Beethoven's Tenth

by Richard Kluger

  Dr. Leonidas Lenz, from all accounts, was the opposite sort. Tired of being humiliated by her brazen, habitual infidelity, he might have told her it had to end and, when she rebuffed him, he took her life. Or perhaps, long clueless to her trysting, he had lately discovered it and reacted berserkly. Or maybe he had simply grown to hate her as his powerful tormentor, successful in the business world even as he had failed to become successful in the field of medicine.

  As their plane taxied toward the Zurich air terminal, Mitch kept flailing for answers. Perhaps Margot had enemies in the business world whose fortunes she had cold-bloodedly reduced by deception, poor advice, or dirty dealing. Or could it have been a simple break-in robbery she fatally resisted? With no answers, he had but one recourse, Mitch told himself: keep calm and don’t obfuscate.

  The bland sign reading “Government Building 1” over the entrance left him unprepared for the ground-floor lobby of Zurich’s central police station just off the Bahnhofstrasse. A broad, bare expanse with no seating, it was a psychedelic vision of baroque ornament, its tile floor, stout columns, interlocking archways, and barrel-vaulted ceiling painted in soft reds, golds, and blues in exquisite floral patterning lit from below by recessed lights that gave a roseate glow to the entire space. It suggested a great entry chamber to a royal pleasure palace more than the access hall to the workplace of a small-city police force. Its inviting warmth was the opposite of the cold, impersonal interior of New Scotland Yard, his other recent holding pen.

  The Swiss officer on his right noticed Mitch’s bewildered expression as he scanned the artistry of the magical cave. “It’s called Giacometti Hall,” he was told. “It’s very beautiful, yes?”

  “Yes. Why such fantastic workmanship?”

  “Just for a police station, you mean? Well, why not? Giacometti was Swiss, he needed work, Zurich is a wealthy place—it’s very soothing. It makes us proud.”

  “Was it Alberto Giacometti—or maybe a relative?” Mitch asked with professional curiosity.

  “Ah, you know about art. It was Augusto Giacometti, the uncle—also excellent.”

  Mitch was impressed with the civility of a municipality willing to enlist first-rate artists to embellish its public buildings. Now how civilized would its law-enforcement corps be in dealing with a foreign murder suspect?

  Very, it appeared, as he was ushered without haste to a carpeted second-floor interview room with smartly upholstered furnishings and several abstract prints on the wall, like an upscale doctor’s office. Awaiting him were City Police Captain Kurt Wydler, Inspector Lieutenant Andres Ackermann, and a Mrs. Kirschner, no first name provided, from the canton prosecutor’s office. Mitch was invited to sit on the leather-covered sofa and told that the police had been contacted by Gordy Roth, who was due in Zurich the next morning and had arranged for a well-regarded Swiss counselor to represent the suspect. “If you’d care to answer a few questions before then, that would be helpful to us all,” Captain Wydler said, “but no need if you prefer to stay here with us until tomorrow. We don’t have your Miranda rights as such or the precise equivalent of your Fifth Amendment, but we know you’re a former prosecutor in—which state was it—Maryland?”

  “Yes,” said Mitch, glad they seemed reluctant to intimidate him. “I want to be as cooperative as possible—I liked Mrs. Lenz and was very sorry to learn what happened to her. All I can tell you is that I went to visit her at her home the day she was killed to clear up some issues about my firm’s pending auction of the William Tell Symphony—I’m sure you’re familiar with some of the controversy surrounding its discovery—”

  “We know all about it, Mr. Emery,” Lieutenant Ackermann confirmed.

  “Okay. I spent an hour with her, our talk was cordial and wide-ranging, and I left. And I can assure you I had nothing whatever to do with—with her awful death. I really don’t have anything more to offer you people, and I’m not clear why you need to detain me here—though I must admit it’s the most beautiful police headquarters I’ve ever seen.”

  “Perhaps the only beautiful one,” Captain Wydler said with a smile. “Since we have no extradition treaty with your country, we need to detain you until we’ve had the chance to question you thoroughly. So far as we know, you were the last person to enter Mrs. Lenz’s home before her death. It’s our procedure—and she was a prominent citizen—”

  “But what possible motive would I have had?”

  “We’re looking into that, you can be sure.” A subdued but perceptible hint of menace in that. “We’ll try to make you comfortable overnight—your wife is free to stay with you when she arrives—and we’ll resume our interview when you have counsel present.” The captain handed him a copy of the Zurich daily paper. “You may want to read the story in here about Mrs. Lenz’s death—it’s factually accurate as far as it goes. We’re not saying a lot to feed public curiosity until we have more to go on.”

  Mitch took the newspaper with a nod of thanks. “My German is pretty rusty, but my wife is fluent—she’ll translate.”

  Clara looked pleased when she arrived just after 8:00 p.m. and saw that Mitch was not bound and gagged or strapped to a rack. They were left by themselves in the locked interview room, where they were brought ham and cheese sandwiches, a chocolate bar, and coffee and allowed to spend the night in recliner chairs. “Say nothing about your session with Hilde,” he whispered to her. “The place could be bugged—in the hope we say something incriminating.”

  Clara nodded and settled for reading aloud the newspaper account of Margot’s death, which was the lead front-page story. The police had made no announcement of what they called “an apparent homicide following a burglary break-and-entry” until three days after the severely bludgeoned body had been discovered and reported to the police by “Mr. Felix Utley, a family friend, who said he had found the Lenz apartment front door open and the victim dead inside.” Felix claimed he had an appointment with Margot “to discuss a memorial service for her late brother, Mr. Ansel Erpf, who had died by suicide on the Greek island of Santorini six weeks earlier, and a suitable family gift to the community in his honor.” The story noted that Felix had been Ansel’s colleague for a number of years as musicians with the Swiss Philharmonic. “Police said there was no evidence that the deaths of the brother and sister were in any way connected,” the article added, but pointed out that both siblings were “highly active” in the effort by Swiss nationals to recover “the manuscript of the celebrated William Tell Symphony, lately attributed to Beethoven by a panel of international scholars. It was found here last year in the house next door to where Mrs. Lenz’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Erpf, live on Napfplatz and removed to the US soon thereafter.” The victim’s husband, Dr. Leonidas Lenz, a consulting cardiologist, had been reached by police in Bhutan, “where he has been on a mountain-climbing trip with several fellow physicians for the past two weeks. He is expected to return to Zurich tomorrow if he can make flight connections.”

  Mitch shook his head; there went his two leading murder suspects. Felix, to be sure, could have been lying; he might have killed Margot, ransacked the apartment to make it look like a robbery, and then calmly phoned the police afterward to pretend he had found her body. And Dr. Lenz could have arranged for a contract killing of his wife while he was on the other side of the world with an incontrovertible alibi.

  Clara read Mitch’s drawn face. “At least there’s no mention of you or your supposedly having been the last person known to have seen Margot,” she said. “I think that’s a good sign, sweetie—they must know you couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”

  “Right,” he told her and then placed a cautionary index finger over his lips.

  A long, silent night followed.

  Gordy, the proverbial sight for sore eyes, was admitted to the Emerys’ room a little after ten the next morning, more rumpled than usual but very much on his game. “You kids look like hell,” he said. �
��Cheer up—we’ll get this taken care of.” He caught Mitch’s apprehensive look as he cupped an ear and pointed to the walls, ceiling, and table lamps. “Oh, yeah,” Gordy said. “They assured me the place isn’t wired, so I’m afraid we’ll have to take them at their word.”

  Gordy had been a whirlwind since Clara called him in a panic from Tempelhof right after Mitch was taken into custody. “So,” he reported now, “here’s where we are. The leading criminal lawyer in Zurich is skiing this weekend in Zug—he’ll be back Monday and meeting me at my hotel at eleven—he and the canton prosecutor are best buds. Harry’s been in touch with his second cousin’s husband, who happens to be the Undersecretary of State heading up the European Desk—he’s talking today to our ambassador in Bern, who’ll be instructed to approach the Swiss Ministry of Justice about your situation and say that unless they have some firm evidence linking you to Margot Lenz’s death, they can’t lock you up. Meanwhile, our friend Johnny W. has his people fanning out around town, shaking the underworld grapevine—talking to snitches, drug pushers, fences—anyone who might have heard anything about the killing.”

  Gordy’s news about Felix was mixed. The police had reviewed Margot’s bank records and discovered she’d been writing him monthly checks of 5,000 francs for years, “so they’re not buying Felix’s assurances that he and Margot were just casual pals. Plus she stopped writing him checks three months ago, suggesting a change in their arrangement—and a possible provocation for him to strike back at her. Unfortunately, Felix asked to take a polygraph test, Chief Inspector Ackermann tells me, and the results suggest he had nothing to do with Margot’s murder. Ackermann wants to know if you’d also be willing to take a lie detector test.”

  Mitch was alarmed by the question.

  “There’s a reason the tests are not admissible evidence in the States,” he told Gordy, whose legal expertise did not include crime detection. “The results are notoriously unreliable—some people get very jumpy taking them and give false positive readings, and some can control their emotions and fool the machine. I don’t want to bet my life or freedom on whether my involuntary nervous system has a good or bad day.”

  “Whatever you say, Mitch—but I wouldn’t count on its going over too well.”

  Late in the afternoon, following a day of deafening silence from the police, Ackermann appeared in a loden green blazer bearing the crest of his sports club and told the Emerys they were to be transferred within the hour to the nearby Widder Hotel, where Gordy had booked them all rooms. Mitch was to be interrogated on Monday about issues that he had allegedly gone to Margot’s apartment to discuss shortly before she was killed.

  “I’ll do my best to be helpful, of course” Mitch said to Lieutenant Ackermann, hoping to sound as cooperative as possible. “But I honestly doubt I can be of much use in your investigation—my exchanges with Mrs. Lenz dealt only with the extent of her involvement in the discovery of the Tell manuscript.”

  “That sounds to us,” the lieutenant replied, “as if your firm has had suspicions of fraudulent activity on somebody’s part—possibly Mrs. Lenz or her late brother—or Mr. Utley, who we now have reason to believe was the victim’s longtime gigolo. And fraud is criminal activity, and so is murder—these are the possible connections we need to explore with you.”

  “The manuscript issue is strictly a business matter,” Mitch countered, “and the details are private information. We are not a public company or agency.”

  Ackermann was unimpressed.

  “This is a murder investigation—there’s no such thing as private information when we need to account for a savage killing of a leading citizen. So while you’re thinking things over, you’re to remain within the confines of Zurich city until we resume our conversation on Monday.” The lieutenant pivoted on his heels. “Have a nice weekend.”

  {18}

  At liberty within the city limits while under round-the-clock police surveillance, Mitch and Clara braved the winter wind off the lake to oxygenate their tired lungs. They viewed the stained-glass windows and listened to the choir during Sunday morning services at the Grossmünster, then rode the tram up to the Zurich zoo for a diversionary outing before attending to their unfinished task of determining the truth, all of it, about the William Tell Symphony. Was it Beethoven’s Tenth, Emil Reinsdorf’s First, Somebody-or-Other’s Forgery, or still possibly even Ansel Erpf’s nose-thumbing defiance of a world that never understood him?

  It was four in the afternoon, with darkness already encroaching, when Mitch phoned Felix Utley to ask for a final audience at his apartment. “So long as you’re not wearing a wire,” he said, sounding dead serious, “or have any hit men with you.” In view of the peril Clara had been exposed to during her earlier jogging encounters, Mitch insisted she stay in their hotel room just in case Felix tried to act up—and to let Lieutenant Ackermann know if he didn’t return soon.

  It was evident from the outset of the session that things had changed since their earlier confrontational meeting at his flat. Both of them were now subjects of interest in the police investigation of Margot’s slaying, and neither could afford a misstep by flying off the handle.

  The shaggy-headed musician listened closely to Mitch’s playback of the final round of disclosures to him and Clara by Felix’s lately slain mistress and his still very alive Aunt Hilde. By the end of Mitch’s delivery, Felix saw that his clumsy attempt at a million-dollar shakedown of C&W had backfired. But he would not allow himself to be vilified, he insisted, by lies and half-truths. “You need to understand two things about my aunt,” Felix said, trying to sound more sorrowful than vindictive. The first was that she disliked him profoundly. The second was that for all her painterly gifts, Hilde had always been a classic German küche-kirche-kinder hausfrau, “only there were no kinder, so her sun rose and set on Uncle Emil—he could do no wrong by her—he was brilliant and faithful and never struck her—what more could she ask? And if he ran off the track at the end, it had to be someone else’s fault.” He poured Mitch and himself shot glasses of cognac.

  “Off the track in what sense?” Mitch asked.

  “The whole Tell thing—in hindsight—was clearly an immense error in judgment on his part, but, Emil being Emil, he was a force of nature, and he roped us all in, starting with Hilde herself. She sees that now and knows we all should have stopped him. But she’s trying to make you believe Emil’s only mistake was confiding in me, entrusting the manuscript to my care, and holding me responsible for everything that went wrong. And she never wanted me to share in the rewards—if there ever were any.”

  The reason his aunt disliked him so, Felix said, was not hard to grasp. In her eyes, he was a rival for Emil’s affection who never went away—not far enough away, at any rate, to suit her. “I once overheard her tell Emil that I’d been a leech on their marriage for nearly forty years. My real sin was admiring him more than he deserved.” When Felix chose to remain in Switzerland instead of joining him in Berlin, his uncle had accused him of cowardice, fearing to compete against Europe’s finest young musicians. “I doubt it ever occurred to him what failure might have done to me,” Felix mused. “We traveled in different galaxies, you might say.”

  Which brought Felix to the Tell saga. “You can’t begin to understand it without realizing what an egomaniacal old bastard Emil truly was.” It wasn’t enough for his uncle to become the world’s leading Beethoven authority; he needed to be seen as a great man in his own right—“and that hunger drove him nearly delusional in the end. In a way he really thought the Tell was as much his own accomplishment as Beethoven’s.”

  Felix sat staring into his cognac, trying to reconstruct the twisted skein of events.

  “I was utterly blown away when he first brought it to me on one of his visits about six or seven years ago.” His uncle had devoted his entire career to anatomizing harmonic structure and delighting in like drudgery that for him unlocked the mysteries of mu
sical genius. “And suddenly here he was, showing me this thrilling piece, with its extraordinary charm and power, and claiming it was his own creation!” Felix shook his head, as if to exorcise the jarring memory. “I couldn’t believe he’d pulled it off—nobody becomes an instant composer, particularly in such an inventive way and on such an ambitious scale.” He wondered if his uncle was playing a joke on him, but Emil assured him he had been slaving over the work for years and had progressed inch by painful inch. And when he revealed the daring notion behind the effort—to attempt what Beethoven himself had flirted with but never begun, namely, putting Schiller’s Tell to music, and trying to simulate the maestro’s “heroic style” as closely as he could—“it struck me as raging egomania. But then Emil was nothing if not full of himself.”

  Felix’s skepticism was overcome when his haughty uncle invited his assessment of the composition. “He was telling me, for the first time, that my opinion mattered to him.” Felix’s investment in the project deepened when his uncle swore him to secrecy; until Emil’s Beethoven symphony was presented to the world in all seriousness, he might be mercilessly mocked by envious colleagues in academia. What gave Felix pause, he said, was that his uncle had also opted to confide in his old friend Richard Grieder. Even before running afoul of the Swiss Philharmonic’s conductor, Felix had found Grieder to be a shallow character who had parlayed modest talent and imposing looks to win an unassailable perch atop his country’s music establishment. The only thing Grieder and he had in common—besides affection for the conductor’s niece—was Emil’s fondness for teasing them both as hopeless provincials.