tell Symphony is an unknown, qualitatively—it needs to be published and circulated and studied—”

  “Of course, Mark—and I’m sure it will be over time—but if that were done first, the owner would lose copyright protection of the text and how it’s edited and scored. Which is why I can’t append even a page or two of the music to this memo for the thesis committee’s enlightenment, however much I’d like to. Look, what I’m proposing for my thesis is an analytical narrative of all these issues you raise—it’s the story of a stunning discovery and all it set in motion.”

  “Just how stunning remains to be seen, I’m afraid,” her adviser said stonily. “Besides, you already have a perfectly good dissertation topic, and you’re well into the project. Why not finish up the Schubert, collect your doctoral medal, and write about this Tell business later when we’ll all know more about it?”

  “Because I’m on top of it now—I’m watching it all unfold, and it’s fascinating. Frankly, and entre nous, please, my husband still has doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript, and he won’t let it be sold unless they’re cleared up. Anyway, I’ll do the Schubert right afterward, if that would assuage your committee people.”

  The professor looked defeated by Clara’s resolve.

  “Well, if you’re so determined,” he said, “why don’t you revise this proposal a bit as I’m urging, and I’ll do my best for you. But meanwhile, you need to keep me posted on developments—we need to be sure this is no hoax.”

  “Smashing!” she said. “I’m most grateful. When do you need my revised memo?”

  “The committee next meets on Friday—can you have it back to me by then?”

  “I can do better than that,” Clara said, reaching down for her laptop beside her chair. “I’ve got my memo to the committee on a file in here—and all the supporting material I’ll need for the fixes you want. Is there some vacant office around here where I can park for a few hours and do the revisions right now?”

  She was accommodated in an office next door belonging to one of Aurelio’s professorial colleagues on sabbatical that term. “Take all afternoon, Clara—just send me your edited file and leave a hard copy on my desk when you’re done.” Aurelio looked pensive as he left her. “I just wish we had a Columbia alumnus with a boatload of gold who could swoop in and offer your Mr. Whatshisname whatever price he wants for his discovery—and then hand the manuscript over to our department for TLC.”

  “Might be worth a try,” she said with an encouraging smile. “But I think the owner is set on auctioning it out of fear he’d be shortchanging himself if he accepted a preemptive offer.”

  Clara put in an hour and a half revising her memorandum, then decided to take a lunch break and walked over to Broadway for a sandwich. When she came back, she found that the door to the office where she was working had been locked. The problem was solved by an appeal to the secretary in the departmental office who had a set of keys to every member’s quarters. “Oh, yes,” the secretary said, “Professor Aurelio noticed you’d left the door open when you went out and asked me to lock it as a security measure.”

  “How very thoughtful of him,” Clara said sweetly.

  {14}

  Jake Hassler’s lawyer sounded more animated than usual—giddy almost, for him—when he called Mitch at the end of the third week in January. “We’ve got something for you,” Owen Whittaker told him, “something big. Jake wants to bring it into the city over the weekend.”

  “Do we get a hint?” Mitch asked.

  “Among other things, a new letter from Nina.”

  Mitch’s early-warning system went on instant alert. “I’ve heard of slow mail delivery, but this is one for the Guinness Book of Records.”

  Whittaker laughed and then explained. Troubled because Mitch had confessed the week before Christmas that he was still not totally sold on the credibility of the whole Tell story due mainly to its reliance on the Nina letter (on top of the as yet unanswered question of who had written the letter from London over Ansel’s signature), Jake had begun to brood about whether he would ever realize any serious money from selling the manuscript. The news of Ansel’s apparent suicide only deepened his worry and confusion, not to mention guilt because Jake had run off with the symphony after Ansel recognized it for what it was—and ought to have been rewarded for it in some substantial way. But there was no agreement between them at the time of Ansel’s demise.

  “And then yesterday, Jake got a padded envelope with some documents and a covering note from Ansel—it was apparently sent through an attorney friend of his in London, though there was no return address,” Whittaker said. “The note is self-explanatory—it looks pretty legitimate to me. Jake got hold of his neighbor with reading knowledge of German to give us the gist of the items in the envelope—you’re in for a treat.”

  “I could use one about now,” Mitch said, at once profoundly skeptical but powerfully eager to see the alleged new evidence. “Can you come here tomorrow—or do you charge overtime for weekend work?”

  “How’s ten o’clock?” Owen asked.

  “Fine—and drive carefully. A lot may be riding on what you bring.”

  Mitch and Clara rearranged their Saturday plans and met with Jake and Whittaker in the C&W library. Jake had offered to bring along his German-speaking neighbor, but Mitch had assured them that Clara’s command of the language would likely serve their immediate needs. The new finds consisted of three documents, two of which Jake said had been tucked together inside the third one, which appeared to be a portion of a diary-like scrapbook. The typed cover letter, on a plain sheet of white copy paper, read:

  Dear Jacob,

  I am asking a solicitor friend in London to send you these revealing items in the event I am put away or meet some unfortunate and untimely end. After you disgraced yourself by absconding with the wooden box holding the Beethoven manuscript and related papers, I revisited your grandfather’s attic and carefully explored again the cluttered contents of the big tru
nk before Herr Schacht had it sent to your home in N. Jersey. These enclosed items may have been placed in the trunk by someone else long after Nina had put the wood box there and were left nearby but not inside it. I have not sent them to you because we are no longer friends and I have no desire to enrich you with the help of these documents. But if they reach you, it will mean they can no longer do me any good as a “bargaining chip” and so all I ask is that if they help you to make money, you will make sure that the world knows of my essential part in the Tell discovery.

  The typed, not handwritten, sign-off read, “Be well, Ansel.”

  “Why didn’t he sign it?” Mitch asked.

  “Who knows why he did anything—he was a very strange duck,” Jake’s lawyer replied. “Maybe he just didn’t have a pen handy.”

  Mitch turned to Jake. “Where’s the envelope this stuff came in?”

  “It was just a plain padded envelope—no return address. But it had British stamps and a London postmark—I think. No, I’m sure.”

  “Why didn’t you bring it?”

  Jake clamped his eyes shut. “I chucked it, I guess—it was all ripped after I opened it.” He gave a single, defenseless shake of his head. “Not too swift, huh?”

  “But the contents speak for themselves,” Whittaker put in to cover his client’s blunder.

  “Let’s see,” said Mitch.

  They started with the briefer of the two small items, a single half-folded sheet of mildewed paper with neat writing in badly faded brown ink. The heading paragraph stated that a messenger from the Zurich Canton Registry had gone to the Hassler house “on this day, 23 June AD 1818,” to urge a member of the family to return with him to the bureau’s office to copy the text of a brief notice received in the previous day’s post from Vienna, along with a sealed letter addressed to the Hassler residence. Clara translated the text of the notice aloud: