The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists

by Barbara Wilson

  No, she hadn’t! Under the influence of another glass of wine, she told me about her unhappy marriage to and divorce from a man who hadn’t really supported her. If he had, who knows what heights she might have reached with an international recording career. Instead she had often chosen to stay close to home and to teach and perform mainly in Sweden, And in the end it hadn’t helped, because Sven left her anyway…after twenty years.

  An unhappy Marco came to the door and announced he was taking Frigga to dinner. He had seen no sign of Andrew. Would we consider joining them? Poor Marco! As soon as he was gone, Bitten opened up another bottle of wine. This time she poured me a glass too.

  “So much death!” she sighed. “My mother died only a month ago. And my grandmother six months ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The worst of it is, I never knew my grandmother. How much I would have liked to have known her! She was a famous musician, you see. Olivia Wulf.”

  “Your grandmother was Olivia Wulf?”

  “Yes.” Bitten went to a bureau and pulled out a photograph. It was Olivia with a young man and woman. I realized I’d seen the same photograph in Olivia’s study.

  “This is my mother and father and grandmother.” Bitten paused. “How well do you know Nicola?”

  “How well do any of us know each other?” I said soulfully and raised my glass.

  We toasted, but then Bitten looked confused. “She called you to help her.”

  “Only because I happened to know a man here who knows a bit about stolen art objects.”

  “Ah, yes. Albert.” I could see Bitten’s now well-lubricated mind sailing off in the uneasy direction of Albert Egmont and the mystery of the stolen bassoon that had not been accepted as the stolen bassoon by Signore Sandretti.

  I said quickly, “It must have made Nicky so happy when she found out that you were Olivia’s granddaughter. You know that she lived with Olivia for years.”

  “Happy!” Bitten banged the coffee table with a large foot. “No, Nicola was not happy. Because she had been imagining that Olivia was her grandmother and that she deserved everything that Olivia had.”

  “Did you just tell her recently?”

  “Yes. Here, the second day. We had a very bad quarrel. A pity because I had hoped to be friends.”

  “How did you find out about Olivia?”

  “I was visiting my mother in the nursing home six months ago, when she stared at me and stared at the newspaper she was reading and said, mysteriously, ‘I wonder if it’s true that musical talent runs in the family.’

  “I thought it was a case of my mother’s mind wandering, especially when I looked at the newspaper later and saw that my mother had been reading the obituary of Olivia Wulf, a musician I had only heard of slightly. But last month, after my mother died, I was going through her things and discovered an old scrapbook of photographs that showed my mother as a young woman, with a young man and a woman who seemed to be his mother. Underneath was written, me with Jakob and Olivia Wulf, Vienna, 1936. This is the photograph.

  “I knew my mother was Austrian, of course, but she always said she had come to Sweden with her mother during the war. She said she’d met my father, Carl Johansson, at university. My father had died years before, but I found an elderly relative of his who said that, yes, she thought that my mother, Elizabeth, had been married before. When I asked if it was possible I could have been the child of her first husband and not Carl’s, the relative said she couldn’t recall anything about the circumstances of my birth, not even if I’d been born before or after my mother and Carl were married. She said, ‘During the war, everything was so confused. Everyone got mixed up about who they were and what they were doing.’

  “On the one hand I was shocked, because this news meant I could be older than I’d thought, and that seemed impossible. I have no memories of war or of a flight to Sweden, only of growing up in a peaceful suburb outside Stockholm. But I decided to find out more about Olivia Wulf, and that’s when I came across the information that Olivia’s son was called Jakob. I found my mother’s entry papers to Sweden from 1940, and discovered she had arrived as a refugee. There was no mention of Jakob entering. She was never a student at the university, though my father was. My own birth certificate is from 1943, but when I went back to the hospital where I had supposedly been born, they had no record of my mother ever having been a patient. They said that wasn’t unusual, to lose records from those years, but it still struck me as strange.”

  “But if Elizabeth survived the war and got to Sweden with you, why didn’t she contact Olivia through the Red Cross? Why didn’t she tell Olivia she had a granddaughter?”

  “My mother would never talk about the war. Whatever happened to Jakob must have been horrible. Now when I look back I remember how she would cry whenever there was a documentary about the Holocaust. My father, Carl, forbade me ever to ask her questions because of what she had been through.”

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “I’m going to claim my rightful inheritance,” Bitten said, lying down on the bed and kicking off her shoes. She looked tired, but her voice was firm, if a little slurred from drink. “I’m going to claim everything that’s mine.”

  I left Bitten reclining on her bed. No one else seemed to be in the house. It was curious that Andrew was still out. Perhaps he was waiting until Frigga was safely back in her hotel before he pounced on Marco again. I thought I might as well take a look through the room Nicky had been staying in when I arrived. No one was there. I had just pulled the mattress up when Anna de Hoog entered quietly.

  “Are you searching for something?”

  It was fairly useless to deny that I was, and yet I stalled, dropping the upper mattress and sitting heavily down on it. Taking a hint from Bitten, I mumbled in a slurred voice, “The Swede and I had a few too many glasses of wine, I guess. Wasn’t sure I could manage to get back to my hotel. Thought about Nicky’s room next door all free and clear. Why not sleep here, I thought. Just checking around for a little of the duty-free.”

  Anna laughed. “Let me get my bottle of brandy.” She went out.

  Dear Mother of Christ. Was she going to get me drunk? I had let Bitten do almost all the drinking earlier, but I wasn’t sure Anna would let me get away with that.

  When she returned Anna was wearing a kimono and slippers. She poured me a glass of brandy and watched as I sipped it. She took a hearty slug.

  “So, was Bitten able to tell you anything you didn’t know?”

  “I don’t know what your interest in these people is,” I said. “You’re an oboist—at least you claim you are—and they’re bassoonists. Who invited you to this conference anyway? Signore Sandretti? You seem to be pretty tight with him.” I remembered the two of them arriving together when Albert was showing us the missing bassoon. More important, Sandretti had been one of the first people at the scene of the discovery of Gunther’s body, appearing at the Danieli shortly after Anna herself.

  “Signore Sandretti did invite me to the conference, as a matter of fact. He invited everyone.”

  The brandy was doing its work, on top of the two glasses of wine with Bitten. I hadn’t had dinner either. I noticed my body was assuming a slightly more prone position than I’d intended.

  “But he didn’t invite you because of your musical skills, I bet.”

  Anna laughed. She was certainly more attractive when she laughed than when she played the oboe. “Let’s say I’m here in a special capacity. To keep an eye on some things.”

  “You didn’t keep an eye on the bassoon.”

  “The way the bassoon went missing came as a surprise,” she allowed.

  I took a leap in the dark, a mental leap that is, because my body was getting more and more relaxed. “You were supposed to be watching Gunther, I bet. That’s why Frigga is so convinced he died from foul play. He was involved in something illegal, wasn’t he?”

  “I have no evidence Gunther was involved in anything
illegal,” Anna said, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. She moved closer to pour me another drink, and this time she stayed seated on the bed. As she leaned over to fill my glass, the neck of her kimono swung open, revealing a high firm breast.

  I muttered something about virgins, I believe, and renunciation versus passion. I think I may have spoken of the need for pilgrimage. I know I protested slightly when my clothes began to come off; I tried again to voice my suspicions that Anna was working for somebody, if not Sandretti, then perhaps Frigga herself. She had definitely been avoiding Frigga. My thought process, however, grew more and more muddled, and in the end the only admission I was able to draw out of Anna was that, no, the oboe was not her first instrument; she had actually studied the trombone and that was some years ago.

  I woke up in the morning, surprisingly naked under the sheets. I had a headache and at first only a hazy memory of the past evening’s events. It took Marco’s shocked face at the door to alert me to the possibility that something had gone awry with my sleuthing. The biography of the well-known conductor that I’d brought from Nicky’s house in London lay by my head on the pillow, with a brief note: “This is possibly what you were looking for. Regards, Anna de Hoog.”

  Eleven

  SHEEPISHLY, THOUGH WITH LESS guilt than one would expect, I let myself out of the palazzo and found a café, where I had a bracing cappuccino and a croissant. When my head was a little clearer, I began to seriously page through the biography. It was inscribed to Olivia in memory of “all we went through during the war.” Midway through the book it became obvious that the author had been Olivia’s lover, the conductor who had arranged for her to get out of Vienna and to England.

  “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “Olivia’s son, Jakob, was not able to come with us that day. He promised to join us very soon. Olivia believed it was his fiancée Elizabeth who held him back. She was not Jewish and did not see the danger in the way we did. Like millions of others, Jakob and Elizabeth were swallowed up in the horrors that followed. Jakob was picked up by the Nazis. Elizabeth vanished. It was a great tragedy in Olivia’s life that she was never able to save her son. She made several trips to the Continent after the war and eventually learned he had died at Dachau of pneumonia. A survivor of the camp remembered that Jakob had spoken of a wife and daughter, but Olivia found no trace of a child.”

  Nicky had never mentioned to me that Olivia suspected her son and his wife had had a daughter, and that she’d searched for them. But Nicky must have known, and asked me to bring the biography to confirm her memory. No wonder she was so upset when Bitten turned up claiming to be Olivia’s granddaughter. It had to be true. Jakob had died at Dachau, and Elizabeth had escaped to Sweden with her young daughter in 1940 and remarried. Of course, Bitten didn’t seem to remember anything of her early years; everyone knew now that survivors of great trauma often blocked out memories that were too painful.

  If Bitten was Olivia’s granddaughter, and it seemed quite likely she was, no wonder Nicky was nervous.

  Nicky! I looked at my watch. The meeting with Roberta and her friend Giovanna was scheduled for one at the conservatory, and it was now ten thirty. I had to find Nicky’s hotel and let her know. “Yes, I’m sure I can find it,” I had said to her yesterday, waving away her offer of a hand-drawn map. “The Frari, of course. You can’t miss the Frari,” I’d said, forgetting that in Venice even a huge church like Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari could disappear into the closely-packed buildings around it.

  I went around in circles for half an hour until I found the tiny hotel in the “alley near the Frari” almost by accident. Bassoon music wafted from an upper story. At the reception desk, the clerk looked blank when I asked for Signora Gibbons in room seven. “No one of that name is here.” Were those her instructions, or was she passing herself off as someone else? She must be here; I could hear the bassoon.

  Of course. She was using my passport. I slapped my forehead and apologized to the clerk. “She must be using her married name. Signora Reilly, is that how she registered?”

  He nodded and then said shyly, “Are you her sister? You look like her picture in the passport.”

  “No I’m not her sister!” I said, and then coughed. “Actually—she’s my cousin.”

  I went upstairs and heard the bassoon behind the door. “I know you’re in there, Nicky,” I said. “Open up.”

  Reluctantly she dragged herself to the door. She was wearing a large T-shirt that said VENEZIA, which she must have bought at the airport, and velvet stretch pants.

  “Come on,” I said briskly. “I have news of various sorts, but I can tell you on the way to the Conservatory of Music. We’re going to do a little research.”

  “Thanks, but no,” she said, picking up her bassoon again. “I’ve just come to a place of great satisfaction and joy in my rehearsing, and I plan to stay with that for the morning. Later maybe.”

  “But I thought you wanted to know more about the girls in the Pietà.”

  Ignoring me completely, she plunged into a long and eerie passage. “Who do you think that is?”

  “Shostakovich?”

  “No, it’s Vivaldi. It’s amazing; there are times when I think I’ve completely pegged him, that I know him and his way of writing for the bassoon inside and out. The cheeriness, the chattiness, his way of making the bassoon carry the weight of the world for a few long bars, only to resolve it in a laugh. Then, all of a sudden, I’ll be completely taken aback by how modern he sounds. What he could do with the bassoon—not just the usual sounds. You know, Cassandra, a lot of people have captured the bassoon’s longing, and that sort of stockinged-feet-tiptoeing-into-a-room sound. And, of course, everybody always makes it the buffoon of the orchestra. When the symphony composer wants a clumsy, stumbling bumpkin, he always writes in the bassoon. Like this—”

  Nicky jumped up and advanced on me, humming some bars from Peter and the Wolf. Her auburn curls flew wildly. I backed off. Clearly she had been spending far too much time alone with this instrument. She waved her hands about. “But Vivaldi doesn’t caricature the bassoon; he doesn’t make the bassoon a buffoon. He’ll do fussy, he’ll do bickering, but purely comic squabbling—never. You get the dialogue, you get spirited conversation. You get laughing, you get sighing. I know all that. And then suddenly, I’m playing a passage and realize, the next composer to create this eeriness is Sibelius.”

  Nicky plumped down on her bed, completely overjoyed. “He’s a genius. You just can’t come to the end of Vivaldi. Though I wonder,” she said, lying back on the pillows, lifting her leg in the air and regarding her ankle, “if he didn’t get a teeny touch of inspiration from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. The bassoon is prominent in the passages in the underworld. There’s some eeriness there, definitely.”

  “I thought you wanted to meet Roberta,” I said impatiently.

  “Roberta who?”

  “Roberta Sandretti. Marco’s sister, the clarinetist. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to arrange this visit to the library. Her friend Giovanna, who teaches the violin, is going to help us.”

  “Cassandra, why didn’t you say so to begin with? Of course I want to come.”

  She jumped up and began gathering her things and thrusting her feet into a ridiculous pair of pumps.

  “We don’t have to be there for an hour and a half,” I said. “No need to pinch your toes longer than necessary. We can go have a bite and then stroll over in a leisurely way.”

  “I don’t have time for lunch.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t think I can wear this T-shirt to meet Roberta Sandretti, do you? To do research in a library? I’ve got to go shopping.”

  I pounded down the stairs behind her. “Just don’t be late,” I said, as she vanished out the door.

  The desk clerk looked admiringly after her. “Your cousin is very vigorous,” he said. “I hear her playing the fagotto. She has very good lungs.” He gestured approvingly to his chest and stared in a disappointed way at my
own.

  “She’s a famous fagotto player,” I said. “It’s meant to build you up.” Which reminded me: Where was Albert with that old fagotto anyway? I hadn’t seen him all yesterday. I hadn’t seen him since after the concert. I still had some time to kill before one. I decided to take the vaporetto over to the Riva degli Schiavoni and see if I could locate Albert at the Hotel Danieli.

  The Danieli was the sort of hotel that made me feel that any moment after my tentative, soft-shoed entry, a security man might grab my elbows and escort me forcibly out. Fanciful glass chandeliers swung from the high gilt ceiling. Marble stairs zigzagged upwards in a dazzling painterly perspective. Bellhops hefted sleek suitcases, followed by skeleton-thin women in tiny black suits. In the lobby, elegant men sat in leather chairs, smoking and leafing through La Stampa and The Times. In vain I told myself that George Sand, Ruskin, Wagner and Proust had stayed here and that if I wore dark glasses and assumed a haughty British accent, I’d fit right in.

  I didn’t of course. Receptionists can always tell. The uniformed desk clerk had narrow shoulders, hollow cheeks and little black eyes that could probably show obsequiousness, but not to the likes of me.

  “Albert Egmont? No, I’m sorry he is not a guest at the hotel.” He dismissed me quickly, with a haughty British accent of his own, implying that it would be very peculiar indeed should I know a guest at the Danieli.

  “I don’t understand. Has he checked out?”

  With a show of taking great and unnecessary pains, the clerk flipped back a page or two. “I don’t see that this person was ever a guest here.”

  “But I…” He turned away, more obviously rude now, to speak to a guest, a woman with a fur hat sitting on her head like a party of dead squirrels. She had an Argentinean accent.

  There was nothing to do but take my Joan Plowright imitation and leave. But suddenly I found one of the porters giving me a wink and a surreptitious gesture that said to follow him down a short hall. Well! This hadn’t happened to me in many years. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be annoyed. Then I noticed he seemed to be mouthing the name “Albert.” I went after him and turned into a small room filled with left luggage.