Free The Weimar Triangle by Eric Koch Page B

hotel safe. He was given a receipt, which he put in his wallet. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Uzielli visited assorted bureaucrats and curators at the exhibition and at City Hall and described the projected exhibit to them, offering to show it to them if they were interested. They rejected it politely on various grounds, without bothering to inspect it first.
    On Thursday morning the director of the institute had called Uzielli to suggest they have lunch together at the Café Laumer on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse to discuss the possibility of publishing his lectures. The Café Laumer, he explained, was a favourite of the institute’s staff and graduate students. Seminars were held in spacious rooms on the second floor.
    Uzielli told the director about the locket of Beethoven’s hair and its rejections. The director was intrigued and amused and asked whether he would mind showing it to him at lunch.
    Oh, not at all.
    The director said he intended to invite Erwin Herzberg, who was always anxious to meet distinguished visitors, professionally and personally, and also one of the institute’s most gifted graduate students, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who happened to be a composer and music critic. They would be bound to be interested in the lock.
    The director told Teddy to wait in the wings at the café until he was called to the table. Teddy was so thrilled by the prospect of seeing a locket of Beethoven’s dark-grey hair that he could not help telling a few friends about it right away. Erwin did not tell a soul.
    On arrival at the restaurant, Uzielli put the briefcase — containing the pigskin case — on the floor next to his chair. During lunch the director, Uzielli and Erwin talked about all kinds of things. After the dessert the director waved to Teddy, who was impatiently waiting at a nearby table, tapping the opening rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on a book he had brought along. He and Erwin exchanged cordial greetings, after which the director introduced Teddy to Uzielli. They made small talk.
    Uzielli picked up the briefcase.
    The leather case containing the locket had disappeared.
    Two hours later, the police had been called and the gruff, mustachioed Detective Sergeant Günther Holzmann, the upholder of Law and Order, had come to ask a few routine questions. He did not inspire much confidence. In the meantime Erwin had called his friend Konrad Edler, an amateur detective who loved solving puzzles and had lots of money of mysterious origin. Since Konrad had an arrangement with the Frankfurter Hof, where the concierge was a friend of his, he began his investigation in the hotel lobby — according to Erwin’s philosophical studies, the locus of objective truth.
    This was on Thursday. By Friday morning — yesterday — Konrad had solved the puzzle.
    The first thing Konrad always did when he was consulted on matters of this sort was to ask himself whether any obvious possible motive came to mind. Here are two of the more than twenty motivations he thought of.
    Suspect A was a descendant of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Konrad had heard that the Hummel family was furious about the way their ancestor’s friend Beethoven was being fêted. Hummel was just as great a composer, they said. All Hummel wanted was to give joy to the world. It was outrageous that badtempered Beethoven got all the publicity. It was time to set the record straight.
    Suspect B was a researcher at the Paul Ehrlich Institute. Ehrlich discovered the drug Salvarsan, which cures syphilis. He received the Nobel Prize in 1908. Any researcher of the institute who somehow had got wind of the locket in Uzielli’s briefcase would, of course, seize it — legitimately or illegitimately — to find out whether Beethoven had syphilis and, if so, whether that was the reason he became deaf. (The answer to both those questions is no.)
    Having decided it would take too much time at this stage to follow up on these and other suppositions, Konrad asked the