He stopped, as if to gauge what part of the bait he had set out his prey might snatch at.
“Go on,” Mitch said.
“Okay. There’s one further matter equally troubling, perhaps even more so.”
Mitch signaled to Clara to pick up their bedroom phone with care. “Namely?”
“My uncle confided in me that before casting his vote in favor of the authenticity of the Tell Symphony, an arrangement was made that assured him a degree of participation in the revenue from the sale of the manuscript. I was shocked, of course, but Emil insisted the understanding was not really unethical because before he made the deal, he’d already made up his mind in favor of the work as a legitimate Beethoven composition. He agreed to the offer, he told me, to protect Hilde, who he was afraid would be left with insufficient funds for a comfortable widowhood after he was gone. He was telling me about it, he said, because as his only surviving blood relative and the heir to whatever was left of their joint estate at Hilde’s death, I had a vested interest in the arrangement.”
The baldness and implications of Felix’s delivery had caught Mitch entirely off guard. All he said in response was, “I know of no such arrangement between your uncle and my firm.”
“Perhaps not. Or perhaps you’re required to deny it. Or perhaps it was made by your colleagues without your knowledge.”
It was a clumsy divide-and-conquer gambit, Mitch recognized.
“You’re acknowledging that your uncle didn’t say who’d supposedly made this arrangement with him.”
“I understood it was a duly authorized representative of your firm.”
“But he didn’t say that to you, did he?”
“It was implicit, given your vested interest in a sale for some astronomical sum.”
“And so you’re prepared to make an open declaration to that effect?”
“I am—out of precisely the same concern that I have over Ansel’s withheld letter to Margot—both of which the music-loving public, and certainly every would-be bidder for the manuscript, is entitled to be told about. And my two disclosures together, I’m fully confident, would have a seriously detrimental effect on your firm’s hopes for the auction.”
“I see,” Mitch said.
“I trust you understand my situation—”
“Oh, entirely—and your righteous indignation as well. Is there something further?”
“Only that I also trust you’ll pass all of this on to your colleagues. And you might indicate to your firm that, in view of my extreme financial duress just now, I’m in need of a prompt response, or I’ll have to do what I believe is morally required.”
There it was, viciously deceitful and hugely menacing. Mitch could not restrain his wrath. “Your moral obligation to reveal our alleged sins rings a bit hollow, I’m afraid, in view of the absence of any basis in fact for them, as you’re fully aware. Ansel’s crank letter from London was typed—anyone could have written it—and totally unsupported. The same with your claim that Emil accepted a bribe for his vote in favor of the manuscript.”
Felix saw that he had a very balky fish on the line. “Nevertheless, I believe the charges alone would prove highly detrimental to your firm.” He paused, then added, “As I said, only my financial difficulties cause me to approach you in this rather distasteful fashion.”
Mitch chose to protract the game no longer. “What exactly is it you want, Mr. Utley?”
There was no hesitation. “Just two million dollars. Cash would make most sense—nothing to trace, no way for me to use it as leverage for a second approach to you before your auction comes off. Your people should think of it as a small, prudent investment, not as…a…”
“Shakedown?”
“I’m not familiar with that particular—”
“How about ‘extortion’? Or perhaps ‘blackmail’ would cover it. The Swiss authorities will recognize all three—unless we both agree to forget this conversation took place.”
“I doubt you’ll go to them. You’d have too much to explain after I advise the media of your company’s unethical practices. Your risks are infinitely greater than mine. I’m merely performing a public service. If you claim I’ve asked you for money, I’ll counterclaim that you knew I’d found out about the arrangement you’d made with Uncle Emil and offered me cash to keep quiet about it—and about Ansel’s letter to Margot as well. Your word against mine—and you’d look at least as culpable.”
He was a more devious scoundrel than Mitch could have guessed. Who would suppose that an accomplished violinist might excel as well as a dexterous con artist? “I think not, Mr. Utley,” Mitch replied. “As for your late uncle, whose reputation you seem so eager to blacken, his only imprudent dealing with our firm was his attempt to arrange for the manuscript to be sold—without an auction—to a consortium of German investors in the interest of what you might call cultural correctness. And when we rejected Dr. Reinsdorf’s proposal, he accepted our decision with good grace. We attributed his behavior not to bad character but to misplaced patriotism.”
“A handy rationalization,” Felix shot back, “and frankly laughable—if you’d known Emil at all, Mr. Emery. My uncle harbored a deep resentment of the Fatherland. His Swiss ancestry was held against him by his colleagues at the conservatory. Why do you think he was never seriously in the running for the directorship despite being the most distinguished member of its faculty? He played at being the loyal, even passionate German in order to advance his standing—and who else but a German should be Beethoven’s foremost academic champion? So he took out citizenship papers—and lived to regret it. His chauvinist pose in dealing with your firm was almost surely intended to misdirect your attention so that when, in the end, he asked for a financial consideration in exchange for his vote, it was in fact a simple business transaction, to his way of thinking, under the guise of patriotism.”
It was Felix’s last desperate lunge, Mitch calculated. “Well, so you say, Mr. Utley. But your uncle is no longer around to dispute your charges—a fact that would hardly be overlooked by anyone examining your transparent betrayal of him.”
Felix gave a growl of protest. “My aspersions on his integrity can’t harm Emil now. They can harm your company, however, and rather severely.”
His voice had turned to gravel from the strain of the confrontation. “I’ll expect to hear from you by a week from Monday,” he said, “or I’ll have to make plans accordingly. My press conference would likely be held in New York, and you’d be welcome to attend and refute me. The spectacle would make for marvelous theater and ensure wider coverage. Oh, by the way, the fee I mentioned is nonnegotiable and must be delivered here. I think a mix of dollars, sterling, francs, and euros would work best.”
“But notice,” Mitch said to Clara afterward, as they tried to calm themselves, “he didn’t claim Emil had anything to do with composing the Tell. You should be happy about that.”
“I’m not happy about any of this, love,” she said. “It’s all become so hideous.”
Harry was even more disconcerted the next morning when advised of Felix’s demand.
“But he’s bluffing, of course—just like his pain-in-the-ass uncle was.”
“I wouldn’t be quite so sure,” said Mitch. “He sounded desperate enough to do it—and he’s not clinically certifiable as unbalanced, the way Ansel was when the London letter came.”
The company, they decided, had only two ways to deal with the latest dire threat. Their first option, Gordy contended, was to go straight to the Swiss authorities and tell them about Felix’s extortionate game. “Several problems with that, though. For one thing, there’s no way we can be sure they’d keep a lid on our accusation—or that, even if they did, Felix won’t do precisely what he’s threatened—and then, as he told Mitch, it’s his word against ours.”
“Next option,” Harry said with a grimace. “And I hope you’re
not about to tell me we have to pay off this lowlife.”
Gordy turned up his palms in confession.
“Forget that,” Harry barked. “Who’d pop up next out of this vipers’ nest—the treacherous Margot? Emil’s demure widow? Maybe our rube of a client from the Jersey boonies—or Tony Soprano? Maybe it’s all a mob scam—”
Mitch—still hoping that the tap he had ordered on Hilde Reinsdorf’s phone or Johnny Winks’s search for whoever ordered the Nina-Marie tombstone might produce results—saw a third option. “Let’s postpone the auction for a month. We can claim we need the extra time to wrap everything up on the authentication end, and meanwhile we’re giving more potential bidders an opportunity to review the manuscript. Then I’ll get back over there to work more closely with Johnny and try to deal with Felix face-to-face—he’s got to be neutralized somehow—and maybe Clara can rev up her feminine wiles and try to get something out of Hilde and Margot.”
Harry shook his head fiercely. “No delay, no excuses, no explanations. If we have to bail at the end, then we bail, but nothing should interrupt the process now—it would totally undermine bidders’ confidence.” He turned to Mitch. “You and Clara get back over there, as you say—I’d start with Emil’s widow, she may be our best bet. Have Lolly pick out a dress for her this afternoon—nothing too pricey—and bring it along as a gift for when her period of mourning eases up a little. Maybe she and the scummy nephew are at odds, and she’ll turn on him.”
.
clara felt conscience-stricken over their thinly varnished pretext for dropping in on Hilde Reinsdorf. Her distaste was compounded by awareness that Johnny Winks’s slithery people had been illegally eavesdropping on the poor woman’s phone line. But the visit was a professional necessity, not an optional condolence call.
They arrived bearing, as a morale-booster, the smart St. John wool suit that Lolly had chosen for her. Mitch had phoned her several times and gotten no answer, but he knew from Winks’s field men that Hilde was at home—just not taking calls. In the end, given their time constraint, they decided to drop by unannounced, with profuse apologies. Better, too, that Hilde would have no opportunity to compose herself beforehand. Her house was a high-stooped, two-family graystone on a short, tree-lined street a few blocks from the conservatory and close by the park. The Reinsdorf apartment occupied the bottom two floors, with its entry three steps below the street level. The instant Clara pushed the bell, the bulldog within went ballistic.
“That would be Scherzie,” Mitch said, “pining for his departed master to return home.”
Hilde herself was notably more welcoming after she peeked through the curtained glass of the front door and recognized Clara. A short, firm command sent the woebegone bulldog waddling off, his sentry duty fulfilled, and allowed the Emerys peaceable entry. “We tried calling,” Clara quickly explained, “and then thought we’d just take our chances—we won’t stay long, if you can tolerate visitors at all.”
“You’re more than welcome,” said the gracious widow Reinsdorf. “I’m just trying to, you know, regather my energies and get on with things.”
As she led them inside, the Emerys paused in the vestibule, their attention arrested by its stunning walls, painted floor to ceiling in a millefleur design. The trompe l’oeil effect left them feeling as if they had been set down amid a meadow of wildflowers. Just as when unwrapping the edelweiss painting Hilde had sent her as a gift, Clara sensed herself instinctively trying to inhale the imagined fragrance of the two-dimensional bouquet. “Oh, how perfectly splendid,” she exclaimed. “It must have taken you years.”
“Three,” Hilde said, pleased by the attention to her artistry. “I did it when we first moved in here—the place needed cheering up—rather as I do, just now. Seeing you both helps.”
She served them dry sherry and drier biscuits in the dark-wood parlor and made a game show of pleasure at the gift they had brought her. “We thought it might help a little to take your mind off your loss,” Clara said. “It’s from Lolly Cubbage and me—she’s still sorry you wouldn’t accept the outfit she sent to you in New York, and this is my way of thanking you for the wonderful painting you gave me.”
Their supply of small talk was soon exhausted, and Mitch had no alternative but to confess they had more on their minds than expressions of sympathy. “I’m afraid your nephew has given us cause for concern,” he said and as succinctly as possible spelled out Felix’s malevolent threat. “Aside from the discomfort it brings to our company, his claims reflect on Dr. Reinsdorf in a troubling way. I wouldn’t have dreamed of disturbing you about this, but my firm is facing a time bind—the auction date for the Tell manuscript is only—”
“Yes, of course—I understand completely.” Hilde shook her head slowly. “I knew all of this would turn out badly from the start. I urged Emil not to become involved.”
Mitch was careful not to pounce. “In the sense that—?”
“Bitte?”
“I mean you wanted him not to become involved in—what, exactly?”
“I mean when your firm first approached him to participate in the vetting process. Emil knew more, you see, than everyone else put together about the maestro, and I was afraid he’d find it very difficult to deal with—well, what he considered lesser minds. And so it proved. He was ill at ease throughout the proceedings with your company.”
“And Felix?”
Hilde’s lips pinched reflexively.
“Whatever my nephew’s flaws, outright criminality has not been among them—so far as I know.” She sat for a moment, considering how much to reveal. “This is quite a nasty business he’s proposing, isn’t it? It’s brought you all the way here.”
“I’m afraid so,” said Mitch. “We’re hoping you might be able to enlighten us if it’s something you can talk about. Mr. Cubbage and our house counsel—you met Mr. Roth at the dinner party—assure me our firm made no secret reciprocal arrangement with Dr. Reinsdorf.”
“No, of course—Emil would have marched out in a great fury if you had proposed it and gone straight to the UN General Assembly to denounce you. He could get terribly worked up at times. I can’t imagine what’s inciting Felix to make such vile charges against Emil—”
“He says it’s money—he apparently needs a lot of it to settle his debts and so forth.”
“Nothing new there,” Hilde allowed and then drew a deeply anguished breath. There followed an unflattering portrait of a nettlesome family relationship—“rather a love/hate sort of thing, I suppose,” she said, stemming from the early death of Emil’s sister back in Lucerne. Her husband was a philanderer, and when he wandered off, it had seemed for the best—until she fell ill, and Felix was left an orphaned teenager with high musical aptitude. Emil took a close interest in the boy, who stayed in Switzerland, living with his paternal grandparents.
“How close an interest could Emil have taken, living so far away?” Mitch asked.
“Emil would visit with him twice a year. Felix became more or less the son he—we—never had. Emil made sure of his admission to the conservatory in Zurich, opened the door for him when he sought employment at the Swiss Philharmonic—Emil and Richard Grieder had been close as boys and in their student days in Vienna.” But as his uncle thrived in the rarefied air at the apex of German musicology, his hopes that his nephew might follow him to Berlin and perhaps win a place with its great philharmonic were to be forever frustrated.
“Felix never even tried,” Hilde recounted. “He was comfortable in Zurich, and although he was gifted, I think he knew—better than Emil—what his limitations were. Emil did his best to promote Felix’s hopes of becoming the concertmaster, only Herr Grieder always had some excuse—some obligation to another player or to a member of his board of trustees.”
Hilde tried to shake the misfortune from her memory. “I think Grieder never wanted to insult Emil with the truth—that Felix didn’t deserve t
he first violinist’s chair, and that he had too much personal baggage. You know all about that, I suppose—”
“His various women?” Mitch ventured.
“And mostly married ones, at that, including Grieder’s niece. Felix was rather a predator, I’m sorry to say. Emil didn’t want to hear about it. He only cared about the music. He thought Felix had a decent brain and first-rate musical instincts. They’d have great, long discussions about this or that composer or dissect a particular composition whenever he went down to Zurich or Felix came up here to spend Christmastime with us. There was something of a rapprochement between them in the later years—they became quite close at the end. Felix would ring up several times a month, just trying to cheer up Emil with any little story.”
“Forgive my poor manners,” Mitch asked when she was done, “but what about the money? It seems to be what’s driving Felix to the point of threatening our firm if we don’t—”
“Yes, the money. Always the money.”
Hilde poured them all a bit more of the sherry. “Emil gave him gifts from time to time—never anything sizable, though, or so he told me.” She gave a wan smile. “Whatever Emil did for Felix in that regard was never enough.”
Mitch nodded. “I’m obliged to ask one further question.” He waited for Hilde’s nod before continuing. “Was there any provision in Dr. Reinsdorf’s will for Felix?”
“A bequest, you mean? No, not actually. Emil and I had an understanding that after I’m gone, whatever’s left would go to the conservatory and a few of our preferred charities.”
“I understood from Felix that the money was to pass to him upon your death.”
“I don’t know how he could have come by that idea—perhaps he was being wishful.”
“Felix said Emil told him so.”
“I wouldn’t know what Emil told him in that regard—but Emil certainly didn’t instruct me to that effect, and there’s no mention of Felix in either of our wills.”
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