The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists Read Free Page B

the family for centuries. I don’t know the price, or even if there is one. In Italy everything is millions of lire anyway. But how do you value something that is one of a kind?”
    She stuck the money and the envelope marked PRIVATE between the mattresses without further explanation. Then she picked up the biography of the conductor and began flipping impatiently through it. I pulled off my boots. They made a sorry impression next to Nicky’s red heels. She’d tried for years to make me more fashion conscious, but I’d stuck to my black Levi’s and boots. It was one of my few consistencies.
    A knock at the door interrupted Nicky’s reading, and a beautiful young man entered with a tray. Ah, the faithful retainer at last and none too soon, for I was hungry, and the sight of biscuits and cheese with a carafe of wine was particularly welcome.
    “Marco Sandretti. Cassandra Reilly,” Nicky said in a clipped, even hostile manner. Since Nicky usually enjoyed the company of attractive young people, I could only surmise that she considered him to be if not an enemy, then of the enemy camp. “Why does everyone else get to go out and I have to stay here?”
    “I’m very sorry,” said Marco. “My father told me for you to stay here.”
    “Your father, your father!” said Nicky, pacing and eating biscuits. She looked like Maria Callas as Medea in her heavy days. “I never should have accepted his invitation to come to this symposium. Oh yes, he made it sound so lovely. A week in sunny Italy with gorgeous meals and the enchanting company of like-minded musicians. Ha!”
    “We will go out tonight for a very nice meal,” said Marco, looking hunted. “And your friends, they don’t go far. It is raining. I am sorry,” he added again.
    There was another knock on the door, and a man in his late thirties came in. He went purposefully up to Marco as if to claim an embrace, but the Italian adroitly sidestepped him.
    “You have not yet met Nicola’s friend. Cassandra Reilly. Andrew McManus.”
    Andrew was good-looking, but not in the dark, questioning, romantic way of Marco. Andrew was more on the order of a well-designed cereal box. His head sat thickly on his shoulders, which were narrow but powerful. His waist was low and his upper torso pumped up by big, strong lungs. His legs, on the other hand, were short and spindly, ending in heavy shoes, as if to balance him.
    In spite of the flatness of his features, his face was oddly colorful. The freckled skin had an orangish cast, the eyes were blue, the mouth very red. When he smiled at me, he looked more dutiful than charmed. He made another awkward leap at Marco, which was again quickly foiled.
    In a minute, two more people entered the room. I realized they were the couple I’d seen clandestinely embracing outside.
    “Bitten and Gunther,” Nicky said with no great enthusiasm.
    “Hello,” said the pair with an equal lack of interest in me. It was taking all their energy to keep their hands off each other. I managed a hello as well, though I was gaping impolitely at Bitten Johansson.
    She was almost six feet tall, a stunningly beautiful older woman dressed in a coral silk shirt and cool gray-blond linen pants suit with a hip-length jacket. Her hair, the same color as the linen suit, was thick and parted on the side, and she wasn’t wearing much makeup, only eyeliner, which elongated her frosty blue eyes. The only thing that seemed remotely untidy about this striking woman was that three, that is to say all but one, of the buttons on her silk blouse were undone, and she was wearing no bra. Was it Swedish lack of inhibition? Or were her bassoonist’s lungs so powerful that they had split the blouse open?
    Gunther was also a strapping blond specimen with delicate but strong lips, a firm jaw line, a wide chest and a half-zipped fly. He looked to be in his thirties, a good fifteen years younger than Bitten.
    Should their dishabille be pointed out? The tinny, insistent ring of