Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “We don’t have applicants—people who ask don’t get hired. We do the asking.”

  “So I see. What in the world makes you think I’d be interested in working for an auction house, of all things? I mean I’m sure it’s a respectable business and so forth—”

  “You didn’t think so last time we met,” Harry reminded him. “Tell me about your dad.”

  The man was incorrigible. Almost laughably so—yet his attention, perhaps because it was entirely unsolicited, was flattering.

  “He’s a nice man,” Mitch said. “He doesn’t say much, but what he says is worth hearing. He’s been the deputy administrator at our county hospital for as long as I can remember, but he never got the top job. I think he lost out because he didn’t have a college degree—only a business school diploma—but he took evening courses in health services and worked hard to get ahead, as far as he got. He’s taking early retirement next year.”

  “And your mom?”

  “She’s nice, too—more outgoing than Pop. She was an English and Latin teacher at our local high school for a long time—and made sure I didn’t goof off in my studies. Otherwise, I’d never have earned a scholarship to Princeton. She’s also an excellent landscape painter—for a hobby. She used to take me and my sister April to the museum in Minneapolis all the time—it was only thirty miles away—and explain what made a great painting and what didn’t. I guess that’s why I majored in art history at college. But I don’t have her artistic talent—I’m just an appreciator.”

  Harry nodded a few times and lifted his wine glass to Mitch in tribute for having endured his little inquisition.

  “Okay,” said Mitch as their poached salmon plates arrived, “my turn now. Why specifically have I had my privacy rummaged through by your thugs?”

  “Gordon Roth is not a thug,” Harry replied evenly. “As our house counsel, he occasionally makes tactful inquiries into the background and character of people we’re interested in—usually would-be clients but sometimes potential employees. I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re someone who could be of considerable value to our firm, and that you, in turn, would welcome the unique sort of challenge that Sedge Wakeham and I have in mind for you in the international sphere of art and cultural artifacts. There’d be a certain amount of travel involved, mostly to places you’d enjoy being in. You would not find the work monotonous, I think I can assure you of that.”

  Harry Cubbage’s self-sureness knew no bounds.

  “Why all your kind solicitude,” Mitch wondered, “considering that I once did my best to spatter your twenty-four-karat reputation?”

  “You did us quite a favor, actually—we were growing lax. Besides, spattered gold cleans up quite nicely, in case you’ve never noticed.” Harry’s archness had reached its apex. “We’ve decided to create an entirely new position of chief investigator, coordinating the authentication procedures in all our departments. The operation has been too hit-or-miss until now, very ad hoc. It needs to be systematized under the direction of an enlightened but dogged inquisitor. You would fit the bill, in my judgment—though I could be wrong, of course.”

  It was not what Mitch had been expecting. “You want me to—do what exactly—play detective for your firm?”

  There was a detectable absence of delight at the prospect in Mitch’s tone. “In a manner of speaking,” Harry answered. “Our merchandise happens to be among the costliest and most fascinating on earth—and, accordingly, it needs to be validated beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

  “Why not just hire a presentable former FBI guy? They’re trained investigators—”

  “I’ve considered it—even brought in a few of them for a chat. The problem is they’re neither fine-arts-oriented nor particularly couth—they all seem to wear mid-calf socks, which I find unacceptable on a grown man.”

  Mitch frowned. “My socks aside, how do I qualify? Any fool can ask lots of questions—”

  “Au contraire, pal,” Harry countered. “To ask the right questions, ideally one needs a broad frame of reference, and without puffing up your hat size—if you had a hat—”

  “I don’t, actually—just a Minnesota Twins baseball cap.”

  “My point is that you rate high in well-roundedness. You’ve been educated at superior schools. You have a worldview enriched by a firsthand ordeal in a place where no one in his right mind would ever go. You write at or above professional standards. You know the law and more than a little about criminality. You seem to have a keen appreciation of art and culture. You have an attractive wife with European connections. And, if I’m not mistaken, you savor adventure, which you’ve enjoyed too rarely in your interesting but checkered career. You have jumped about a bit, employment-wise, Mitchell—which is my sole reservation about bringing you in to work closely with me. I’m not much enamored with flighty sorts.”

  “I see,” Mitch said with a betraying smile. He decided about then that there was something elusively likable about Harry Cubbage. “Is there anything else?”

  “We pay decently—plus travel and all other expenses, of course, and generous fringes. If things work out, you could make quite a nice living—and enjoy your work. And there’s room for advancement, though it’s a relatively small shop.”

  Mitch had the sensation that he’d been hooked and was being reeled in by a masterful angler.

  “And what is it exactly that I’d be doing?”

  It took Harry only a few moments to sketch C&W’s painstaking authentication process, starting with their forensics people, who tested the physical properties of any article offered for auction to see if it conformed with its alleged age, materials, provenance, and the like, and ending with still more intensive scrutiny to determine not only whether the object in question was indisputably authentic but just how high its quality and/or historical value might be.

  “Not all Da Vinci sketches or Lincoln letters are equal in importance,” Harry noted.

  “And you want me to ride herd on your various experts, from the big-picture view?”

  “Exactly.”

  Intrigued by now, Mitch said he appreciated the offer and agreed to think about it. “How long do I have?”

  “A week should do,” Harry said. “Longer means you’re reluctant—which won’t do at all.” He began attacking his cold salmon. “Oh, in the interest of full disclosure, I should add that we don’t provide first-class air travel. But we compensate by billeting you at four-star hotels for up to a week’s stay—which usually covers even our most demanding field trips. If you prefer a Best Western, we’d oblige you, but you don’t get to pocket the difference, I’m afraid.”

  Mitch accepted Harry’s offer two days later.

  A month before the end of his probationary period, Mitch won his permanent spurs in the course of checking out a canvas offered to C&W for auction and said to be the work of the early-twentieth-century American Cubist Charles Demuth. In the same style as the artist’s well-known I Saw the Figure Five in Gold, the painting had supposedly been withheld from public sale by the artist and given as a gift to a relative, whose descendants now wished to cash it in. But the paint tested badly; its chemical components varied suspiciously from the pigments available in Paris in the early 1920s, the place and the time that the work was said to have been done, and the execution seemed to lack the crispness of Demuth’s other museum-hung work. Mitch’s further investigation, in tandem with the firm’s modern art curator, disclosed that Demuth’s signature appeared on the rear of none of his bona fide canvases, as it did on this purported work of his. Apprised of all these discrepancies, the would-be C&W client at first theorized that the signature may have been added later as a certifying device, but then lamely withdrew the painting with a pledge never again to try to palm it off as genuine.

  After that, Mitch Emery was Harry Cubbage’s new golden boy, given a 20 percent raise and offered a five-year contract, which w
as promptly declined. “Thanks, but a contract would make me feel like an indentured peon—I’ve never had one.”

  “Peons don’t generally get contracts,” Harry remarked. “They get whipped.”

  But Mitch insisted on his freedom of mobility, even if it left Harry with misgivings that his valued new hire might sponge up expertise at the house’s expense and then jump ship just when he was becoming truly useful. Over the next nine months, though, nothing occurred to make either of them regret their arrangement. But neither had it been tested by a complex challenge that would have given Mitch a true sense of job security; the Demuth episode had been easy pickings. Which was why Harry’s droll disclosure of the imminent arrival at C&W’s premises of what purported to be the lately exhumed manuscript of the—for God’s sake!—William Tell Symphony by the Biggest Bopper of Them All left Mitch’s brain in a frenzy. He crossed Fifth Avenue, hurried back to his office, and Googled the “Beethoven” file on Wikipedia. This Tell symphony, he told himself as he scrolled, had to be pure bullshit; the composer had never had anything to do with Switzerland so far as Mitch could see. Still, he left a message for his wife on their home voice mail saying he had something of interest to share with her.

  .

  upon arriving a fashionable but annoying eighteen minutes late with not even a hint of apology, Lolly Cubbage wasted no time letting Clara Emery know that, by venturing all the way across town from her apartment on East End Avenue to the Café Luxembourg, a few doors west of raffish Broadway, she was practically slumming. “I’m never over here,” Lolly said dismissively, “except for theater or Lincoln Center. What’s up in this neighborhood, anyway, except that—that lox store—with all those—those—” She groped for a sufficiently abusive yet still civilly utterable epithet, but none sprang to her tart tongue, so she settled for “people,” said with enough edge to register detectable scorn. “I’m here only to make you happy, darling—but your treating me is totally unnecessary.”

  Clara thought otherwise. She was months overdue with a reciprocal gesture. Welcome or not, Lolly’s embrace had served to propel the Emerys onto the New York socialite scene and its outlying dependency in and around the Hamptons. Ever since Mitch had gone to work for Cubbage & Wakeham, Lolly had taken Clara under her warped wing like the younger sister—there were twelve years between them—she never had. This generosity was, alas, accompanied by an urge on Lolly’s part to make Clara feel somehow inadequate and thus in need of mentoring that only she could provide. Lolly’s handiest target was Clara’s clothes. “I see you’ve got your usual weekday uniform on,” she would begin her carping, “not that it isn’t fetching on you, sweetpea—but then absolutely everything would look fabulous on you, with your height, coloring, and those good Dutch bones. I’d love to see a more playful outfit on you.”

  Clara’s “weekday uniform” consisted of five virtually identical black suits, cut severely to emphasize her tallness, and invariably worn with one of her dozen vanilla silk blouses. For the merest glint of visual elegance she always added a small gold brooch delicately spiced with tiny gems—she owned fourteen of them in various shapes (including a bow, a butterfly, a spray of lilies, a bunch of grapes, and a tiger with ruby eyes)—worn on her left lapel. Hoping to be taken seriously in the realms of academia (as a Columbia doctoral candidate) and philanthropy (at Lincoln Center, where Lolly had arranged for her to do volunteer fundraising), she did not wish to be noticed for her wardrobe. It just had to be low-key and smart. Dolling herself up was reserved for parties or when she and Mitch dined occasionally at a pricey restaurant. “I don’t do playful,” Clara told Lolly. “And forgive me, please, but you really needn’t keep casting me as your Eliza Doolittle.”

  “Sorry, my dear—but honestly, I’m not trying to turn you into a fashion-plater,” Lolly persisted as always. “It’s just that a teense of pizazz would go a long way with your raw material.” And Clara, as always, gave a demure nod of thanks, and then Lolly, as always, took back half the compliment. “Of course, you could do with more meat on that frame—you are depressingly lanky for a grown woman. But then I suppose it comes naturally—you don’t have to live on goat cheese and endive like the rest of us matronly types.”

  Dream on, Clara yearned to correct her but didn’t. In fact, to keep off the dreaded pudge, she followed a punishing schedule, jogging three days a week around Central Park reservoir or in Riverside Park along the Hudson, and slogging away on the treadmill for an hour on three other days, listening to a CD to cushion the numbing ordeal. Sundays she vegged out.

  Clara tolerated Lolly and her slashing tongue mostly because Mitch worked for her husband and to spurn the advances of so willful a woman who had taken an obvious shine to her would have been impolitic. Possibly disastrous. That Lolly was a borderline alcoholic, able but unwilling to slake her intake, did not excuse her verbal onslaughts. That they sometimes took the form of gross disparagement of her spouse Harry, who plied her with a surfeit of worldly goods and comforts, made her sometimes savage indiscretion still more objectionable.

  Clara decided the woman was consumed by self-hatred. An honors graduate from Wellesley who lacked the moxie to pursue a career and the selflessness to be a devoted wife and mother; she had shipped their only child, a whiny daughter, off to boarding school at an early age and distanced herself from a husband who all too often treated her, according to Lolly, with sadistic callousness—unless, Clara guessed, cause and effect were in truth reversed. Whatever the cause, Lolly’s principal daily activity was self-indulgence.

  For all Lolly’s disagreeableness, Clara recognized her own complicity in fostering their relationship. Its utility went beyond protecting Mitch’s professional standing. Lolly had not only conscripted her as a sort of noblesse oblige fundraiser for the Lincoln Center culture gulch but also soon began including her and Mitch at some of the dinner parties she gave monthly from October to May, dedicated largely to spreading goodwill for the Cubbage & Wakeham company name among the well heeled. Paying Lolly’s dues, though, meant humoring a sometimes abrasively out-of-control lady.

  Hardly into her first Dewars with a splash at their Café Luxembourg lunch, Lolly began on an upbeat by exclaiming how happy Harry remained with Mitch’s work ethic and sunny disposition. “I told him it’s probably because you two are good in bed—he doesn’t acknowledge that other people exist below the waist. I think he digs your stud because Mitch is the only one in the place who doesn’t kiss his ring three times before noon. Harry says it’s because Mitch has enough f-you money, so he can always walk away from his job if it gets him down.”

  “What’s ‘eff-you money’?” Clara asked.

  Lolly gave her a slit-eyed look. “F-you, f-you. What are you, lady—a vestal virgin?”

  “Oh, yes—I see. I just haven’t run across the expression.” Clara asked the waiter for a glass of cranberry juice in place of anything alcoholic. “But what makes Harry think Mitch is privately wealthy? He comes from a modest background and has never held a high-paying job before now—he was a newspaper reporter and a government employee—”

  “Harry means your family, sweetheart—he knows you come from Old World money and probably just assumes you and Mitch are sharers.”

  Lolly’s revelation was disturbing. “And just how does Harry know about me and my family’s private business?”

  Lolly took a large swallow of her scotch.

  “Beats me—he hires investigators all over to check up on C&W’s clients and the stuff they bring him to auction. Anyway, it’s hardly a secret, is it? Harry says your father is a big deal in the corporate world—what is he, again—CEO of Unilever? Isn’t that a humongous company?”

  “He’s CFO, as a matter of fact—and yes, it’s a large and powerful company—but he doesn’t exactly own it.”

  “Well, close enough. And Harry’s partner, Sedge Wakeham, actually knew your father from the Second World War—Sedge was in British Intellige
nce and had secret meetings with your father—I gather he was very active in the Dutch Resistance and something of a national hero. I’ve been wondering if you’d ever get around to mentioning his exploits—”

  “I’m very proud of my father, of course, but one doesn’t talk about such things casually,” Clara said softly. “It’s not the way I was brought up. Nor, by the way, do my parents believe in showering Mitch and me with earthly goods—love in abundance, though—”

  “Drat,” said Lolly. “Well, I won’t let on to Harry—I think it’s good for him to have someone around the office he thinks he can’t bully. Trust me on that—”

  The next moment Lolly was careening into one of her boozy monologues that would soon turn into an unstoppable, polluted stream of consciousness and numb her captive audience. Clara had learned months back how to make just enough eye contact and utter a few timely uh-huhs so that her own mental gears could grind away undetected while being subjected to Lolly’s venting.

  “…We figured that any moron panting to pay us three hundred thou to rent for August in Southampton isn’t going to squawk about the hundred-thou deposit Harry insists on for any damage they could do to the place.” Lolly shoved the remnants of her pear-and-arugula salad to one side. “To be honest, I hate the idea of anybody else spreading their nasty cheeks over our upholstered furniture—greasy fingers on the draperies—you can just imagine—” She sighed wearily, yearning for a cigarette to finish off her third Dewars. “But as Harry says, everything has its price—and he should know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Shit, I can see I’m boring you, angel—”

  Caught. “Not in the least. I’m just a little—”

  “You mustn’t let me rattle on—it’s those long Dutch silences of yours that do me in.” Lolly instinctively reached for the check on its arrival, but Clara stayed her hand and smiled demurely. “Well, all right for this time,” Lolly said. “We need to huddle again soon—I want you to help me plan my dinner lists for the rest of the spring so we can have more people for you to hit on—in your adorable way—for fat gifts to the Center.”