The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists

by Barbara Wilson

  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.

  When I woke in the morning, I went to the window and opened the shutters. I looked down on the wide stone seaside promenade of the Záttere and across to the island of Giudecca, whose churches wore cowls of white mist. The tide was high. I could see that the waters had risen over the embankment and spilled onto the pavement below.

  I could have had breakfast in the hotel, but decided to celebrate my first real day in Venice by going over to the Piazza San Marco for coffee. I put on half my wardrobe to ward off the morning chill and took Lovers and Virgins with me. In spite of myself, I could already feel its seductive rhythm invading my brain. Taking the short vaporetto ride from Accademia to San Marco, I found myself thinking, The ancient city rose from the sea like a cache of pastel seashells wrapped in tissue. As Cassandra caught her first glimpse of the Palace of the Doges, she clasped her hands tightly. “My destiny awaits me here!” she murmured.

  The unnamed woman narrator of Bashō in Venice would be more likely to murmur:

  Through the mist

  Ancient pillar

  An old lion

  Yawns.

  The reality was damper and saltier. Wooden platforms had been placed like boardwalks over the paving stones now covered by the high tide. When I reached the grand piazza, I found it flooded with an inch or so of the Adriatic; at the same time, fog seemed to pour down into the enormous square. It was like being in the midst of a giant scientific experiment, with liquid at the bottom of the beaker and clouds of condensation rising, falling and swirling all around me.

  It was early, and only the most die-hard tourists were about; most people were on their way to work. The cafés were open, but only a single person sat among the dozens of rows of outdoor tables. Through the rising and falling mist the man made a peculiar figure in the piazza. He was slender and dressed all in black: black trench coat, black shirt tightly buttoned at his neck, black galoshes and a black bowler hat. The hat was familiar and so were the black leather gloves, which I knew were as thin as latex.

  As I drew closer, I saw that he was reading Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, and it wasn’t the abridged version.

  “Albert?” I said, still unbelieving, tip-toeing through the water to get to his table. “Albert!”

  Albert Egmont, known as “the Egg” because of his bald head, and I had met under competitive circumstances once in Norway, both of us searching for a painter called Cecilia Alcarón. I recalled, with a slight frisson of pleasure, how I had eventually discovered Cecilia’s identity and managed to send Albert packing on a boat in a fjord in the middle of nowhere.

  Not that either of us would acknowledge remembering the exact details.

  “Cassandra Reilly,” I pretended to remind him. “Romance translator.”

  He gave his mysterious, surprisingly sweet smile. “Cassandra, my dear.” He lifted his black bowler hat. Beneath it he was perfectly pink and smooth. “What on earth brings you to Venice?”

  “A brief holiday,” I said. “Change of scene.” I sat down and put my feet up on another chair to keep them from getting soaked.

  “Well, it is a change from England, isn’t it?” he said in his strong Manchester accent. Albert had an art and antique shop in Buxton, a former spa town in the Peak District. “Though I’m not sure I would have seen you as a Venetian type. You seem more Florentine: sunnier, earthier somehow. The Venetians have always been elaborate, recondite, convoluted. Or as Ruskin says, Gothic. You know, Ruskin found the Renaissance terribly tedious. Hated the Florentines.”

  There was an insult somewhere in there, but it still made me laugh. “Are you here on business?”

  “One might say business, dear one. I prefer to call it a bit of a look around. A chat here and there. Perhaps something will turn up.” But he winked. “And, as Henry James said, ‘Almost everyone interesting, appealing, melancholy, memorable, odd, seems at one time or another, after many days and much life, to have gravitated to Venice.’”

  The waiter approached with a cappuccino, and Albert spoke to him in respectable Italian. He ordered a cappuccino for me too. Clearly I needed to put my pleasure in triumphing over Albert in the matter of Cecilia behind me, and recognize that, at the moment, the Egg might be quite a useful person with whom to reacquaint myself.

  “I don’t suppose you know anything about wind instruments, do you?” I asked, after a moment.

  “Clarinets, oboes and so on?”

  “Bassoons, actually.”

  “Ah, yes, bassoons.” He eyed me speculatively. “Have you lost one, found one or taken one up in a dramatic career change?”<
br />
  “Lost one, actually. That is, a friend of mine had a very expensive Baroque bassoon loaned to her, and she, ah, seems to have misplaced it.”

  Albert raised the foamy cup of coffee to his lips with his black-gloved fingers. “Not easy to misplace a bassoon. Of course,” he added, “anything can go missing—if someone else takes a fancy to it.”

  Albert thought a moment. “I have a few acquaintances in the same trade here,” he finally said. “Respectable, of course, but they keep their eyes open. As you probably know, beautiful old things in Italy get misplaced with distressing frequency.”

  “Perfect,” I said, though I felt a little uneasy. Was it wise to mix Nicola up with Albert’s “respectable” friends? I kept thinking of that huge pile of bank notes I’d brought over for her. There was more to this story than I knew. Still, I gave Albert the details, as best as I could.

  “Paper?” he asked. “Pen?” I pulled out a pen and my notebook. In my haste, Lovers and Virgins spilled out too, into the inch of water that still swirled under us.

  Albert retrieved the book. On the cover was the scribbled list of things Nicola had asked me to bring to Venice. Something caught his interest—I couldn’t see what—but all he said was, “New translation project?”

  I stuffed the wet book into my satchel and told him a little about it, and then gave him more details about the missing bassoon.

  “But really,” I said, “you should hear about all this from Nicola.”

  “Perhaps we can meet for drinks later today,” suggested Albert. “What about six?”

  “Fine, except she’s not allowed to leave Sandretti’s palazzo.”

  “Then I’ll come to you.” He took Ruskin in hand again. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” He winked again and unfolded his long, thin body from the chair and began to wade in purposeful strides across the wet piazza.

  After a discreet interval, I left the piazza too, using a rather less graceful hopping technique to make my way to higher ground. I went into one of the cafés sheltered by the vast arcades and sat down at a marble-topped table. I ordered another cappuccino and some toast and yogurt. I had a view, not of the Basilica di San Marco itself, a cathedral that looks like a combination of a Turkish bath and the palace of Kublai Khan, but of its dreamlike opalescent reflection in the waters of the huge rectangular piazza. I thought, I’m in Italy. In Venice! And someone else is paying!! For Nicola, generous to a fault, had managed, probably during dinner, to slip a plump envelope of lire inside my satchel, along with a note: CR, you’re a pal.

  The convent school of Lovers and Virgins was a thing of the past now, and I was deep into Chapter Three, making notes and getting the feel of the thing. I could see that I was going to have trouble with some of the terminology if I took it on as a translation project.

  After her wild ride across the pampas, Maria dismounted and handed the reins to the stable hand. He must be new, she thought. For he did not call her señorita and keep his eyes lowered as most of them did. Instead, he faced her boldly and, with a smile that showed white teeth, murmured, “It is clear that the young lady is an excellent rider, even without a saddle.”

  She slapped his face. How dare he address her, much less make a comment like that? She was sixteen and no child, though she had spent her life being taught by nuns. She knew what he meant. Ladies did not ride without a saddle. That he should even be imagining…

  More of this mental and physical flouncing about followed before Maria returned abruptly, accepted her stable hand’s apologies and began to help him groom the horse.

  It was clear where all this was leading, if not in this chapter, then soon. The horse box was reeking of animal sweat and young lust. But the sexual antics of Maria and the stable boy, at least in terms of vocabulary, were not my concern. It was all the unfamiliar and arcane equestrian terms that were throwing me. The author had probably dug them up in some eighteenth-century volume in an obscure private library in a hacienda in deepest Venezuela. I had thought my greatest problem with this book was going to be nun speak; now I could see it might be horse talk.

  I flipped open Bashō in Lima and began to read it slowly, the way it wanted to be read. Now this would be a challenge to translate, a lovely project full of mystery and poetry and deep feeling. I could feel the language of the book easing my heartbeat, rearranging my brain cells. These were the kinds of books that should be published, that should be in the world. No one would probably buy it, it’s true. It did not have the words NEW INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER screaming off its pages as did Lovers and Virgins. But if I didn’t write a favorable reader’s report, it would end up in Simon’s trash bin, like so many other novels from other countries that publishers and agents with great hopes tried to market to the English-reading public.

  When I first arrived at the city of dreams, the city of my youth, the city of unknown possibilities…

  Then all that caffeine must have kicked in, because suddenly I was impatient with this modern-day Bashō. Wasn’t this text a bit precious, a little self-indulgent? I pretended I was Simon, asking: “But what is the book about, Cassandra?”

  For an hour or so I went back and forth between the two books, from time to time glancing out the plate-glass windows onto the piazza. As the tide receded and the stones of the piazza reappeared, the reflection of the basilica vanished. The sun came out, though the mist still lingered in wisps and streamers. The arcades were filling with those tourists who would not be put off by a touch of damp; they were streaming toward the Palace of the Doges and the basilica, toward the Accademia Museum and the Rialto Bridge. Some were simply streaming in circles, already lost and befuddled.

  To my surprise, I saw someone I recognized in the crowd. He stood out because of his height. It was big, blond Gunther making his way through the opposite arcade, his head bent as he struggled to listen to whoever was talking to him on his cell phone. But that wasn’t what made me hastily jam the books back in my satchel, jump up and dash out the café door…It was that Marco was following him.

  And Andrew McManus was following Marco.

  Four

  I UNDERSTAND there are many detective novels set in Venice. If I were a thriller writer, it’s the one place I would avoid. Venice can never be described too often. On the other hand, I was discovering the practical problems of investigation in this city of bridges and narrow, twisting lanes. It is almost impossible to follow suspects without A) being seen and B) getting lost.

  I succeeded for a short while in keeping Andrew’s cereal box head in view while I pressed myself into narrow doorways, popped out again and attempted to hide, very unconvincingly, behind passersby, most of whom seemed to be shorter than I. The only things I had going for me were that Andrew was watching Marco follow Gunther, and none of the three had turned around.

  Nevertheless, before too much time had passed, I took a wrong turn and lost them all. I thought I might be near the Rialto Bridge; I was in a dense thicket of touristy shops full of glass objects and rather hideous masks of silver-and-white leather topped with feathers and costume jewelry. In the midst of all this was a fornaio, a bakery, so I stopped and had a slice of pizza to settle my nerves, and while I ate it I looked in the window of the stationery shop next door. At first I dismissed it as another touristy place, one of the many shops that sold marbled papers and bound books. But gradually I weakened and admitted to myself that I would love to have the money to write letters on mold-made Fabriano paper using a glass pen with a steel nib dipped in tinted ink. To tell the truth, it was the bottles of ink that really enthralled me. Squat or slender, with hand-lettered labels and caps secured with wax and colored ribbon, they glowed dimly in shades of indigo, burgundy and sepia. I never fool myself that, in an earlier century, I would have been a woman of letters (I would have been keeping pigs in the west of Ireland), still I could dream.

  Pens and paper are romantic; a woman with a crust of pizza in her hand and a dab of tomato sauce on her face is not. I sudden
ly saw my reflection in the glass and, behind it, the figure of a young woman looking curiously at me. Her twisted-up pile of red-gold hair and her pale face with its prominent thin nose made me understand Ruskin’s claim that Venetians were Gothic, not Renaissance. She was wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt with a crisp high collar; she had an almost monastic appearance.

  Well, I can look, can’t I? I thought defensively. Then a surprisingly mischievous grin lit her austere face, and I went in.

  We exchanged buon giornos and a few other pleasantries about the weather and what a lovely shop, yes, in the family for three generations, and then she asked me if I was Spanish.

  “Irish,” I said, then amended, “North American,” and amended again, “But I travel a lot. My Italian sounds Spanish because I’m a translator.”

  “And whom have you translated?” she asked. Her eyes were the green of sunlight in the forest. She was probably twenty years younger than I was, but if I never took off my beret—a handsome second-hand Canadian Mounties’ affair—she wouldn’t see my gray hair. I had been told that my chin was holding up admirably, and certainly my spirit had always been that of an adolescent (I had been told that often enough too).

  “Gloria de los Angeles. Luisa Montiflores. Elvira Montalban. My own name is Cassandra Reilly.” I wrote it on the scratch pad in a flourish of sepia.

  “Francesca,” she said and then told me she didn’t much care for the overblown magic realism of Gloria de los Angeles and had never heard of Luisa Montiflores, the Uruguayan writer whose latest novel, Diary of a First Love in Montevideo, had just won a prize whose monetary worth would keep her in paper and pencils for perpetuity. Fortunately Francesca was a great fan of Elvira Montalban, the Argentinean author whose career I had in a sense invented.