The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (21 page)

As we came closer to the twisted passageways around the Frari, it got worse. There were no platforms, and the water was often up to mid-calf. Finally we reached the hotel and climbed onto the dry land that was the tiny lobby. Upstairs, I knocked twice at Nicky’s door.

There was no answer, but I heard movement inside.

“Nicky, it’s me. And Roberta. We have something to show you.”

Now I heard whispering. Giovanna was certainly there with her. All the better.

“Go away, Cassandra. Come back later. This is not a convenient time.”

“Open up,” I repeated. “You wanted a Pietà bassoonist,” I said. “Well, I’ve brought you one.”

W
ITHIN A FEW MINUTES
, Nicky, Giovanna and Roberta were piled on the bed examining the bound music of Vivaldi and Vittoria Brunelli. It reminded me of how my sisters used to heap themselves up like kittens to look first at comic books and then
Secret Romance
. I’d never joined them, feeling myself too different. It was the same now. I perched on a chair and watched Nicky and Giovanna exclaim over Roberta’s find (though
steal
seemed a better description than
find)
. They’d already been looking through the volume of violin music belonging to Anna Maria, the
maestra
. Notes for a narrative lay scattered about the bed. Although I’d never be a musician like them, I was happy to realize that the girls in the
ospedali
were no longer faceless orphans. They had names now—Vittoria Brunelli, Anna Maria. They were about to enter recorded history again, after a long absence. They had families again.

I interrupted Nicky once to give her Graciela’s shop address and to tell her that the sooner she got there to identify the bassoon, the sooner she’d be in the clear. “Anna told me last night it was Bitten who took the bassoon, as you suspected, and for the very obvious reasons. I suppose you could get someone to press charges, but it might be better just to let it go.”

“Oh, but we’ll need the bassoon for our film,” said Nicky, and I had the feeling she did not intend to let the instrument be given back to Signore Sandretti. So perhaps she would become a bassoon thief after all.

“Bitten?” said Giovanna. “Is she the one who lost her lover?”

“The woman who wants my house and everything in it,” said Nicky, but she didn’t seem, at least at the moment, particularly perturbed. She lay in splendor, curls abundant, red dressing gown open to her powerful chest.

“She could be a consultant on the film,” said Giovanna, “that might make her happy.”

“She bloody well…” began Nicky, but Giovanna stopped her lips with a finger. “I am going to be the Italian producer,” she told me. “When my term ends in November, Nicky and I will go to Rome for two weeks and then back to London. I suppose I’ll see you there.”

Roberta was looking at them in fascination. Now, at last, she had some true role models. “Perhaps Francesca and I will visit London during Christmas season too.”

“The house is big enough for everyone,” I said. The idea of music again in the rooms below my attic filled me with pleasure.

I picked up my leather jacket from among the clothes on the floor and put it on. I straightened my beret. My character is such that when I have a mind to go, I go. I have made rapid and unpremeditated departures from all sorts of places, and all sorts of situations. Nicky is used to it. She understood, when I got up from the bed where the three of them were happily poring over Vittoria’s bassoon concertos and plotting how they would do further research on her life, that when I said, “I’m off,” I did not mean I was planning a visit to the Palace of the Doges, but that I had decided to go back to London.

“Cassandra,” Nicky said, “I probably won’t be back for a week or two, until I have the concert at the Purcell Room. Take care of the mail, will you? And everything?”

I kissed her full, soft cheek. “Thanks for the trip to Venice,” I said. I decided not to tell her I’d almost been strangled on her account. Let bygones be bygones.

“Cassandra?” she said, her eyes filling, but I waved and went out the door.

My dear friend was far too sentimental sometimes.

I splashed back through the streets to my hotel room. It was hard going in places, but I felt strangely exhilarated, the way I always do when I am seriously on the move. It’s true, major questions were still unanswered: Who had killed Gunther? Who, for that matter, had tried to kill me? Who’d taken the violin last night? Had I done anything to help or just confused things more? I might just stop by the Sandretti
palazzo
on my way to the Piazzale Roma. Something Roberta had said still echoed within me; her suspicion that her father had been stealing the instruments himself. Was Anna de Hoog working for him or against him?

I packed, put the three remaining Latin American books in my satchel and set off through the still-flooded streets, carrying my small suitcase above my head. The city was beautiful, but it was sinking. One of my plastic foot-bags had punctured, and an unpleasant wetness was creeping up one leg of my Levi’s. I wanted to get to dry ground, wanted to get
off
the ground in fact. I’d go to the airport and just wait for the next flight back to London. All I had to do first was ask a few more questions.

This time Sandretti himself came to the door. I thought he had aged a great deal in the last few days; perhaps Roberta’s fear that her father would never grow old was unfounded. His skin was gray, his eyes, hunted and guilty. He had obviously been about to go out in a hurry and seemed taken aback to see me there with my suitcase, even when I told him I wasn’t staying, that I just wanted to make a few good-byes. He had clearly never placed me in the ménage of musicians, yet he wasn’t sure I
wasn’t
one of them either. He told me he believed Bitten was practicing and that Frigga had just returned from a last visit to the police. She would be flying back to Germany with Gunther’s body this afternoon. His whole manner suggested that he wished I would go away and as soon as possible.

His nervousness only made me curious, and I eased my way around his solid body into the foyer to indicate I wasn’t to be put off so easily.

“I’m just on the way to the airport myself,” I said. “Of course I know that Nicky’s not around—wonder whatever happened to her?—but what about Marco and Andrew?”

“Mr. McManus is moving to his permanent accommodations this morning. My son is assisting him.” Sandretti averted his eyes. I wondered what this was all about. Marco couldn’t be leaving home finally, could he? Especially not in the company of Andrew?

“Well, I’ll just pop up and say good-bye to Frau Hausen,” I said, pushing past him to get to the stairs. I refused to ask about Anna de Hoog. She’d hardly noticed when I left the
palazzo
last night. She was probably in cahoots with Sandretti anyway. Behind me the door closed; Sandretti had slipped out. Clearly, he didn’t want to be here when the two boys arrived.

I went quickly up the stairs and knocked on Frigga’s door. Across the
piano nobile
I could hear Bitten playing the mournful adagio again.

Frigga was sitting on her bed, with her back to the door, dressed in her Chanel suit, a hat and gloves. A dark raincoat lay half-folded neatly beside her. She was small and old and in great pain.

I sat as gently as I could beside her. “Frau Hausen, excuse me for troubling you, but what was the name of your son-in-law?”

“Jakob,” she answered after a moment. “Jakob Wulf.”

“Did you know his mother was a very famous musician, who got out of Austria and to London before the war?”

“My daughter said something about that. But she told me he and his mother had a terrible quarrel. His mother did not like the girl Jakob was going to marry.”

“Not your daughter Dorothea?”

“No, another girl. I don’t know her name. Elizabeth perhaps. But she was frightened when the war started. She and her mother went to Sweden where they had friends.”

“And Jakob married Dorothea instead…” Now it was clear what had been troubling me in the conductor’s biography. He had called Elizabeth Jakob’s fiancée, not his wife. It had been the most obvious thing to assume they had gone ahead and married. “Do you have by chance a photograph of Jakob, Frau Hausen?”

“No,” she said. “Not here. Why?”

“It’s a long story, but Bitten’s mother died recently in Sweden. Bitten had some reason to believe that her mother, Elizabeth, knew Jakob and his mother, Olivia Wulf. And that Bitten was Jakob’s daughter. I’ve been trying to put together her story.” I was relieved I wouldn’t have to tell Bitten that she was Gunther’s aunt.

“Bitten says she loved Gunther,” Frigga said slowly. “How can that be, to fall in love so quickly? He would have told me, wouldn’t he? He was my little boy. My last one.”

She didn’t cry; she sat very still, facing the window.

I went across to Bitten’s room. The house was absolutely quiet except for her muted notes. I remembered what Nicky had said about the bassoon being used during musical settings in the underworld. I hesitated before knocking. Should I be the one to tell Bitten that her mother had been Jakob’s fiancée, not his wife? That she had no claim to Olivia’s name or estate?

I was glad for Nicky, of course, not just that she could keep the house, but that she wouldn’t lose the sense that
she
and she alone had been Olivia’s favorite. But everything else was terribly sad. Gunther’s senseless death, Bitten’s loss. Olivia would never know she’d had a great grandson. Perhaps what saddened me most was the story of Ruth, Gunther’s mother, the talented violinist who had destroyed herself. No, history was not optimistic. History was not kind.

The adagio ended, with a sweet sorrowful flourish, but Bitten didn’t go on to the allegro movement that would end the concerto, round it out and create wholeness. Instead, the mournful notes of the adagio began again. She would play them until she moved on, but I didn’t have time to listen. I knocked,
con vivace
.

Bitten wasn’t dressed; she was wearing the same Hotel Danieli terry-cloth robe. I said I was leaving, and had just come to say goodbye.

“I’m leaving too,” she said. “I have a flight to Stockholm tonight. I play in a recital tomorrow. That is good. I need to begin my life again. Please tell Nicola…” But she stopped; she didn’t know what to tell Nicola. I held my tongue. If Bitten did any sort of serious investigation, she would find out soon enough.

We shook hands. Then, just as she was closing the door, I said, as if it had just occurred to me, “Why do you have a bathrobe that says Hotel Danieli?”

She paused. “It…it isn’t mine, it was Gunther’s. He was staying here, but he had another room there. We used to go there…to be alone. We did not have enough privacy here.”

Just as Bitten shut the door, Anna came out of her room, as if the two motions were attached. She had an oddly alert look that took me in but somehow did not quite see me. In fact, she pushed me down as I came toward her, pushed me right down in front of her, and drew her gun, and pointed it down the stairs. Andrew had just come in the front door, whistling something from
The Four Seasons
. Two plainclothes police, also with guns, appeared and had his arms behind his back before he could get to the end of “Spring.”

Andrew! It all made sense now. He was the one who had killed Gunther and had tried to kill me. I had been taken in by his assertions of gay solidarity.

Anna rushed downstairs. There was a scramble, and everyone was shouting, Andrew loudest of all. “Marco,” he was screaming. “Get away.”

But it was too late. Anna de Hoog had flung herself on someone just outside the door and had his arms behind him in a fierce grip. When the rest of us got outside, he was handcuffed and lying on his side, and she was just returning her gun to her shoulder holster.

“I’m so glad he didn’t run,” she said, hardly winded and very pleased. “I really hate to shoot people.”

“Is it for stealing the violin last night?” I asked. Andrew I could believe as a murderer, but not sweet little Marco. One of the Italian cops had bundled Andrew into a room in the
palazzo
, from whence we heard his anguished cries.

“You may take a good look now at the person who tried to kill you, Cassandra,” Anna said. “And at the man who knocked Gunther on the head and pushed him into the canal from a hotel window.”

Marco’s beautiful face stared angrily up at us. He said to the Italian policeman next to Anna de Hoog, “My father won’t allow this. My father will have your job! Where is my father?”

But Marco was an orphan now. His father was nowhere in sight.

“
IT BEGAN SIMPLY
,” said Anna, from a recumbent position nearby. “I was assigned by Interpol to investigate a series of cases that involved antique musical instruments being stolen in Italy. The instruments came from private collections, from small or provincial libraries and from unguarded museums or churches. The name Sandretti had come up more than a few times. His wife had been wealthy, but he himself was only a sort of musical entrepreneur. He held prestigious positions that could not have paid terribly well, at least not well enough to allow him to live as well as he did. There are all sorts of men like that in Italy, you understand. Generally there are under-the-table arrangements going on, various pleasant schemes between friends to fill each other’s pockets. Certainly nothing for Interpol.”

She stroked my arm gently. It was early afternoon, and the rain was easing off. The luxurious hotel room was a little humid; from below, I could hear motorboat wash rippling through the canal and gondoliers singing to their passengers. Mostly
O Sole Mio
. Her gun in its shoulder holster lay on the pillow by her head. I hate to admit it had rather excited me.

“The thefts had been going on for years, but in the last year they had become more frequent and more noticeable. In the past, often what happened is that a lesser instrument would be substituted for a more valuable one. Perhaps they ran out of lesser instruments! At any rate, there began to be more daring robberies, from larger museums. The Italians called on us for help.