Ansel showed up the next day looking unrecognizably downcast and haggard, Grieder recalled, his tone darkening. “I asked how he was, and he said, ‘As you see me,’ and then added that things had never gone right for him since he had walked away from the philharmonic. Now his family was about to put him away as a lunatic, he said, his parents had all but disinherited him, his damnable drug habit had returned, his involvement with the Tell discovery had proven fruitless, and I had gone back on my promise to rehire him—so frankly all seemed lost. At which point he produced a suicide letter—to be mailed to you, Mr. Emery—and insisted that I read it. It was full of anguish and self-pity, with a soupçon of the gallows humor he excelled at.”
Putting the letter aside, Grieder urged Ansel to reconsider and suggested that an extended course of hospital treatment might well send his demons packing. Instead, Ansel pleaded to be taken back into the philharmonic—“far better therapy than any available to him in hospital,” he said and reminded Grieder that his professional skills had never been at issue. Grieder, no longer pressured by the Erpf family to forgive Ansel for his past insubordination, said it was impossible. But Ansel, wild-eyed by now, wouldn’t take no for an answer. “He claimed I had constantly provoked and belittled him—and then he was shouting that he had a loaded gun in his pocket—he hadn’t bothered to remove his coat when he arrived—and was going to blow my brains out for making his life so miserable. ‘I’m taking you with me, you worthless load of shit,’ he screamed, ‘because what can they do to me after I’m found flat as a pizza at the bottom of a cliff on Santorini?’”
Grieder said he had no choice by then but to assume Ansel was in deadly earnest and gave the prearranged signal—a tug on the right ear—to Tonio, who was standing by in the entry hall, poised to intervene. The conductor told Ansel that killing him would do neither of them much good, which made Ansel laugh. He asked for a drink and wondered if Grieder might now want to reconsider his refusal to rehire him and thereby spare both their lives. “So I said, ‘Well, perhaps I might.’ But he said that wasn’t good enough, I’d have to write out an irrevocable promise to restore his position with the orchestra. I said he was being unfair, which made him explode and appear ready to do what he’d threatened. I nodded at Tonio, who bounded in from the hallway and gave Ansel a great wallop with a poker he had borrowed from the fireplace in our suite. I’m afraid it inflicted fatal damage on the poor, hopeless fellow.”
Although the homicide was indisputably an act of self-defense, Grieder was unwilling to risk the scandal from any investigation. They cleaned up Ansel’s blood from the floor, where it had pooled neatly, saved the suicide letter that had been left on the coffee table, and made arrangements “through friends in our community” to have Ansel’s bundled remains put aboard a fishing vessel that same evening for the voyage to Santorini. “The next night they shoved him off the jagged cliffs below his ex-wife’s house—she was notorious on the island, so finding the place was no problem,” Grieder wound up, “and his injuries were consistent with a thousand-foot plunge onto a bed of rocks.” The local gendarmes were accustomed to suicides by swan dives off the cliffs. Then Grieder’s hirelings went into Thera, the main town on the island, and posted the suicide letter Ansel had pre-addressed to Mitch. While the letter had viciously defamed Grieder, it also served to spare him, and anybody else, for that matter, from a homicide charge, notwithstanding a suspicious absence of splattered blood at the site where Ansel’s remains were found.
“I see,” Mitch said, struck by the cold-bloodedness of the account. “Any regrets?”
“Not really—it was my life or his. As I say, I was getting ready to report all I know to your company about this Tell business. And the police were to be my next stop. I’m hopeful they’ll be discreet—but not counting on it. Thus, the timing of my resignation.”
“And Ansel had nothing whatever to do with dreaming up the Tell project?” Mitch asked.
“Not so far as I know. He was a gifted performer, but his creative skills were limited.”
Mitch made a final entry in his pocket-sized notebook and, before closing it, looked up. “Oh, what sort of gun did you say Ansel had on him—the one he threatened you with?”
Grieder shrugged. “I didn’t say.”
“Now would be an opportune time, then.”
“He didn’t have a gun. It was all just a bluff to scare me out of my wits. His letter might have been part of it—he may never even have intended to take his own life. Poor sad chap.”
“Poor, mon derrière,” said Tonio. “He was a psycho—and tout le monde knew it.”
.
on tuesday, the swiss authorities turned up the heat.
Gordy came by their hotel room at midmorning with his star Zurich legal recruit in tow directly after the two of them had conferred at police headquarters with the team pressing the inquiry into Margot Lenz’s murder. Ruedi Lutoff carried himself with self-assurance and spoke English nearly accent-free, having read law at Oxford and won his JD at Georgetown. Before opening his own office, Lutoff had worked seven years in Bern with the Swiss Ministry of Justice and was acquainted to one degree or another with all twenty-six canton prosecutors in the country. “Ruedi knows the ropes,” Gordy told the Emerys. “He’s running our show with these folks from here on in.”
And the show was no comedy, Lutoff made clear to them. “The police think you’re obstructing their investigation in order to protect your employer more than yourself,” he told Mitch.
“They’re right,” Mitch said. “What I can tell them about my interaction with Mrs. Lenz is proprietary information—strictly about our efforts to explore all aspects of the Tell manuscript. It has nothing whatsoever to do with her death.”
“How can you be so sure there’s no connection, Mr. Emery,” the Swiss lawyer asked, “unless you know more about how and why she was killed than you’re letting on?”
“With all due respect, I don’t think that’s what their detaining me is all about.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Emery?”
Mitch began to pace their hotel suite like the caged tiger they had seen at the zoo two days before. “I’m saying it’s no secret that your government—and Swiss public opinion, from what I gather—is not kindly disposed to my company’s efforts to help our client Mr. Hassler sell the Tell manuscript he removed from your country in the belief he had every right to do so. I’m afraid anything I tell the police about my ongoing investigation of the writing and discovery of the manuscript will be leaked to the media and seriously compromise my firm’s ability to conduct its business. I think your government is trying to hold me hostage in an effort to sabotage our auction of the Tell manuscript, which may attract bids in eight or nine figures. And if we give in and cancel the auction, our client will probably have little choice but to accept a far more modest offer from a Swiss national—perhaps Mrs. Lenz’s parents or her husband—or from the government itself, so the property can gain worldwide prominence as a Swiss national treasure.”
The Swiss attorney looked at Gordy with disbelief and then back at Mitch. “I admire your loyalty to the Cubbage & Wakeham company,” he said, “but frankly you sound obsessive and paranoid—if you’ll forgive my saying so. Besides, you give our police and government far too much credit for scheming in tandem. This is a criminal investigation, not a national policy issue. And even if there were a grain or two of truth in what you say, it doesn’t mitigate the right of the police to interrogate you thoroughly. Which, by the way, is what Mrs. Lenz’s husband—he’s now back from the Himalayas—strongly urges. He says his wife was somehow mixed up in something ‘rather odd’—his words—but he doesn’t know what, having to do with the Beethoven manuscript, if that’s what it is. He thinks Mrs. Lenz may have been acting in some sort of connivance with her late brother, whose death he suspects was not really by suicide, and with her lover—yes, he’s known all about her affair with Mr. Ut
ley—”
“It sounds,” said Mitch, “as if the good doctor knows a lot about a lot of things. Perhaps the police ought to be concentrating on him instead of harassing me.”
“They say they’re considering everything and everybody, Dr. Lenz included. And as you’ve heard, the police know Margot was keeping Utley as her well-rewarded lover, so he’s still very much on their radar screen even though he volunteered to take the polygraph test. So they need you to tell them everything you know about all of these people, however remote you may think it is from the woman’s death—which has become a national sensation, by the way. They’re giving you till noon tomorrow to begin talking to them.”
“Or what?”
“Hard to say. They can jail you again and hold you as a material witness and a flight risk until they’ve solved the crime or you’ve been conclusively absolved from it. The courts will decide how long you can be held.”
Gordy phoned Harry Cubbage in New York to report the latest chilling news. At the end of their exchange, Gordy put Mitch on the line. “You didn’t sound so hot when we talked Sunday, kiddo—I’m worried about you,” Harry said. “Great that you’re being ballsy with these Swiss jerks, but we don’t want them shoving you in their pokey and tossing the key off the Matterhorn. Will telling them what they want to know really mess us up all that much more than we already are? I’m afraid we’re in an endgame mode.”
Mitch was grateful for his employer’s sudden solicitude. “I don’t know, Harry—to be honest, I’m still processing everything. It’s even messier than you think—and not really phone talk, if you follow me. If I tell the Swiss cops all I know and word leaks out, it would probably kill the auction. I’ll lay it all out for you when I’m back.”
“Okay, hang tough, tiger—I’m still working the phone with the State Department. I’m told the Swiss government isn’t all that eager to yank Uncle Samuel’s beard ever since we’ve begun leaning on them hard over their bank secrecy laws. Meanwhile, maybe Johnny W.’s people will come up with something.” Harry paused to listen to someone talking to him in the background. “Oh, tell Clara that Lolly sends her love—and promises to treat her to the works at Elizabeth Arden—whatever that means—as soon as you’re back.”
Noon Wednesday came and went.
“I think they’re just trying to make you sweat,” Clara said as Mitch crumpled the day’s issue of the International New York Times and sailed it toward the refuse can like a lumpy basketball.
At one thirty, Gordy and Lutoff came by to advise them that the government might at any moment deport Clara as an undesirable alien.
“On what grounds?” Mitch demanded.
“As a possible accessory to a crime who is interfering with their investigation just by being here and comforting you,” said Lutoff.
“Can they do that?” Clara asked.
“They think it’s their country,” Gordy said.
“But Clara’s got nothing to do with this—she’s just here because—”
“The government can claim whatever it likes—it deports foreign nationals every day,” Lutoff said. “They know expelling Mrs. Emery will upset and demoralize you—and may force you to cooperate a lot faster.”
Gordy phoned the US ambassador in Bern and left word with an aide that the Swiss Justice Ministry ought to be advised not to use Clara, wholly innocent of suspicious activity, as a pawn and risk negative attention from the global media. Then he went into the Emerys’ bedroom for a private conversation with Harry, at the end of which he reemerged and presented the anxious couple with Plan B. “Harry’s about to phone Sedge in London and have him contact Clara’s father—they’re well acquainted, remember,” Gordy laid it out. The chief financial officer of Unilever had a major say about where his huge company parked its international revenues—Swiss banks prominent among the depositories, in all likelihood. Then, besides ringing up the Swiss Embassy in London to protest its government’s planned manhandling of his daughter, Piet would be asked to call his opposite number at Nestle’s, Switzerland’s largest corporate exporter and the world’s leading producer of processed foods, and suggest how foolhardy it would be for their government to set off a global boycott of Swiss products by persecuting innocent foreign visitors like Clara Emery.
Clara was momentarily dazed by the sheer cheekiness of the idea. She glanced at Mitch, who nodded at what he knew would follow, and then told Gordy, “I won’t hear of it. Daddy’s not to be involved in any of this—it’s not a family affair, and it would weaken his position at Unilever for indulging in special pleading on his daughter’s behalf. He works for a heartless corporation, not a benevolent patron. Please call Harry back and thank him but tell him to forget it.”
Gordy fell onto the sofa and shook his head. “Right—Harry and I knew you’d say just what you did. But I’m instructing my friend Ruedi here to advise the police and his pals at the ministry that Plan B is already in the works, and they should expect to be instructed at any time by their superiors to back off the threat to deport Clara.”
Ruedi Lutoff gave a quizzical smile. “It’s what you people call playing hardball, right?”
Gordy stretched his arms wide. “They called it Poker 301 at my law school—the art of the bluff. Let’s give it a try, Ruedi—and blame it all on me.”
Lutoff went off to carry out his assignment while Mitch and Clara, fearful of their imminent separation, took a pre-parting walk down the Rennweg, glancing idly at the merchandise crowding the colorful shop windows, followed by an early dinner delivered to their suite by room service. At eight o’clock, Chief Inspector Wydler and a flunky from the Justice Ministry tapped on their door to hand Clara deportation papers and instructed her to be ready at seven thirty in the morning for a nine o’clock flight to New York, her ticket courtesy of the Swiss Confederation. “Unless Mr. Emery advises us by midnight,” the inspector said without emotion, “that he’s ready to cooperate with us in the morning.”
Their lawyers were out, probably at dinner, when Mitch called them with the news but had to leave a message on Gordy’s cell phone. Clara was frightened and briefly teary-eyed before she steeled herself for a stringent appraisal of their situation. “Is all this really worth it, Mitch? You’re a very upright guy to stand on principle like this. Forget about me for the moment—but is Cubbage & Wakeham worth risking your neck for? You can work at a lot of other places—and for people a lot more endearing than Harry Cubbage.”
Mitch reflected a while before answering her. “First, it’s not just a principle that’s involved here,” he finally said. “It’s potentially a shitload of money, and C&W’s future financial well-being may depend on it. Second, I like my work there—it’s different and challenging—almost never routine. Third, as to Harry—let’s see just how endearing he is.”
It was mid-afternoon in New York, and Harry was at his office desk when Mitch phoned in and described their plight. The conversation was relatively brief. At the end, Mitch handed Clara the phone. “Himself wants to speak with you.”
“Tell your beau I heard that,” Harry said jauntily when she came on the line. “Now you listen to me, Clara Hoitsma Emery—this will all work out fine—and soon. Mitch will tell Gordy to call me with your flight information, and Lolly and I will pick you up at JFK—unless you come in at Newark, wherever that is. And you’ll stay over at our place till this thing blows over—no point in your knocking around alone in your apartment, brooding all day. And I’m not taking no for an answer, you hear? Besides, if you don’t accept my gracious offer of hospitality, Lolly will move in with you by brute force, and you’ll never get rid of her.”
“Okay,” Clara said with a smile after Mitch hung up, “so Harry’s semi-endearing.”
Mitch grew increasingly irritable as time passed without a call back from Gordy. Then, at eleven thirty, he phoned them to say—with subdued ecstasy—that Johnny Winks’s people had saved Mitch’s b
acon. They had picked up the trail earlier in the day of a couple of punk drug dealers operating on Niederhofstrasse near the student quarter who had been overheard bragging about a jewelry heist they scored recently and were looking for a fence. Johnny’s agents passed the word along to the police, who picked up the pair at a tattoo parlor, found one of them with a large diamond brooch in his pocket, and hauled them down to headquarters for a considerably less genteel interrogation than Mitch had faced.
The brooch was rushed over to Dr. Lenz, who at once identified it as his late wife’s property and, on checking her jewelry cases more thoroughly than he had on his melancholy return from Bhutan, discovered that half a dozen of Margot’s prize baubles had been taken. Within an hour, the two captives confessed that they had been friends and drug suppliers of Ansel Erpf, were angered when he told them that his “slutty sister” was about to have him put away in the loony bin, and decided after Ansel’s suicide to take vengeance on “the nasty bitch” by robbing her apartment. Semi-zonked as they broke in through the building’s fire escape, they lost it when they found Margot there, and she tried to resist. They beat her senseless with a crystal vase and grabbed a few handfuls of the dying woman’s valuables before running off.
The tragic intrusion had evidently occurred, according to the Zurich coroner’s best estimate, about midway between Mitch’s departure from and Felix’s arrival at Margot’s apartment. What were the odds against that fortuitous timing? Mitch asked himself. Longer perhaps, he mused, than against Beethoven having composed the William Tell Symphony.
Mitch joined Clara on her morning flight home, but the Swiss government declined to pick up the airfare for either of them.
.
“so here’s what we know—or think we know—but don’t, really,” Mitch said, hiding his fatigue as he laid it all out at the review session Friday morning in the C&W library for Harry, Gordy, Clara, and, listening in absentia, Sedge at the firm’s office in London. “In fact,” Mitch concluded, “the supporting forensics aside, we know nothing at all for certain—especially the Reinsdorfs’ account of how they came by the Tell sketchbooks in the first place. We have only Hilde’s word for it—and she gave us two totally different versions, both equally implausible but not entirely impossible. And Felix says he was given both versions by his uncle, but we have only Felix’s word for that. As to how the manuscript and the supporting evidence got into Otto Hassler’s attic in Zurich—well, we have multiple accounts, including poor, tormented Ansel’s London letter—which Felix confesses he wrote, pretending to be Ansel—and some solid forensic studies concluding that all the documents presented to us appear to be authentic. As to our panel of experts—well, its key member seems to have been the perpetrator of the fraud—if it is a fraud—unless it isn’t—”
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