Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  On the third of the four legs of her riverside route, it struck her that she was practically the only runner in sight, though there were a few walkers and an occasional sitter on the benches along the east side of the promenade. There was no runner up ahead of her, but a guy in sweatpants, T-shirt, and sunglasses was trailing her at a distance of perhaps five hundred feet. The gap between them had begun to narrow, she sensed—not surprising since she had set a moderate pace and intended to reserve a burst of energy for the last leg of the run.

  As she drew opposite the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the top of the park incline near Ninetieth Street on the drive, the lace on her right running shoe came loose, and she pulled up at an empty bench to attend to it. Obliquely she noticed that the male jogger, now only about a football field’s length behind her, also drew to a halt, seemingly to catch his breath while he looked out at the river and some passing small craft. After a moment, she resumed her run and waited perhaps twenty seconds before glancing over her shoulder as unobtrusively as possible. And there the man was, gliding along smoothly no more than two hundred feet behind her.

  Ahead, the park looked deserted, and, growing uneasy now, she sped up to avoid being overtaken. Was he actively pursuing her or just moving along at his own accelerated pace? The latter, surely. She kept losing ground to him the harder she ran, and suddenly she spotted another man to her right, also in running gear, angling down the park slope in her direction, almost as if—it could not just be her imagination—on a course to intersect with her and the runner fast closing in on her from behind.

  Dread now seized her and drove her long legs all out. Was this an assault by a pair of rapists working in tandem? It couldn’t be a robbery—joggers usually carried nothing more than an ID on them. She could see the man to her right only as a blur now as she lowered her head and kept pumping as hard as she could until finally, she could see a cluster of park-goers joining the promenade from the Ninety-Sixth Street access. Heart pounding, she found shelter in their midst as the two male runners flew past her without a sideways glance. There must have been thirty or forty feet between them the last time she glanced in their direction, suggesting they were not confederates out to do her harm. Still, it had given her a fright. Stupid.

  The next day, after her duties at Lincoln Center, she biked over to the Central Park reservoir for her usual three laps around the course. Her brief but intense scare of the previous day now seemed a silly overreaction, but it was nonetheless comforting to be out among a lot of joggers, though annoying as usual when walkers refused to cede them the waterside lane.

  Midway through her second lap, near the reservoir’s westernmost point, which afforded her a sweeping vista of the Fifth Avenue skyline, Clara became aware of another woman, not quite as tall as herself, pulling alongside and matching her stride for stride for a while. She was wearing a Kelly green T-shirt with “Manhattan College” stenciled on it in white letters, white running shorts with the same green piping, and a white sweatband. The only thing Clara knew about Manhattan College was that it was not in Manhattan. Somewhere up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, she thought idly. If she were more extroverted, she might have asked the woman to explain the seeming misnomer, but for her to put such a trivial question to a passing stranger was unthinkable.

  The stranger, though, did not pass her. “Great weather,” she said after another ten or fifteen seconds and without looking sideways at Clara.

  Was this an idle pleasantry in the middle of the park in the middle of a lovely New York afternoon, or was it a come-on? “The best,” Clara replied disinterestedly and without a lateral look, but imperceptibly slowed her pace in the hope the woman would slide past her. She didn’t.

  After another short interval, her unwanted accompanist said, “You’re Clara, right?” This time she turned toward her, revealing a narrow face and engaging smile. Her question sounded like a declaration of familiarity. An unwanted one.

  Must be someone on the Lincoln Center staff she had never taken much notice of or possibly a fellow Columbia scholar or perhaps a secretary in the music department.

  “Sorry—do we know each other?” Clara asked politely, picking up the pace again.

  “I don’t think you know me—I’m Betty—Betty Smith, would you believe?”

  “Okay, Betty—but how do you know me?” Clara felt a small stab of alarm, probably a residue from her imaginary run-in the day before with the two male runners along the river. But they had never indicated overt hostile intent—or addressed her by name. Now what was this?

  Betty, or whoever she was, kept smiling and looking ahead. “Well, I’ve seen your picture—some friends showed it to me.”

  What? Now wait a minute—who was this woman? And why did she know Clara’s name? And why was she there, insinuating this was a casual encounter? “What friends?”

  “Friends who want to speak to you,” Betty said. “It’s important.”

  Her anxiety antennae switched on. Speak to her about what? Clara was unsure whether to pull up on the spot and demand an explanation or to keep running and tell her to get away or she’d shout for help. Inertia kept her legs moving. She fought to calm herself. Probably a misunderstanding. Only it didn’t sound that way. She kept quiet, hoping that silence would end their exchange.

  “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, Clara,” the woman said evenly. “It’s a business thing—trust me.”

  Was it an insurance company pitch? A white-slave recruitment? God in heaven, she asked herself, what have I done to deserve being harassed in public like this?

  “Whoever you are or whatever you’re up to, would you please leave me alone?” Her panic attack was ill disguised.

  “Not until I deliver the message I was sent to give you,” said so-called Betty Smith, panting. “Just listen for a minute and don’t make a scene, or I’ll get sacked for screwing this up.”

  Christ, now she was accosting her with a plea for sympathy! Was she really a novice at this stalking game or just playing one? “Okay—get it over with,” Clara said, pulling up short.

  “The people who sent me want to hire you—as a scout—to let them know how William Tell’s health is. That’s the first part of the message I’m supposed to deliver—it doesn’t make any sense to me, but they said you’d—”

  The woman cut herself off and waited for a reaction from Clara. When there was none, she continued. “My people also said they would like to buy Mr. Tell and put him to work, if his health permits. Do you get what that’s about?”

  Clara would not respond. The message, unthreatening on the surface but with an undertow of menace, sent a chill through her. Some people—people who had no business knowing—were up on the whole Beethoven scenario and her professional involvement with C&W’s secret authentication proceedings. And they wanted her to betray her own husband’s company and let them know if the Beethoven manuscript was real or bogus. What sheer stupidity. What supreme gall. But at least they hadn’t kidnapped her—yet. Or were those two guys yesterday in jogging sweats really on her case? Would they have tried for a daylight snatch if the coast had been clear? Her mind raced. “How did you know where to find me?” she asked sharply.

  “I was given instructions and your description—with a photo. That’s all I know, honest.”

  Lord in heaven, these creatures had been actively spying on her, they knew her habits and movements, they—they had to be ruthless crooks or something. “Did your friends send a couple of guys out yesterday to find me and give me the same message—or rough me up to scare me into cooperating—or something?”

  “Nobody told me that,” the woman said as they leaned on the reservoir railing. “I don’t think they’re into violence. It’s a business operation—a big company, I think. And they’ll pay you a whole lot of money, Clara. I think you should hear their offer. What do you say?”

  “I say tell them to save their money bec
ause what they’re after isn’t for sale—it’s going to be auctioned if and when that’s appropriate—that’s been reported in the media.” Clara flashed the Betty person an angry look. “Now get the hell away from me, Miss Whoever You Are, or I’ll definitely yell for the cops.”

  “Hey, calm down—and you don’t have to get nasty about it, either, I’m just doing my job. Besides, they know about the auction—I think they want to buy the thing before it gets put up for sale, but they need someone on the inside to tell them if it’s worth it.”

  That was better—not so desperate-sounding. More calculated. Clara turned away and resumed running, nearly at a sprint. “Tell them I’m not interested,” she yelled over her shoulder.

  “They’ll call you tomorrow morning—you should listen to them.”

  “Get lost!” Clara shouted as passing heads spun around to see what the fuss was about.

  She tried to calm herself on the bike ride home. Who could have mentioned her name to whoever these sleazeballs were? Who knew about her involvement with Tell? Only Mitch and her parents, who certainly knew enough not to bruit it about. Well, there were the people in Mitch’s office, of course, starting with Harry and Gordy, but they’d never—oh, Jesus, there was Lolly, who could have blabbed it to anyone, to any of the friends she’s hitting on for her wacky collective bid to benefit Lincoln Center.

  But why would Lolly even bring her name up—she was just a minor consultant to C&W. Same with Mac Quarles, who was contractually bound to keep a lid on everything he had to do with Tell. Wait—what about Professor Aurelio? He knew she was in on it—and hadn’t he just asked her to keep him closely abreast on developments? Could he be some kind of an academic poseur? Or just trying to cash in on one of his students’ special entrée to the hottest game in classical music at the moment?

  It was all a great muddle—anything and everything suddenly seemed possible. She got home feeling sore and definitely violated. There were demons abroad in the land, and some of them appeared to be on her case. She double-locked and bolted the front door to the apartment.

  {10}

  His Eminence occupied a third-floor corner office at the Institute of Music in Berlin, a square-block, five-story pile of rough gray stone in the rococo style of the late nineteenth century. The two north windows in Emil Reinsdorf’s cluttered lair overlooked the treetops of the Tiergarten, still fully leafed in late summer, while his east windows were perpetually shadowed by the corporate shafts of steel and glass that had risen phoenixlike in recent years of frenetic postwar reconstruction over the rebuilt Potsdamer Platz.

  “Once upon a time it was quite serene around here,” Reinsdorf said, taking Mitch’s hand and directing him to a well-worn armchair, “until the Wall went away and the reconstruction craze came. They’ve been building a tunnel under the park for years—we’ve spent millions soundproofing this place. A bunker mentality sets in after a while—if you’ll forgive the politically incorrect allusion.”

  It was the musicologist’s only reference to the dark German past, and he did not posture in the least as defender of any master-race kultur. Wreathed in his own cigarette smoke, broad shoulders slumped, Reinsdorf was an arresting figure, with a full head of light gray hair cut short in the military manner, a shrubby mustache tobacco-tinged at the bottom, and heavy, horn-rimmed glasses with thick lenses that made his eyes look bleary and elusive. His office was forbiddingly spartan except for the framed drawings of flowers and plants that filled the walls and caught Mitch’s eye with their vibrant colors and fluid lines.

  “I see you’re thinking I should hang portraits of the great composers instead,” Reinsdorf said, catching Mitch’s peripheral glance and giving a phlegmy laugh. “Yes, well—that’s what comes of having a former botanist for a wife. My Hilde decided she’d rather draw than study flora, so she left university to become an artist and nearly starved—until she went to work for a grubby advertising company, the fate I rescued her from. She repaid me in part with these lovely things—we give prints of them to friends at Christmas.”

  “She’s very gifted.”

  “Unfortunately, the marketplace seems to favor nature’s own over man-made floral renderings, however exquisite. Hilde has adjusted.” Reinsdorf motioned toward the corner, where a large, black-and-white-mottled bulldog lay beside the radiator. “That’s the rest of my family—Scherzo likes it in here despite all my smoke.” There was no apology for inflicting the toxic miasma on Mitch’s lungs. “Now let’s hear all about our maestro’s miraculously resurrected Tenth Symphony—which, remember, I’ve already told the press is a very bad joke.”

  “Understandably,” said Mitch. “And my company fully shared your reaction—at first. But there is an accumulating body of evidence that’s hard for us to dismiss lightly.” He handed Reinsdorf copies of the forensics report from the Veritas people and the letters from Nina Hassler, Hans Nägeli, and Archduke Rudolph. “Perhaps you might review these overnight.”

  Reinsdorf nodded, then dropped the papers indifferently on his cluttered desktop. “But first tell me, please,” he asked, “why is it that I should lend my name to this bizarre enterprise of yours—which, even assuming good faith on your part, our esteemed national government has decreed would best be conducted under its own supervision—dunderheads that they are?”

  Permitting himself a half smile at the subversive crack, Mitch was ready with an answer. “We appreciate your government’s concern but believe it’s misplaced. We think any patriotic German musicologist invited to examine the evidence should feel conscience-bound to do so—in view of the leading historic role your countrymen have played in creating this art form. And since no one is better qualified than you are to make the necessary judgment—which, after all, should not be left to lesser minds—we’re very hopeful that you’ll participate quite willingly. And we’re prepared, incidentally, to compensate you more than amply for your services.”

  Reinsdorf drew on the last of his cigarette, then slowly, thoughtfully stubbed it out. “You make several good points,” he said and offered no rebuttal. “Come, my Scherzie needs to be walked. We’ll have a bite in the park—there’s a nice little beer garden I like at one of the ponds. Only don’t be offended by the foul smells en route—it’s our beloved Turkish immigrants, barbecuing their wretched goat meat on every lawn in the Tiergarten. If Schliemann were still around, he could take them all back to Troy with him.”

  Over lunch, Reinsdorf recounted his student and junior faculty days at the University of Vienna, when he fell in love with Beethoven and haunted all the places the maestro was known to have lived, eaten, and performed. It was in Vienna where the young scholar wrote the first volume of his Maestro trilogy that earned him a professorship at the Berlin Conservatory.

  “I moved here very reluctantly—as a non-German, I feared I would always be treated as an outsider. The pace and feeling were entirely different from Vienna, and living in a divided city during the Cold War was no picnic.” It was nothing like the heady prewar days of the Weimar Republic, he said, when free-floating Bohemianism had collided with the brutishness of the budding Nazi Reich. In time, though, he grew to feel at home in the divided old capital and became a West German citizen—“pretty much a career requisite.” He cut off a piece of his knockwurst and fed it to the quietly slavering bulldog at his feet. “All of which may help explain why this so-called Tell Symphony has stirred up so much resentment here. We need our gods badly—the good gods, anyway—and are hopelessly proprietary when it comes to our master composers. So it’s been doubly painful to watch others—alien infidels, you might say—pawing through an alleged new cache of Beethoven’s holy writ. And suppose it were to wind up in the wrong hands for cheap exploitation?”

  Mitch nodded but made no attempt to rationalize either Jake Hassler’s making off with the Tell manuscript or Cubbage & Wakeham’s complicity in helping him try to exploit it. Instead he sat respectfully watching the preoc
cupied old scholar drain his mug of beer and light a Marlboro. “I’ve reached the age,” he said without a context, “when I look to Beethoven more for guidance in spiritual matters than for sensory satisfaction. Does that surprise you?”

  “A little,” Mitch said. “I didn’t know he was an authority in that area.”

  “No—not an authority—a believer. He was nearly fifty and had endured—to hear him tell it—far more sorrow than joy in his life when he wrote in his diary, ‘With tranquility, O God, I submit…all my trust in Thy unalterable mercy and goodness.’” Reinsdorf looked quizzically at the ember of his cigarette. “This was the same God, mind you, who had bestowed him with the spark of soaring genius and then denied him use of the sensory faculty he needed most to apply that gift. Where was the mercy and goodness in that? Why, I’ve long wondered, does such a God deserve the loving submission that Ludwig gave him?”

  Mitch felt himself turned into the captive ear for a savant’s running internal monologue. Was he meant to reply? Was the professor dissing the composer? Or God? Or both—or neither? “Could it be that Beethoven saw his life as an ongoing test,” Mitch offered, reluctant to risk a fatuous reply, “rather like Job? I mean that so long as he refrained from cursing his deepening deafness, God would let him keep on creating masterpieces.”

  A series of dry, wheezy coughs rattled the professor’s insides. When the spasm subsided, he replied, “Would that be your definition of a good and merciful God?”