Emil then began bending his brain toward dreaming up “the proper background” for staging the Tell discovery. The elements fell nicely into place: Zurich was the right venue for Beethoven’s imagined trip to have his deafness cured (and for Swiss heroism to be on his mind); the late summer of 1814 was the right time (since he was not otherwise engaged or accounted for), and the politically repressive climate in post-Napoleonic Austria was a plausible reason for his symphony on an anti-Hapsburg theme to have been set aside by the maestro. Emil’s imaginative drafts of the first Nina note, the Nägeli, and the Archduke Rudolph letters followed; all that remained was to find a suitable Zurich household—with a documentable nubile maiden in residence—to fit the scenario.
“I thought the conception quite ingenious—and harmless,” Hilde confessed. She even helped Emil embroider the story, which she felt would be more affecting if Nina’s relationship with Beethoven were revealed to include a subtle sexual attraction—well beyond the flirtatious or sentimental sort he pursued with the wives and friends of his patrons. Since the resulting love child’s existence would have caused a scandal ruinous to the maestro’s reputation for rectitude, he would have had to deny fathering the infant and thus could not have reclaimed the abandoned Tell manuscript without owning up to his heinous sin. Emil thought it a deft touch and drew up the second Nina letter, with its heart-wrenching farewell rebuke to the family that had disowned her, along with the note from the clerk in a nonexistent Austrian village reporting her death by drowning in the Danube and the entry in an invented Hassler family diary with its equally touching account of the loveless life and unlamented death of Nina’s illegitimate Marie.
By now, Clara was equally shocked and enthralled by Hilde’s narrative, unable to scoff at or interrupt her story.
By the fourth year, Hilde now hurried on, they had reached the culminating stage of the project—fabricating the Tell sketchbooks. After Emil had steeped himself in the literature on the illicit art and craft of forgery, he turned to the only person qualified and trustworthy enough to produce what he termed a “certifiable simulation” of Beethoven’s compositional handwriting. At first, Hilde would not hear of it, urging him instead to come forward with his edited, sanitized version of the work and a detailed explanation of how it had evolved—“but it was too late for that.” Shortly thereafter, Emil was diagnosed with lung cancer, and all other concerns were put aside during his struggle for survival. His surgery, chemotherapy, and recovery of strength took the better part of a year, but the long interruption served only to harden Emil’s resolve to bring the Tell to fruition. Sure that he was living on borrowed time, he renewed his appeal to Hilde to apply her artistic skills to creating the ersatz Beethoven sketchbooks.
“It was my dying husband’s last request,” she explained, “and, as he kept reminding me, I would one day be the prime beneficiary of our joint venture.” As an artist, it was to be her own supreme challenge. She studied and practiced for months mimicking Beethoven’s inelegant handwriting and slapdash composing penmanship under Emil’s rigorous scrutiny.
“Didn’t the difficulty of it all frighten you?” Clara wondered with complicitous admiration.
“Of course—I was so nervous that my hand trembled for weeks, and when I overcame my anxiety at last, I wrote in too stiff and deliberate a fashion, lacking the flow of natural writing—which Emil assured me was the undoing of even accomplished forgers.” Less trying for her was to simulate the odd handwriting of Archduke Rudolph and the more regular script of Hans Nägeli, photocopied samples of which Emil had found at archives in Germany and Austria.
While Hilde honed her dark art month after month, Emil went about methodically gathering, mostly in antiquarian shops, the ingredients for the rendering process—vintage paper both bound and unbound, quills, the materials for mixing old-fashioned ink, and an early edition of Schiller’s Tell. With these in hand, he enlisted a graduate student in chemistry to devise a way for doctoring the writing surfaces in the unused old sketchbooks so the ink did not feather when applied to them yet did not crust and crack, telltale signs it had been chemically swabbed to hide the age of the ink. Every page Hilde then copied from Emil’s transcribed version of the original manuscript had to be perfected, which meant endless practice. “It was a grinding procedure that could not be hurried,” said Hilde. “It greatly tried both our patience.”
As his wife labored on, Emil decided he could no longer delay confiding the truth about the Tell’s real composer to his two advisers in Zurich. If the manuscript was to be planted there and the discovery scenario played out, both Felix and Grieder had to be in on the secret. His nephew, while distressed at first over having been misled, even if for plausible reasons, soon agreed to become Emil’s full-fledged accomplice. It fell to him to arrange the logistics for the staged discovery and to devise some means for extracting money from the sensational rebirth of the Tell without giving the game away. Emil, of course, could in no way be suspected of involvement with the resurrected work; his mission thereafter would be to help authenticate it. Informed by his lover Margot of the Erpf family’s lien on the next-door Hassler house, Felix hit upon using Otto’s attic for the discovery site and Margot and the Erpfs’ connections as the conduit for reaping a portion of the riches that the Tell would likely generate. It was a steep price to pay the Erpfs, but Felix argued it was the surest way to obtain the Swiss government’s imprimatur on the work and to sanitize its profits.
“And what was Felix to get out of it?” Clara asked.
“Emil’s gratitude, mostly—but money, to be sure, was always on Felix’s mind.” Hilde turned up her palms in confession. “When I misspoke to you earlier about the matter, I felt that I had no choice. The truth is, they came to some sort of understanding—Emil never told me the details, only that Felix would receive some share of the money, if only because his paramour Margot would be the front person in dealing with the Cultural Ministry. There had to be trust among them or the whole arrangement was worthless.” As an added inducement to Felix, Emil promised to push Grieder even harder to promote him to concertmaster. So heartily did the philharmonic’s conductor dislike Felix, though, that he nearly rejected Emil’s plea. But on being told authoritatively by his old pal Emil that the Tell was authentic Beethoven, he readily forgave Reinsdorf for his duplicitous handling of the matter. For his cooperation, Grieder was promised the world premiere of the symphony and financial support for his orchestra from its revenue stream. In return, all Emil asked from Grieder was silence about what he knew.
“After all,” Hilde contended, “it had all been done primarily for art’s sake—to salvage an otherwise disreputable work—not for any base motive on Emil’s part.”
She had woven the tale so compellingly that Clara felt herself torn between fascination and revulsion. Emil Reinsdorf had surely sinned by his massive application of artifice—but not so heinously, perhaps, to deserve condemnation as a criminal. He had paid for the right to own the Tell manuscript, be it rogue or genuine Beethoven, and dedicated himself to the excruciating labor of making it presentable in the passionate conviction that he was not committing fraud. Definitive identification of the work’s composer, and the finesse of Emil’s anonymous craftsmanship in repairing it, he left to other experts to confirm or reject, though he surely did not shrink from complicity in the process when invited to join C&W’s authentication panel. “You have a point,” Clara admitted, “but I think his zeal was overwrought—and likely misguided by his deteriorating health.”
“I don’t disagree,” Hilde said with some resignation, “but I couldn’t deter him.”
In the end, Felix persuaded Emil that the second Nina letter about her illegitimate daughter and its related documents might strike too sour a note, so dirtying Beethoven’s memory that his infuriated worshippers might go to great lengths to deny the Tell’s authenticity. So Emil withheld the Nina-Marie material from the documents that Margot placed in t
he wooden box in the Hasslers’ attic trunk, but he saved them in his bank vault in case they were ever needed to embellish the original Nina tale. As an added precaution, Felix arranged for the carving and installation of the peculiar mother-daughter tombstone in the Hassler cemetery plot, where only Otto remained to be laid to rest.
“And then Jacob Hassler came along to muck up the works,” Clara filled in the ending.
“Exactly—and all that backbreaking effort of ours, about eight years’ worth, seemed lost to Emil for good. He was terribly depressed.”
The Reinsdorfs’ spirits revived, however, when Emil was asked to serve on C&W’s panel of experts, and it became clear at once that his judgment would prove pivotal. His unique leverage allowed him to compensate for Jake Hassler’s heist of the Tell manuscript. “Your firm had arranged a sightseeing tour of your Revolutionary War battlefields in New Jersey just before his panel was to begin final deliberations, and Emil found himself brushing up against Mr. Hassler, this grasping American philistine. They were able to discuss the situation—sotto voce—and work out a sensible understanding.”
“How much of the real story did Dr. Reinsdorf tell Jake?” Clara asked.
“I was sitting elsewhere on the bus, so I can’t say for certain,” Hilde replied. But each of them needed the other if either was to realize anything from the sale of the symphony, so their agreement was soon committed to paper. They both had something in writing as a protection in case the other failed to perform his part of the bargain—Emil to vote for authenticating the manuscript and Jake to turn over a share of the auction price to him. “It was very risky, of course,” said Hilde, “but then the whole undertaking was fraught with risk from the beginning.”
The trade-off with Jake struck Clara as inexcusable.
“Didn’t it seem to you blatantly immoral for Dr. Reinsdorf to sell his vote in the authentication process by my husband’s firm?”
“Not in the least,” said Hilde. “Emil’s vote was never in doubt, of course. And Jacob Hassler had, in effect, stolen Emil’s property from him. And your husband’s company has been Mr. Hassler’s eager accomplice ever since. Furthermore, your people approached Emil to join in the certification process—not the other way around—and Mitchell’s auction house got what it bargained for, so where was Emil’s sin?”
When his cancer recurred, it was virulent and inoperable. Still, Emil was almost at peace because it looked as if the Tell would survive him—intact and fully legitimized. But he had to contend with two final threats to the Tell’s acceptance. The first was the letter Margot Lenz received, apparently from her brother, threatening to claim that the symphony was a hoax and that he himself had perpetrated it.
“It infuriated Emil. He could make no sense of it whatsoever,” Hilde recalled, “until he realized that it must have been written by Felix. Who else knew all the technical details that the letter mentioned?” Felix’s purpose, Emil guessed, was to scare C&W into withdrawing the manuscript from auction and thus encouraging its sale to the Erpf family, so that the original plan to cash in on the symphony could be resurrected. The ploy was not as witless as it first struck Emil, who, in his anger at Felix for allowing the manuscript to be removed from Zurich, had informed his nephew about the income-sharing deal he had reached with Jake. So Emil had phoned Felix from his sickbed, railed at him for meddling by concocting the fake Ansel letter, and then forgiven him.
Her explanation did not satisfy Clara. “Felix told my husband that Emil promised him a part of whatever he would be paid under the arrangement he had made in America.”
“Possibly—but I didn’t hear their conversation, and Emil never told me about any such promise. I doubt he wanted to reward Felix for letting everything get out of hand in Zurich.”
Soon after Emil returned home from the hospital, he had a phone call from Jake Hassler anxiously informing him that C&W was still questioning the Nina story. Emil told him he would think about it, then instructed Hilde to retrieve the second Nina letter, which had been residing in their bank vault along with its supporting documents, and to phone his nephew, asking him to hurriedly compose a typewritten note to Jake over Ansel’s name, the same way Felix had earlier concocted the confession letter addressed to Margot from London. Overnight, Felix faxed Hilde the fake cover note to Jake, explaining why the accompanying documents had been withheld previously and were being forwarded now supposedly by Ansel’s London lawyer friend who had been asked to do so in the event of Ansel’s death or commitment to a mental hospital. Hilde added the new faked Ansel note to the other items Emil had prepared earlier but withheld till then and shipped them to Jake along with instructions to tell Mitch and his C&W colleagues that the material had come from London and, if asked to supply the envelope, claim he had thoughtlessly discarded it. “My Emil was lucid till the end, as you see,” Hilde added. “He died very soon after that.” She unfolded her hands, which had remained serenely immobile on her lap throughout her long narration, then reached down to stroke Scherzie’s squat neck and looked up brightly. “Shall we drink to his health?”
They did. Silently, respectfully. “It’s what Americans call a fascinating yarn,” Clara said.
“Well, I trust this helps you understand a little better why we—”
Hilde cut herself off, as if assuming she had disposed of the entire matter to Clara’s satisfaction.
“Is there anything else, dear? I’ve tired myself, and no doubt you, with all of this…”
“There is just one troubling thing, I’m afraid.”
“Bitte?”
“Dr. Reinsdorf was an eminent musicologist,” Clara said, “so it’s unthinkable to me that he would have tampered to the extent you’ve described with an original Beethoven manuscript of such importance and priceless value.”
“But he didn’t tamper with it—as I thought I explained to you,” Hilde said, growing irritable now. “It was in a hopeless, unsightly condition when he obtained it from Herr Osterweil—so he and I created a cleaner, more legible reproduction in order to make it comprehensible to the music world. There was no other way for it to be taken seriously.”
“Fair enough,” said Clara. “Then where is the original? Surely Emil must have preserved it, no matter how derelict its condition. My husband’s company must have that evidence if the auction is to proceed as planned.”
Hilde bowed her head.
“I was afraid you’d ask me that sooner or later. And I fully understand why.” She looked up glumly. “But sad to say, I cannot oblige you—Emil instructed me to destroy the original sketchbooks at his death. He said because they were in such wretched condition, any account he might leave behind of what had happened would never be believed—and that instead, our painstaking restoration of the originals, which by then had been authenticated by your panel of experts, would have to satisfy posterity.” She shook her head mournfully. “And I had to honor his instruction.”
“Then what about this lawyer who sold you the manuscript—Herr Osterweil? Is he reachable to corroborate the beginning of your story?”
“I don’t much care for that word ‘story’—it sounds as if you think I’ve made all this up.”
Clara, sensing the woman was about to snap, was uncertain whether to press her attack or relent out of kindness. But she had come there for a reason. “That wasn’t my intention, Hilde—it’s just a word in common use. Now, please—do you know where this Osterweil is?”
Hilde would not face her now.
“I have no address or contact number. He more or less disappeared after settling up with Emil—by their mutual agreement, I rather think.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Clara said, growing less charitable with each new pat answer she was given. “Do you understand that my husband’s company has nothing else to rely on in the way of documentation but your word for all of this?”
“But why would I tell you less than the tr
uth at this late stage?” Hilde asked plaintively. “And now that Emil’s gone, I have nothing—and no one—left to protect.”
“Except yourself.”
Hilde leaned forward to massage Scherzo’s neck folds. “I don’t matter now,” she said.
.
in police custody for the second time in a month, Mitch told himself mirthlessly that this had better not become a habit. For him, as a former law officer, to be held under duress as a suspected murderer and transported across an international boundary for questioning was more than infuriating—it was plain absurd. His resentment churned throughout the thankfully short flight—less than an hour’s airtime—as he sat wedged between his silent Swiss escorts and began to think about Margot, her austere beauty and quicksilver intelligence, and why her vibrant life had been taken so soon after her painful revelations to him.
The timing of her death, Mitch reflected, could very well have been planned by conspirators out to frame him for the murder, victimizing both Margot and him. But who could have had advance knowledge of his movements and arranged the fatal crime accordingly? And toward what end? No, it was just as likely that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. His best hope for swift release was to point the police in the right direction.
The most obvious candidates for the murderer were Margot’s ex-lover and her husband.
But what did he know for certain about their relationships with her? Only tangled claims and counterclaims about her and Felix. Mitch had never met Dr. Lenz, the heart specialist, but had repeatedly heard him vilified as a distant spouse and very cold fish. Felix seemed the more likely assailant. By their mutual account, there had been bad blood between him and Margot for some time now, much of it over Ansel. And Margot probably knew about or suspected his promiscuity—and if she was subsidizing his fancy flat and his high lifestyle, she had likely called a halt to the practice and left him, as he had claimed to Mitch, financially desperate. He might even have feared she was about to turn him in to the police as the mastermind behind planting the Tell manuscript in Otto Hassler’s attic. All of that could have driven him to do her in. All he had to do was show up at her door, and she would have let him in—he likely knew it was the housemaid’s day off. And in an instant he could have violently slain her even as he had long and passionately made love to her.
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