The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (29 page)

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.

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?”

“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
.