The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (3 page)

“We will go out tonight for a very nice meal,” said 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.

M
ISS 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.”

Gunther hadn’t said anything till now. Laughing, he said to Anna, “But you
do
play the oboe. You mean, you’d love to spend your life playing the work of the women musicians!”

“Well, now there’s one less treasure in the Sandretti library,” Andrew put in. In spite of his knowledge of soccer, he seemed to be getting nowhere with Marco.

“We must not be quick to judgment,” Anna de Hoog murmured.

“What is the story behind the bassoon that was taken?” I asked, taking advantage of my innocent status as a stranger.

“Why don’t
you
tell her, Andrew?” said Nicky sullenly. “Since you’re the expert.”

I had the strong sense that Nicky, with her long and well-established interest in the women bassoonists, could not have been too pleased to arrive in Venice and find Andrew getting ready to write a book on the subject. She was a little touchy about academics in general, being a self-taught scholar herself.

“So far I only know what Marco’s father has told me,” said Andrew. “When I come to write my book about the Pietà, I’ll of course understand much more. But what is interesting about this particular bassoon is that it survived two hundred years in the Sandretti family.”

“The Brunelli family,” Marco put in. “My mother’s family.”

“No bassoons from the Pietà are known to exist, except this one. The Correr Museum, I believe, has the largest collection of instruments from the
ospedali
, mostly violins and cellos, horns, even a pianoforte, but this is—was—the only bassoon.”

“What were the rest of you playing on?” I asked.

“For the most part, reproductions,” Gunther explained. “They call them period instruments, but often they are re-creations. That’s especially true with the bassoon. With the violin, it’s different. You cannot make an imitation Stradivarius, but an old bassoon and a new bassoon made to look like an old one—well, they sound quite the same.”

“Oh, Gunther, no,” said Bitten. “The soul of old bassoons is different.” Their eyes locked again, and they clutched each other under the table, as the waiters appeared with our dishes.

“Ah,” said Marco to me, “Here is your
fegato
, a specialty of Venice.”

“
Fagotto
? Funny, it doesn’t look like a bassoon.”

“No, no,
fegato
is…”

“Liver,” said Andrew, with a touch of lasciviousness.

It was the only touch of humor in an otherwise gloomy gathering.

I had assumed I’d be staying in the villa with my friend the suspected bassoon thief, but when we emerged from the restaurant, Marco told me otherwise. The palazzo’s rooms were all spoken for. I would be more comfortable in a hotel, and he had taken the liberty of booking me a room.

“It is the hotel where Ruskin wrote
The Rocks of Venezia
,” he said enthusiastically and then paused. “Perhaps it is Stones? Yes.”

I bid good-night to everyone at the
palazzo
and, again pulling my suitcase behind me, set off for the nearby hotel. As we parted Nicky had whispered, “I’ll explain soon.” Why couldn’t she tell me now? What was she waiting for? Whom was she afraid of?

At the hotel, the clerk asked for my passport. I always travel with two—an American one and an Irish—and out of habit I use the Irish, since that generally keeps prices down and earns me more sympathy. But for the moment I could find only the American one, which I presented, and then I went upstairs and fell into a deep but muddled sleep.