balustrade. Marco was having a nervous smoke and didn’t meet my eyes. I hadn’t seen him smoke before.
“Where’s Gunther?” Bitten asked Marco, coming up behind us. “Didn’t he come back yet?”
“Come back from where?” Albert asked.
“Oh, he took a walk. He was feeling rather restless,” Bitten said, after a pause in which she seemed to take hold of herself. “I’m sure he’ll meet us soon.”
If that was the case, then why did she suddenly sound so nervous?
I was eager to dump the bassoonists after the concert, but they insisted on clumping together like amoebas under a microscope. No one spoke. As we walked away from the Pietà, Bitten kept looking around for Gunther, and Andrew and Marco seemed suddenly shy with each other. I wondered if Andrew had gotten a little of what he wanted. At the door of the Hotel Danieli, one of the doormen gave a respectful wave to Albert. So he was staying there.
Albert swung along beside me, bowler low on his forehead, trousers too short above black boots that caught the shine of the street light above. He whistled a tune between his teeth, but it wasn’t from the Vivaldi opera we’d just heard. It was Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea , and it echoed the clarinet solo we were heading toward. He moved to take my arm, and although I shuddered slightly at his touch, I allowed it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Albert’s sexual proclivities. He was such an enigmatic blend of innocence and cunning, he could turn out to be either chaste or polymorphously dissolute. The only thing I didn’t believe about Albert was that he was happily married and lived with a wife and two children in the bucolic English countryside.
The air was still humid, and the sky was heavy and moonless; each breath I took tasted of musty salt, of old wood and damp stone. As I had in the Pietà, I closed my eyes and opened them again, imagining myself in an earlier time, when masked women in wide cloaks stepped into gondolas, the gondolas that now rode emptily in their moorage in the wide basin to our left.
Marco caught up to me and Albert. He seemed worried that we were headed in the direction of Piazza San Marco and in the direction of the clarinet.
“We take the vaporetto over to Accademia,” he reminded me. “A nightcap, yes?”
“You can do what you like. I don’t believe I’m under any sort of obligation to spend all my time with you lot.”
“No, of course not,” murmured Marco unhappily as we arrived at the square.
“How the heck should I know where he is?” Andrew was now saying under his breath to Bitten. “You’re the ones who had the lovers’ quarrel.”
“We…”
“Bitten, I heard you two arguing.”
“Where?”
But then they both noticed I had stopped abruptly and seemed to be listening to them.
I did hear them, but I had stopped for quite another reason. I had seen, alone at an outdoors café table, a figure with red-gold hair in a dark coat that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. She was enthralled by the trio directly in front of her, especially by the young woman who was similar enough to Marco to be his twin. Roberta Sandretti. The same straight nose, decisive brows, dark curly hair. But she radiated a kind of energy that made her brother look like a low-wattage light bulb. Her eyes flashed the intelligence of their father, along with the joyful controlled abandon of a real musician.
I assumed Francesca had told Roberta about me, for she looked me over boldly as she lowered her clarinet for a moment. Boldly and with the practiced eye of someone assessing the competition.
We seated ourselves and ordered overpriced drinks from a waiter who had no right to look contemptuous, considering how few people made the step from mildly interested strolling passerby to paying customer.
The set ended—perhaps a little sooner than the bass player and pianist had expected—and Roberta bowed briefly to acknowledge our applause before coming
“Where’s Gunther?” Bitten asked Marco, coming up behind us. “Didn’t he come back yet?”
“Come back from where?” Albert asked.
“Oh, he took a walk. He was feeling rather restless,” Bitten said, after a pause in which she seemed to take hold of herself. “I’m sure he’ll meet us soon.”
If that was the case, then why did she suddenly sound so nervous?
I was eager to dump the bassoonists after the concert, but they insisted on clumping together like amoebas under a microscope. No one spoke. As we walked away from the Pietà, Bitten kept looking around for Gunther, and Andrew and Marco seemed suddenly shy with each other. I wondered if Andrew had gotten a little of what he wanted. At the door of the Hotel Danieli, one of the doormen gave a respectful wave to Albert. So he was staying there.
Albert swung along beside me, bowler low on his forehead, trousers too short above black boots that caught the shine of the street light above. He whistled a tune between his teeth, but it wasn’t from the Vivaldi opera we’d just heard. It was Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea , and it echoed the clarinet solo we were heading toward. He moved to take my arm, and although I shuddered slightly at his touch, I allowed it. Not for the first time did I wonder about Albert’s sexual proclivities. He was such an enigmatic blend of innocence and cunning, he could turn out to be either chaste or polymorphously dissolute. The only thing I didn’t believe about Albert was that he was happily married and lived with a wife and two children in the bucolic English countryside.
The air was still humid, and the sky was heavy and moonless; each breath I took tasted of musty salt, of old wood and damp stone. As I had in the Pietà, I closed my eyes and opened them again, imagining myself in an earlier time, when masked women in wide cloaks stepped into gondolas, the gondolas that now rode emptily in their moorage in the wide basin to our left.
Marco caught up to me and Albert. He seemed worried that we were headed in the direction of Piazza San Marco and in the direction of the clarinet.
“We take the vaporetto over to Accademia,” he reminded me. “A nightcap, yes?”
“You can do what you like. I don’t believe I’m under any sort of obligation to spend all my time with you lot.”
“No, of course not,” murmured Marco unhappily as we arrived at the square.
“How the heck should I know where he is?” Andrew was now saying under his breath to Bitten. “You’re the ones who had the lovers’ quarrel.”
“We…”
“Bitten, I heard you two arguing.”
“Where?”
But then they both noticed I had stopped abruptly and seemed to be listening to them.
I did hear them, but I had stopped for quite another reason. I had seen, alone at an outdoors café table, a figure with red-gold hair in a dark coat that was pulled tightly around her shoulders. She was enthralled by the trio directly in front of her, especially by the young woman who was similar enough to Marco to be his twin. Roberta Sandretti. The same straight nose, decisive brows, dark curly hair. But she radiated a kind of energy that made her brother look like a low-wattage light bulb. Her eyes flashed the intelligence of their father, along with the joyful controlled abandon of a real musician.
I assumed Francesca had told Roberta about me, for she looked me over boldly as she lowered her clarinet for a moment. Boldly and with the practiced eye of someone assessing the competition.
We seated ourselves and ordered overpriced drinks from a waiter who had no right to look contemptuous, considering how few people made the step from mildly interested strolling passerby to paying customer.
The set ended—perhaps a little sooner than the bass player and pianist had expected—and Roberta bowed briefly to acknowledge our applause before coming
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