The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (12 page)

“I have no evidence Gunther was involved in anything illegal,” Anna said, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. She moved closer to pour me another drink, and this time she stayed seated on the bed. As she leaned over to fill my glass, the neck of her kimono swung open, revealing a high firm breast.

I muttered something about virgins, I believe, and renunciation versus passion. I think I may have spoken of the need for pilgrimage. I know I protested slightly when my clothes began to come off; I tried again to voice my suspicions that Anna was working for somebody, if not Sandretti, then perhaps Frigga herself. She had definitely been avoiding Frigga. My thought process, however, grew more and more muddled, and in the end the only admission I was able to draw out of Anna was that, no, the oboe was not her first instrument; she had actually studied the trombone and that was some years ago.

I woke up in the morning, surprisingly naked under the sheets. I had a headache and at first only a hazy memory of the past evening’s events. It took Marco’s shocked face at the door to alert me to the possibility that something had gone awry with my sleuthing. The biography of the well-known conductor that I’d brought from Nicky’s house in London lay by my head on the pillow, with a brief note: “This is possibly what you were looking for. Regards, Anna de Hoog.”

S
HEEPISHLY, THOUGH WITH LESS
guilt than one would expect, I let myself out of the
palazzo
and found a café, where I had a bracing cappuccino and a croissant. When my head was a little clearer, I began to seriously page through the biography. It was inscribed to Olivia in memory of “all we went through during the war.” Midway through the book it became obvious that the author had been Olivia’s lover, the conductor who had arranged for her to get out of Vienna and to England.

“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “Olivia’s son, Jakob, was not able to come with us that day. He promised to join us very soon. Olivia believed it was his fiancée Elizabeth who held him back. She was not Jewish and did not see the danger in the way we did. Like millions of others, Jakob and Elizabeth were swallowed up in the horrors that followed. Jakob was picked up by the Nazis. Elizabeth vanished. It was a great tragedy in Olivia’s life that she was never able to save her son. She made several trips to the Continent after the war and eventually learned he had died at Dachau of pneumonia. A survivor of the camp remembered that Jakob had spoken of a wife and daughter, but Olivia found no trace of a child.”

Nicky had never mentioned to me that Olivia suspected her son and his wife had had a daughter, and that she’d searched for them. But Nicky must have known, and asked me to bring the biography to confirm her memory. No wonder she was so upset when Bitten turned up claiming to be Olivia’s granddaughter. It had to be true. Jakob had died at Dachau, and Elizabeth had escaped to Sweden with her young daughter in 1940 and remarried. Of course, Bitten didn’t seem to remember anything of her early years; everyone knew now that survivors of great trauma often blocked out memories that were too painful.

If Bitten
was
Olivia’s granddaughter, and it seemed quite likely she was, no wonder Nicky was nervous.

Nicky! I looked at my watch. The meeting with Roberta and her friend Giovanna was scheduled for one at the conservatory, and it was now ten thirty. I had to find Nicky’s hotel and let her know. “Yes, I’m sure I can find it,” I had said to her yesterday, waving away her offer of a hand-drawn map. “The Frari, of course. You can’t miss the Frari,” I’d said, forgetting that in Venice even a huge church like Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari could disappear into the closely-packed buildings around it.

I went around in circles for half an hour until I found the tiny hotel in the “alley near the Frari” almost by accident. Bassoon music wafted from an upper story. At the reception desk, the clerk looked blank when I asked for Signora Gibbons in room seven. “No one of that name is here.” Were those her instructions, or was she passing herself off as someone else? She must be here; I could hear the bassoon.

Of course. She was using my passport. I slapped my forehead and apologized to the clerk. “She must be using her married name. Signora Reilly, is that how she registered?”

He nodded and then said shyly, “Are you her sister? You look like her picture in the passport.”

“No I’m not her sister!” I said, and then coughed. “Actually—she’s my cousin.”

I went upstairs and heard the bassoon behind the door. “I know you’re in there, Nicky,” I said. “Open up.”

Reluctantly she dragged herself to the door. She was wearing a large T-shirt that said VENEZIA, which she must have bought at the airport, and velvet stretch pants.

“Come on,” I said briskly. “I have news of various sorts, but I can tell you on the way to the Conservatory of Music. We’re going to do a little research.”

“Thanks, but no,” she said, picking up her bassoon again. “I’ve just come to a place of great satisfaction and joy in my rehearsing, and I plan to stay with that for the morning. Later maybe.”

“But I thought you wanted to know more about the girls in the Pietà.”

Ignoring me completely, she plunged into a long and eerie passage. “Who do you think that is?”

“Shostakovich?”

“No, it’s Vivaldi. It’s amazing; there are times when I think I’ve completely pegged him, that I know him and his way of writing for the bassoon inside and out. The cheeriness, the chattiness, his way of making the bassoon carry the weight of the world for a few long bars, only to resolve it in a laugh. Then, all of a sudden, I’ll be completely taken aback by how modern he sounds. What he could
do
with the bassoon—not just the usual sounds. You know, Cassandra, a lot of people have captured the bassoon’s
longing
, and that sort of stockinged-feet-tiptoeing-into-a-room sound. And, of course,
everybody
always makes it the buffoon of the orchestra. When the symphony composer wants a clumsy, stumbling bumpkin, he always writes in the bassoon. Like this—”

Nicky jumped up and advanced on me, humming some bars from
Peter and the Wolf
. Her auburn curls flew wildly. I backed off. Clearly she had been spending far too much time alone with this instrument. She waved her hands about. “But Vivaldi doesn’t caricature the bassoon; he doesn’t make the bassoon a buffoon. He’ll do fussy, he’ll do bickering, but purely comic squabbling—never. You get the dialogue, you get spirited conversation. You get laughing, you get sighing. I know all that. And then suddenly, I’m playing a passage and realize, the next composer to create this eeriness is Sibelius.”

Nicky plumped down on her bed, completely overjoyed. “He’s a genius. You just can’t come to the end of Vivaldi. Though I wonder,” she said, lying back on the pillows, lifting her leg in the air and regarding her ankle, “if he didn’t get a teeny touch of inspiration from Monteverdi’s
Orfeo
. The bassoon is prominent in the passages in the underworld. There’s some eeriness there, definitely.”

“I thought you wanted to meet Roberta,” I said impatiently.

“Roberta who?”

“Roberta Sandretti. Marco’s sister, the clarinetist. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to arrange this visit to the library. Her friend Giovanna, who teaches the violin, is going to help us.”

“Cassandra, why didn’t you say so to begin with?
Of course
I want to come.”

She jumped up and began gathering her things and thrusting her feet into a ridiculous pair of pumps.

“We don’t have to be there for an hour and a half,” I said. “No need to pinch your toes longer than necessary. We can go have a bite and then stroll over in a leisurely way.”

“I don’t have time for lunch.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t think I can wear this T-shirt to meet Roberta Sandretti, do you? To do research in a library? I’ve got to go shopping.”

I pounded down the stairs behind her. “Just don’t be late,” I said, as she vanished out the door.

The desk clerk looked admiringly after her. “Your cousin is very vigorous,” he said. “I hear her playing the
fagotto
. She has very good lungs.” He gestured approvingly to his chest and stared in a disappointed way at my own.

“She’s a famous
fagotto
player,” I said. “It’s meant to build you up.” Which reminded me: Where was Albert with that old
fagotto
anyway? I hadn’t seen him all yesterday. I hadn’t seen him since after the concert. I still had some time to kill before one. I decided to take the
vaporetto
over to the Riva degli Schiavoni and see if I could locate Albert at the Hotel Danieli.

The Danieli was the sort of hotel that made me feel that any moment after my tentative, soft-shoed entry, a security man might grab my elbows and escort me forcibly out. Fanciful glass chandeliers swung from the high gilt ceiling. Marble stairs zigzagged upwards in a dazzling painterly perspective. Bellhops hefted sleek suitcases, followed by skeleton-thin women in tiny black suits. In the lobby, elegant men sat in leather chairs, smoking and leafing through
La Stampa
and
The Times
. In vain I told myself that George Sand, Ruskin, Wagner and Proust had stayed here and that if I wore dark glasses and assumed a haughty British accent, I’d fit right in.

I didn’t of course. Receptionists can always tell. The uniformed desk clerk had narrow shoulders, hollow cheeks and little black eyes that could probably show obsequiousness, but not to the likes of me.

“Albert Egmont? No, I’m sorry he is not a guest at the hotel.” He dismissed me quickly, with a haughty British accent of his own, implying that it would be very peculiar indeed should I know a guest at the Danieli.

“I don’t understand. Has he checked out?”

With a show of taking great and unnecessary pains, the clerk flipped back a page or two. “I don’t see that this person was ever a guest here.”

“But I…” He turned away, more obviously rude now, to speak to a guest, a woman with a fur hat sitting on her head like a party of dead squirrels. She had an Argentinean accent.

There was nothing to do but take my Joan Plowright imitation and leave. But suddenly I found one of the porters giving me a wink and a surreptitious gesture that said to follow him down a short hall. Well! This hadn’t happened to me in many years. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed. Then I noticed he seemed to be mouthing the name “Albert.” I went after him and turned into a small room filled with left luggage.

“Please, you speak Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Your friend Alberto is my friend also,” he said. “You wish to find him?”

“Actually, yes. Him and his bassoon.”

“He is not a guest here at the hotel. He is staying elsewhere. At a hotel near the train station. It was an old monastery once. I have forgotten its name, but if you ask near the station, they will know it.” Hearing the ring of the desk bell, he started to leave, but I stopped him. I’d noticed with a shock that we were almost next to the glass door leading to the dock and the canal.

“Wait,” I said. “Were you here the night the German man was found in the water?”

“Yes, but I was here, in the left luggage, not on the dock. It was the doorman who found the body.”

“Then you were here when Signore Alberto came earlier that evening to drop off the bassoon in the left luggage.” I cast my eyes quickly around for a paper-wrapped parcel resembling a long frankfurter.

The desk bell gave an irritated ping-ping. “He left no parcel.”

“If Alberto is keeping such a low profile, why are you letting me know where he is? Other people are looking for him. The police, for instance. Are you telling the police where he is? If not, then why me?”

“He said if a woman, a very
lovely
, tall woman with a beret from the Canadian Army, comes to ask for him, I must tell her where to find him.”

I was sure Albert had not said
lovely
. But the porter had whisked off.

I took the opportunity to sneak out onto the dock and look around. The canal was busy, as usual. Timing was everything in whatever had happened. Except for the ten minutes he was gone to deposit the bassoon—when Gunther was firmly before my eyes—Albert was with me at the Pietà through all of
Orlando Furioso
. Marco and Andrew were gone for the third act but were presumably together. Bitten’s movements were unaccounted for, except that she’d left the Pietà with Gunther during the middle of Act Two. Anna of course had been playing, though there might have been enough time during the intermission to kill Gunther. Signore Sandretti? He’d made an appearance before the performance and another at the end, but where had he been in the middle? And Albert had certainly said something about the Danieli to Marco before the performance began. Had they agreed to meet? Had Albert left the bassoon here? And when had he taken it away? Or had he been the one to pick it up again?

I took a good look at the canal. Gunther could have been pushed from any number of places. From this dock, from the bridge, or from the pavement on the other side of the canal where the water surged up. That would have been the darkest place. Of course, Gunther could have been pushed in from someplace farther up the canal, perhaps from one of those dead-end narrow alleys. Even a window was possible.

“Is Madame still here?” the front desk receptionist, he of the narrow shoulders and beady black eyes asked, suddenly appearing behind me. “Are you still looking for your…friend?”

In another moment he’d be having me searched to see if I had one of the chandeliers tucked into my leather bomber jacket.

“I’m hoping to find a water taxi, my good man,” I said, now Queen Victoria as played by Judi Dench.

The desk clerk snapped his fingers, and a water taxi appeared from nowhere.

“The Conservatory of Music,” I said grandly. I held out a folded note, a large note, but as the receptionist reached for it, I managed to drop it into the water. In spite of himself, he scrambled for it, and that was a sight I wouldn’t have missed.

The water taxi headed out toward the Grand Canal. It was madness to spend Nicky’s money this way. Dropping thousands of
lire
into the canal to make a silly point; dropping thousands more on a trip through the most touristy, gondola-clogged stretch of water in Venice. Was I losing my mind? Still, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, with its huge snails of Baroque buttresses guarding or glorifying the entrance into the Grand Canal was one of the world’s great sights. It was best seen from the water, I told myself. Might as well enjoy it. It was, after all,
Nicky’s
money.