The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (16 page)

“Cassandra would like to know how the bassoon came to you,” Albert prompted, since I seemed suddenly tongue-tied.

“Of course. When Albert told me what he was looking for, I put the word out immediately, especially among my colleagues who specialize in old musical instruments. I didn’t have much hope, to tell the truth. Generally whatever is stolen in Italy is out of the country within twenty-four hours. To my surprise I got a call back very quickly. My friend Andreas said that a gondolier had brought the bassoon in two days ago, saying it had been left under a seat. It appeared to have been privately owned. It had no museum markings at any rate. I called Albert, and he retrieved it from my colleague and brought it to the Sandretti
palazzo
. It wasn’t a question of selling it back to Sandretti, of course; still, we did expect a small gift, a token, for our help and honesty.”

Albert nodded, his domed head gilded in the chandelier light. “When Sandretti refused to accept the bassoon or even acknowledge that he recognized it, I realized something else was going on.”

“A gondola!” I said. “Isn’t there a Lost and Found for gondola boats?”

They both laughed politely.

“What did you do with the bassoon before the concert then?”

“As you suspected, I placed it in the Danieli’s left luggage room with my friend the porter, who was under strict instructions to report to me if anyone came asking about it and also to deny that it was there. The next morning I picked it up and brought it here to Graciela’s for safekeeping.” Albert paused. “Three people came to the left luggage room to ask about it.”

“I bet I can guess. Marco, Bitten and Sandretti.”

“Partially right. Bitten came first. About a half hour later, Marco inquired. But the third person was not Sandretti. It was Anna de Hoog, who came after the concert. It was while she was asking about the bassoon that the doorman on the Danieli dock discovered Gunther’s body in the canal.”

“Which is why Anna was first at the scene of the crime,” I said. “Sandretti and Anna de Hoog must be in this together somehow. Is that why you left me the note at the hotel asking what orchestras she played with?”

“A word in your ear, no more,” said Albert. “As several people have noticed, Anna de Hoog is not the world’s most remarkable musician.”

I blushed, recalling the previous night. She had completely disarmed (and disrobed) me.

Graciela brought out the bassoon from the back of the room. “It would be curious indeed if this were one of the instruments from the Pietà. My colleague who specializes in musical instruments says that the Correr Museum owns and displays many of the instruments from the musical school of that
ospedale
. There are a number of violins as well as horns and flutes and oboes. There is even a pianoforte. But there are no bassoons among the inventory.” She patted it somewhat regretfully. “I would not think of selling this, of course. I really hate to see beautiful and historical examples of the national patrimony leave the country.”

“What about all this?” I gestured to the shelves around me. Did she think I was simple? The woman had an antique shop.

“Oh, very little of this is Italian,” smiled Graciela. “Most of it comes from my visits to the big auctions in Great Britain, in the north of England and Scotland, particularly. That is how Albert and I met, didn’t we?”

“But, but,” I said, “Don’t people come into your shop, your shop in
Venice
, expecting to buy something
Venetian
?”

“Collectors don’t think that way, my sweet,” Albert said with amusement. “And as for ordinary people…”

“They don’t think about value and appreciation,” said Graciela. “They love what they love. They love what speaks to them.”

I looked around. The only thing that spoke to me in the shop was Graciela herself, but that was out of the question. Actually, the bassoon spoke to me as well. It said, “Give me to Nicky.
She’ll
appreciate me.”

I said, “I’ll need to get Nicola over here. She could definitely recognize the bassoon. I mean, officially. At least that would get her out of being accused of theft.” I looked around again. “She might recognize some other things. She’s from Scotland, from a family that sold off quite a bit, I believe, on their descent from castle-living a few generations back.”

“Some fall and some rise,” said Albert, with a wink. I gathered he considered that he and I were among the latter. As he showed no signs of wishing to leave, I got up without having destroyed the antique chair and made my way to the door. This hardly seemed the place, in front of his elegant lady friend, to ask him the question I’d saved for last:
You wouldn’t by any chance have noticed that the combination to Nicky’s safe is kept in the lentil jar
?

“If you’re not going to sell the bassoon and you’re not going to give it back to the Sandrettis, at least right away, what are you going to do with it?”

“I’ll keep it safe here,” said Graciela.

“I had an uncle who was a tuba-player,” said Albert. “Perhaps now is my chance to carry on the family talent for tooting. I might take up the bassoon. Just might. After all, it’s one of my favorite instruments.”

“Why?”

“Of all the instruments in the orchestra, it is the most emotionally distinctive. Other instruments, the piano and the violin for instance, have far greater tonal range. Yet what other instrument can alternate between bittersweet lyricism and outright jocularity with such engaging finesse?”

“Are you quoting someone, Albert?”

“Magazine article by Andrew McManus.”

“And where would you have come across an article by Andrew McManus?”

“Stuffed inside the bassoon, oddly enough.” Albert held a crumpled piece of newsprint. “Can’t think how it got inside the tube.”

I
DIDN’T FIND ANNA
de Hoog or, for that matter, Andrew or Bitten at the
palazzo
when I went by.

“Miss de Hoog took them out on an excursion to the cemetery,” said the unhappy Marco. He was back to baby-sitting Frigga, who had slept for a while, but was now up and pacing again. We could hear her overhead. “San Michele is a very interesting island in the lagoon.”

That Anna had some sly reason for taking Andrew and Bitten to the cemetery island of San Michele, I had no doubt. Still, I didn’t think she would actually do away with them. Nor were they the characters in this drama I was most worried about.

“The police inspector came by here looking for you at four o’clock,” Marco added. “He waited for a while, but then he left. He gives you his card and respectfully asks that you call him as soon as you can.”

“Thanks. Listen, why don’t you slip out for a drink, Marco? I’ll go up and sit with Frigga a while.”

“I am only gone a half hour, no more,” said Marco gratefully. “I am only around the corner.”

“Take your time.” Not only did I wish to speak to Frigga, but I was curious about the library at the top of the stairs. I had caught only a glimpse when Sandretti opened it the other day, but I wondered if there might not be some interesting things in the desk or on the shelves, and not just the collected works of Plutarch.

But the door to the library was firmly locked, and no amount of jiggling would open it. Instead, I knocked on Frigga’s door and, after a moment, went in.

The overhead light wasn’t on, only a small lamp by the bed. Frigga stood, still in her Chanel suit, by the window watching the sunset over the Giudecca Canal. The gathering storm had brought piles of blue-black clouds, embroidered with gold thread.

“I was in Venice as a girl,” she said, half turning to see who it was, and then turning back. She spoke in German, and I had to strain to understand. “I came with my father and mother in the twenties. They were prosperous then, at least enough to take an Italian holiday. We stayed on the Lido, not here in the city. The city was thought to be unhealthy. We stayed at the Excelsior. I remember my father saying we would return here often. But of course we never did. The economy turned very bad, and my father lost his factory. I married. Hitler came to power. I sent my daughter to Vienna to study, to be safe. She was safe. For a little while.”

I’d charged in meaning to interrogate Frigga. After the tour of the synagogues, I hadn’t been feeling particularly friendly toward members of the German population. Now I took a seat on the bed. The room was quite dark; only Frigga, small and almost young-looking stood out, silhouetted against a window full of black clouds and streaks of color, was in focus. Speaking in her own language, not in haltingly correct English, she was clear and fully herself.

“What happened to your daughter?” I asked, when she said no more. My German was not brilliant, but it was good enough to understand her story. What I did not understand, the sadness of history filled in for me.

“Dorothea was a music student at the conservatory in Vienna. She married, quite suddenly, a Jew who was a fellow student. He should have left when he had the chance. But something happened, he did not. Shortly after, he was arrested. He died in Dachau a year later, though I did not find that out for a long time. He simply disappeared. Dorothea came home to me in Munich, pregnant. During the war she died in a fire. I took the child and moved to a small village near the Rhine, with relatives.

“Ruth was all I had. My husband was shot very early on in the war. There was no chance of remarrying. We were scraping to live, for years and years. Ruth was my life, and yet I could not stop her from suffering. She suffered to be an orphan, she suffered because she was a girl of much talent, she suffered because she was half Jewish. She grew up hating everyone. Her life was a tragedy. She could have been a musician like her parents. She had the skill and the temperament. If she had not lived in this village. If we had had money, or someone to help us after the war. Instead, she threw herself away, at only twenty. She threw herself away with a boy in the village who cared nothing for her. She was a sensitive, beautiful girl, like her mother. She had a baby, and the shame was too much for her. She killed herself.”

Frigga had wrapped her arms around herself tightly, and rocked back and forth. There was very little light now. In the distance there was lightning. The air was close in the room.

“I resolved I would bring up her little boy and do everything I could do for him that I had not done for Ruth. The times were better then. He went to an excellent school, he received a scholarship to study music at the university. He was a good and faithful son to me, who always called and who never went with bad girls. That is why I do not believe he was engaged to this Swedish woman. Not after knowing her only a week. He told me nothing about it.”

“Did he call you from Venice?”

“Oh yes, several times. He described it beautifully. He said I should come. I said, no, I was too old to travel. Too old to travel to Venice.” She laughed with some bitterness. She came away from the window finally and turned on a lamp. Our eyes blinked in the sudden light.

“You didn’t happen to call the evening he was…found?”

“I never called him,” said Frigga. “I didn’t have to. He called me.”

“But I heard his phone ring several times. I heard him talking to someone he called Frigga.”

She looked astonished and then hurt and then firm again. “But he would never have called me Frigga,” she said. “He always called me
Grossmutter
, just as Ruth had.”

Marco knocked and came in. He still looked worried. “You will join us for dinner I hope, Mrs. Reilly.”

“Sorry,” I said, looking at my watch, “I have plans for the evening. But I would very much like to speak with Anna de Hoog.” I scribbled down the name of the restaurant where the klezmer band was to play. “Perhaps she could join me there when she returns from the cemetery.”

I said good-bye to Frigga with more gentleness than I’d shown when barreling into her room earlier. Marco followed me down the stairs.

“You know, Mrs. Reilly, the police…”

“It’s all right, Marco. I won’t be telling the police what I know. I won’t reveal your deep, dark secret.”

I meant it for a joke, but he stared at me, shocked. “I have no secret.”

I felt sorry for him—conflicted about his sexuality, obviously in thrall to his father and Sandretti’s devious financial machinations, despised, perhaps rightly, by his strong-minded sister. “About Andrew,” I said impulsively. “I hope the two of you…”

But that seemed only to alarm him more, though he tried to hide it.

Giovanna and I had arranged by phone that Nicky and I would meet her at her aunts’ restaurant in a small campo near the Via Garibaldi, away from the main tourist areas near the public gardens. There we’d have dinner and then stroll over to the Ghetto to hear Roberta and her klezmer group.

Not surprisingly, Nicky was practicing when I arrived. It was something I recognized, one of those Vivaldi largos or andantes that separated the first and third allegro movements of just about every bassoon concert I’d ever heard of his. It did no good to ask Nicky which concerto it was, because she always said No. 18 or No. 12, which gave me no mnemonic clue. But for some of them, I had my own secret names; this one was “The Snake” since it had a lovely sinuous longing to it. I didn’t knock until she finished that movement; then I barged in. The first thing I did was to take my Canadian Mounties’ beret off the chair post and stuff my hair back inside it.

“Giovanna awaits,” I said.

“Right,” she said, tossing the bassoon aside and searching for her shoes, a newly purchased pair of silver boots with impossibly high heels.

“Nicky!” I said. “We’re going to have to walk.”

“I can walk. Besides, I adore these boots, and I need to erase the image of those hideous brogues from Giovanna’s mind.”

She ripped the beret off my head and started pulling at the sleeves of my bomber jacket.

“Hey, leave off,” I protested.

“I want to see you in a cape I just bought.”

She threw open the wardrobe and hauled out a long black
velvet
cape with a hood. It was beautiful, but it was her, not me.

“Cassandra, live a little. Forget the beret. Find your inner Venetian. Put on the cape, lass. See, you look
exactly
like me, especially with the hood over your head.”