The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists

by Barbara Wilson

  “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.

  Twenty-one

  “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.

  “I am one of the few agents with a background in music, though as I mentioned, trombone was more my specialty than Baroque woodwinds. I was able to persuade a young bassoonist to help in our investigation. In retrospect, I wish I had not. I wish I had carried out the investigation on my own. But it was thought that an inside source would be of great use, and it was unclear whether I could get myself invited to Venice for this symposium. We wanted to get into Sandretti’s world, you see, and we understood that he often had musicians staying at his palazzo. I suppose it was another way of augmenting his income. He would pocket the funding that should have gone to pay for hotel rooms.

  “Gunther agreed to be a sort of mole, to watch Sandretti unobtrusively and to see how he operated. It was through Gunther that I ended up being invited as well. Sandretti was a little surprised by me, but since he had so much respect for Gunther, he accepted my presence.

  “We also set Gunther up here in this room in the Danieli, so that he would have another base, especially if anything went wrong. I can certainly take care of myself as you know, but he was an amateur. He entered right into the spirit of things, however, and decided himself on the code word he would use when calling me.”

  “Frigga!” I said, finding my voice for the first time in a while. I had been so filled with well-being up to now that I hadn’t been quite paying attention.

  “Yes. Things were going well until the moment that the bassoon was stolen. Although a stolen instrument is just what we were expecting, I hardly expected that it would go missing in such a public way or that it would be a bassoon belonging to Signore Sandretti himself. Although the bassoon certainly has historic value, it is hardly in the same league as the violins and cellos we’d been looking at. I was very puzzled at Sandretti’s reaction too. He immediately accused Nicola of taking it, called in the police, had her passport confiscated. It seemed a great show of firmness.

  “Interesting, I thought. Perhaps he is not the person we are looking for after all. All the same, his reaction was very strange. I didn’t for a minute, of course, think that Nicola had stolen the bassoon, but I couldn’t imagine that Sandretti had done it and blamed it on her. I was as intrigued as anyone when your friend A
lbert turned up with the bassoon and Sandretti said he’d never seen it before.

  “Actually, your friend Albert threw me completely off the track for a while. I kept trying to figure out what role he was playing in all this—was he working for Sandretti or against him?—I didn’t understand for a long while that it was as simple as it was: He was a casual acquaintance of yours and was doing you a favor, a favor that might involve some reward for himself.

  “A great deal about Albert seemed mysterious, aside from those thin black gloves. But I did find out a few curious things about your Mr. Egg. His shop in Buxton is run without reproach by his elderly mother and specializes in antique tea sets, but Albert himself is frequently on the slightly shady side of the law. He travels a little more than he might, given the size of his shop and its contents, and he lives a little better than he might. He’s too much of a small fry to investigate for theft or fraud, but there is a small file on him in England. Something you might mention to him if you have the opportunity.”

  I raised myself on my arm. My brain seemed to be working again, at least enough to know that I was puzzled. “But Sandretti didn’t know that Bitten had taken the bassoon. Did he really think Nicky had done it? Or did he suspect his son and was he trying to protect him?”

  “The latter, Cassandra. It was only last night that Sandretti gave up on his son. But let’s go back a few days. Albert put the bassoon in the left luggage with instructions to his friend to keep an eye on it and tell no one it was there. Gunther was the first to leave the church during the performance of Orlando Furioso. He got a phone call, and Bitten followed soon after.”

  “Was it you who called him? How could you? You were playing in the orchestra.”

  “A colleague of mine rang Gunther on my instructions and told him to ask Bitten if it was she who had taken the bassoon. When Bitten admitted it was, they had a great quarrel, which Andrew and Marco observed. Bitten went back to the left luggage and tried to retrieve the bassoon but failed. She then went up to the hotel room in the Danieli, hoping Gunther would join her.

  “Meanwhile Marco and Andrew had gone to the Danieli for a drink. Marco left Andrew in the bar and went to ask about the bassoon. At this point he observed Bitten, who had come downstairs to leave a message for Gunther at the desk. Marco discovered from the clerk that Gunther had a room at the hotel. Unfortunately, it had not occurred to him to register under a pseudonym.

  “At this point Marco seems to have given way to terror. He had been feeling for a long while that he was under surveillance, and for some reason he picked up on Gunther right away. That was why you saw him following Gunther that morning in the piazza. At any rate he saw Gunther come into the Danieli and then go up the stairs. He followed him up and they had some kind of exchange. Marco hit Gunther on the head and knocked him out. If only he had left then, everything would have been all right, for Gunther wasn’t dead. But Marco, panic-struck, pushed him out the window into the canal. Marco rejoined Andrew at the bar, and they returned to the Pietà.”

  “And all Andrew remembered was that Marco gave him a kiss,” I marveled.

  “On closer questioning Andrew remembered that Marco had been gone a good twenty or thirty minutes.”

  Anna began gathering the underwear that was scattered around us on the king-size bed. She put on her shirt and checked that the trigger of her gun was on safety before slipping her arm through the holster.

  Anna continued, “It was when I was at the left luggage asking about the bassoon that they found Gunther’s body. I was quite shocked. I really couldn’t believe that Sandretti had done it. He was not visible to the rest of you, but he was backstage the entire time, and I had a good view of him. Gunther’s death made me rethink everything, and that is when I began to concentrate on Marco. Marco Sandretti had even less going for him than his father. He was young, he was not talented, he was dependent on his father. He had gotten involved in stealing instruments and smuggling and was desperate to conceal it. His father had guessed something like that was going on. He thought Marco had taken the bassoon. That’s why he pretended the bassoon Albert recovered wasn’t the bassoon that had been stolen.”

  I began slowly putting on my clothes. My plane was leaving in a few hours. The rain storm was over; the room was heating up. I hoped Anna would stop me from getting dressed, but she didn’t. She’d already put on her shirt and jeans and was looking for her socks.

  “Last night,” she went on, “when Marco took the violin, Sandretti realized he couldn’t go on covering up for him. He’d tried. He messed up the desk so it would look like someone was looking for money or papers and to draw attention away from the loss of the violin. But when I went back to the library after everyone had gone to sleep, he admitted he knew his son was involved in the thefts. I told him I thought Marco had killed Gunther and made an attempt on your life, and I wanted a chance to prove it. Sandretti agreed to stay out of the way this morning.”

  “But why did Marco try to strangle me? I thought he liked me.”

  “You must have done something to make him think you knew what he was up to.”

  I thought back. “Right before going to the klezmer concert I told Marco that I knew who had taken the bassoon and that the police would be making a thorough investigation. I also said the police would try to get to the bottom of his secrets, but that I’d never reveal them.”

  Anna looked at me with a half-smile. “And you’re surprised he tried to shut you up?”

  “I didn’t think I was talking to a murderer! I was trying to cheer him up about his relationship with Andrew.”

  Anna was fully dressed now. She pushed her hair back off her face. I felt like saying something inane like: “Will I ever see you again?” but that was not my style. An intense feeling of sabi came over me. I tried to disguise it in pity for Andrew.

  “I wonder if Andrew suspected Marco?”

  “I think he must have,” Anna said. “He was so distraught this morning. Now he says he’s not going to stay in Venice. He says he can’t stay here after what’s happened.”

  “That should make Nicky happy. Then she’d be first with the research on the orphaned bassoonists. You know, it was Roberta who broke into the library first last night and stole two volumes of manuscript music. One of them seems to contain original bassoon music by a relative of the Sandrettis.”

  “That’s one last piece of the puzzle cleared up, then,” said Anna, opening the door for me. We went out and started down the stairs. “I thought that Marco forced his way in to make it look like a break-in. Where is Nicky, by the way?”

  “Still in bed, I believe,” I said. “With Giovanna.”

  Anna gave me a sidelong look. For a woman who had probably killed in the line of duty, she was surprisingly shy. “You share a house in London, but you’re not…”

  “She’s given me an attic room to store my things,” I said. “Out of the kindness of her heart.”

  “I sometimes have business in London.”

  “I’m sometimes there.”

  “Perhaps we could…”

  “Take in a bassoon concert,” I said. “Or perhaps an oboe performance, since that’s your instrument.”

  “You wretch,” she said, as we reached the lobby and walked by the desk clerk. She threw down the key as she gave me a kiss that surely rocked his unflappability forever. “You know that the trombone is really what I’m good at.”

  Twenty-two

  I TOLD MYSELF that the little paper store was on the way to the Piazzale Roma, where I’d catch the bus to the airport. I told myself I’d just walk by. I would just look through the window a second. I didn’t have to go in. I had no reason to go in. Yet as soon as I saw the girl with the red-gold hair sitting behind the desk, scribbling in a notebook, I couldn’t help myself. A CD was playing as I opened the door and she smiled up at me. The tune was one I would remember her and Roberta by: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

  “Buon giorno,” I said. “I need some ink, I’ve d
ecided. I want inks the color of burgundy wine, sepia and indigo. And I want a pen, a glass pen with a gold nib. I need them all very quickly.”

  I gathered what I wanted, and Francesca wrapped everything beautifully, melting a drop of red wax on the knotted string and stamping it so that it looked like a soft, flattened heart. I didn’t tell her I was leaving. I didn’t tell her about Marco’s arrest. She said she’d almost finished her story; she would send it to me when she was done. She asked me if the inks and pen were a present. I said yes, but for myself. I didn’t tell her good-bye, but I pressed her hand as I left. It was enough for me to see her again, as I had seen her the first time. With Anna de Hoog’s touch still all over my body, it seemed strange to want Francesca as my last image of Venice, and yet I did.

  I did.

  The heart is a strange little instrument. It plays in all registers, up and down the major and the minor scales. Nicola would say that the bassoon captures the complexities of the spirit best, but I put my money on the clarinet, with its knowing wail that restores hope, even in history, and makes adolescents of us all, especially in love.

  I settled into my seat on Air Italia. Just before we took off into an autumn twilight glazed with vermilion and warm gray, a last passenger came aboard. He had a long, paper-wrapped parcel that looked strangely familiar. Did he dare? Should I tell a flight attendant Albert Egmont was smuggling out a national treasure? Or should I wait for him to be caught at Heathrow? Would I walk right by him as they took him away? Or would I give Anna de Hoog a call to let her know that business might take her to England sooner than she expected? He caught me watching him as he stowed his package carefully overhead.

  With a wink he sat down. A moment later his card, with the Buxton antique shop’s address on it, was passed back to me. “Spaghetti,” he had written. “The very long kind.”