Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  That evening after work, Mitch shared his concern with Clara. “I think Harry’s losing his grip over this thing—the enormity of it may just be overwhelming him. Or maybe plain old greed has taken charge of his soul—if he had a soul.”

  “Is it remotely possible,” his devoted devil’s advocate asked him, “that you just don’t like being called a wuss—and by a Harvard bed-wetter, at that?”

  “Childish of me, I know,” he conceded. “But I’d just as soon risk his scorn in order to save his firm, and if he doesn’t thank me for it, tant pis. You and I will survive quite nicely.”

  The wussification of Mitchell Emery ended with the arrival of the Saturday morning Times. As she leafed through the mainsheet while Mitch was reading the business section, Clara paused to dwell as usual on the obituary page—supporting his claim she was an incipient necrophiliac—and let out a pained cry. “Emil’s gone,” she said. “That didn’t take long. Poor Hilde.”

  “God,” said Mitch, pained at the news. First Ansel, now Reinsdorf. He wondered if Emil had met his Maker half as defiantly as his beloved Beethoven reputedly had. “I liked him—in a weird way. Any picture?”

  “Yes—and the obituary runs a whole column.” She began to scan it. “Uh-oh—”

  “What?”

  “Emil forgot to mention something to you.”

  Mitch looked blank a moment. “What—he was a transvestite?”

  “See for yourself.” She handed him the paper.

  The photograph was an old one, showing the deceased in dated dark-framed glasses that gave him a decidedly owlish demeanor. The article began:

  BERLIN—Emil N. Reinsdorf, widely regarded as among the world’s foremost authorities on Ludwig van Beethoven, died at his home here on Jan. 27 at the age of 64. He had recently fulfilled a controversial assignment as one of five scholars who authenticated the lately discovered “William Tell” Symphony as a composition by Beethoven. Its manuscript is due to be auctioned in late March.

  The cause of death was a recurrence of lung cancer.

  Dr. Reinsdorf, a professor of musicology for thirty-four years at the Federal Institute of Music, also known as the Berlin Conservatory, was highly admired for his “Maestro” trilogy, close analyses of Beethoven’s compositional styles. He also wrote five other books about the great composer and more than one hundred articles for academic journals.

  Famous for his bluff, occasionally abrasive personality, Dr. Reinsdorf was a popular and provocative guest lecturer at universities and cultural centers around the world. His books have been translated into twelve languages.

  A native of Lucerne, Switzerland, he studied at the Zurich Conservatory and the University of Vienna, where he was awarded his doctoral degree before moving to his academic post in Berlin…

  The closing paragraph said the scholar was survived by Hilde, his wife of thirty-eight years, “and a nephew, Felix Utley of Zurich, a violinist with the Swiss Philharmonic.”

  “Felix!” Mitch’s eyes widened. “That slippery fucker.”

  “Do I smell a hairy rat?” Clara asked. “Possibly a pair of them—feasting on Swiss cheese? Didn’t Emil lead us all to believe he was more German than Siegfried?”

  Mitch’s head began to ache even as it seized on these twin revelations. “I remember now. Felix made some vague reference to an uncle of his—both times I talked to him, as a matter of fact—that he was a professor somewhere. I thought he said in history. Maybe he did mention it was music history.”

  “I remember at our hotel room. Didn’t he say his uncle knew the Swiss Philharmonic conductor—Grieder, the one Ansel detested—from their years together at university, and the uncle kept pushing to get Felix promoted to concertmaster?”

  “Yes, but Felix never mentioned him by name—even though he must have known we’d met him while he was serving as one of our Tell panelists.”

  Clara’s convictions about the symphony abruptly begin to waver. But maybe it was a simple miscommunication. “Perhaps he didn’t think it was appropriate to bring up,” she suggested, “or maybe it was just an honest oversight—or irrelevant, the way Emil never bothered telling you he was born in Switzerland, probably because it was something he didn’t care to advertise in German academia.”

  Mitch, though, felt deceived and more worried than ever. How embarrassing that, when recruiting the panel of experts under Mac Quarles’s direction, he had not learned Emil Reinsdorf was a native Swiss. Where had Emil’s heart and head been during the authentication process?

  Mitch had Clara listen in on the bedroom extension while he phoned Felix Utley’s home in Zurich. There was no answer, and he left no message. After a moment’s reflection, he tried Emil Reinsdorf’s number in Berlin. It was answered by Felix, presumably on hand for his uncle’s funeral.

  “Awfully sorry to disturb you,” Mitch said. “My wife and I wanted to express our sincere condolences to your aunt. We hope she’s bearing up under—”

  “Yes, thanks—I’ll pass along your sentiments. She’s not taking calls just now.”

  “Of course.” Mitch paused. “I hope you’re okay as well.”

  “Yes, quite—thanks.” Felix’s impatience was thinly cloaked.

  “I had no idea you and Dr. Reinsdorf were related until I just read it in the paper.”

  “Yes, well, I thought I did mention it to you, actually.”

  “Never his name or that he was among the world’s leading Beethoven scholars.”

  Felix grasped now that he was being interrogated. “Well, no—one wouldn’t normally bring up such a matter or make such a claim. I seem to recall mentioning that when Ansel phoned me about his discovery of the Tell manuscript, I offered to ring up my uncle about his having a look at it. I thought it was clear enough in that context—who and what he was. You didn’t ask me his name.”

  That was true, Mitch knew. “But weren’t you curious to see the manuscript yourself?”

  “Well, yes, of course—I’m a musician.” Felix was straining not to sound put upon. “But Ansel told me he was in no position to have outsiders trooping into the Hassler house—that the American grandson might get frightened and—well, you know what happened.”

  “But why didn’t you alert your uncle to the possibility there was an important find—”

  “Oh, but I did. Uncle Emil just laughed and said somebody was playing a great joke.”

  “How could he have been so certain? Why didn’t he want to get on the next plane and come look at it? Wasn’t Beethoven his life?”

  The innuendo, pressing well beyond cordial conversation, drew Felix’s curt response. “I’ve answered your untimely questions, Mr. Emery. Now I trust you’ll kindly honor the saying, De mortibus nihil nisi bonum—assuming anyone in America knows Latin.” And he hung up.

  “Sounds as if he may be covering up for Emil,” Clara said, back from her listening post.

  “And who in the entire world,” Mitch asked rhetorically, eyes wide open now, “would have been better qualified—and more favorably positioned—to invent a Beethoven symphony and pass it off as the real thing? And Felix was ideally situated to arrange for the manuscript to be placed in the Hasslers’ attic—he and Ansel had been pals for a long time—and sister Margot was his lover—access would have been easy.” It all made blindingly simple sense. At last.

  Clara was reeling over the sudden obviousness of the arrangement.

  “Maybe they were all in on it—isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  “All of them—some of them—none of them—take your pick. Let’s stick with Emil for the moment—why would he have done such a thing? What could he have gained by it?”

  Clara pondered a while, then wafted her partially formed hunch into the air. “He did it because—just because he could, and nobody else could have—and because he was sick, terminally, and it was sort of a parting display of de
fiance—because—because he was jealous and thought he deserved the world’s acclaim, but nobody outside of academia knew who he was—so this would be his fiendish way to—”

  “You left out money,” Mitch put in, his excitement spiking. “He’d probably never had a ton of it—his books were too specialized to have sold a lot of copies—so he figured somehow he’d cash in on the Tell creation—probably he’d worked out some kind of scheme with Felix and possibly the Erpfs, too, since Felix had been on close terms with both Ansel and Margot—but Jake screwed up the deal by just barging in and taking off with the manuscript—”

  “Unless—oh, God, yes!”

  Clara was practically tumescent from cerebral stimulation. “Don’t you see—Jake’s got to be in on it, too, and the whole dispute with the Erpfs was trumped up. It was all a setup to get the manuscript laundered by C&W through an auction. And they knew you people would naturally turn to Emil to be one of the expert authenticators—”

  “But Emil was the most reluctant to go along—he was questioning everything.”

  Clara nodded knowingly. “Exactly—it was a pose.”

  “So we’d never suspect him?”

  “Voila!” Clara savored the neatness of the solution—but then fell off the log as fast as she’d jumped on it. “There are a few little flaws in there, of course. To start with, I never heard that Emil composed anything in his life. He’d have needed a collaborator, a very talented one—and Ansel’s the only one who might have—well, the only one we know of who was more or less connected to all this. Except, of course, he never composed anything of real distinction, either, so far as we’re aware. Also it’s pretty hard to imagine Emil scurrying about, attending to the infinite details of such an immensely complex forgery. And Jake Hassler hardly seems the sort to be implicated in a big-time scam with a pack of—”

  “Nobody seems likely to have been involved—except Ansel, and he’s dead.”

  “Maybe that’s why he’s dead. He couldn’t face the music, so to speak.”

  They groped on and on, chasing their comet tails. Finally Mitch phoned Harry, weekending in Southampton, and ran their astounding theory by him. “Why didn’t we know Emil was Swiss-born?” Harry asked. “Why do we need to read about it in the New York-fucking-Times?”

  “I—we—pretty much understood him to be a staunch German patriot,” Mitch answered lamely, ready to take his lumps, “and he certainly presented himself that way to us—trying his best to angle the thing for Deutschland. I just pretty much assumed—”

  “You’re not paid to assume things, Mitchell.” In the next breath, though, Harry switched his tack. “Listen, if you’re trying to convince me that Emil’s Swiss connection adds up to a wicked conspiracy, I say you’re barking up the wrong Alp. Your whole fantasy is ridiculously out of character—these just aren’t the sort of people who get involved in such lunacy—Emil Reinsdorf, least of all. I mean, the guy worshipped Beethoven. I admit the idea might just possibly have occurred to Ansel, our deceased certified psycho, but you’ve told me everyone agrees he could never have sustained that level of creative effort, so let’s move on.”

  Mitch was not about to be cowed.

  “You’re forgetting about Reinsdorf’s connection with his nephew. I want Johnny Winks to try to get us a list of Emil’s phone calls for the past year—there may be a pattern, possibly frequent communication with Felix, that tells us something. I also want a tap on Hilde Reinsdorf’s phone, especially as we get closer to the auction date.”

  “And how many more zillion euros will these little fishing expeditions eat up?” Harry objected. “Besides, if Emil was involved in a hoax—an idea that frightens me mostly because it says you’re getting carried away by hallucinations—do you think he’d be phoning up his henchmen on his own line? What the hell kind of investigative genius are you, anyway?”

  He waited for Harry’s smoking tongue to cool, then shot back, “You’re burying your head in the sand, Harry. Something’s up here.”

  “Possibly it’s your head—buried up where the sun don’t shine.”

  For the briefest instant, Mitch wondered if Harry’s vehemence was a signal that perhaps even he himself might be involved in some grand connivance with these schemers. All that money was on the table. Why else was Harry chucking caution to the wind? The suspicion fled before he dared dwell on it.

  “As soon as we’re done here,” Mitch declared, “I’m going to call Johnny and ask him to follow up just the way I said—there, you’ve been advised. If you want to overrule me, fine—you own the joint. But you’ll have my resignation first thing Monday.”

  Had he gone too far? Harry’s silence suggested as much. “Is that a threat or a promise?” he finally asked with a dismissive laugh. “You’re a bit much—le grand Mitchell Emery.”

  Clara rewarded him with a full-frontal kiss, a long one, after he hung up and then led him back to their boudoir for a half hour’s coupling. They rarely lingered in bed Saturday mornings—there was so much else out there beckoning. “I think I need to phone Daddy,” she said as they dressed, “about all of this, I mean—before he gets too involved in the Tell auction.”

  “Do that.”

  “You don’t think I’m being disloyal to C&W?”

  “Daddy comes first—and you more or less got him into this.”

  Piet Hoitsma told his daughter that yes, he was still definitely trying to carpenter a joint Anglo-Dutch consortium to bid for the Tell manuscript at the C&W auction. “The lawyers have raised some questions—the Bern Copyright Convention and that sort of bothersome detail. But I’m hopeful we’ll overcome all of that and be able to make a respectable bid.”

  “Um, well—you may want to hold up a bit on that—”

  “In fact, I ran into Sedge Wakeham at a wassail party over the holidays—he’s quite good at wassailing—and allowed that we might be doing some business with his firm before long—”

  “Daddy!” Clara broke in, “Mitch and I are terribly afraid it’s all bogus—a hoax—”

  “What—the Tell Symphony?”

  “And the whole discovery story.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Mitch is trying to get to the bottom of it, and Harry’s behaving rather beastly. I feel dreadful about getting you into this, but I’d hate to see us all wind up looking like total fools.”

  “Not to worry, darling,” his father comforted her. “Tell Mitch to stick to his guns—especially if it gets too dicey and Harry doesn’t know enough to bail out.”

  .

  the list of phone calls from Emil Reinsdorf’s home over the last year of his life, dredged up by the Winks espionage apparatus from impenetrable computer files at a cost of 6,500 euros, revealed just three conversations between nephew Felix and his uncle, hardly a suspicious total, and none whatsoever with members of the Erpf family, Jake Hassler, or anyone else Mitch and Clara could think of who might be linked in any way to Tell. There was one call to Richard Grieder, the Swiss Philharmonic’s musical director, but Felix had indicated the two men were old friends, so that contact seemed less than extraordinary. The phone tap on newly widowed Hilde Reinsdorf, costing a further 1,500 euros a day, produced even less evidence of suspicious activity. It was beginning to look as if Harry may have been right—that Mitch was running up the tab in dogged pursuit of phantom villains.

  And then, a week before the first would-be bidders were due to begin inspecting the Tell manuscript at C&W’s offices, Felix Utley telephoned Mitch at his apartment at nine in the evening. That translated to three in the morning Zurich time.

  In a halting voice that Mitch attributed to the lateness of the hour, Felix said he was sorry to be calling so inconveniently but circumstances had necessitated it. His personal finances were a hopeless muddle—too many bad investments and mooching friends, too rich a diet of wine, women, and song, heavy debts he could never catch up with—
“or you can rest assured I would never approach you in this fashion.” He sounded nothing like the assured Felix Utley during their recent phone conversation while he was in Berlin for his uncle’s funeral.

  “And what fashion is that?” Mitch asked, at once sensing the worst.

  “Constructively—and aware that the impending auction of the Tell manuscript is certain to bring very substantial returns to your firm. I heard on CNN that you had rejected a preemptive offer of ten million, or something like that, from a small recording company. They said competing international coalitions are in a bidding war that could drive the price way up—maybe as high as nine figures. Someone said there are plans for a world tour to showcase the new symphony with an all-star orchestra, rather like an Elton John or Rolling Stones extravaganza. Sounds enthralling.”

  “Well, yes—our firm is hopeful there’ll be a good response,” was all Mitch conceded.

  “Splendid—and which I’m sure explains your company’s failure to disclose the receipt of my late-friend Ansel Erpf’s letter to his sister—the one dealing with his possible forgery of the symphony. We spoke of it at our last meeting in your hotel room here. It would seem to me obligatory for your auction house to make it public out of consideration for your potential bidders—aren’t they entitled to be told that Ansel’s disclosure may have been genuine and not the ravings of a madman, as you evidently concluded them to be?” His barbed tone hinted that Felix had carefully rehearsed his incendiary approach. Possibly he was reading from a script.

  “As you also concluded—and his sister,” Mitch pointed out, “and she tried to have him committed as a result—and we kept it all under wraps so as not to embarrass the Erpf family—and Ansel himself—as you perfectly well know.”

  “I’m afraid that’s beside the point just now—”

  “All right—what is the point, then?”

  Felix took a quick swig of something, from the sound of it, before answering.

  “The obvious inference to be drawn from Cubbage & Wakeham’s withholding Ansel’s letter from public knowledge is that you and your colleagues greatly fear it will compromise the outcome of the auction—perhaps even prevent its coming off altogether.”