The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists by Barbara Wilson

Author:Barbara Wilson [Wilson, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781580050463
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2000-09-12T05:00:00+00:00

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ELEVEN

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SHEEPISHLY, THOUGH WITH LESS guilt than one would expect, I let myself out of the palazzo and found a café, where I had a bracing cappuccino and a croissant. When my head was a little clearer, I began to seriously page through the biography. It was inscribed to Olivia in memory of “all we went through during the war.” Midway through the book it became obvious that the author had been Olivia’s lover, the conductor who had arranged for her to get out of Vienna and to England.

“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “Olivia’s son, Jakob, was not able to come with us that day. He promised to join us very soon. Olivia believed it was his fiancée Elizabeth who held him back. She was not Jewish and did not see the danger in the way we did. Like millions of others, Jakob and Elizabeth were swallowed up in the horrors that followed. Jakob was picked up by the Nazis. Elizabeth vanished. It was a great tragedy in Olivia’s life that she was never able to save her son. She made several trips to the Continent after the war and eventually learned he had died at Dachau of pneumonia. A survivor of the camp remembered that Jakob had spoken of a wife and daughter, but Olivia found no trace of a child.”

Nicky had never mentioned to me that Olivia suspected her son and his wife had had a daughter, and that she’d searched for them. But Nicky must have known, and asked me to bring the biography to confirm her memory. No wonder she was so upset when Bitten turned up claiming to be Olivia’s granddaughter. It had to be true. Jakob had died at Dachau, and Elizabeth had escaped to Sweden with her young daughter in 1940 and remarried. Of course, Bitten didn’t seem to remember anything of her early years; everyone knew now that survivors of great trauma often blocked out memories that were too painful.

If Bitten was Olivia’s granddaughter, and it seemed quite likely she was, no wonder Nicky was nervous.

Nicky! I looked at my watch. The meeting with Roberta and her friend Giovanna was scheduled for one at the conservatory, and it was now ten thirty. I had to find Nicky’s hotel and let her know. “Yes, I’m sure I can find it,” I had said to her yesterday, waving away her offer of a hand-drawn map. “The Frari, of course. You can’t miss the Frari,” I’d said, forgetting that in Venice even a huge church like Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari could disappear into the closely-packed buildings around it.

I went around in circles for half an hour until I found the tiny hotel in the “alley near the Frari” almost by accident. Bassoon music wafted from an upper story. At the reception desk, the clerk looked blank when I asked for Signora Gibbons in room seven. “No one of that name is here.” Were those her instructions, or was she passing herself off as someone else? She must be here; I could hear the bassoon.

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