Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  “Our guess is that the broker brother forwarded the file to Helvetica’s private banking department,” Johnny told Mitch, “giving the bank, its acquisitive Asian client, and your Mr. Drummond all the ammo they needed to come after you. Nice bit of horseplay. But that’s over.”

  Mitch, still officially restricted to his hotel room, asked, “How come?”

  “I phoned the head of private banking at Helvetica Reliance,” Johnny said, “and told him who I was—our existence is no secret to the bank’s security people—and that unless they backed off this power play, destroyed the file they stole from you, confessed to Scotland Yard they had passed along corrupted intelligence, and told Mr. Got Rocks in Hong Kong to forget about it, I would promptly reveal to the American, British, French, and German governments the names of one hundred of their citizens who hold secret accounts at the bank—and if it wasn’t done in two days, we’d turn over another hundred and keep on going. Probably cause a run on their private accounts and lose them billions in deposits.”

  “But how the hell did you get hold of the names of their secret account holders?”

  “I didn’t,” Johnny said. “But I’m known far and wide as one nasty piece of work, so the bank can’t take the chance that I’m bullshitting.”

  Because of the underhanded manner in which C&W got the goods on Mark Aurelio—and in light of its need to prevent Clara’s potentially embarrassing “Ludwig” file from being introduced into evidence—no legal action could be taken against the Columbia professor. But the day after Mitch got home, Clara phoned Mac Quarles to congratulate him on his recent elevation to director of the Curtis Institute of Music. Then, as artfully as possible, she asked if he happened to be on close terms with any of the heavy hitters on the Columbia music department faculty. “I am indeed, Miss Clara,” Mac said with his usual gallantry. “My good ol’ Amherst roommate Al Yates is finishing a five-year sentence as departmental chairman there this spring.”

  “Brilliant. Now I have another question if you don’t mind. Can unethical conduct be held against an associate professor who’s coming up for a vote on tenure?”

  “Absolutely,” Mac told her. “Why? Somebody hittin’ on you up there, Clara?”

  “You might say—but I’m in an awkward spot to blow the whistle on him.” And she told him the whole sordid story.

  “Fear not, dear lady,” Mac said. “I’ll pass the word.”

  A week later she received a terse email from Mark Aurelio, advising her that he had accepted a tenured full professorship in Iowa State’s Department of Fine Arts to begin that fall. Her doctoral thesis would be supervised “effective immediately” by the incoming music departmental chair. “The doctoral committee, you’ll be happy to learn,” he added, “has approved your change of topic—good luck with it.”

  {15}

  By the time Inspector Riggs had dropped by Mitch’s hotel room to apologize for the “bit of a cock-up” over C&W’s conduct in the Tell matter and tell him he was free to leave the country, he had the Nina #2 documents back from the Veritas forensics laboratory, along with their judgment that the items were more than likely authentic. The paper and ink dated from the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the same hand had surely composed the two Nina letters.

  Johnny Winks and his people, however, had run into trouble trying to find official records that might corroborate either the dispatch or receipt of Nina’s death notice that Jake Hassler had lately produced. At the Zurich Registry, the resident bureaucrats said that no notice of births, marriages, deaths, or commercial transactions was taken if they occurred outside of the canton, no matter that they involved citizens of that jurisdiction. That left only the clerk’s office in Mittendrinnen on the banks of the Danube, where the death notice seemed to have originated. But after canvasing the Austrian government’s agencies and archives, they could not discover any extant village by that name or any record of there ever having been one.

  “The only possibility we’ve come up with,” Johnny reported to Mitch on the phone after his agents’ failed search, “is that such a place might have existed before the Danube flooded pretty badly in the early 1830s. There’s a couple of newspaper references to the waters having swept away three small riverfront settlements, but no community names were listed. So probably no records survived the flood.” It was just conceivable, though, he said, that the middle one of the three little settlements had been known locally as Mittendrinnen.

  The untraceability of Nina’s Austrian death notice left Mitch irritable. Here was the chance for a real clincher, but the best his crack investigator could manage was no better than a remote possibility. “But aren’t the Veritas findings conclusive enough for you, sweetie?” Clara had pressed him after his flight home and ardent embrace of forgiveness for her Aurelio blunder.

  “Nope,” he said. “Just because they’re made of authentically old materials doesn’t prove that they’re what they seem. They could still be phony—and so could Nina’s first letter—and the archduke’s letter and Nägeli’s—all painstaking, beautifully executed inventions.”

  Why was he being so damn obstinate? Clara kept asking herself as she shopped along Broadway the next morning. And why did she so want the whole business resolved in a positive way? Nobody could be sure, until the music was finally and properly performed, that it constituted superior artistry, let alone attained the sublime heights of Beethoven’s best work, but what a lovely consummation it would be! Was she being, as Mitch more than hinted, a fuzzy-headed romantic about it all? Doubtless, his detached approach was far more sensible and, well, essential where the auction house was concerned.

  Her mind skipped about until it focused on the two suicides that had reportedly occurred nearly two centuries apart and had lately become woven into the Tell story—Nina Hassler’s and Ansel Erpf’s. If not for the both of them, Nina as its preserver and Ansel as its recoverer, there would be no Tell symphony vexing them now. How sad that the both of them had sunk to a point in their lives where nothing mattered more than putting an end to their misery. Ansel’s case struck her as the more poignant, if only for proving that you could be blessed with all of life’s material advantages and still wind up a soul bereft. It made her quadruply grateful for the happiness she had found with Mitch—even if no child ever came to further enrich their shared joie de vivre.

  Finally, she found herself reflecting on Marie Hassler’s pathetic life. Did she deserve pity or contempt for remaining within a household that treated her so shabbily? Or might it all really be, as Mitch feared, an invention from top to bottom, and there was no Marie Hassler—and Nina Hassler was no more than a duly recorded name that somebody had decided to exploit. But why? The most plausible answer was the one she had once broached to Mitch—to give the Tell discovery a context. She circled back to the Nina-Marie gravestone story. Mitch, incorrigible skeptic that he was, might be right: it was all too neatly packaged. Then all at once she knew what had to be done to validate or finally demolish his doubts. If you could forge documents like Nina #1 and #2, why not a gravestone?

  “Call Johnny Winks,” she told Mitch excitedly over her cellphone, “and have him take a closer look at the Nina-Marie headstone.”

  “Why, hon?”

  “Because maybe there’s nobody buried under it—and never was—which would lend weight to your qualms about this whole thing. Maybe whoever put together the whole Tell scam, if that’s what it is, was equally capable of installing a make-believe gravestone in the Hassler plot to clinch the whole story.”

  There was a pause on the other end, then a snicker. “Far out,” Mitch said. “Let’s go for it—and if it’s a dud, we can blame it on you.”

  He passed on the brainstorm to Johnny and urged him to take along a bottle of detergent and a rag when he revisited the Hassler family cemetery plot and to phone him directly from the gravesite, assuming there was nobody around to object to the minor sacri
lege.

  “The headstone looks the same as it did to me the last time,” Johnny told him from the cemetery the next day. “Old—very old.”

  “Is the stone anchored solidly in the ground?” Mitch asked. “Give it a little nudge.”

  “I—that’s really not my—hmmm, there is a bit of give there, now that you mention it. But then we’ve had quite a lot of rain here recently.”

  “Try the other headstones in the area—especially the older ones—nineteenth century or before—and see if they’re the same way.”

  None of the other older, nearby headstones Johnny pushed against were comparably unstable. And when he briskly applied the detergent to the surface of the Nina-Marie stone, the grime gradually yielded. Not so with the next dozen headstones of comparable vintage when he rubbed them with the cleaning fluid. “Maybe our stone isn’t as old as it looks,” Winks said. “Maybe we need to find a stonemason to examine it closely.”

  It took three days to find one willing, even for the generous fee offered, to examine the stone and to poke about the gravesite. “He says he doubts it’s been in the ground a hundred and twenty-five years,” Winks advised Mitch. “More like a hundred and twenty-five days.”

  “And the stone itself?”

  “The stone itself is old—stones tend to be—but there are signs the surface area with the inscription has been ground down and touched up—and the lettering’s possibly been redone and sanded to look old.”

  “Do you mean it could be a reused old gravestone that someone’s fixed up?”

  “Could be.”

  “Yes!” Mitch exulted, telling himself God bless Clara’s brains. “Now all we need is a disinterment to see if anyone’s under there.”

  A howl came over the phone. “And how do you propose we do that?”

  “Go to the cemetery office. Say it’s urgent. Tell them what we suspect.”

  “They’ll tell me to—what’s your saying?—go fly a kite. It’s hallowed ground, Yank—and I’m not up for impersonating the fuzz on an official grave-opening expedition.”

  “Then do it without asking. Just bring along a couple of your huskier recruits with long-handle shovels—shouldn’t take them longer than an hour or so.”

  “Mitchell, really now! First Dr. Kohler’s office files, now this. Is nothing sacred?”

  “Look who’s asking,” Mitch said with a laugh. “I guess it’ll have to be done after dark—and very quietly. When’s the next moonless night?”

  Winks gave a grunt. “I’ll check. And what precisely is it we’re to look for?”

  “A coffin, to begin with—or some recognizable fragment thereof. It’s doubtful there’d be much in the way of remains, but some artifact—anything at all—would help. A hank of hair, a fragment of bone, a piece of a dress, jewelry, a keepsake of any sort. And take photos, so they can’t nail you for grave-robbing—only breaking and entering. I used to be a prosecutor.”

  “You’re most considerate, Mitchell.”

  During the weeklong wait for the moon to wane, Mitch was a study in suspended animation. Much as he would have preferred a fairy-tale ending to the story to gratify Clara and fill the C&W coffers, he had not been hired to validate dreams. He was a certified doubter by profession. And the more fantastic the dream, the more pressing his need to track down every loose end and shed every clinging suspicion. He pounded away for hours on the treadmill in their apartment, his heated brain brimming with possibilities. If only Johnny’s crew could unearth a sarcophagus with a well-wrapped Marie mummy inside, it would go far to confirm the whole Tell saga, but a few splinters from a casket or shards of a kneecap might serve almost as well. Finding nothing whatever, though, would trigger a red alert and vindicate his hesitancy to buy into the symphony, lock, stock, and timpani.

  The arrival of the Nina #2 material had gladdened Harry, but prudence dictated postponing jubilation until the Veritas lab had reported its findings. With these in hand now, Mitch’s boss was ready to firm up the tentative auction date for the Tell manuscript and step up the surrounding publicity.

  “I’m thinking it’s time for you to climb down from the fence,” Harry told him, “and put your seal of approval on our little gem.”

  Mitch felt trapped. Until Johnny’s diggers completed their ghoulish assignment, no matter what it disclosed or failed to, thereby justifying the trouble and expense of the graveyard transgression, he did not want to reveal it to Harry for fear of being thought extravagant with the firm’s money and indecisive about committing to the Beethoven validation. But even more, he told himself, he was dedicated to sparing the firm from rashly allowing itself to fall victim of a spectacular hoax. “I’d like to hold up for a few more days,” he said.

  “We have to get this show on the road, pal,” Harry ruled. “You’ve got five days.

  That afternoon, the CEO of Syzygy Studios, a small, freewheeling record company headquartered in San Rafael, California, called Harry with a preemptive bid of $15 million for the Tell, unseen and unheard. “It’s a big risk for us,” Syzygy’s honcho said, “but we can’t afford to get into the auction game—and you may not get a better offer.”

  C&W’s deal with Jake Hassler obliged the firm to bring the offer to him. Owen Whittaker advised his client that the buyout would net him around $7 million, no small fortune for a hardware department supervisor at a lumberyard in outermost New Jersey. “Okay,” Jake said.

  “We don’t think so,” said Harry, whose firm stood to pocket about $2 million after expenses if it cancelled the auction and grabbed the Syzygy offer. “If a small outfit like this is willing to pay up that kind of money, our auction could bring in four or five times that much—possibly more, though nothing’s sure. There’s a lot of buzz out there, from what we hear.”

  Whittaker made Harry agree to a million-dollar guarantee to get Jake to hold his horses.

  Three nights later, with Harry’s deadline to Mitch looming, a cloud-shrouded moon rose over Lake Zurich while at dusk in Manhattan the Emerys holed up in their apartment, draining a bottle of Chablis while listening to Debussy and anxiously waiting for Johnny Winks to phone.

  The ring came shortly before ten New York time, nearly jolting the groggy couple off their loveseat.

  “Les flics nearly nabbed us at the end,” Johnny reported, still short of breath.

  “And?”

  “We dug down ten feet—helluva messy business. Our guys were also scared shitless.”

  “And?”

  “Nada, Mitch—not a blessed thing down there—just dirt.”

  .

  harry’s reaction to the news of the empty Nina-Marie gravesite was not quite what Mitch had expected. Far from commending Mitch for assigning Johnny Winks’s crew to the daring task—albeit at double the usual hourly rate due to the risk factor—C&W’s edgy chief executive was testy about it.

  To begin with, Harry thought he should have been consulted before Mitch authorized the substantial outlay, especially since the Tell project was already running way over budget. Mitch countered that it was imprudent for the company to stint on this high-stakes venture, and up until the disinterment initiative, Harry had agreed. “But we’ve got to cap the spending somewhere sometime,” he berated his chief of authentication. “Enough’s enough.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Mitch said. “I thought it was important—and it is.”

  “Check with me first from now on, like it or not. And as for the vital importance of this empty grave business, I think you’re being a wuss. Your caution is commendable, but you’re letting it get out of hand. You’re finding rattlesnakes under every pebble. Look, that tombstone was probably secondhand when the Hasslers had it re-engraved—they probably did it on the cheap, ordering an old stone ground down for the fresh inscription. And I don’t see anything surprising about the grime coming off when the stone was cleaned with a strong detergent.” As t
o when the stone was installed, Harry said, it was a matter of supposition—the stonemason Johnny brought in was making a calculated guess, and he could be wrong. As to the empty gravesite—maybe the Hassler family diarist got it wrong, possibly on purpose. Maybe they didn’t bury Marie in the Hassler plot—“maybe they just put up the new stone as a half-assed memorial to the disowned mother and her bastard daughter they’d crapped on all those years and dumped poor Marie’s body elsewhere.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” Mitch objected. “I think we’ve got a serious problem here.”

  “I want to get on with this thing. The bidders start coming in here in two weeks to inspect the manuscript—we can’t tell them to wait up because we’re still trying to figure it all out.”

  “Why not?”

  “It kills the momentum—it raises too many doubts.”

  “Then maybe we should have waited before announcing our expert panel’s findings and scheduling the auction.”

  “That was my call, Mitch—I run this show, and I thought it was the right one. You’ve done a fabulous job up to now—don’t screw it up at the end by turning into a Nervous Nellie.”

  “You pay me to be a Nervous Nellie.”

  “Now I’m paying you to back off and enjoy this historic occasion. We’ve got more than enough evidence to bring the manuscript to the marketplace in complete good faith.”

  “I don’t think so—not yet. There are still too many unanswered questions.”

  “Because they’re unanswerable,” Harry said, crossing his arms. “Okay, you’re on record as abstaining—and off the hook. But don’t expect any medals for it.”

  If insubordination was not in Mitch’s nature, neither was cowardice under fire. Within the hour, Mitch covertly directed Winks to have a rubbing made of the inscription on the Nina-Marie headstone and shown to every stonemason within a hundred kilometers of Zurich to see if any of them had carved it and could identify who had ordered it. “And mach schnell, bitte.”