The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Read Free Page A

anywhere outside her house in Hampstead. Her London residence contained her, accommodated her. When you saw her at home in the kitchen wearing her lipstick-red satin dressing gown, you didn’t think, What a gigantic force of nature the woman is . You merely thought, Here’s Nicky having her morning cuppa .
    Now she seemed to fill the doorway in a long maroon tunic reminiscent of the latter days of the Roman Empire, though a shawl around her shoulders and reading glasses pushed up into her spiraling auburn curls lent a more domestic look. As usual she was wearing expensive and somewhat complicated shoes; Nicky was proud of her well-shaped ankles.
    “Come upstairs,” she said, leading the way up marble stairs to a bedroom with enormous ceilings and dusty gold drapes. A chandelier poured from above. The double bed was covered with Nicky’s clothes, and shoes were flung every which way over the flowered carpet, as if she’d been throwing them at ghosts. On the wall was a large gilt-framed School of Tiepolo painting that showed the Virgin Mary being sucked into a vortex of angels.
    “Did you bring what I asked you to? Thank you, by the way.”
    I handed over the bag and then perched on the edge of the bed. “A thousand pounds is a lot of money,” I ventured.
    Nicky only snorted. “This whole situation is extremely annoying, to say the least. I have a concert in Birmingham tomorrow. Quite a number of people are going to be furious if I’m not there. I have no idea how long these Italians think they can keep me in Venice.”
    “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
    “I got here five days ago for the symposium. There are about fifteen of us, I suppose, a combination of scholars and musicians. Some of us were put up in this house, which belongs to the man who organized the event, Alfredo Sandretti. I’ve hardly seen him by the way, except when it’s time to give a flowery speech; he makes his son do all the work.
    “Anyway here we are.” Nicky paced around the room, counting off: “Me, Gunther from Germany, Andrew from Canada and Bitten from Sweden. All of us have performed Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos. Bitten Johansson is probably Scandinavia’s best-known Baroque bassoonist. Andrew isn’t the most brilliant player, but he’s made himself an expert on Vivaldi. I didn’t realize he’d begun to focus exclusively on the Pietà. He’s a professor and is just starting a sabbatical to write a book about his research here. Anyway, I suppose they put us together because they thought we’d have a lot to talk about. There’s an oboist staying here too, Dutch or something, probably because they didn’t have anywhere else to stash her.”
    Nicky ran her hands through her curls, newly colored and full of life. My own hair was curly too, but frizzier and getting gray. I usually tucked it into a beret and forgot about it.
    “The idea was that we would participate in seminars during the day and in the evening play music. Each day we were loaned period instruments to practice on. Then, after practicing, they’d take the instruments away again and give them back to us at the concert. Yesterday, the last day of the symposium, everything was a little more lax; we had a long lunch and then only a bit of a late rehearsal. Everyone was tired, to tell the truth. We kept the instruments with us, as it was only a few hours until the performance. I took a nap, fell deeply asleep, and when I woke up, the bassoon I’d been lent was gone.
    “There was an enormous search—Sandretti, his son, the police, everybody sniffing through my knickers. I couldn’t imagine they were serious. I couldn’t believe anyone thought I’d taken it. And why would I do it before the last concert, when it would be so obvious?”
    “Is it worth a lot?”
    “Of course, though it could have been worse. It’s not a classic, like a Denner or Hotteterre. But it is one of the instruments once used by the Pietà girls. Belongs to the Sandrettis, in