Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “Possibly.” Harry flipped his chewing pencil onto his desktop. “But that would interest me a lot less than a lost Beethoven symphony. Sandals are a dime a dozen.”

  Mitch struggled to regain his cool, though the enormity of the Beethoven fish story had plainly caught him off guard. “Is there any reason whatever to suppose that this character isn’t totally off-the-wall and the little goody he’s favoring us with isn’t a complete crock?”

  “None that I’ve heard about so far. He’s almost surely a loon—or an arrant charlatan.”

  Mitch was surer now that Harry was toying with him, so he played along. “But it would be an immense sensation if the thing miraculously proved to be authentic—and earn us a very handsome commission and worldwide attention.”

  “Quite true, which is why we always keep our door—and minds—wide open.”

  “But why,” Mitch asked, “would Beethoven ever have written a symphony to honor William Tell, of all people? Attila the Hun, maybe—but a Swiss folk hero? Seems preposterous.”

  “Beats me,” Harry said in his best blasé manner. “If we don’t toss this Jersey fellow out on his ear this afternoon, it occurs to me that you may want to run this whole subject past your better half. Isn’t Clara’s Columbia dissertation more or less concerned with Beethoven and the German Romantics?”

  “Mostly less. It deals primarily with Franz Peter Schubert.”

  “Well, close enough,” said Harry. “All those German biggies must have known one another and their work. Weren’t Schubert and Beethoven contemporaries?”

  “They were a generation apart, I believe—but both lived in Vienna. I think Clara told me that Schubert was one of Beethoven’s pallbearers.” The subject suddenly ignited another weird recollection in Mitch’s head. “Say, here’s a funny thing I just remembered—Clara also told me that the manuscript of Schubert’s great symphony, his Ninth, was found among a bunch of his overlooked papers some years after his death.”

  “Mmmm,” said Harry. “So you see, strange things happen and always have. You’re right, of course, Mitchell, to be supremely skeptical about miraculous discoveries of this sort—and especially of this magnitude—it’s what we pay you for, as I recall. But prejudging any claim, however farfetched, isn’t really good for our business. Let’s give our New Jersey visitor his day in court.”

  His boss’s tone left Mitch in no doubt he was about to face his sternest test at C&W.

  .

  notwithstanding clara’s thoughtful suggestion that he put on the feed bag for lunch, as she was doing with Harry’s wife, Mitch grabbed a bowl of sludgy pea soup and a cup of fresh fruit salad at the luncheonette around the corner on Madison and then headed for a stroll in the park to the sailboat pond and back.

  Beethoven! His brain was clanging with all that titanic sound. All that Sturm und Drang. All that big hair. Just to conceive of a brand-new masterwork by numero uno, suddenly materializing from beyond the grave, was dizzying, and, to be sure, a huge turn-on for anyone sharing Mitch’s occupation. Harry was no doubt right that Clara would be fascinated by the very idea, however absurd on its face, and more than likely laugh herself silly that grown men at Cubbage & Wakeham would entertain such an idea even for a moment. Still, Harry had made his point about their need to suspend disbelief when confronted by even the most implausible claim about any historical document or art object—it was part of the auction house’s very reason to exist.

  On the other side of the same coin, however, was Harry’s impassioned caveat, delivered when the two of them had first connected, that unless his firm’s authentication procedures were utterly trustworthy, the whole business might as well shut down. His rigid standards of legitimacy, like his undisguised elitism, were daunting to most newcomers in his employ.

  Those who had been at C&W a lot longer than Mitchell Emery, only in his second year there, confided to him that Harry had let his hauteur over-ripen a shade or two after Sotheby’s and Christie’s came tumbling down from Olympus as a result of price-fixing scandals. This startling reversal of fortune, deftly seized upon by Harry and Sedgwick Wakeham, his partner in London, had allowed their smaller but more discriminating enterprise to elude the long shadows cast by the former twin giants of the high-end auction trade and take command of its center stage. So respectable was Cubbage & Wakeham’s style of doing business, so artfully crafted its glossy catalogues, so unimpeachable its imprimatur on the rare and exquisite items offered at its monthly auction in the chaste auditorium of the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue, that attendance often had to be limited to bidders with the highest credentials and deepest pockets. The pride Harry took in C&W’s fine-tooth vetting regimen was understandable, given his family’s pedigree and economic prowess dating back to colonial New England and, a bit later, to Ezekial Cubbage, who had founded the mercantile house of V. C. Craig & Sons in Boston in 1817. It was all the more ironic that Ezekial’s great-great-great-great-great-nephew Harry should have invited Mitch to join its successor firm, Cubbage & Wakeham, despite the fact that Mitch had quite publicly kicked mud on its escutcheon a few years earlier.

  Mitch, as an art history major at Princeton, had briefly flirted with the notion of a career that might one day place him in charge of a world-class museum. Attaining a post of such lofty cultural eminence would no doubt have been a notable achievement for a boy from Red Wing, Minnesota, not exactly the intellectual hub of the American heartland, albeit a pleasant and wholesome place to have grown up. On further reflection, though, the actual administration of a big art museum seemed likely to entail far more tedious and irksome time-serving, not to mention avid bootlicking, than he could stomach. And, after four years at an elite college insulated from life’s rough and tumble, Mitch opted for two years in the Peace Corps and a chance to tend the needy in non-elite Tanzania. Sobered by witnessing the natives’ desperate struggle for survival, he came home and elected to try his hand at journalism—that way, he might at least stay in touch with reality and perhaps cast light on some dark places—and managed to get hired as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post, covering consumer affairs and the culture beat.

  It was while thus employed that he first came into contact with C&W. One rainy Saturday, while taking in an exhibition of recent purchases by the Corcoran Gallery, Mitch confronted a canvas attributed to the seventeenth-century Dutch landscapist Jacob van Ruisdael. In the course of preparing his Princeton senior thesis, titled “Painterly Skies in the Works of Tiepolo, van Ruisdael, and Constable,” he had devoted long hours at a dozen museums to contemplating every billowy outcropping and fleecy contrail of cloud in the renderings of the three marvelous artists. “Brilliantly observed,” wrote his faculty thesis adviser, who gave Mitch a 1+ and added puckishly, “Have you considered a career in meteorology?” Suddenly, at the Corcoran that Saturday, as the clouds outside opened and were deluging the nation’s capital, it all came back to him. Something about the museum’s newly hung van Ruisdael, recently hailed by the Post’s art critic as a superb example of its genre, struck the attentive young journalist as—well—off. The glow of the sky, he sensed, had a bit too much pop to it, even for a freshly restored work, yet the execution of the clouds was oddly muddy in spots. Perhaps this was the misattributed work of van Ruisdael’s well-regarded uncle, Salomon, or of some apprentice in his studio. Or perhaps—the delicious possibility tantalized the byline-hungry reporter—it was a forgery.

  Making a few casual inquiries with the Post’s clout behind them, Mitch learned that the painting had been anonymously donated to the Corcoran by a novice collector, who, through a dummy bidder, had paid a bundle for the work at a Cubbage & Wakeham auction some months earlier. Further questioning over the phone of C&W’s media relations officer yielded reassurances that the authenticity of the painting had been certified by three ranking art historians, among them the leading Netherlandish authority on van Ruisdael. Alas, he had died recently. “In that case,
” Mitch prodded, “I’d appreciate seeing the paper work on the provenance of the painting as far back as it goes.”

  “We don’t normally allow outsiders to examine any of our internal documents,” the auction house publicist told him, “unless they are considering the purchase of an item being offered.”

  “If your management has nothing to hide,” Mitch replied, “I think its—and the viewing public’s—interests would best be served by transparency on your end.”

  “Well, it would be quite irregular, but I’ll pass along your request.”

  “Please do—I trust I’ll hear from you Monday.”

  “It may take some time, I’m afraid—”

  “Not if you tell your superiors that a delay or stonewalling might prove embarrassing.”

  His persistence, along with the Post’s high standing for its art and cultural coverage, earned Mitch an invitation to C&W headquarters, housed in three joined brownstones just down the block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a face-to-face meeting with a detectably miffed Harry Cubbage. “No one,” he grandly informed Mitch, “has questioned our integrity for a very long time. Is there some special reason, Mr. Emery, beyond your trade’s usual pandering to the yahoos, that brings you here?”

  “I’m not questioning your integrity,” Mitch answered calmly. “I’m just curious.”

  “About the provenance of a masterly painting we’ve vetted backward and forward and inside out, as we do routinely?”

  “That’s right—if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” Harry said caustically and thereupon launched into a long recital of forgeries or otherwise fraudulent articles that C&W’s staff of vigilant investigators had uncovered in the course of his venerable firm’s history and that, accordingly, were not offered for sale. These pretenders ranged from a fragment of papyrus said to have come from the earliest known version of the book of Exodus, a beaten gold Minoan drinking cup reportedly found in the royal apartment in the palace at Knossos, and a rough draft allegedly in Cicero’s handwriting of his eloquent harangue against the arch conspirator Cataline, to three impeccably articulated interiors attributed to Vermeer, twelve claimed (and suitably treacly) Renoirs, a memorandum setting forth the peace terms reached at Appomattox Courthouse by Generals Grant and Lee, and a detailed Picassoesque sketch for a huge mural in memory of the Holocaust that Pablo was supposedly planning to render in the manner of his Guernica.

  “What,” Mitch asked at the end, feigning disappointment, “no pietà by Andy Warhol?”

  Harry gave him a sustained squint through his wire-framed glasses, decided he liked his cheeky visitor, and burst into laughter. In short order, Mitch was allowed to explore who had owned the van Ruisdael in question and when. It was not a line of inquiry that C&W’s experts had pursued half so vigorously as their X-ray study of the canvas, chemical analysis of its paint, and intensive appraisal of the composition. Mitch soon learned that the trail of ownership was, to understate the matter, faint. According to the C&W file, the painting had been purchased by a merchant in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and sent by sea to hang in his villa outside Jakarta in the Dutch East Indies. Centuries of equatorial climate must have taken their toll on the work, and in 1937, it was purportedly sent for restoration to an art dealer in Hong Kong, long out of business, who ran a shop in the back renowned for its repair skills, faithful copying, and—as Mitch discovered by a series of phone calls—many forgeries. There was simply no way to tell from the subsequent documentation whether the van Ruisdael hanging in the Corcoran Gallery was an original heavily touched up, a copy, or an imposter altogether.

  While not definitive, Mitch’s revelations in an exclusive three-column exposé in the Post forced the Corcoran to relabel the painting as “Attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael” and stirred its donor to threaten suit against C&W, whose client—the one who had put the work up for auction—naturally professed complete ignorance of any intrigue. In the end, it was C&W that took it on the chin by having to repay the buyer his purchase price of $2,365,000. Mitch’s article portrayed the auction house management as mortified by the discovery but, out of kindness, included near the end of the piece a sampling of other bogus items C&W had detected and duly squelched. Harry was impressed but not grateful. The heads of five of his staffers rolled as a result.

  By the time Harry invited him to lunch in the Oak Room at the Plaza in New York, where Mitch and Clara had lately moved, seven years had passed, Mitch had embarked on a legal career, and whatever hard feelings Harry had nursed against him appeared to have turned to pudding. He oozed cordiality while avoiding all reference to the unfortunate van Ruisdael episode. It was evident from his questions, moreover, that Harry knew a lot about Mitch’s resumé, starting with his splendid record at Yale Law School, where he migrated on leaving the Post and served as Notes Editor of the Law Journal.

  “In my ignorance, I assumed Notes Editor was a lowly staff position,” said Harry, “but my sources tell me that it’s the second-ranking job on the masthead—and that you graduated close to the top of your law class.”

  “Somewhere up there.”

  “May I ask,” his host continued, “why you chose not to accept the clerkship that was offered to you at the US Court of Appeals—on the what—Second Circuit? Isn’t that quite a plum? I’m told that anyone with your glittering academic record, a federal clerkship at the appellate level, a suitably ingratiating manner, and a modest degree of competence could have landed a lucrative position at any Wall Street law firm. Why opt instead for a job as assistant prosecutor for Montgomery County, Maryland? Seems like grunt work for anyone with your splendid promise.”

  Why, Mitch asked himself, did Harry Cubbage care what the answer was? Something up his sleeve in the way of payback for what Mitch had cost him? A little late for that. Well, there seemed no harm in the question or being cordial in response.

  “Corporate law didn’t much interest me, frankly—or not enough, anyway, to take the big money and slave for fat cats.”

  “Aren’t business people entitled to top-flight legal representation?”

  He could tell Harry was baiting him, but it hardly mattered.

  “There’s a lot of talent out there for them to hire—it’s just not my idea of a calling. I’d rather work with ordinary people facing real issues—like survival—with a little dignity, maybe.” He paused half a beat, then quickly added, “Not that I’m against money—or people whose mission in life is to stockpile it. But it’s not my mission, and they certainly don’t need my help.”

  “You’re for the downtrodden.”

  Mitch thought he detected a sneer in the remark. “Not exclusively—and I’m not a closet Marxist, if that’s your next question—I think those guys are fanatics without any understanding of human motivation. I just think working people deserve a fair shake out of life.”

  “I gather that your stint in the Peace Corps left an indelible impression on you?”

  “It certainly opened my eyes after growing up in a peaceful Minnesota town on the Mississippi and attending Princeton.”

  “And left you a deeply caring person, from the sound of it.”

  Mitch shrugged. “Excuse me, Mr. Cubbage, but is there a point to any of this?”

  Harry raised a hand defensively. “We’re getting to it.” He took a swallow of his sauvignon blanc. “What happened when you joined the county prosecutor’s office?”

  “I learned a lot—and helped dispose of a bunch of rotten apples—but also saw how the justice system is screwed up and run by too many burnout cases who cling to their jobs way too long. Fortunately, my boss wasn’t one of them, and after almost three years at the repetitive grind in his office, he encouraged me to move on to something more challenging.” His sterling record and a Sunday round of sociable golf—Mitch was at best a low-intensity duffer—at Burning Tree with the head of the Department of Justic
e’s criminal division got him recruited on the spot for the federal anti-racketeering unit. “It was demanding work, and I was thriving on it.”

  “But?”

  Near the end of his second year at the DOJ, Mitch said, a new federal administration took power, and its overseers in his department soon proved clueless, aimless, and nastily politicized. “I guess I wasn’t terribly discreet about registering my objections when they kept telling me to hold my horses, and before long they pointed me to the door.”

  “And left you at loose ends—which I believe you are at the moment?”

  “Well, it seemed like the right time to catch my breath and regroup. My wife and I decided to travel awhile—thanks to her parents’ generosity—so we stayed with them in London—they have a townhouse in Chelsea—before taking a cycling trip up to Scotland and then through France and the Low Countries. I got to see her native Holland.”

  “And now you’ve moved to our fair city and taken a prewar apartment on Riverside Drive while you explore your options,” Harry said, “and your wife is pursuing her doctorate in musicology at Columbia.”

  “Sounds as if your spies have been working overtime. What’s this all about?”

  Harry nodded. “We’re almost there. Just one last thing—tell me about your people.”

  “My people? What do you mean, my family tree?”

  “Well, a few branches of it, anyway. For example, do you come from a long line of horse thieves? If not, then from whom?”

  “Why does that matter? This is America—we specialize in social mobility.”

  “Humor me a minute or two longer—I like to know something about the people we bring into our organization.”

  What an insufferably snotty bastard, Mitch thought. “I didn’t know I was an applicant.”