The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Read online

  Marco shrugged unhappily, as Albert excused himself and left our row. I had noticed that Marco seemed to take upon himself the weight of situations that had nothing to do with him.

  “Do you play an instrument, Marco?” I asked.

  “Me? Oh no. Nor my father, either. But he was singing opera when he was younger. A tenor. Now he just organizes. Me, too. It is other people who have the talent for music.”

  I’d warmed to Marco immediately, but it was hard to appreciate Andrew. He seemed to have little of the ironic self-deprecation I enjoyed so much in his fellow Canadians. But perhaps he was just insecure. He reminded me a little of a French teacher I’d had in junior high, a toupéed older man with an execrable accent (I knew this because I later reproduced it in Paris, to looks of great horror), who showed us slides of his trips to France. In these slides one or more handsome young sailors always seemed to be lurking in the background.

  Gunther and Bitten turned around, two blue-eyed giants in love. The dazed expression on their faces was too much to bear in duplicate.

  Andrew said to them, in real anguish, “It’s an insult to Vivaldi,” and Gunther nodded solemnly, while keeping his arm firmly around Bitten. Bitten said, “I’ve been trying to understand. Is it that the acoustics are so bad, or is it the orchestra? Surely we did not sound so bad as they.”

  “It’s not the acoustics,” said Andrew, and I was amazed at how violent his feeling was. “The singers are really dreadful too. The whole performance is intolerable.”

  I wanted to say that I didn’t think it was so bad, but I knew they wouldn’t be interested in my opinion. I was relieved to see Albert threading his way back among the returning members of the audience.

  “But where is the bassoon?” Marco asked.

  “I thought it best to put it in a safer place, not far from here.”

  “What safer place?” Marco said, but in a lower tone, and in Italian, for that was the language Albert had addressed him in.

  They murmured back and forth, but loud enough so that all of us, including Bitten and Gunther, could hear the word Danieli.

  The Danieli was one of the poshest hotels in Venice, and it was practically right next door to the Pietà. Could Albert possibly be staying there?

  The second act began with a flourish. I had, in spite of my best intentions, been unable to recall the plot, so I was soon at sea. In a Baroque vessel sailing in alternately splashy and calm waters of the human soul, yearning, restless and joyful.

  Beside me, Albert and Marco listened intently, but I heard Andrew sighing in disgust, presumably at ear-bending oboe errors that I couldn’t recognize. The rest of the audience seemed quite enthralled. At least until, during a solemn moment, the sound of a cell phone trilled as demandingly as a tiny poodle wanting to be picked up.

  It was Gunther’s Handy. He answered it in a low voice, at the same time rising to excuse himself. Of course he was in the middle of the row. From the set of Bitten’s shoulders, it was clear she wasn’t at all happy, and after a few minutes, just as everyone in her church pew got settled again, she popped up like an extremely large jumping jack and pushed her way out after Gunther.

  The concentration of the singers and players faltered, particularly after the second interruption (for some reason Bitten felt compelled to say Scusi several times in a distractingly loud voice, especially after she half-fell onto the lap of an elderly man who had been snoozing), and although the musicians went on with as much verve as possible, Andrew’s critical, pained sighs increased.

  At the next interval Marco got up, murmuring, “I must tell Gunther to turn off his telephone.” A moment or two later, Andrew followed him out.

  Albert and I remained where we were. When the rows around us had emptied, I said, “It’s quite unusual that two bassoons should go missing at the same time, don’t you think?”

  “Highly unusual,” said Albert, “and, in fact, quite untrue.”

  “What do you mean, untrue?”

  “It’s the same bassoon all right.”

  “But Signore Sandretti…”

  “One might ask oneself why.”

  “Did you get the strong impression that Bitten recognized it?”

  “Yes. But for some reason she didn’t want to say anything.”

  “Marco thought the bassoon was the right one,” I pointed out.

  “But after his father said it wasn’t, Marco immediately fell in line.”

  “What about Andrew?”

  “His face reveals nothing most of the time except a great eagerness to be with Marco. But no, I’m tempted to believe that he didn’t steal it. Nor did Gunther.”

  “Why would Signore Sandretti…?”

  “That remains to be discovered. Meanwhile the bassoon is safe.”

  “At the Danieli?”

  Albert smiled, but all he said was, “Ah, so you can eavesdrop in Italian too. A useful skill.”

  None of our friends returned for the opening of Act Three, a truancy I’m sure the performers appreciated. Perhaps it was the absence of a critical voice next to me, but from the opening strains I began to hear and feel the music this time. In spite of the hard pews and less than perfect acoustics, the singing began to penetrate my bones with intense sweetness. Festive, sober, giddy, tragic, the music floated me down rivers and danced with me in mirrored reception rooms. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I glimpsed for just a second a world other than the superficial and tawdry one I lived in. It was not a perfect place, of course, for it was created by human beings who loved intrigue, complexity, luxury and revenge. Emotionally, it was not a simpler world, but it was one that was livelier and more dignified. I opened my eyes and saw a richly intricate Guardi painting superimposed over the church scene. Instead of a motley collection of tourists dressed in T-shirts and jeans, I saw silk dresses, velvet capes, embroidered breeches and stockings. I smelled sweat and heavy perfume, candle wax and damp stone. Behind the latticed balconies, the voices of the chorus poured out like water. And the orchestra of women below was filled with beautiful orphaned musicians looking pale and monastic. Like Francesca.

  The presentation was over and everyone took a bow, many more bows, actually, than necessary. As Albert and I got up to go, I saw Bitten in a side pew, alone. Outside the church we found Marco and Andrew leaning against a balustrade. Marco was having a nervous smoke and didn’t meet my eyes. I hadn’t seen him smoke before.

  “Where’s Gunther?” Bitten asked Marco, coming up behind us. “Didn’t he come back yet?”

  “Come back from where?” Albert asked.

  “Oh, he took a walk. He was feeling rather restless,” Bitten said, after a pause in which she seemed to take hold of herself. “I’m sure he’ll meet us soon.”

  If that was the case, then why did she suddenly sound so nervous?

  I was eager to dump the bassoonists after the concert, but they insisted on clumping together like amoebas under a microscope. No one spoke. As we walked away from the Pietà, Bitten kept looking around for Gunther, and Andrew and Marco seemed suddenly shy with each other. I wondered if Andrew had gotten a little of what he wanted. At the door of the Hotel Danieli, one of the doormen gave a respectful wave to Albert. So he was staying there.

  Albert swung along beside me, bowler low on his forehead, trousers too short above black boots that caught the shine of the street light above. He whistled a tune between his teeth, but it wasn’t from the Vivaldi opera we’d just heard. It was Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, and it echoed the clarinet solo we were heading toward. He moved to take my arm, and although I shuddered slightly at his touch, I allowed it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Albert’s sexual proclivities. He was such an enigmatic blend of innocence and cunning, he could turn out to be either chaste or polymorphously dissolute. The only thing I didn’t believe about Albert was that he was happily married and lived with a wife and two children in the bucolic English countryside.

  The air was still humid, and the s
ky was heavy and moonless; each breath I took tasted of musty salt, of old wood and damp stone. As I had in the Pietà, I closed my eyes and opened them again, imagining myself in an earlier time, when masked women in wide cloaks stepped into gondolas, the gondolas that now rode emptily in their moorage in the wide basin to our left.

  Marco caught up to me and Albert. He seemed worried that we were headed in the direction of Piazza San Marco and in the direction of the clarinet.

  “We take the vaporetto over to Accademia,” he reminded me. “A nightcap, yes?”

  “You can do what you like. I don’t believe I’m under any sort of obligation to spend all my time with you lot.”

  “No, of course not,” murmured Marco unhappily as we arrived at the square.

  “How the heck should I know where he is?” Andrew was now saying under his breath to Bitten. “You’re the ones who had the lovers’ quarrel.”

  “We…”

  “Bitten, I heard you two arguing.”

  “Where?”

  But then they both noticed I had stopped abruptly and seemed to be listening to them.

  I did hear them, but I had stopped for quite another reason. I had seen, alone at an outdoors café table, a figure with red-gold hair in a dark coat that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. She was enthralled by the trio directly in front of her, especially by the young woman who was similar enough to Marco to be his twin. Roberta Sandretti. The same straight nose, decisive brows, dark curly hair. But she radiated a kind of energy that made her brother look like a low-wattage light bulb. Her eyes flashed the intelligence of their father, along with the joyful controlled abandon of a real musician.

  I assumed Francesca had told Roberta about me, for she looked me over boldly as she lowered her clarinet for a moment. Boldly and with the practiced eye of someone assessing the competition.

  We seated ourselves and ordered overpriced drinks from a waiter who had no right to look contemptuous, considering how few people made the step from mildly interested strolling passerby to paying customer.

  The set ended—perhaps a little sooner than the bass player and pianist had expected—and Roberta bowed briefly to acknowledge our applause before coming over. She pulled up a seat between me and Francesca and kissed her cheek.

  We were introduced all around.

  “But, of course, I know him,” she said, waving dismissively at her brother.

  Francesca said to me, “I told her about the missing bassoon…”

  I smiled to show it would be best not to get into that discussion immediately, and asked Roberta where she’d studied.

  At the Conservatory of Music, she told me. “Along with Marco. But now I work in a music shop, and he is an errand boy for my father.”

  She seemed to be deliberately taunting him. He said something in dialect I couldn’t quite catch, and she answered him just as rapidly with a rude gesture in the direction of Andrew, who had an arm draped over the back of Marco’s chair.

  Marco jumped up. Roberta jumped up. Francesca looked proud but alarmed, Andrew confused, Bitten preoccupied. Only Albert thought to intervene. Holding out a black-gloved hand like a policeman, he blew on an imaginary whistle. He followed this by a short, graceful speech in Italian about there being a time and a place for everything.

  Roberta turned her back on us and walked up to her place by the piano, and Marco sat down dejected, but not before I’d had a chance to see the expression of fury distorting his handsome face. He rather violently pushed away Andrew’s consoling hand on his shoulder.

  Our drinks arrived, and Andrew insisted on paying. “We’re in Venice,” he said, with an imploring look at Marco. “On a beautiful night.”

  That probably made about as much sense to Marco as it would saying to someone from Winnipeg, “We’re in Winnipeg, let’s enjoy ourselves!”

  But it was a gorgeous night, and the piazza was magic, and Roberta wasn’t glaring at me as I edged my chair slightly closer to Francesca’s; she was launching into something wild that had more klezmer in it than Benny Goodman.

  Bitten said, “Do you hear a siren?”

  A police boat was speeding across the water in the direction of the Pietà.

  Six

  I DIDN’T SEE Anna de Hoog at first. She was surrounded by Italian police, gondoliers and porters from the Danieli Hotel. But the big, blond body that had been dragged from the canal was clearly recognizable. We didn’t need Bitten’s scream to tell us it was Gunther.

  The narrow canal that runs by the hotel is one of the busier waterways in Venice. In addition to gondolas, private cruisers and barges loaded with goods, water taxis were constantly arriving and departing from the small dock next to the hotel. From where we stood, on the stone bridge over the canal, the dock was inaccessible. You would have to go through the hotel to get to it, which Bitten did. The rest of us remained on the bridge.

  Andrew looked pale. He leaned over the bridge and was sick over the side. Marco patted his shoulder distractedly and went over to the group down on the short strip of quay opposite the hotel, a group I could now see included Signore Sandretti. Across the canal, on the hotel’s landing dock, the unremarkable Anna, still in her formal black dress, was in the center, apparently explaining who Gunther was. Bitten knocked her aside in her haste to get at the corpse of her lover.

  Francesca and Roberta came racing up to me on the bridge and gasped when they saw Gunther’s body laid out on the dock.

  “Who is he?”

  “The German bassoonist,” I said. “I wonder if it was the oboist, Anna de Hoog, who discovered him.”

  Signore Sandretti glanced up and noticed us standing on the bridge above. A look of distaste, even rage, crossed his face when he saw his daughter with Francesca. It reminded me of Marco’s expression just a short while earlier, when handsome turned to horrifying for a split second. Roberta returned his glare with vigor, but I felt Francesca tremble slightly beside me.

  It soon became obvious that we could do nothing. Marco returned from a conversation with the police and said we should all go home; the inspector would let us know in the morning if he needed a statement from any of us. For the moment the police were treating Gunther’s death as suspicious, but only after an autopsy would they be able to pinpoint the cause. They would interview Miss Johansson and Miss de Hoog now.

  “But how did it happen?” I whispered to Marco in Italian. “Did Anna de Hoog see anything?”

  “No, she left the Pietà immediately after the performance and came into the Danieli to meet someone for a drink. There was a commotion on the dock, and she went out and was able to identify Gunther.”

  Marco looked subdued and scared. He avoided looking down at his father. I wondered if Sandretti would hold Marco responsible. Roberta left the bridge without speaking to her brother, and Francesca, giving me a shaky smile, trailed after her.

  I cast one last glance at the scene below, with Bitten collapsed like a fallen Valkyrie at the feet of a slain warrior companion, and then reluctantly followed Marco and Andrew to the vaporetto stop and back across the Grand Canal to the Dorsoduro. No one had mentioned the word murder yet, but it lingered in the air like the brackish scent of the canals.

  I couldn’t help thinking, It’s unfortunate that Nicky had to choose this afternoon to disappear. And that made me remember that Albert Egmont had not been among those who had arrived breathless at the scene of the crime. The last time I remembered seeing him was at the table in the piazza, with a Campari in front of him and a look of pleasure on his austere face as he tapped his black fingers in time to the clarinet.

  The next morning I woke from a dream of stone echoing under a solitary step. The sound was coming from outside my hotel, but the steps wound their way into my sleep. I was in a convent, a nun, and in my dream it was a very pleasant thing. I had no worries and no job other than to walk in circles and pray. No romantic entanglements complicated my life; my yearning was only for the Virgin. Best of all, I knew I was making my mother ha
ppy. She had longed to be a nun herself, she’d once confided, and had hoped that one of her four daughters would make the choice. I was the least likely of the four to take the veil; on the other hand, I was the only girl in the family who was still technically a virgin, which counted for something I suppose.

  I’d ordered my breakfast brought up and in great luxury sat up in bed with a tray of rolls and fruit and coffee, with Lovers and Virgins open in front of me. It was gray and overcast outside, and I was in no hurry to go out. Nicky might or might not show up, with or without explanations or bassoons. Gunther’s death might or might not be solved. But in the timeless world of a romance novel, life would go on, like a ship surging over rhythmic waves of luxurious prose. Despite some feeling of guilt on my part, Bashō in Lima had migrated to the small pile of books I’d brought with me but hadn’t yet opened. Guilt, because I knew it was real literature, composed with thoughtfulness and intent. Guilt, because I considered myself a literary person, widely read and not adverse to working my way down through the surface of a text to the meaning below.

  I couldn’t help it, though, I had to find out what was happening to the four sisters in Venezuela.

  I had come to the part where Lourdes, the baby of the family, was demanding to return to the convent and become a novice. She had seen her sister Maria’s seduction by the stable hand, and her innocent mind had rebelled and turned it into a Biblical vision that she kept babbling about, much to Maria’s dismay. Mercedes, her next oldest sister, who clearly had her wits about her and was perfectly aware of what had gone on in the horse box, was considering taking the veil as well. Not because she completely believed in God or thought that locking herself up in a nunnery was so fabulous, but because the convent had a library, and the library contained not only the complete works of Voltaire and Rousseau, but also Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, books she couldn’t obtain elsewhere. As Mercedes said, “What else can a woman with a mind do in this godforsaken country but live as a nun?”