The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Read Free

descended into Marco Polo Airport. I’d meant to read through the articles from Nicky’s files on the flight. I’d also meant to give a serious look at Bashō in Lima and a couple of the other books I’d brought with me, if only to get them firmly out of the way and off the list. Instead I’d become thoroughly engrossed in the first chapters of Lovers and Virgins . I could see I was going to have trouble resisting its headlong plot. The characters might be pasteboard, the dialogue stiff and romantic, and the narrative as ridiculous as anything that the author’s mentor Gloria de los Angeles, the queen of magic realism, had ever devised. All the same, I was hooked. What would happen to the four girls in the Venezuelan colonial family? I’d had hints from the reviews. Lourdes saw visions. Mercedes loved books. Maria would be deflowered by a handsome stable boy, and Isabella was her mother’s right hand. Which of the sisters would become nuns and which lovers? Like many ex-Catholics, I had never lost my secret fascination with nuns and what they really did under those voluminous robes.
    I took the airport bus to the Piazzale Roma and then a vaporetto down the Grand Canal. There is always a sense of magic and disorientation when arriving in Venice. Your mind panics a little, tells you, Flooded. The streets are flooded . But your imagination, so much closer to the dreaming state, murmurs, Yes, and isn’t this how life should be? Simply stepping onto boats instead of buses or cars, gliding easily between tiny ports of call ? Tonight Venice was wet and trembling. Explosions of thunder came from all directions—sometimes far away, sometimes right overhead, as if the city were being demolished. I half expected, when lightning scoured the face of an ancient palazzo , that the thunder following would break it to dust and rubble.
    I stepped off the vaporetto at the Accademia stop, in the Dorsoduro district, just as it began to pour. My sore hip slowed me down, but, pulling my luggage behind me like a rectangular dog, I began to make my way through the streaming little streets to the address Nicky had given me. It had been a long while since I’d been in Venice, and, in any case, it’s not the kind of city whose map is easy to recall from one visit to the next. The spring I’d been here, I’d been content to wander without paying attention to my itinerary.
    Within minutes I was lost, of course. Narrow passages opened into empty squares with a dozen exits. Canals forced streets to dead-end, and bridges multiplied with bewildering complexity. I hadn’t remembered to bring an umbrella (I was going south, after all) and was soon soaked. The wind carried the salty smell of the Adriatic.
    It wasn’t until I’d crossed the width of the Dorsoduro and come out on the Záttere, the promenade that faces the island of Giudecca, that I could see where I was. I read the map again, asked for directions at a café, and plunged back into the maze of streets. In the strange way of things, I found the address easily this time, perhaps because I halted awkwardly when I saw a pair of lovers taking shelter in a doorway, and in my confusion looked away from them and saw the number Nicky had given me on a large house across the canal.
    The palazzo was in a garden full of dripping trees and rain-darkened statues. Up a few marble steps was a huge door with peeling paint and a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. I knocked and heard footsteps echoing off a tile floor in the manner of a gothic novel. I expected an aging manservant in threadbare golden livery to open the door, but it was Nicky.
    “Good! You’re finally here,” she said, not bothering to give me more than a cursory kiss on the cheek. “I’ve been through hell.”
    She didn’t look it. Or rather, she looked as if hell agreed with her. Even though I’d known Nicky for twenty years, the forcefulness of her appearance could still surprise me, especially if I ran into her