The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Page 2

  I took the airport bus to the Piazzale Roma and then a vaporetto down the Grand Canal. There is always a sense of magic and disorientation when arriving in Venice. Your mind panics a little, tells you, Flooded. The streets are flooded. But your imagination, so much closer to the dreaming state, murmurs, Yes, and isn’t this how life should be? Simply stepping onto boats instead of buses or cars, gliding easily between tiny ports of call? Tonight Venice was wet and trembling. Explosions of thunder came from all directions—sometimes far away, sometimes right overhead, as if the city were being demolished. I half expected, when lightning scoured the face of an ancient palazzo, that the thunder following would break it to dust and rubble.

  I stepped off the vaporetto at the Accademia stop, in the Dorsoduro district, just as it began to pour. My sore hip slowed me down, but, pulling my luggage behind me like a rectangular dog, I began to make my way through the streaming little streets to the address Nicky had given me. It had been a long while since I’d been in Venice, and, in any case, it’s not the kind of city whose map is easy to recall from one visit to the next. The spring I’d been here, I’d been content to wander without paying attention to my itinerary.

  Within minutes I was lost, of course. Narrow passages opened into empty squares with a dozen exits. Canals forced streets to dead-end, and bridges multiplied with bewildering complexity. I hadn’t remembered to bring an umbrella (I was going south, after all) and was soon soaked. The wind carried the salty smell of the Adriatic.

  It wasn’t until I’d crossed the width of the Dorsoduro and come out on the Záttere, the promenade that faces the island of Giudecca, that I could see where I was. I read the map again, asked for directions at a café, and plunged back into the maze of streets. In the strange way of things, I found the address easily this time, perhaps because I halted awkwardly when I saw a pair of lovers taking shelter in a doorway, and in my confusion looked away from them and saw the number Nicky had given me on a large house across the canal.

  The palazzo was in a garden full of dripping trees and rain-darkened statues. Up a few marble steps was a huge door with peeling paint and a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. I knocked and heard footsteps echoing off a tile floor in the manner of a gothic novel. I expected an aging manservant in threadbare golden livery to open the door, but it was Nicky.

  “Good! You’re finally here,” she said, not bothering to give me more than a cursory kiss on the cheek. “I’ve been through hell.”

  She didn’t look it. Or rather, she looked as if hell agreed with her. Even though I’d known Nicky for twenty years, the forcefulness of her appearance could still surprise me, especially if I ran into her anywhere outside her house in Hampstead. Her London residence contained her, accommodated her. When you saw her at home in the kitchen wearing her lipstick-red satin dressing gown, you didn’t think, What a gigantic force of nature the woman is. You merely thought, Here’s Nicky having her morning cuppa.

  Now she seemed to fill the doorway in a long maroon tunic reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire, though a shawl around her shoulders and reading glasses pushed up into her spiraling auburn curls lent a more domestic look. As usual she was wearing expensive and somewhat complicated shoes; Nicky was proud of her well-shaped ankles.

  “Come upstairs,” she said, leading the way up marble stairs to a bedroom with enormous ceilings and dusty gold drapes. A chandelier poured from above. The double bed was covered with Nicky’s clothes, and shoes were flung every which way over the flowered carpet, as if she’d been throwing them at ghosts. On the wall was a large gilt-framed School of Tiepolo painting that showed the Virgin Mary being sucked into a vortex of angels.

  “Did you bring what I asked you to? Thank you, by the way.”

  I handed over the bag and then perched on the edge of the bed. “A thousand pounds is a lot of money,” I ventured.

  Nicky only snorted. “This whole situation is extremely annoying, to say the least. I have a concert in Birmingham tomorrow. Quite a number of people are going to be furious if I’m not there. I have no idea how long these Italians think they can keep me in Venice.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I got here five days ago for the symposium. There are about fifteen of us, I suppose, a combination of scholars and musicians. Some of us were put up in this house, which belongs to the man who organized the event, Alfredo Sandretti. I’ve hardly seen him by the way, except when it’s time to give a flowery speech; he makes his son do all the work.

  “Anyway here we are.” Nicky paced around the room, counting off: “Me, Gunther from Germany, Andrew from Canada and Bitten from Sweden. All of us have performed Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos. Bitten Johansson is probably Scandinavia’s best-known Baroque bassoonist. Andrew isn’t the most brilliant player, but he’s made himself an expert on Vivaldi. I didn’t realize he’d begun to focus exclusively on the Pietà. He’s a professor and is just starting a sabbatical to write a book about his research here. Anyway, I suppose they put us together because they thought we’d have a lot to talk about. There’s an oboist staying here too, Dutch or something, probably because they didn’t have anywhere else to stash her.”

  Nicky ran her hands through her curls, newly colored and full of life. My own hair was curly too, but frizzier and getting gray. I usually tucked it into a beret and forgot about it.

  “The idea was that we would participate in seminars during the day and in the evening play music. Each day we were loaned period instruments to practice on. Then, after practicing, they’d take the instruments away again and give them back to us at the concert. Yesterday, the last day of the symposium, everything was a little more lax; we had a long lunch and then only a bit of a late rehearsal. Everyone was tired, to tell the truth. We kept the instruments with us, as it was only a few hours until the performance. I took a nap, fell deeply asleep, and when I woke up, the bassoon I’d been lent was gone.

  “There was an enormous search—Sandretti, his son, the police, everybody sniffing through my knickers. I couldn’t imagine they were serious. I couldn’t believe anyone thought I’d taken it. And why would I do it before the last concert, when it would be so obvious?”

  “Is it worth a lot?”

  “Of course, though it could have been worse. It’s not a classic, like a Denner or Hotteterre. But it is one of the instruments once used by the Pietà girls. Belongs to the Sandrettis, in the family for centuries. I don’t know the price, or even if there is one. In Italy everything is millions of lire anyway. But how do you value something that is one of a kind?”

  She stuck the money and the envelope marked PRIVATE between the mattresses without further explanation. Then she picked up the biography of the conductor and began flipping impatiently through it. I pulled off my boots. They made a sorry impression next to Nicky’s red heels. She’d tried for years to make me more fashion conscious, but I’d stuck to my black Levi’s and boots. It was one of my few consistencies.

  A knock at the door interrupted Nicky’s reading, and a beautiful young man entered with a tray. Ah, the faithful retainer at last and none too soon, for I was hungry, and the sight of biscuits and cheese with a carafe of wine was particularly welcome.

  “Marco Sandretti. Cassandra Reilly,” Nicky said in a clipped, even hostile manner. Since Nicky usually enjoyed the company of attractive young people, I could only surmise that she considered him to be if not an enemy, then of the enemy camp. “Why does everyone else get to go out and I have to stay here?”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Marco. “My father told me for you to stay here.”

  “Your father, your father!” said Nicky, pacing and eating biscuits. She looked like Maria Callas as Medea in her heavy days. “I never should have accepted his invitation to come to this symposium. Oh yes, he made it sound so lovely. A week in sunny Italy with gorgeous meals and the enchanting company of like-minded musicians. Ha!”

  “We will go out tonight for a very nice meal,” s
aid Marco, looking hunted. “And your friends, they don’t go far. It is raining. I am sorry,” he added again.

  There was another knock on the door, and a man in his late thirties came in. He went purposefully up to Marco as if to claim an embrace, but the Italian adroitly sidestepped him.

  “You have not yet met Nicola’s friend. Cassandra Reilly. Andrew McManus.”

  Andrew was good-looking, but not in the dark, questioning, romantic way of Marco. Andrew was more on the order of a well-designed cereal box. His head sat thickly on his shoulders, which were narrow but powerful. His waist was low and his upper torso pumped up by big, strong lungs. His legs, on the other hand, were short and spindly, ending in heavy shoes, as if to balance him.

  In spite of the flatness of his features, his face was oddly colorful. The freckled skin had an orangish cast, the eyes were blue, the mouth very red. When he smiled at me, he looked more dutiful than charmed. He made another awkward leap at Marco, which was again quickly foiled.

  In a minute, two more people entered the room. I realized they were the couple I’d seen clandestinely embracing outside.

  “Bitten and Gunther,” Nicky said with no great enthusiasm.

  “Hello,” said the pair with an equal lack of interest in me. It was taking all their energy to keep their hands off each other. I managed a hello as well, though I was gaping impolitely at Bitten Johansson.

  She was almost six feet tall, a stunningly beautiful older woman dressed in a coral silk shirt and cool gray-blond linen pants suit with a hip-length jacket. Her hair, the same color as the linen suit, was thick and parted on the side, and she wasn’t wearing much makeup, only eyeliner, which elongated her frosty blue eyes. The only thing that seemed remotely untidy about this striking woman was that three, that is to say all but one, of the buttons on her silk blouse were undone, and she was wearing no bra. Was it Swedish lack of inhibition? Or were her bassoonist’s lungs so powerful that they had split the blouse open?

  Gunther was also a strapping blond specimen with delicate but strong lips, a firm jaw line, a wide chest and a half-zipped fly. He looked to be in his thirties, a good fifteen years younger than Bitten.

  Should their dishabille be pointed out? The tinny, insistent ring of a cell phone sounded in the awkward silence.

  “Please,” said Gunther. “I must speak to my Handy.” He turned slightly away. “Ja, ja, Frigga,” we heard him saying. Was his Handy his cell phone or his wife?

  Bitten approached me. “So, you came to help your friend?” she said blandly, with some secret threat attached to the word help.

  “If I can.” Was this the she Nicky had railed against in her phone call? More important was this the she who had called to dissuade me from coming to Venice? The admiration I’d first experienced for Bitten’s gorgeous physique turned quickly to dislike as she glared at me. No, it didn’t look as though we would become pals.

  Nicky interrupted. “Bitten your shirt, Button. I mean, button it, Bitten, for pity’s sake. You look like a tart.” I noticed Nicky had done something with the book she’d been flipping through. The maroon tunic, perhaps, had absorbed it, like some great fish swallowing a minnow.

  Slowly Bitten took her Arctic blue eyes off me and looked down. “Oh my goodness,” she said vaguely and glanced over at Gunther, who was still saying, “Ja, ja, Frigga.”

  Marco said, “In only a few minutes we are going for dinner to a place very close to here.”

  “I suppose you’ve heard,” Andrew said, finally addressing me, “that although Nicky is the one they suspect, they’re making all four of us continue to stay on here.”

  “But you don’t suspect her, do you?” I asked him. “I mean, really.”

  “Of course not,” he said, but his eyes shifted just a little.

  Bitten said, “Well, the fact is, the bassoon is still missing. If it would come back, then our problems would be solved. We could all leave.” There was no mistaking the hateful look she gave Nicky.

  “Then why don’t you return it?” snapped Nicky.

  “I object. I object. You had the bassoon, the room was locked, how could I possibly take it? And anyway, I feel that we had a sacred trust with these instruments. They represent the soul of the cori.”

  “Oh, stuff it,” said Nicky.

  Gunther got off his cell phone with a final cheerful but impatient, “Ja, Frigga.”

  The caller must have been his wife, because Bitten was giving him the cold shoulder. He looked at her pleadingly and then noticed he was unzipped, which made him blush.

  “Well,” said Marco brightly. “Is everyone ready for dinner? We will go to the same nice place,” he said. “Squid in its own ink, its specialty, you remember.”

  “Oh, delightful,” said Bitten. “Squid in its own ink, definitely the sort of thing you can eat night after night. Why should we be punished just because she…”

  Andrew said, “I think we should respect the task Marco has taken on. It’s no easy matter for him to keep us together and amused.” Disgusted grunts around him showed that amused was slightly the wrong choice.

  Marco looked around. “Are we all…?”

  It was then I noticed that someone else had slipped into the room, a middle-aged, nondescript woman with short brown hair, wearing a brown raincoat. The Dutch oboist perhaps?

  “Miss de Hoog,” said Marco. “Cassandra Reilly.”

  We shook hands briefly. She had clever eyes that did not quite fit the studied politeness of her expression.

  Outside, I fell into step with Marco, forcing Andrew to walk ahead with Nicky. Gunther and Bitten walked side by side, without speaking, behind us, and Miss de Hoog brought up the rear. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still whipped about. The canal beside the house slopped over into the street. Everything was wet and shiny.

  “Your friend Nicola,” said Marco cautiously, “she is a very large, I mean big-hearted woman. But she don’t like me.”

  “I’m sure you realize, Marco, that she’s in a bit of a difficult position here. Nobody likes to be suspected of stealing a bassoon.”

  “Oh, it’s all very complicated,” he sighed. “My father is very sad to go to the police. He has much admiration for your friend and her playing. And also for the great interest she shows in the girls.”

  Was that the true problem here? “Which girls?” I asked cautiously.

  “Girls from long ago. The cori of the ospedali. It is a long tradition here in Venice. Very remarkable. Your friend, she is remarkable.”

  “Yes, she is, and as her long-time friend, I have to say you’re barking up the wrong tree. Nicky would never steal anything valuable.” I put out of my mind the time she’d pinched a lover of mine. “When the true culprit comes to light, you can bet it won’t be Nicky.” (But why did she need all that money? Was she being blackmailed? Had she hired someone else to steal the bassoon for her?)

  Looking at Nicky’s substantial back and powerful stride, Marco could not help sighing. “I am still hoping that all this can be resoluted illegally,” he said, rather hopelessly.

  Three

  MISS DE HOOG’S skin was not really chalk gray—it was not that unhealthy—but it had a dusty cast to it that would have flattened even more memorable features. Her mouth was pale, her nose nothing special, and her eyes were as gray as a metal strongbox and just as impenetrable. She would never be the first person noticed in a group. She would not be the one you remembered afterwards. In a photograph taken of an event where she was present, it was likely she would be half-concealed behind someone else or have her eyes closed against the sun. She was so unremarkable that you wouldn’t expect anyone to point to the picture and ask, “And who was that?”

  And yet her body was solid and strong. I noticed, when she entered the restaurant in front of me and took off her raincoat, that her shoulders were broad and that her calves, under the slightly too-long skirt, looked muscled, as if she were a cyclist. Certainly her fingers had tensile strength; I’d felt that when we shook
hands earlier.

  For a fleeting moment, as I seated myself next to her, I thought, She’s disguising herself as an ugly woman. But that was no doubt only whimsy. The fact is, over the years I had met many musicians, and Nicky’s dramatic appearance was the exception. Most orchestra players were ordinary looking, even drab: vessels or reeds through which the sublimity of Mozart or Sibelius poured.

  To my first questions, Miss de Hoog, or Anna as she now allowed her first name to be, was respectfully indifferent. About her nationality and residence, she answered politely that she was Belgian and had been born in Antwerp, but that her work took her to second-string cities everywhere. “I am a rather minor oboist,” she said with unfeigned modesty. “But I always have appointments.”

  She discouraged further attempts to pin her down. Since I often do the same—and, in fact, did do the same when Anna de Hoog tried to pin me down—I couldn’t blame her. “No, I don’t live much of anywhere either, I’m afraid. I’m usually traveling,” I said.

  “And your travels are for pleasure or for…”

  “Pleasure mostly.” Not an untruth, but I found myself reluctant to indulge her curiosity when she eluded mine. Still, I persisted in trying to draw her out. For Nicky sat in funereal splendor, eating her starter and then pasta with (for her) little appetite, and ignoring Marco, who tried to talk with her, though Andrew had him pretty well monopolized with cunning questions about Italian soccer teams. Gunther and Bitten were preoccupied with each other, talking in low tones in German or staring semi-covertly at each other’s body parts. Seen side by side the two of them did make a handsome, if overly tall, pair. They reminded me of a children’s book I’d read long ago, about a Mr. Giant who is lonely until he finds a Miss Giant to share his life.

  It was only when we began to talk about the Venetian ospedali that Anna de Hoog grew animated.

  “It’s a very recent passion of mine,” she said. “Of course I’ve always played Vivaldi. But I had little idea that so many of his compositions were written for girls. I find that very charming. Very inspiring. The symposium really opened my eyes to the rich legacy of these cori. Do you realize there were hundreds of women musicians whose names we are just beginning to discover? Who knows what treasures are hidden in archives and private libraries?” For a second Anna’s shadowy face looked quite transformed. “In another life, how I would love to spend my life playing the oboe.”