She eased herself back against the pale silk cushions. “Needless to say, Ansel has not been told of this precaution on their part—for fear it would further unhinge him—though, as you perhaps can see by now, it’s a necessary arrangement. That’s why I’m being brutally honest—and painfully so, I can assure you—so that your company might respond accordingly—and perhaps with some compassion.”
“I see,” Mitch said hesitantly. “And shall I take that for a denial that you have any possible motive for wanting Ansel institutionalized?”
“None whatsoever—or I’d never have been so open with you in discussing the trust that our parents created to protect Ansel from himself.”
“But Ansel seems to think you want him put away as permanently damaged goods, to be ignored if he ever goes to your parents and divulges your relationship with Felix. That might serve to condemn you, I gather, as unworthy of directing your family’s affairs and continuing as his—would ‘protector’ be the word?”
Margot seemed darkly amused. “‘Protector’ will do, I suppose—but let me disabuse you about Ansel’s vile insinuation that Felix and I are intimately involved. We were brought together years ago out of shared concern for Ansel, and so we have stayed—friends only. The rest is Ansel’s fantasizing—at which he excels, as you may have grasped by now.” She had run out of patience. “Your last question?”
“Since I take it you don’t doubt that Ansel wrote the letter to you from London—”
“Who else? It’s his way of expressing himself—pitch perfect—”
“Then why would he deny to us that he wrote the letter—if it seems so obviously his?”
“Yes, I’ve been wondering the same thing since he phoned me. If I’d had any doubts who wrote it, I’d have called him at once to ask who might be trying to embarrass him this way.” She looked genuinely perplexed.
“Then again,” Clara spoke up for the only time, “his denial may have been true.”
Margot threw her a cauterizing glance. “I suppose anything’s possible.”
{13}
They flew home the next morning after learning that Johnny Winks’s investigators had uncovered no new suspects for them to interview—in particular, anyone who both bore a grudge against Ansel Erpf and knew enough about the inner workings of his half-fried brain to have composed the “confession” letter sent to his sister. Johnny’s operatives had gone so far as to track down Ansel’s ex-wife, Lisa, whom they found sunning her buns and filling her airhead with vintage rock albums on idyllic Santorini in the Aegean, out of touch with her Swiss roots, too rich to still be vindictive toward Ansel and unaware of the Tell Symphony—or so she claimed.
One or possibly all of their interviewees had lied to them, Mitch and Clara agreed on the flight home, but they could not tell the white hats from the black hats. Accordingly, Tell was still not out of the woods as far as Mitch was concerned. To reach that clearing, he would have to resort to measures he considered somewhere between distasteful and hateful. Ordering Winks and his shadowy crew to tail Margot and Felix for a while was foul and expensive business, but trying to penetrate the files of Ansel’s London shrink for a clinical readout on his mental state was downright putrid—and could even prove disastrous, given the possible penalties if the offense were detected. How much would it cost for Johnny’s people to bribe Dr. Kohler’s assistant for a photocopy of Ansel’s file? And how much would it cost Mitch in self-respect?
Seeking expiation in advance, he told Clara his plan over breakfast when they were back on Riverside Drive.
“But that’s criminal activity,” she said. “We don’t do that.”
“I don’t see what’s so bloody awful about our trying to get to the bottom of it all.”
“Yes, you do—and you just want me to buy into your turning rogue. I thought you and I were actually civilized human beings who know right from wrong and—and are well enough off not to have to do sleazy things like invading someone’s privacy—”
“Determining Ansel’s true clinical condition would not involve stealing anything, actually—it would just be a form of self-protection for the firm. And I really don’t see how that’s any worse than what the cops do—they’re allowed to lie to suspects in order to trap them into confessions.”
“Sorry to sound sanctimonious, Mitch, but two wrongs never make a right. This isn’t like the man I married—Beethoven’s not worth selling your soul for.”
“Shit,” he said and went off to sulk for an hour before leaving for the office.
At which point, as he delivered a perfunctory kiss goodbye, Clara relented. “I’m not agreeing with you, but I promise not to call you a blackguard for doing what you feel you have to do.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “But you’ll have to do something for me in return.”
“What?” he asked irritably.
It had been three months since they had both put aside their last traces of reluctance and agreed to start a family. At first they had gone at it indiscriminately, like wild creatures in heat, but without success. Then, given her age, she took a more scientific approach, closely tracking her days of ovulation and targeting them for morning and evening couplings in the hope that industry would achieve what spontaneity had not. It was proving rather a chore. “We’ve been shagging overtime and nothing’s happened,” she said. “I think maybe it’s time for you to visit a fertility specialist. Your equipment’s easier to check out.”
“Isn’t it a little early in the game?”
She nipped at his ear. “It’s not a character flaw, hon. It’s biochemistry. All you do is hand them a lovin’ spoonful—in a container, I suppose—and they study it under the microscope to count your little guys and check to see if they’re wiggly enough.”
“I believe the word is motility.”
“Oh, you’ve been reading up on it behind my back. What a darling!” She grabbed his hand. “You’ll do it, then?” Her smile, normally a radiant enough thing, now extended ear to ear.
“Bring us a paper cup, luv,” he said in his best Michael Caine East Endese.
.
at the office, harry was cranky over Mitch’s equivocal report on his latest sortie abroad and balked at throwing more money into the pot to explore Ansel Erpf’s psychopathology. But in the end, he came around. “There’s too goddam much riding on this thing,” he decided, “for us to sit back and pray that we’re dealing with your garden-variety psycho.” It was agreed, though, that Gordy had to be left out of this particular loop if Mitch meant to pursue an extralegal course of action that C&W’s house counsel could not be a party to under the canons of judicial ethics.
Sedge Wakeham, C&W’s London partner, was another matter altogether. Harry called him to seek his blessing for the nefarious tactics to be employed on British soil and ask for whatever cash had to be disbursed to Johnny Winks for prying into Dr. Kohler’s file on Ansel.
“’S not cricket,” Sedge admonished. “Shouldn’t mix into this sort of nasty business.”
“I couldn’t agree more, old top,” Harry wheedled, “but sometimes there’s no choice. Just think of the Opium War and the Raj—nasty affairs, both. Or the Elgin Marbles—they’d be scattered all over the Peloponnesus by now if you chaps hadn’t heroically stolen them.” He left out the part about Queen Victoria closing her eyes and thinking of England when mounted by Bertie.
It took Johnny Winks a mere forty-eight hours to infiltrate Dr. Kohler’s file on Ansel. “The office manager says her folks are about to wind up in the poorhouse,” he reported to Mitch, “so she needs every farthing she can lay her hands on, otherwise she’d never violate such a sacred trust. Cost you three thousand quid—I talked her down from five.”
Winks, in his beastly way, earned his fee as usual. But Clara was right, of course—this whole thing was warping Mitch, edging him by degrees toward the dark side. The only saving grace would be to get to the
bottom of it all on the double. And happily, the bribe to the psychiatrist’s assistant and the stakeout across from Felix Utley’s apartment behind the Hotel Eden au Lac both bore rapid results.
The faxed file copy on Ansel’s psychiatric condition, though largely cryptic, contained the telling comment, “Subject suffers from spells of pathological lying.” It seemed corroborative of what Margot and Felix had contended about the authorship of the confessional letter Ansel had denied writing. “But even pathological liars don’t lie all the time,” Mitch cautioned Harry. “They can be selective about it.”
So the question stubbornly persisted: Which part of Ansel’s story was true—all, some, or none?
The other intelligence report from Winks’s field people, however, complicated Mitch’s task of winnowing the truth by appearing to verify Ansel’s claim about the ongoing intimacy between his sister and Felix Utley. At 3:30 p.m. on the third day of Winks’s Zurich surveillance, who should park her customized Prussian blue Beamer up the block from Felix’s apartment house and pay him a visit but Margot Lenz, in dark glasses and a designer scarf hiding her hair.
Mitch and Harry shared this portion of Johnny’s report with their lawyer. Gordy proposed a wait-and-see response to the Ansel letter. “The guy hasn’t actually done anything yet about his threat—and he really may not have written the thing.”
“The trouble with waiting and seeing,” said Harry, “is that if Ansel—whatever he suffers from clinically—goes public as threatened, assuming it really is his letter, he’ll have succeeded in smearing the Tell manuscript so badly that it can’t ever be fully sanitized—and can’t be auctioned as unquestionably authentic—and we come out of this with something a lot worse-smelling than egg on our faces.” Why not, Harry asked, beat the other side to the punch—whoever the other side was—by taking away Ansel’s threat, real or not? Show the Swiss government the letter, stressing its apparent author’s unfortunate history of emotional instability, but still label Ansel what he appeared to be—a sleazy blackmailer—and a horrendous liar in the bargain. Normally, of course, C&W would have a moral obligation to disclose the contents of the alleged Ansel letter, however wacky it was, to any potential bidders, who would be entitled to know about any challenges to the legitimacy of an item on offer. But out of kindness to an obviously disturbed soul and a wish not to embarrass his family and the Swiss people, Harry proposed, “we’d remain silent about this unfortunate incident and its alleged perpetrator”—provided, he added, that the Erpfs dropped their title claim to the manuscript and the Zurich cantonal court promptly probated Otto’s will, allowing C&W’s auction to proceed on schedule. “And we’ll threaten, if they won’t go along, to take the story public ourselves to maintain our squeaky-clean reputation.”
Gordy paused a respectful moment before demurring. “The thing is, Ansel claims he’s being victimized as much as we are, so if we go whining to the Swiss authorities about the letter and their need to bring charges against him for fraud, he could turn around and sue us for slander, and the resulting publicity might achieve exactly what Ansel admits he’d like to accomplish—kill off our auction. We’d be the ones, not Ansel, planting the seeds of doubt about the authenticity of the symphony.”
“Whoa-whoa-whoa!” Harry bellowed. “I didn’t say we’d actually make a public disclosure of Ansel’s letter, We’d just lay the threat on the table as a potentially huge embarrassment to the Swiss government and the Erpf family unless they help us out here. It would be a blow to their national pride if the whole idea that the great Beethoven had actually composed a symphony in their honor suddenly goes up in smoke because of this letter. Let the other side, whoever the hell it is who’s screwing with us, figure out if we’d actually go through with revealing the letter and then try to debunk it—or not. Let’s find out who’s willing to call whose bluff.”
“It could work, I suppose,” said Gordy, “but I wouldn’t recommend risking it.”
“Duly noted—you’re off the hook.” Harry turned to Mitch. “This is back in your bailiwick, Lieutenant Columbo—you get the dirty end of the stick since you haven’t figured out yet what’s really going down here. Just tell Margot Lenz you’re sorry but you’re under orders to take the letter to the Swiss police even if it means staining her family’s name.”
Mitch labored to check his temper. “I get it,” he said, “and I fully understand your anxiety—the company’s reputation and future are at stake here. But I think your counter-bluff strategy could blow up in our faces. It’ll only provoke the Swiss if they think we’re out to browbeat them into giving up on the Tell. Their courts could be pressured into sitting on Otto’s will till kingdom come—and their government could call for a worldwide boycott of the stolen Tell—and file a criminal complaint against Jake in our courts and name us as accessories—”
“Not if we’re bluffing,” Harry protested, “and don’t go public with the letter.”
“But if we bluff and they don’t buy it, they’ll know we’re only paper tigers and will probably come at us all the harder to block the auction. I say we sit tight, as Gordy suggests.”
“That’s your opinion,” Harry snapped, hot at being rebuked by his two subordinates. “And you’re both overruled. I’m instructing you to do this, Mitchell.”
Mitch paused to measure his response. “If you’re so sure it’s the right step, then I respectfully suggest that you do it yourself. I’m not paid enough to carry out orders that I honestly believe could bring the company down.”
“You may not get paid at all if you opt out on this.”
“Then so be it,” Mitch said and marched out of the proprietor’s baroque office.
“Good for you,” Clara bucked him up that night. “I’ll bet the US Attorney’s Office has a staff opening with your name on it.”
But the next day dawned with no pink slip in Mitch’s office mail or phone message of doom from Harry, so he went back to business, letting the Ansel puzzle hang unresolved.
Two days later, Philippe Saulnier called Gordy from the Swiss Consulate to say that the probate division of the Zurich cantonal court had just rubber-stamped Otto Hassler’s will. “We Swiss are not in the business of going out of our way to antagonize the rest of the world,” he added. “And I believe the Erpf family has no further plans to pursue the matter. If your firm feels some reciprocal gesture of goodwill is in order, it would likely be accepted.”
In passing Mitch the news that the Swiss had caved, rewarding their joint cautionary counsel to Harry, Gordy remarked, “If I had to guess, my money says Margot gave up the ghost because she knew you were up to speed on her love life, and she didn’t want to risk having it bandied about. Good work, tiger—and even better for not genuflecting to His Nibs—stress makes him unlovable sometimes.”
Clara produced a bottle of Dom Pérignon that night and toasted Mitch for his victory via patience on the Swiss front. “Harry should thank his stars we’ve got enough fuck-you money—that’s Lolly’s delightful term for it, by the way, not mine—for you to resist him when he turns into Mr. Hyde.” She took another sip of bubbly and rested her head on his shoulder. “Now we just have to stop worrying ourselves silly over the Beethoven. Old Ludwig’s temperament may have been a disaster zone, but whatever caused him to compose and then kill off the Tell Symphony, no one can convince me he’s not the one who wrote it.”
“That’s still the problem, hon—you’re totally invested in it now. I can’t afford to be, at least not until I know who wrote the letter to Margot over Ansel’s name—and why.”
“I don’t think it matters anymore. Somebody’s just trying to scare us off.”
.
the thin, tightly wrapped package addressed to Clara bore a return address in Berlin but not the identity of the sender.
“What’s this?” Mitch asked, flipping through the mail. “Who do we know in Germany?”
“The Reinsdorfs?�
�
“Possibly.” He handed her the envelope. “Make sure there’s nothing explosive inside.”
Clara shrugged off the gibe but undid the parcel carefully. Inside was a simply framed, exquisite floral painting in watercolors. The outlines of the plant, an herblike clump of leaves and buds, dense and woolly white, were etched with such precision that the whole effect was one of irresistible tactility. Her impulse was to lift the picture closer and sample its fragrance. “Oh, my,” she cried softly. “How perfectly lovely.”
The attached note read, “For Clara, a small bouquet of edelweiss—I think often of the kindness you offered during our visit to your shores.” It was signed, “Fondly, Hilde Reinsdorf.”
Mitch examined the painting with an admiring nod. “Yes, she’s quite good—the walls in Emil’s office are covered with her work. She was a starving commercial artist when he—”
“Oh, my,” Clara said again, this time in a different tone. “Sorry—I just noticed the postscript. She says Emil’s in the hospital—‘His lung cancer has returned, worse than before, it would appear. Pray with me for him.’” Clara communed with the edelweiss for a moment. “How sad. She never mentioned it when we were together.”
Remembering the old scholar’s incessant smoking, Mitch was hardly surprised. Still, the news was depressing. Emil Reinsdorf was a lively, brilliant man, and his role on the Tell panel was memorable, if less than ennobling. Of Emil’s prodigious knowledge, there could not be the slightest doubt. Indeed, word of his serious illness prompted Mitch to consider approaching the musicologist briefly one final time. So long as the “confession” letter from London that Ansel had firmly denied writing remained a mystery, all bets on the Tell were perilous, so far as Mitch was concerned. Before it was too late, he had better get Emil’s take on the letter, in view of the German scholar’s relatively tepid endorsement of the Tell’s legitimacy. He asked Clara whether it would be callous of him to disturb Emil if he were truly on his last legs.
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