One day shortly after Emil had first apprised them of the existence of his grand undertaking, Grieder summoned Felix to his apartment to solicit his thoughts about what the conductor called “this William Tell madness of your dear uncle.” Although he’d encouraged Emil’s effort to evoke the grand Beethoven style, Grieder struck Felix as envious of his old friend’s swollen ambition and eager—beyond Emil’s earshot—to mock it. “It reeks of kitsch, dear boy,” Grieder pompously told Felix. “Do we let him go on, or do him the favor of candor —and risk his eternal wrath?” Felix shook his head. “Grieder just couldn’t grasp what Emil was trying to accomplish,” he said, “whereas I thought it was a gorgeous conception but had grave doubts Emil was capable of sustaining it.”
When his uncle was struck down by cancer and finally confessed the truth about his acquisition of the Tell manuscript from a stranger knocking on his door, Felix found the revelation even more fantastic than Emil’s original claim that he had composed the work himself. At first he suspected that the old rascal had indeed written it but was so frightened of being laughed at that he was now trying to palm it off as genuine Beethoven—and what a masterful ruse! Who else could pull off such a colossal deception? But it all made a crazy kind of sense when Emil explained to him the sorry condition of the two original sketchbooks when they had come into his possession in dire need of exacting restoration before being delivered to mankind.
After being told the full story, Grieder did an about-face when he and Felix spoke again in private. “Richard, that old windbag, leaped at the news and said he had known all along that the Tell was far too dazzling to have been Emil’s creation.”
“But if it was authentic Beethoven,” Mitch asked, “why did your uncle need to reach out to you and Herr Grieder—even assuming you’re both far more than competent musicians?”
“He said he needed confirmation, as he went along refining the manuscript, that the music was truly masterful—feedback from people he could trust to keep a monumental secret.”
The real challenge for Felix came when his uncle prevailed upon him to help stage the discovery of his restored Tell. Grieder and he ought to have urged him to play it straight, Felix conceded, but Emil by then was too deeply committed to his plan and very fearful he would be blamed for having laid his profane hands on holy writ. Moreover, the material rewards Felix claimed he was promised—a quarter of Emil’s profits and renewed pressure on Grieder to make him concertmaster—overcame his qualms. Grieder was similarly seduced by Emil’s assurances of the fame and fortune that had eluded him; the Tell’s world premiere by the Swiss Philharmonic would cure that. He even bowed to Emil’s insistence that he make Felix concertmaster—“and then, at the first opportunity, please notice, he broke his word, treacherous ponce that he is.”
“Your aunt insists she doesn’t know about any financial arrangement that Emil made for you to share the payoff from Tell,” Mitch prodded.
“So she says—perhaps became Emil found it convenient to blame me when Jacob Hassler ran away with the manuscript.” Made to feel guilty, Felix dreamed up the Ansel letter from London, hoping that if it would scare C&W enough to cancel the auction, allowing Margot’s family to buy back the manuscript cheap from Jake. It was the only way for any of them to make money from the thing, Felix had calculated, never suspecting that Emil had struck his own deal with Jake. In the end, after Mitch had sent him the Ansel letter in the hospital, Emil figured out who its real writer was, relented enough to apprise Felix of his arrangement to share in Jake’s take from the auction, and told C&W that the letter claiming Ansel had written the Tell was preposterous. “And he promised I’d benefit someday from his share of whatever the manuscript sold for—which I assumed meant I’d be a beneficiary under his will.”
“But nothing was ever put in writing between the two of you?” Mitch asked.
“He was my uncle—how could I ask him for that? I had to trust him.” Whether Emil ever told Hilde about his promise, Felix said he never knew. “But maybe you can see more clearly now—without awarding me a medal—why I tried to lean on your company after Hilde told me at the funeral to forget about any inheritance. I would not call her a doting aunt.”
Nor, he insisted, had Margot Lenz’s animosity toward him been justified. Their ardent affair had foundered, in Felix’s view, when it collided head-on with her chronic ambivalence toward her half-mad brother. “I was forced to point out to her, on more than one occasion, that he was a nasty piece of work. She was lying to you if she tried to convince you that I was the sole author of the letter Ansel supposedly sent her from London.”
“Then who did write the letter?” Clara asked.
“Margot and I, together—taking pains with every word. If she wasn’t a party to it, and it wasn’t intended from the first for your company’s eyes, why do you think she was so quick to send it on to you?” Felix turned up his palms to stress the obvious.
“Then why hide from us her own part in writing the letter and blame it all on you?”
“Because by then she was in denial that the letter may have driven Ansel to do away with himself—which was certainly not our intention.” The collateral purpose of the letter, besides trying to confuse C&W enough to call off its auction, was to get Ansel institutionalized as paranoid and delusional, “which he certainly was.” Margot’s dirty little secret, Felix charged, was that even though she complained bitterly about the burden, she subconsciously wanted to keep her brother in a dependent state. Ansel’s accidental disruption of the Tell scheme messed up things so badly that his situation became unmanageable. He was unemployable as a musician, on drugs once again, and living off the family dole while publicly badmouthing its members. Worst of all from Margot’s standpoint, Ansel was threatening to use her affair with Felix as leverage to dislodge her control of Limmat Realty and was even hinting that he would get his act together sufficiently to participate in the family business. “Ansel’s involvement in the Tell situation offered an opportunity to get him out of the picture,” Felix confessed. “I’d been urging her for some years to have him hospitalized—for however long it might take to repair him fully—but she always said she didn’t have the heart for it and, anyway, he’d never forgive her.” That was when Felix proposed drafting the Ansel “confession” letter from London.
“But surely you must have known he’d suspect one or both of you,” said Mitch. “He said as much to us when my wife and I met him in London—suggesting he wasn’t all that addled.”
“Oh, Ansel could be perfectly lucid for long stretches, especially when he was medicated. But his underlying pathology wasn’t being dealt with. Our purpose was mainly to get him help—the letter was meant to demonstrate his pressing need of it. The beauty of it was that the louder he protested that he hadn’t written it, the crazier it made him seem.”
“The beauty of it,” Mitch noted acidly, “may have helped drive him off a cliff.”
Felix gave a hardly persuasive nod of contrition. “Sadly.”
Mitch returned his shot glass to the table. “Well, I’m sorry to inform you there won’t be any million dollars in hush money coming your way from Cubbage & Wakeham,” he told Felix. “Nor, I suspect, will you ever become concertmaster of the Swiss Philharmonic.”
“You may be wrong about that—not that it much matters anymore. Grieder’s just announced his retirement, in case you haven’t heard.”
.
at ten monday morning, Gordy came by their hotel room to report that Chief Inspector Wydler was showing no signs of relenting in his insistence that Mitch disclose every last detail about his encounters with Margot Lenz, her brother, and anyone else concerning the authenticity of the Tell manuscript and the circumstances of its discovery.
“I think you’ll just have to tough it out for a few days longer,” Gordy added. “Our hotshot local lawyer is due by my room a little later, and we’ll get a better read on the law of t
he land. Meanwhile, Johnny Winks’s people are still scouring the town for any leads that might link up to Margot’s killing.”
Mitch and Clara used the interlude to pursue their final, still untapped source of enlightenment regarding l’affaire Tell—Richard Grieder. A vibrant male voice answered Mitch’s phone call and, after a brief, unheard colloquy on the other end, advised, “The maestro will be glad to see you. Three o’clock, please—ring three times.”
The music director’s expansive fourth-floor flat was directly across the street from the philharmonic’s Tonhalle headquarters. The Emerys arrived ten minutes late by intention, not wanting to signal urgency about their mission.
“I’m surprised you haven’t come by for a visit before this,” Grieder greeted them in a plummy baritone. “As a matter of fact, your call anticipated my coming to you with slightly soiled hands and a full heart—now that I’ve formally cut my ties with the orchestra, as you likely know.” He guided them through a white-marbled foyer to the snow-white living room. “But let me assure you I never intended to allow your auction to be held under false pretenses.”
He had the jaunty look and manner of a thickset boulevardier with a suspiciously unseasonable tan and blown-dry white hair that swooped and swirled after much cosseting. His pearl-gray, Italian-cut blazer screamed pricey and may have been retrieved from the cleaners only a few hours before by Tonio, his strapping, chisel-chinned, and considerably younger companion. Mitch focused his line of inquiry—surely the last he could undertake to solve the whole Tell riddle if he hoped to remain employed by Harry Cubbage—on the disclosures by Felix Utley, inviting the conductor to confirm or correct them.
“About what we would expect, eh, Tony?” Grieder said blithely. “Typical of Utley to try to savage me by playing fast and loose with the truth.” Felix had never forgiven him, he said, for breaking up his rather brazen affair with Grieder’s happily married niece, the mother of two, being carried on right under the conductor’s nose and in plain view of the orchestra. “Pity he’s not half so accomplished an artist as he is a womanizer,” Grieder sniped.
The remark drew an assenting whoop and girlish cackle from Tonio.
“Then why did you keep him on?” Mitch asked.
“Oh, he’s a competent enough musician—and then there was dear Emil, always hovering and nagging me to advance Felix. But he didn’t deserve it—rather the opposite, on grounds of depravity.” The aging dandy folded the fingertips on his left hand into its palm and examined their cuticles intently. “In fact, I’ve just signed his notice of dismissal from the orchestra—did he mention that? It’s one of my final acts as music director—it was very satisfying. They may not have told him yet.” Was it any wonder, he asked, that Felix had accused him of being an active co-conspirator in the reprehensible game that he and his uncle had been playing with this Tell symphony? “It’s all an outright fraud, in my opinion, and Felix perfectly well knows it.”
“A fraud—how, exactly? Because Emil counterfeited it—and there never was a stranger who appeared out of the blue and sold him the beat-up manuscript?”
“Who can tell?” Grieder cried. “He kept changing the story—”
“But you deny being implicated in any way?” Mitch pressed him.
“If you mean did I engage in any fraudulent activity, certainly not! But was I culpable for failing to speak up and shame the supremely eminent Professor Reinsdorf, the eminence gris of the German music world? I plead guilty.”
He had been acquainted with the Tell project for some years and with its instigator since boyhood, Grieder acknowledged. They had attended the same schoolhouse in Lucerne, shared university digs in Vienna and dreams of becoming famous concert artists, and remained friends despite having followed sharply divergent career trajectories. “When he learned of my ambition here, he said to me, ‘Richard, to become a Swiss maestro is like being the chess champion of Mars.’ I didn’t appreciate it. I told him that I thanked heaven because at least I didn’t have to lick the boots of the Huns the way he did.”
It was during one of their twice-a-year boozy get-togethers that the Tell was first broached. Grieder was dumbfounded, he said, when Emil showed him the opening section of what he claimed to be his own “dramatic symphony” tracking Schiller’s blank-verse drama of Swiss valor. Emil’s claimed hope was that his old friend’s orchestra would be the first to bring the Tell to the world’s attention. The opening portion of the score seemed worthy enough, even with the bumps and snags that Grieder told him needed addressing. But he had his doubts from the start. “Nobody becomes an accomplished composer so late in life,” he said. “I suspected that something else was going on—which, for his own mysterious reasons, Emil wished not to share.”
And suddenly, after Emil’s cancer struck, he totally altered his story about the Tell manuscript and the true identity of the composer. Grieder claimed that he was “utterly appalled” by his friend’s reckless self-indulgence for failing to go public when the manuscript—whatever it was and whoever wrote it—passed into his hands. “I refused to have anything further to do with the project.” Not that he doubted Emil’s zeal and devotion, Grieder said, or his unique credentials to evaluate the ragged composition and meticulously repair it. But there was a proper way to do it—the painstaking, scholarly way, however long the process took, “and Emil knew the difference better than anyone.” His ego and, perhaps, his advancing age had driven him to the wrong choice, Grieder saw—fixated him until he was totally possessed by the idea of singlehandedly restoring what he had convinced himself was Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. In doing so, the conductor lamented, he had suppressed if not eradicated the almost certain truth—that the Tell had been composed by some pretender and fobbed off on him as a lost masterpiece.
“Once you saw the situation,” Mitch asked, “why didn’t you try to talk sense to him?”
“Because he’d moved beyond appeals to reason. Emil had a terminal disease and was fiercely resentful of his mortality. And suddenly here was a means of cheating death—by grabbing the tail of Beethoven’s comet, so to speak, and riding it to his own place in the musical firmament. Do you think Emil Reinsdorf would have abandoned his consummate ambition just because I asked him to?”
“Then why not blow the whistle on him?”
“Oh, now that’s a different matter.” First, he said, Emil was a very old friend, and old friends didn’t betray each other. More to the point, it was just possible that Emil was right—the Tell might actually have been written by Beethoven—it certainly approximated his sound and passion—and who was the provincial Grieder to say the great Reinsdorf was mistaken? He was satisfied that the academic authorities would ultimately settle the matter. But when Emil sent Felix to explain the devices they had settled on to gain credibility for the suddenly surfacing manuscript, Grieder drew the line. He actually prayed, he said, that their scheme would never come to fruition, and, given Emil’s failing health, it seemed a good bet.
His zealotry prevailed, however, and a year or so later, Emil called Grieder again about the details of the imminent Tell unveiling, including firm plans for the Swiss Philharmonic to give the premiere performance, once the work had been properly authenticated, and for the establishment of a government-run Tell Fund greatly benefiting the philharmonic. The only quid pro quo that Emil sought from Grieder was silence and a pledge to make Felix his concertmaster and to rehire cellist Ansel Erpf, whose family would be of vital help in the staged discovery of the manuscript. He gave Emil no immediate answer, prompting Felix to pay him a follow-up visit a few days later. If Grieder refused to help or chose instead to give their game away, Felix said they would be obliged to implicate the conductor as an active accomplice in the faked discovery in Zurich. “And for good measure, he hinted none too subtly that my so-called ‘moral issue’ would be spread all over the media—‘defrocking the queen,’ as Felix so sweetly put it. I rank him on a par with the less-lika
ble forms of amoebic dysentery.” He glanced over at Tonio, who nodded vigorously. “I felt trapped, humiliated—and immobilized.”
Jake Hassler’s flight with the manuscript thus came as a godsend. After an obligatory lip-service show of patriotic outrage over the American’s theft, Grieder lost little time in reneging on his promise, extracted under duress, to promote Felix and reemploy Ansel. “It was an error in judgment—I needn’t have reacted so rashly,” the conductor conceded. “You see how vindictive Felix is—and for Ansel, I’m afraid, my haste fueled his fatal depression.”
“You mean that your decision not to rehire him affected his state of mind,” Mitch asked, “as in the straw that broke the camel’s—neck, in this case?”
“In a manner of speaking. But you might as well know the truth about Ansel’s death since I’ll be going to the authorities shortly, as soon as my resignation has taken effect.”
Grieder had been spending Christmas/New Year’s week at the hotel in Rethymno, a lively resort town on the north coast of Crete, where he and Tonio vacationed free from inhibition several times a year. Toward the end of the week, he related, Ansel telephoned him—everyone connected with the orchestra knew where the maestro went on holiday—to say he was at his ex-wife Lisa’s place on Santorini, where he had come to say goodbye because he was about to be institutionalized, perhaps for a long while, and might emerge, if ever, as a lobotomized shell. But Lisa was away, so now he wanted to ferry over to Crete, he said, “to reach closure” with Grieder. The conductor replied that he didn’t see the point and assured Ansel that he bore him no ill will. “But he said, ‘Humor me, maestro—one last time,’ as if admitting that I had been more than indulgent toward him over the years. So, being a compassionate soul, I relented—but asked dear Tonio here to stand sentinel until my unwanted visitor had come and gone.”
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