Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  Clara’s head throbbed. “I don’t like to think of it as ‘hitting on’ anyone—I’m just asking them to support the cultural life of their community. It’s a civic duty, the way I see it.”

  Lolly shook her head, severely plucked eyebrows arching. “You’re such a dear bunny.”

  {2}

  I know a thing or two about carpentry—it’s kinda my business,” Jacob Hassler said as he took his seat at the conference table, “and this paneling in here—what is it, mahogany, right?—is one gorgeous piece of work.”

  Mitch sensed at once from Jake Hassler’s rapid speech and antsy body language that the guy was uneasy, surrounded by the baronial splendor of the Cubbage & Wakeham library, which doubled as the firm’s meeting room, and four dudes in black suits. Jake himself was a rougher-hewn sort. Even before he had uttered a word, his clothes suggested as much. A nice-looking fellow with a rosy, round face, snappy blue eyes, neatly trimmed mustache, and a full head of short, graying hair, he had dressed for the warm mid-June day in a seersucker jacket that was two sizes too small on him. And he was understandably quick to shed the garment. Beneath was a short-sleeve, powder-blue dress shirt, worn tieless and open at the collar, and gray trousers in need of pressing. His lawyer, Owen Whittaker, Esq. of the Princeton firm of Gibbons & Lavish, was fiftyish, less fleshy than his client, and professionally attired in summer-weight gabardine.

  “Thank you very much,” Harry Cubbage said, examining Jake obliquely and trying hard—Mitch could tell—not to reveal dismay at the sight of such an unpromising client. “We try our best to maintain the place.” Harry’s eyes settled on the large wooden box Jake had placed carefully on top of the conference table. “That’s a handsome piece of lumber you’ve got there as well,” he said in his best approximation of bonhomie. “Cedar, I’d guess. Nice dovetailing, beautiful hardware, maybe original—may we assume your exciting discovery is inside it?”

  “Assume away,” Jake said heartily. “It’s blowing my mind, to be honest.”

  “Well, let’s try to put you at ease, then,” Harry said, warming to the challenge, however bleak its prospect. “Just tell us all about it—take your time, we’re not your adversaries. Gordon Roth here is our house counsel and may have a question or two as you go along, but don’t let him throw you off track. Likewise, Mitchell Emery, our resident specialist in charge of authenticating all items brought to us for auctioning.”

  Jake nodded soberly, then turned to his lawyer and asked, “Where do I start?”

  “Maybe with Switzerland,” Whittaker suggested, unsnapping his attaché case and removing a yellow legal pad and a needle-nosed pencil, “and your grandfather.”

  “Right.” Jake leaned forward, his muscular, curly-haired forearms on display as he clasped his hands in front of him. “The strangest thing,” he began, “is that I didn’t know my grandpa at all, really—I saw him maybe three, four times in my whole life, his living over there and all. My father took me to Zurich a couple of times when I was a kid—” Jake stopped, sensing he had gotten off on the wrong foot, and paused to regather his thoughts. “The point is, I never had much to do with Switzerland, except that I went once to see Grandpa Otto on my own—that was maybe fifteen years ago—he never wrote or invited me or anything—I just thought maybe I should—he was gettin’ real old. Anyhoo, he told me I should be proud of being Swiss and not blame the country for my good-for-nothin’ father.” Jake turned up his palms and shrugged. “Grandpa didn’t like my old man any better than I did—thought he’d gone to America on a goose chase just to get away from the family—”

  “What was your father’s occupation?” Harry cut in, trying to keep Jake from rambling.

  Jake explained that his father had come to America as a master mechanic after the Second World War, because the family-owned Hassler Tannery Works outside of Zurich had been mismanaged into the ground, and opportunities for a fresh start did not abound in his regimented homeland. Lured by the wide-open spaces that did not exist on his native soil, he managed to become a railroad engineer on the long freight hauls across the immense American West, found a bride at a church supper in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and fathered three kids with her. But aside from an occasional reminiscence about the old country, Jake’s father was a taciturn, cranky bastard who preferred communing with the prairies to sharing himself with his family. “We all kinda thought he’d up and fly the coop someday,” Jake added, “and sure enough—” Thus, he had never been able to whip up much enthusiasm about his Swiss heritage.

  “But you liked your grandfather enough,” Gordy coaxed Jake, “to attend his funeral?”

  “Yeah—I mean, all I’d ever known about Switzerland—besides the knockout scenery, cuckoo clocks, and William Tell—was that it never took sides in all the stupid wars going on in the rest of the world, which I thought was pretty smart but not very brave. Grandpa Otto explained it to me that last time I saw him.” Swiss neutrality had everything to do with national self-preservation, the old man said, because the little country was always outmanned and outgunned, so under the guise of stouthearted independence, “they always had to kiss up to the neighbors—and everyone else, too—and never crap on anybody or take sides—that would have been bad for business, and business came first. ‘Besides, fighting is hopeless,’ he said. So I asked him about the Swiss Guard and why they were off at the Vatican, protecting the pope. ‘Protecting is not fighting,’ Otto said. ‘And we’re not stupid, Jacob—what banks do you suppose the pope puts all the Holy Church’s money in?’” Jake’s features took on a remorseful look. “I should’ve gone to see him more, but—well, you know—woulda-coulda-shoulda—and, hey, he lived far away, and my family isn’t exactly rollin’ in bucks—not that I’m complaining—”

  Mitch could detect nothing disingenuous about the man’s bearing. “So you felt it was your duty to attend his funeral,” he asked Jake a bit pointedly, “even though you hadn’t seen your grandfather for many years, and it would be a long, expensive trip?”

  “Right,” said Jake, “besides which there was a legal reason to go.” A phone call had come from his grandfather’s Zurich attorney, advising him that Otto Hassler had passed on at the overripe age of ninety-eight and designated Jake as his sole heir. He took a week’s leave from his job as head of the hardware department at a lumberyard in Lambertville, a riverfront burg on the Delaware, New Jersey’s western boundary, to reach closure with his Swiss ancestors.

  “And to find out whether you’d come into anything?” Mitch prodded gently.

  “Sure, wouldn’t you? I mean, there’s a lot of money over there they don’t fling around—who knew if Otto was worth anything or just scraping by? All I knew was he lived in this big old house—well, it seemed big to me, dark and pretty gloomy—and smelled of cat piss.”

  Any delusions of windfall wealth Jake had allowed himself to nourish on the trip over were quickly dissipated. There were barely funds, it turned out, to cover his grandfather’s burial. The substantial five-story house on Napfplatz, a little cobbled square in the old section of Zurich near the student quarter, where members of the Hassler family had lived for nearly three hundred years, was in hopeless hock. Otto’s dwindling income after the family tannery closed and his accumulating debts would have landed him in a state nursing home years before if not for the largess of softhearted creditors and well-wishing neighbors. None had exhibited greater generosity toward him than the family immediately next door, the Erpfs, whose fortune gained in the realty and insurance businesses placed them among Zurich’s financial and social elite. The Erpfs held a lien on the Hassler house and everything in it, all of which would become their property as soon as Otto met his Maker. Meanwhile, they sent their staff over once a week to keep the Hassler house habitable and supply the old man with their leftover food. “They were real swell to Grandpa is what I heard,” Jake reported, “and I made it my business to thank them.”

  By the terms of Ott
o’s will and his lien agreement with the Erpfs, Jake was bequeathed only a handful of sentimental but otherwise worthless keepsakes—a few photo albums, a favorite ornamental paperweight, a busted antique clock that Otto had always intended to have repaired—and what his will called “such other personal family papers, records, and memorabilia as my creditors would otherwise discard.”

  Jake shrugged off the bad news, reasoning that he had never harbored serious expectations of inheriting much of anything from his grandfather, and respectfully buried Otto Hassler. On the evening of the funeral, the Erpfs gave a buffet supper of bereavement, open to all in the immediate neighborhood, at which Jake was the guest of honor. “It was real nice—I heard lots of stories about Grandpa’s good nature and popularity,” Jake recounted with evident pride. Before he had lost virtually everything and become bedridden, Otto never closed his door on needy passersby, and neighbors were regularly treated to a smile, a joke, and a cup of tea or coffee while sunning themselves nearby in the square. For many years during the December holidays, Otto used to dress up as Father Christmas, park himself in front of the little gated fountain at the lower end of the sloping Napfplatz, near the shops, and amuse the local children by telling stories and leading them and their parents in a nightly round of caroling by candlelight.

  “You should get to the nitty-gritty,” Jake’s lawyer told him. “These folks are busy.”

  Jake turned up his palms. “I was just tryin’ to—they asked about Otto—”

  “Take your time,” Mitch told him, not bothering to glance at Harry for approval. “It’s all part of the picture we need to get.”

  “I figured.” Jake pulled his chair in closer to the table and picked up the tempo of his narrative. He dwelled now on how, during the memorial supper at the Erpfs’ house, he renewed his acquaintance with Ansel Erpf, the prodigal son of the wealthy neighbors’ household. Ansel told him that he used to go over once a week whenever he was in town to visit with old man Hassler. He would drink and smoke with Otto, read him the paper, or play a CD or a few songs for him on the piano. “He loved my Chevalier impersonation,” Ansel told Jake. “Otto was a gorgeous human being.”

  Jake had a dim-but-fond memory of Ansel from his two boyhood visits to his grandfather’s house. On his first time over, the Erpfs’ lad organized a hiking party for Jake’s benefit, and during the walk, Ansel tried out his then halting English. He confessed to Jake how much he hated regular school subjects and wanted only to learn to play every instrument in the orchestra. Jake learned from other supper guests after Otto’s funeral that Ansel did in fact turn into a musical prodigy and had performed creditably as a cellist for a dozen years with the Philharmonia Helvetica National, better known as the Swiss Philharmonic, until he fell out with the orchestra’s director and found work abroad as an itinerant performer. Nowadays, Ansel was back living in his family’s imposing home, secluded on the third floor so his music playing would not disturb his parents when they were in town. He divided his time performing pop classics at a piano bar behind the Savoy Hotel across the river, on the tennis court at the elite Platypus Club, where the Erpfs had been longtime members, and drinking far too much, as Jake soon noticed. “Plastered or not, though, Ansel was really nice to me after the funeral. But he’s sure pissed at me now.”

  Gordy Roth perked up at that disclosure. “How come?” the C&W counselor asked.

  Jake smiled sweetly, like the proverbial cat that had just gulped the canary, and patted he cedar box in front of him. “He thinks this should be his—just because he helped me find it.”

  “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Jake’s lawyer inserted. “Just tell them what happened—they don’t need to know Ansel Erpf’s life story.”

  His years in pursuit of lawbreakers had taught Mitch that lawyers often erred on the side of overprotecting their clients out of fear they might blurt out something incriminating.

  “I’m a former prosecutor, Mr. Whitaker,” Mitch told him, trying not to sound as if he were pulling rank, “and used to examining suspects, but no one here is viewing Mr. Hassler as a suspect—we just need to know the full circumstances of his discovery, and there’s no way of telling in advance what may or may not be relevant to our judging the merits of his claim. Go ahead, Jake, and relax—there’s no meter running in here.”

  Reassured, Jake sat back, wearing an appreciative look that told Mitch he was savoring all the attention.

  “Well, so this Ansel came over as the dinner party was breaking up and offered to help me go through Grandpa’s house the next day—ya know, to see if there was anything I wanted—any souvenirs or special things that I might not be exactly entitled to because of the Erpfs’ lien but nobody in his family would give a hoot about if I wanted them. ‘Except maybe Vampira over there,’ he said to me, meaning his sister, Margot. ‘Let’s go through the place together before she can get her hands on it.’ Margot runs their family realty business, he told me, while their folks mostly travel now and enjoy themselves. I don’t think Ansel and Margot get along—she probably figures he’s the family leech. Anyway, that’s my take on them.”

  Mitch nodded slowly.

  “And you didn’t think that was a little…pushy, on Ansel’s part?”

  “Nope,” said Jake, “I figured he was just being neighborly—and he knew the house a lot better than I did after all his visits with Grandpa Otto over the years.”

  So Jake accepted Ansel’s offer, and the two of them went through the house from bottom to top the next morning, segregating a few trinkets that caught Jake’s attention, among them a silver-framed photograph dated 1896 of what was probably the entire labor force of the Hassler Tannery gathered in front of a large white workhouse. On their way upstairs, while Jake was lingering in the second-floor drawing room, Ansel sat down at the old grand piano at one end of the high-ceilinged chamber “and fooled around with it for a few minutes,” Jake related. “He said the room had great acoustics, and even though the piano was pretty rinky-dink by now, it still sounded good because the Erpfs kept it tuned, figuring they’d own it soon enough.” Otto told him that for a long time they held recitals in that room—because the Hassler family used to have traveling musicians as lodgers on the fourth and fifth floors, and they’d perform for friends and neighbors in exchange for free rent. They were still doing it when Otto was a boy, but the practice stopped during the First World War and never resumed.

  Eventually, Jake and Ansel reached the attic, and a dark, musty coop it was, with only one small window to illuminate it. “Ansel went back to his house to grab a flashlight so we could see this big jumble of whatnot—it just looked like a whole lot of crapola.” After a cursory inspection, they were about to abort their mission when Ansel, over in the far corner, “where I could hardly see him—he says, ‘Whoa, baby,’ and lifts up a folded-over, moth-eaten old carpet that was hiding a great big wooden trunk with kind of a rounded top—”

  For the first time, Jake’s folksy rendition set off an alarm bell in Mitch’s head. “Excuse me, Mr. Hassler,” he asked, “but did Ansel—”

  “You could call me Jake, if that’s okay—”

  “Sure—and I’m Mitch, okay? Tell me, Jake, did Ansel seem to you to have known about that trunk’s being there even before the two of you went up to the attic?”

  Jake considered the question. “You mean like was he leading me to it or something?”

  “Well, something like that.”

  “Nahhh,” Jake said. “I think he was just poking around down at that end—and he was holding the flashlight, so he could—”

  “Okay, go ahead—I didn’t mean to distract you.”

  “Hey, not to worry.” The trunk latch came undone with a gentle tug, Jake went on, and the two of them lifted the top carefully, its hinges creaking in protest. Greeted by a rank aroma of rot and mildew, which lingered in the hermetic chamber, they proceeded to examine the trunk’s c
ontents by flashlight. If any jewelry or other precious heirlooms had ever been in there, they’d been removed long before. What remained were some neatly folded but now shredding garments of white silk and lace along with tied bundles of papers and letters, several photo albums, a metronome, two crocheted afghans, and, finally, at the bottom, a cedar box, about two feet long by a foot and a half wide and a foot high. “This beauty,” Jake said, giving it a fond, proprietary pat as it sat in front of him on the table.

  The box lid yielded as readily as the trunk top had, its cedar fragrance still detectable, and its contents of books and papers presented no immediate clue of their nature. But something, perhaps the workmanship of the box and the careful arrangement of the material inside, suggested to its discoverers that the container deserved further examination. Ansel offered to carry it, but Jake instinctively recognized it as properly his chore, so he lugged the heavy box down five flights of stairs and deposited it on the dining room table.

  “This is exactly what was in it,” Jake said, standing in front of his chair and slowly lifting its lid. Reflexively the three C&W men at the table rose in unison and, thoroughly spellbound, gathered behind Jake for a closeup view. Owen Whittaker surrendered his chair to Harry Cubbage, who slid right into it and invited Jake to complete his show-and-tell.

  It all came out in a single, odd-shaped armload. The core of the bulky pile was a pair of what resembled old, gray accounting ledgers. Sandwiched between them was a batch of papers of assorted sizes, and on top was a small, leatherbound book with an envelope tied to it by a loosely knotted, faded blue length of ribbon. “Here’s what we got here,” said Jake, carefully separating the elements and introducing them one by one. Mitch pressed in closer as a surge of excitement began to pulse through him.