The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (11 page)

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Frigga has arrived at the
palazzo
.”

“Gunther’s girlfriend!”

“No,” Anna said. “Frigga is his grandmother, as it turns out. Frau Frigga Hausen.”

She tried to seem surprised by that, but I didn’t buy it. I was also curious why she seemed to be hovering, coatless and purseless, by the
vaporetto
stop. There was about her something of precipitous flight. Or was she waiting for someone?

“Why don’t you stop off at the
palazzo
?” suggested Anna.

“I have no desire to meet Frigga.”

“I wasn’t thinking of her so much as Bitten.”

“What about Bitten?” I was a little startled. Anna could not possibly know that Bitten claimed to be Olivia’s granddaughter.

“Bitten and Frigga have been quarreling. Bitten says she and Gunther planned to get married in Stockholm this week. Frigga says that’s nonsense: the two of them only met five or six days ago. Bitten is in a—how shall I say it?—vulnerable state of mind. She might need a drink. If you suggested it. Ah, here’s the
vaporetto.
”

I didn’t think Anna had rushed out of the
palazzo
with the intention of taking a
vaporetto
anywhere. But as she blended in with the crowd surging onto the boat, I realized Anna had given me the impetus I needed to do a little sleuthing on Nicky’s behalf. I was less interested in who had killed Gunther than in stopping Bitten from destroying Nicky’s life. It had not yet occurred to me to wonder if the two things were in any way related.

But it had occurred to me that if Bitten did manage to establish a claim on Olivia’s property and wrest the London house away from Nicky, that I too would have no place to live. Like Bashō after his home burned down, I’d be out on my ear.

F
RIGGA WAS NOT
what I expected. I’d imagined one of those sleek German girls, blond, buxom, thin, with a dark indoor tan, who was just beginning to thicken around the middle from years of cream-laden tortes. Even when Anna had said that Frigga was Gunther’s grandmother, I had merely done a little mental rearranging and added fifty pounds instead of ten.

But Frigga was old, eighty at least, with wrinkled, spotted skin and red-rimmed dark eyes. She was wearing a smart pink Chanel suit from the 1950s, with a black shawl over her shoulders, heavy support stockings and well-polished orthopedic shoes. When I arrived, she was sitting in the garden speaking in stilted English to Marco. There was no sign of Andrew, or of Bitten, but from upstairs came the mournful adagio Bitten had played this morning.

“I will not leave Venice until I find out who murdered him.”

From the expression on Marco’s face, I had a feeling that Frigga had said this more than once.

“Ah, Cassandra,” he said. “This is the grandmother of Gunther, Frau Hausen. We have been to the police station, and we have heard the results. Gunther died of water in the lungs, very sad. To date the police have no witnesses and no motives. So perhaps Gunther only had a misstep, they think.”

“I know he was killed,” said Frigga. “I begged him to be careful, always to take special precautions with his stomach when he traveled and not drink too much coffee. I tried to protect him, his whole life, just like I tried to protect his family. I failed. They all are dead. All dead. And I live on and on. I don’t understand.”

I didn’t really understand either. Gunther hardly seemed like the type to have enemies. Unless of course he’d been a drug courier or had a criminal past. But as far as I knew from his biography in the program, and from what Nicky said, Gunther had been playing and teaching the Baroque bassoon for the past ten years in Düsseldorf.

“I will not leave Venice until I find out who murdered him,” she said again, and Marco’s eyes glazed over. With an effort he said, “We go out to dinner now, yes? To the local restaurant with many Venetian specialty dishes. Have you ever had squid in its own ink, Mrs. Hausen? You will like to come too, Mrs. Reilly?”

In spite of my sympathy for Marco, I couldn’t think of many worse ways to spend the evening.

“I have a tremendous amount of work to do. But I’m sure Andrew would love to join you. Meanwhile, I’ll just have a quick word with Bitten.” I went into the
palazzo
.

It was difficult to believe that when I’d first met Bitten a few days ago, she’d seemed a lusty Swede, in ripe middle age, bursting out of her silk shirt. Now her skin was no longer soft and plump; she was like a slice of orange that had been left out overnight. She’d put her bassoon to the side and was sitting in a corner of the room with a glass of wine. I asked her if she’d like some dinner. She shrugged and gestured to me to sit down on the bed. I could see there were two suitcases in the room and wondered if one of them was Gunther’s.

“Did you know Frigga was Gunther’s grandmother?” I began, not exactly where I’d planned.

“She calls herself his grandmother, but she’s really his great-grandmother,” Bitten said. “Gunther’s mother was her granddaughter; she took her in as a baby and raised her. Gunther’s mother died when he was a child, and Frigga took him in.”

“That’s a sad story,” I said.

“Gunther’s was the third violent death in three generations. Unbelievable,” said Bitten, rubbing her forearms. “If anyone, you would have thought Gunther could have broken the spell. He had the spirit of an angel.”

“Do you think he was murdered then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said violent death.”

“No one goes into a canal easily. Unless they commit suicide. But why would he do that? He had everything to look forward to.
We
had everything to look forward to.”

In the face of her obvious grief, I felt unsure how to continue. This didn’t seem like quite the right time to ask her about the quarrel Marco and Andrew had overheard her having with Gunther the night he died. Nor did I feel quite right grilling her on a few other aspects of the case, such as why she’d always seemed so put out when Gunther got a phone call from Frigga. I didn’t want to appear unsympathetic and lose her. My only recourse was to keep up the concerned front and press on, even though it made me feel a bit of a fraud. “You haven’t had such an easy time of it yourself, I imagine,” I said.

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?”