The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (15 page)

The place suited Albert better than the Danieli, I thought, and then wondered how I could know. I hardly knew Albert at all. Our time in the Norwegian fjord country had been more competitive than social, and I’d spent only one evening with him since. I was pretty sure he was not a murderer, but I was sure of nothing else.

Back at the desk I was told, regretfully, that Signore Egmont was out, and no, they had no idea where he was or when he might be back. But if Madame would like to leave a message?

Madame wrote on a piece of hotel stationery, “What the hell are you up to, Albert?”

But I was still left with the problem of what to do now. I did not particularly want to go back to my hotel and be questioned by the police. I would feel obligated to give them the name of Nicky’s pension, and she might find herself in real trouble. Why hadn’t she just stayed in England when she had the chance? Aside from wanting to know about the bassoon and Gunther, the inspector would be asking questions about how she came to re-enter the country with a stolen passport. My passport.

Where to, then? I began walking up the Fondamenta di Cannaregio, which, before the train station was built, was the main entrance to Venice. The Cannaregio had fallen off somewhat since then. The nicest thing about it was that, since it didn’t have many famous sites, there were far fewer tourists. It was dirtier here, more pungent. The air smelled of fish frying in olive oil, of garlic and tomatoes, of faintly brackish water. I walked until I saw the sign for the Ghetto, and turned off the
fondamenta
. I followed the street past woodworking shops and a kosher restaurant or two to the Campiello delle Scole. Then I came to the footbridge that led to the Ghetto Nuovo. In spite of its name, the Ghetto Nuovo was not new at all. It was the original Jewish ghetto in Venice, the compulsory residence from which all subsequent ghettos derived their name,
geto
, the Venetian word for foundry.

This bridge was one of three that connected the island to the rest of Venice. Connected and closed off. For three centuries the gated bridges had been locked at night, for protection, some said. At one time several thousand Jews had lived on the enclosed island, Ashkenazim and later Sephardim. When Napoleon ordered the gates torn down, that number dropped, though the Jews of the city still continued to pray and do business in the Ghetto.

The large campo seemed a peaceful place this late afternoon, with a few well-dressed children tossing a ball back and forth, their grandparents chatting on a bench. Compared to most places in Venice, it was so quiet that it was hard to imagine a time when the square would have been packed with bankers, laundresses, jewelers, rag and bone pickers, rabbinical students. With children playing games.

The golden light of Venice fell on the Holocaust memorial along one wall.

I walked over to a corner of the square to the museum, paid for a ticket and went upstairs. I was weary suddenly, more melancholy than was proper for a truly inspired museum visit. Yet I didn’t know what else to do at the moment.

A man was standing with his back to me in front of a glass display case. I didn’t recognize him immediately because a yarmulke covered his bald head and his hands were in the pockets of his cloth coat. But after I watched him a moment, I realized there could be no mistake. His reflection floated eerily among the filigreed silver prayer books, the elaborate pitchers, the worked-silver scroll cases and the branched candelabras.

He felt himself observed, turned easily and smiled with more pleasure than worry. It was almost as if he’d planned that I’d follow him to this obscure campo and tiny museum filled with silver liturgical objects.

“Cassandra, my dear. Are you here for the tour as well?”

“
NO, I’M NOT HERE
for the tour!” I said. “I’m here to ask you some questions.”

“No need to blurt. We have plenty of time, my dear,” he said, putting a black-gloved hand on one of my waving arms. “We can talk while we’re being shown about. I’ve been looking forward to this tour of the Ghetto’s synagogues for ages. I like what you’ve done with your hair, by the way. It seems to have grown since I saw you last.”

“Humidity,” I muttered.

“Yes, I expect a storm is coming,” Albert said. “The air feels quite tingly.”

He had led me firmly down the stairs to the group standing in the forecourt of the museum. Almost everyone looked American to me, and few of the couples seemed to be traveling well.

“We could of bought the same exact menorah at home, Daniel,” one frosted blonde was chiding her husband.

There were five synagogues for us to visit. When the Jews were moved on to the small island they’d had to take what buildings were given them, but over the years they had modified the interiors and extended the number of stories on the houses. The
scola
, or synagogues, meeting houses for public prayers as well as general assembly halls and study halls for the daily reading of the Torah, were usually on the top floor of a house, with five windows visible from the outside. Only those five windows gave an indication from the campo that a holy place was hidden above.

We trudged up some back stairs to the Scola Canton, a jewel-box of a synagogue built in the early 1500s. Inside, it was like being in an ornate Renaissance chest, all inlaid with wood and decorated with small paintings illustrating stories from the Bible. Albert had taken out tiny binoculars and put them to his eyes to more closely inspect Moses parting the Red Sea. Questions peppered the guide, a young woman with a streak of orange through her otherwise sedately styled dark hair. Did the Ashkenazim speak Yiddish here? Yes, they did. They were poorer than the Levantines, who came later and were Mediterranean merchants, and the Sephardim, who were ousted from Spain, but who brought wealth with them as well as a habit of praying in secret. The Ashkenazim had been forced since medieval times to be the bank for the poor as well as the rich. I listened with half an ear while I considered what I really wanted to know from Albert.

As the yarmulkes swarmed, I mentally reviewed what I knew of the recent events.

A rare bassoon belonging to Signore Sandretti had been stolen from Nicola’s room while she was sleeping. Although the bassoon was mysteriously recovered by Albert, Sandretti had claimed he didn’t recognize it. The evening of the bassoon’s attempted return, Gunther was found dead in the canal. Anna de Hoog was first on the scene, followed by Sandretti. I knew Gunther had left the Pietà during Act Two of
Orlando Furioso
after receiving a phone call, and Bitten had followed him. She said they took a walk, in the direction of the naval museum. They were observed in the act of quarreling by Marco and Andrew, who’d left the performance during the interval between Acts Two and Three. Marco and Andrew then walked in the opposite direction and went to the bar of the Danieli for a drink. That left about a half an hour for someone to push Gunther into the canal.

Bitten had the opportunity, but unless she was someone other than who she said she was, unless she had been faking an attraction to Gunther, unless he had so roused her to anger that she considered killing him, she didn’t really have the motivation. That’s what it came down to.

“Let’s get one thing out of the way,” Albert said, sidling up. “Then you can stop giving me those terribly suspicious looks. Tell me you don’t suspect me of murdering Gunther.”

“No,” I said grudgingly. “You were with me the whole time.”

“And it’s precisely for that reason that I don’t suspect you.”

“Me!”

We left the Scola Canton and started downstairs with the rest of the group. In front of us were Daniel and his wife, still arguing about the menorah. About whether the one they had bought, that Daniel Big-Spender had bought, was the exact replica of one easily found at Bloomingdales. For half the price.

“Here’s my question to you,” said Albert. “Who called Gunther on his cell phone during the concert?”

“Frigga, I assume.”

“And she is?”

“His great-grandmother. She raised him after his mother died. She arrived in Venice yesterday.”

“It would be easy enough,” said Albert, “to check the cell phone and see what the last number on it was.”

“Except that the cell phone went into the drink with him.”

The tour guide was now leading us up another set of stairs in another building. Some impatient male members of the group had taken off their yarmulkes, and the guide reminded them they had to put them on again. This synagogue was crimson and dark wood. It too was small and had a hidden feeling.

“Where was the elder Sandretti during the concert?” asked Albert, and then darted away to observe some carvings close up.

I waited until the guide had finished her description, and then closed in on Albert again. Signore Sandretti had definitely been there at the beginning—he’d introduced the opera—and at the end, but I hadn’t seen him, at all, during the concert.

“But why would Sandretti murder Gunther?” I whispered to Albert, as the group began to leave the room.

Albert was still enthralled by the wooden bas-reliefs. With difficulty he put his binoculars down and turned to me, sighing. “I’m not suggesting that. I’m only saying that he is not what he seems.”

“Because of the bassoon?”

“Exactly. Here we have a well-known Venetian musical impresario, whom one suspects might be in a little financial difficulty. He reports that a bassoon has disappeared. Not just any rare bassoon from a museum, but a bassoon from his private collection. A bassoon that he repeatedly asserts is a musical instrument once used by the Pietà performers and one which has been in the family for generations.”

“Don’t you believe him?”

“That’s hardly for me to say. But I suspect that his assertion adds to the value of the instrument. That’s usually why people make such assertions. Perhaps he even has some documentation to back up his claim. No, the interesting question has always been, why was this particular bassoon taken?”

“To get Nicky in trouble,” I said promptly. We were walking en masse down the street that led off the island and connected the old enclosed Ghetto with the area where the Sephardim had moved. Once it had been open and farmlike, according to the guide, with an inn and various shops. Now it was as dense as any place in Venice. We passed the shop where Daniel had apparently purchased the menorah. “No, I am not exchanging it. This is not New York; it is not a department store kind of mentality, Doris!”

I added, “Bitten stole it to punish Nicky for…something. A jealousy thing.”

“Ah, the psychological factor,” Albert said. “And yet there may be a far simpler explanation.”

“Such as?”

“Insurance, my sweet. If a rare bassoon from a museum had been stolen, it would have been a serious offense as well as a loss to the Italian people—not exactly on the order of a Bellini Madonna being stolen in broad daylight from a church, but a loss all the same—but it would not have personally enriched Signore Sandretti.”

“Which might explain why Sandretti claimed the bassoon wasn’t his when you returned it.” I thought back to that peculiar scene. “Bitten and Marco recognized it immediately.”

“Marco strikes me as unhealthily loyal to his father,” Albert said. “I’m not sure what Bitten’s silence meant.”

“The psychological factor again?” I suggested. “She wanted Nicky to be guilty.”

“Psychology is all very well,” said Albert as we stepped into the last synagogue on the tour, a small one below that of the Levantines, which was closed to visitors. “But in my profession, money is usually the great motivator.”

“Even for murder?”

“I have seen it happen,” said Albert, enigmatically.

When the tour was over, we stepped out into the silvery stone street of late afternoon. The clouds above were pink and thunder blue: cool colors, in spite of the retained warmth of the pavement and houses. The air rumbled quietly, as if to itself, as if contemplating further action.

The guide’s talk in the last small family synagogue had sobered us. For she had told us about the rounding up of Venice’s Jews during the war. Compared to Germany and Poland, the numbers were minuscule; still, only sixty people returned. The population had remained small in the Ghetto. There were no Ashkenazim left, only Sephardim. Daniel and Doris were no longer arguing, I noticed, and several people wiped away tears.

As Albert and I walked back in the direction of the campo, I asked, “But how did you come up with the bassoon in the first place? And where is it now?”

“Since we’re in the neighborhood,” he said, “I suggest we pay a visit to my old friend Graciela.”

Graciela’s antique shop was a tiny, tasteful place in a quiet square nearby. It was not overly stuffed with objects like many stores of its nature, where you find potato mashers rolled up in Turkish rugs, African masks thrown into Mexican baskets along with broken toys and silver-plated pepper mills. Here one would not discover any odd treasures like a box of doll’s heads or an old travel book titled
By Camel Across the Desert, by Two Ladies
. In Graciela’s shop, the display was deliberate, not random. A few silver teaspoons tied together, a mottled green flask of hand-blown glass, a single delicate wine glass of a beautiful rose color, a spill of glass beads. On a velvet scarf was arranged a handful of old jewelry that made me think of the once frivolous dead. On the walls were nails with coat hangers from which swung a few garments: two embroidered men’s coats, one faded red, one sky blue, a sateen vest that suggested Regency England, some silk scarves from the Orient.

Graciela came forward and kissed Albert three times on the cheeks. “My dear,” she said in perfect English. “I did not expect to see you again today.”

“Graciela,
cara
,” said Albert. “My dear friend Cassandra, whom I ran into
quite
unexpectedly and who has been the source of all this whirlwind woodwind business, has some questions that I thought we could answer together.”

“Certainly,” said Graciela, motioning us onto three rickety but beautiful eighteenth-century chairs. Graciela was not like some of the secondhand dealers I’d known and loved over the years, the shabby and eccentric purveyors of all that was useless, abandoned and mysteriously compelling. Not only was she coiffed and elegantly dressed, but Graciela had the precise gestures and regal manners of a duchess. She reminded me, oddly, of Olivia Wulf, except that her smile was genuine and her voice more kind than gruff. She was a bit older than Albert, I guessed, but then, I had no real idea how old Albert was. He could be thirty-five; he could be sixty.