6 - Whispers of Vivaldi (18 page)

Someone else had also decided to depart before the funeral began. As I paused in the vestibule to wrap my scarf around my neck, the church doors parted, drawn back by black-robed acolytes. A woman was hurrying out from the opposite side of the sanctuary. She was more appropriately garbed than Oriana or Beatrice. A zendale edged in beads of jet swathed her hair and shoulders, a delicately embroidered veil hid her averted face, and her full black cloak almost covered her gown.

Almost.

As the veiled mourner gathered her skirts and darted down the stairs, I noticed a narrow strip of a delphinium blue dancing along the stones.

“Wait,” I cried, fumbling with my own cloak and scarf.

The woman paused, as stiff as a statue. The pretend mourners clustered around her, but she ordered them away with a bold command. For an instant, she glanced back over her shoulder. Her look was direct, but the veil shielded her visage.

Stumbling forward, I raised my hand and called her name. I wasn’t mistaken—was I?

One of the doormen grabbed my elbow: “Is the signore ill? Here, let us assist you.”

I shook him off and hurried down the church steps with hat in hand. The woman had bolted. Her cloak caught the wind and billowed out behind her like a sail. She’d covered nearly half the distance across the small campo.

Growling at the facchini to let me pass, I followed on shaky legs. My quarry ducked into a narrow slit between two buildings. The sky above our island had darkened, and the light on the campo held a curious yellow tinge. Fighting the rising wind, I entered a short alley bounded by sheer brick walls. There she was! The woman turned as she reached the end. In her flight, the veil had dislodged. Now I saw her stricken face plainly. I wasn’t mistaken. My throat closed in a tight spasm.

I limped the rest of the way, holding my side, and came out upon an unfamiliar riva
by a deserted canal. A whimpering moan escaped my lips when I saw bearers liveried in French blue assist the woman into a gilded sedan chair. Without taking time to attach their shoulder straps, they manhandled the awkward box into motion. As they made haste away, I staggered backwards toward the alley.

I was in trouble. I couldn’t catch my breath, and the wind whipping down the canal cut through my woolen cloak as if it were the most delicate silk, making me shiver uncontrollably. I clawed out for a handhold as gray spots whirled before my eyes.

My last thought before I crumpled onto the cobblestones:
Tedi hadn’t left Venice, after all.

***

For some days, time made me its plaything. I existed in a dream impossible to measure in minutes or hours.

Often Maestro Torani sat at the foot of my bed, observing me from under half-closed eyelids. He looked younger, much as he had on the day we’d first met. He still had his hair—frizzled gray curls that wreathed his face in the shape of a young girl’s cap. His jaw was taut and his cheeks were smooth and unwrinkled, not age spotted and withered as they’d become. I told him, over and over, “I recognized Caprioli’s sedan chair, Maestro. I’d committed it to memory, just as you advised. I followed Tedi out of the church and saw her climb into Caprioli’s chair. The chair of your enemy,” I’d finish on a moan.

With each repetition, Torani merely nodded sadly, and I drifted along on my cotton-wool cloud until it was time for Liya to make me drink some of the opalescent liquid or, with the muscular maid’s help, apply a poultice and wrap my chest. Her mysterious poultice possessed an icy heat that dissected its way through layers of skin and muscle like a legion of tiny icicles. Surprisingly, it wasn’t as painful as it sounds. “Open yourself to its healing,” my wife whispered as she placed a feather-light kiss on my forehead. I imagined myself laced with the cold burn, much as Gussie’s milky Christmas syllabub was laced with fire-warmed brandy.

Once, when the wind rattled the shutters and its eerie howling mixed with the screams of the seagulls, my father’s face loomed up over Torani’s shoulder. While the maestro faded to the background, Papa floated closer, puffed up like an operatic Zeus about to hurl a thunderbolt. I told Papa about chasing Tedi, too.

As it had so often in reality, his face registered a sneer. “You had her in your sights, boy. Why didn’t you go after her?”

I raised my head as far as my strength allowed. “I did, Papa, but I was ill. I couldn’t catch up to her…and then she was in the chair disappearing down the fondamenta.” I flopped back to my pillow with a sigh. “Lorenzo Caprioli must have the fastest chair in Venice.”

“Weak.” My father sniffed, fiddling with the lace at his disembodied neck. “Weak as watered wine—you always were.”

Yes, I always was. My older brother Alessandro was the robust son, the one who’d taught himself to swim when he was all of five years old, who’d climbed to the topmost branch of our campo’s tree when I could barely clamber onto my chair for supper, the one who never backed away from a fight. And now Alessandro was a wealthy Constantinople tobacco merchant with a beautiful Muslim wife and a houseful of children. What was I? An emasculated singer who couldn’t sing—with a wife I couldn’t marry honestly and a son who was mine by adoption only—whose house was falling down around me—and who now had no way of supporting my unconventional household.

Against my better judgment, I looked to my father for solace. He had none to offer. As I searched Papa’s face, it began to change. His staring eyes grew wild. They glittered like rubies flaming with an inner fire, then abruptly extinguished to a barely smoldering orange.

I cried out in grunts, twisting and thrashing in my cocoon of bedclothes.

The transformation continued. Papa’s domed forehead stretched up and up, his lean cheeks took on an alabaster hue, and his jaws broke in a cavernous smile—the visage of death I’d always feared.

I could no longer move. An invisible weight pinned me to the bed, and all the while my father’s dreadful image grew larger and stretched above me like an all-encompassing canopy. I heard a staccato drumbeat and realized it was my own frantic heartbeat. Where was Liya? Why wouldn’t she come?

Maestro Torani was my savior. He came around from the foot of the bed and mutely extended his hand. With great effort, I managed to work one hand free and grasped his. It was surprisingly warm for a dead man’s. His warmth spread through me, assuaging my fear and shredding the horror above me into wispy streams of mist.

With the thumb and middle finger of his other hand, the maestro closed my eyelids, and I fell into a blessed sleep

Thankfully, not all of my sickroom visions were so unpleasant. I will always carry the exquisite memory of being visited by a quartet of boy sopranos. The beautiful youths wore white tunics with delicate, feathery wings attached to their shoulders that allowed them to fly like the cherubs on many a ceiling fresco. Each boy carried a gilded candlestick sporting an unquenchable flame. The quartet sang as they flew from corner to corner, varying their pattern from crisscross to circular; their pure voices swelled, and their melodies floated about the ceiling like the mingled scent of lilies and lilacs. The most spectacular of the individual tones hung in the air as slowly falling drops of liquid gold. Thus I was showered with a gentle rain of music that I believe healed me every bit as much as Liya’s burning poultice.

Eventually, spirits no longer came to my bedside and my walls no longer throbbed with song. Small, everyday things nibbled at the edge of my awareness. One morning, I awoke to the sounds of the maid’s heavy step in the corridor and the rattling of the chocolate pot and cups on her tray.

I’d returned to the real world. I greedily drained the cup she served me, reveling in its mix of bitter and sweet.

Later that day, I found myself enchanted with a crack on the ceiling that resembled a mallard duck. Why had I never noticed it before? Despite a persistent headache, I cast my attention beyond the bounds of my chamber. I knew that Benito had not returned. He would have been tending me if he had, but I wondered if my wandering manservant had sent any word. I asked Liya the next time she came in. When my wife shook her head at my question, the look on her face was so miserable that I sat up and put my arms around her.

Liya responded to my embrace for a moment, then gently pushed me back and stood up. “Don’t fret over Benito. You must look to yourself for once. Rest.”

“How long has he been gone?” I suddenly realized that I had no idea what day it was.

“Ten days now. You’ve laid abed for eight.”

I gasped. That long in the land of phantoms!

“And when does
The False Duke
open?” I popped up again, thoughts suddenly focused.

“Sunday a week. Today is Saturday.”

Questions streamed through my aching head—so many questions. Had Rocatti managed to make the opera presentable? Had anyone else tumbled to the fact that Vivaldi was its true composer? Were Angeletto and Majorano sharing the stage without bloodshed? Had Grillo stayed away from Venice as ordered?

Aloud, I asked, “Has Messer Grande located Torani’s killer?”

“I don’t believe so. Several times he’s called in to see how you’re doing—his visits caused quite a stir among the neighbors, I can tell you.” She shook her head as she gathered some dirty linen for the laundry. “I’m sure Messer Grande would have said if he’d arrested someone. At any rate, the news would be in the gazettes…and all over Venice.”

An image sprang to my mind. Not another dream, but a memory. Tedi, her blue gown topped with black, her veil torn from her face, being handed into Caprioli’s sedan chair by his bravo, Scarface. I threw my covers back.

“Oh, no you don’t.” Liya shifted her bundle and shot out an arm to restrain me. Her olive-skinned brow creased in deep lines of worry. “I’ll send for Gussie to wrestle you to the mattress, if I have to.”

I sank back, exhaling slowly. The truth was, I lacked the strength to wrestle a kitten. I plucked at my sheets in irritation. “Liya, I must talk to Messer Grande.”

“Then I will send for him.”

“Now, please.”

“I know that trick.” My wife crossed her arms. “I’ll come back and find you looking for your breeches.”

“I’ll stay in bed this time. I promise.”

She cocked her head skeptically.

“Let’s make a trade. My inviolable promise for the answer to one simple question.”

She smiled. “Go on—ask.”

“Did that mess you cooked up really contain spider webs and moldy bread?”

Her slim brows jumped up. “You dare to call the unguent that saved you a mess?” Liya stood very still. Her tone had changed. “Tito, the corruption from that cut almost killed you. It festered so badly, it makes me wonder if Grillo hadn’t steeped his blade in dung.”

Suitably chastened, and more than a little sickened, I hung my head. “I just wondered what was in it.”

Humor chased vexation from her snapping black eyes. “It contains just what I told you, my darling. Plus chicken fat, yellow watercress, sweet flag, poppy juice, and aconite. The last two are what caused your visions.”

“You know about those?”

“I heard you conversing with Maestro Torani.”

“He seemed so real.”

“Perhaps he was.”

“But, Liya,” I replied, unbelieving. “Surely, his presence…and all the rest…surely they were fantastic dreams and nothing more.”

My wife bestowed another kiss, then whispered, “Don’t be so sure, Tito. If the salve’s ingredients can send the wise women of Monteborgo flying across the sky, who knows what other wonders they can conjure?”

Chapter Eighteen

“Who’s winning?” Gussie asked, as he surveyed the battle formation of gaily painted tin soldiers in the corner of my sitting room.

It was the next day, and I’d felt strong enough to creep downstairs. I leaned forward on the cushioned sofa where Liya had installed me full-length under a woolen blanket. While I visited with Gussie, Liya was paying a long-delayed visit to her Ghetto family. On the faded carpet, I saw my nephew Matteo arranging tiny men in dark blue coats on one side of a strip of aquamarine cloth from Liya’s mending basket. This I took to be the River Danube. On the wide window ledge, Titolino was making neat ranks of red-uniformed men on horseback. The drapes had been thrown back so that the dreary Cannaregio afternoon made a backdrop for his army. On the other side of the glass, a mist lay low around the neighboring houses and over the canal.

“The Austrians are winning,” Titolino proudly chirped. “That’s me.”

“That’s only because you called the window ledge,” his cousin Matteo immediately challenged. “You keep firing cannon balls down on my Bavarians.”

Gussie sent his son a wise nod. “The high ground does have its advantages. Remember that for next time.”

“Why can’t we trade now?” Matteo proposed, looking to his father for support.

“No,” Titolino wailed. “Papa, tell Matteo it’s my turn. General von Neipperg just got his cavalry troops in place for a charge down the mountain.”

My brother-in-law huffed and puffed and fiddled with his unlit pipe, clearly not willing to take sides. I found my watch in my unbuttoned waistcoat and clicked it open. “Boys, it’s nearly twenty minutes after two. At a quarter to three, I’ll call out the time and you must switch sides.”

My pronouncement was met with grumbles, but the boys settled down to play once I’d pointed out that their time was tick-tocking away.

I placed my watch on the nearest table and nested in amongst my cushions. I was weak, but at least the headache had abated. “Tell me all the news, Gussie. Does half of Venice still believe I murdered Maestro Torani?”

“Not really.” Gussie dropped into a tapestry-upholstered chair and propped one white-stockinged ankle on his knee. Over the cheerful clamor of the Austrian charge, he said, “I don’t know how he managed it, but Messer Grande has let it be known that you are blameless and under no suspicion.”

“I’ll tell you how—his web of spies and go-betweens can disseminate information as readily as they collect it. A word here, a word there, and soon the taverns and coffee houses are buzzing.” I sighed, observing the ceiling thoughtfully. “I appreciate his efforts, but people do tend to believe the worst. In some quarters, my name will always carry a taint of scandal.”

“I’m certain it will all die down once the real killer is discovered,” Gussie replied earnestly.

“Perhaps.” I forced a smile. “Now, what else is going on?”

“Well, the acqua alta has come to the piazza.”

“A bad one?”

“Just a modest influx so far. At high tide, the piazza shimmers like a giant mirror and everyone is driven indoors.” He shook his head, fiddling with his pipe again. “But in a few hours, the water drains away, and the people return to their easy pleasures as if it were nothing.”

I nodded. The piazza was center stage for the Carnival that would open on the same day as
The False Duke
. That large, open space was also the island’s lowest-lying area and received the brunt of fall and winter flooding. The Sirocco wind made it worse by sweeping northward up the length of the Adriatic and preventing the tide from flowing back out between the lagoon’s barrier islands. I was grateful that both the Teatro San Marco and my own home sat on less flood-prone sites. If it lasted, perhaps the storm-driven acqua alta would have the proverbial silver lining. With the piazza flooded, more people might attend the opera premiere.

“And what of Angeletto?” I asked. “Did you manage to speak to him about painting his portrait?”

Gussie settled more deeply into his chair. He pocketed the pipe and took on a dreamy expression. “You were right about Angeletto being hard to get at. The poor thing is always rushed to and fro, surrounded by relatives whose one purpose in life seems to be to prevent
him
…” Here I was favored with an accusing look. “To prevent him from interacting with any of the hoi polloi. Eventually, I was forced to dawdle near the stage door like a lovesick puppy. Angeletto snuck out for a breath of air between rehearsals, and we struck up a conversation that allowed me to propose a sitting.”

“Did he swallow the story of an anonymous benefactor?”

Gussie nodded. “Without question. He told me a story from his days in Naples. After a particularly popular opera, a masked admirer once pushed through the crowd in his dressing room and pressed an emerald bracelet into his hand. The fellow disappeared without a word. Angeletto never found out who it was.” Gussie snorted. “My fees don’t run anywhere near as high as emeralds, so I suppose Angeletto merely took it as his due.”

“Hmm…I suppose Maria Luisa sold the bracelet.” I couldn’t help thinking back to my own share of baubles. Never an emerald bracelet for me. A diamond-encrusted snuffbox from the Elector of Bavaria had been my most magnificent gift, and a silver-hilted smallsword the most ludicrous. I was an artist, not an aristocrat in formal dress with a hanger at my side. I’d directed Benito to sell both to help pay for the house that surrounded us. My manservant drove a hard bargain. I’d wager Angeletto’s business-minded sister did the same. I turned my attention back to my companion.

Gussie was happily announcing, “And so it’s all arranged, Tito. Our angel agreed to drop by my studio. Tomorrow morning, in fact. I can decide on his placement, make some quick sketches. That way I can start filling in the background without him and work on his likeness later, when his days are free. Just now Rocatti keeps him very busy in rehearsal—the first provo is scheduled in a day or so.”

I had to smile at Gussie’s use of the Italian term that describes a dress rehearsal, the
proof
that the myriad preparations have melded into a cohesive production. If he continued to absorb our words and ways, my brother-in-law might someday become as Venetian as I was. Though I’d be shocked if he ever gave up his English breakfast of greasy eggs and sausages.

I said, “You’re going to enjoy all this, I presume.”

“Painting Angeletto will be a damn sight more interesting than the sittings with the cloth merchant’s wife I’ve been suffering through lately. A more vapid, simpering woman never existed.” Gussie’s jaws split in a lopsided grin. “One more thing: Angeletto said he’d very much like a word with you.”

“Me? The disgraced director of the Teatro San Marco?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“Some musical business, if I heard him aright.”

A loud rapping at the front door prevented further speculation.

The maid scurried through the hall, and momentarily Messer Grande strolled into the room as if he had nothing more on his mind than taking a glass of wine and a biscuit and perhaps playing a few hands of
tresette
. “Good afternoon, my dear friends. Tito, I was told you are back among the living and wish to see me. No, don’t get up.” He hooked his left thumb in a waistcoat pocket and looked around, smiling at the boys who were deeply engaged in their play. “It’s a pleasant surprise to see you looking so well. No doubt the bosom of your family has a salutary effect.”

I sensed an undercurrent of envy. Did Andrea have a family? I suddenly realized that in all our conversations during the investigation of Zulietta Giardino’s murder several years ago, he’d mentioned a retiring wife several years his senior, but never spoken of children. I gestured toward the nearest chair. “Won’t you sit down?”

“After I give you this,” Andrea replied equably. He’d kept his right hand at his side. Now he used it to hand over a tarot card. A very familiar tarot card—the angel of Temperance and Harmony.

It was the same that had been thrown through Maestro Torani’s window at the theater—only this card wasn’t ragged and creased as the card around the stone had been—it was just the slightest bit limp, as if the pasteboard had been exposed to the damp. I lifted my brows in question.

“I found it tucked beneath your rather substantial lion’s head door knocker, and I have to wonder how long it’s been there.”

Gussie had come over to view the card. “Wasn’t there when I came in around noon,” he said. We exchanged mystified glances, and I added, “Liya left the house just under an hour ago. She would surely have noticed it. No one else has been in or out since then.”

Andrea’s jaw worked back and forth. “It’s a shame no one saw who left it.”

“I saw him,” Titolino piped up from the window, holding a miniature artillery caisson in each hand. “A man came to the door right after General von Neibberg’s charge.”

My feet hit the floor. I grabbed my watch. “That was fifteen to twenty minutes ago. Who was he, Titolino?”

“Don’t know,” he muttered, shrugging.

“Think, boy,” Andrea rapped out. He strode across the room to loom over my son, asserting his noble height and his office of Messer Grande. “Had you ever seen him before? Anywhere?”

Titolino suddenly appeared smaller. “No…but he looked like Papa.”

Andrea glared.

My son dropped his toys, and his lower lip trembled. His cousin retreated to the dining room and peeked around the archway with saucer-shaped eyes. Titolino continued haltingly, “I thought…I thought the man must have come from the opera house…with a message. I was going to tell Papa, but then the Bavarians made a sneak attack from the bend in the riv—”

“Never mind about that.” I pushed up and limped over to embrace my son. Gussie was on my heels. “It’s all right,” I told Titolino as his small hand tensed on my shoulder. I’d knelt so that we were nose to nose, and I stroked his smooth, jet-black hair. “I just want you to explain what you meant—about the man looking like me.”

“It wasn’t his face.” The boy looked past me, into the empty air, and twisted the fingers of both hands. “It was that he had long arms that hung down farther than they should…and I saw when he flipped his cloak back that his chest was big and round like a barrel…and when he walked away, his knees almost knocked together.”

Titolino’s evidence was precise. He’d described the bodily changes that befall a surgically emasculated man. I looked up at Gussie and Andrea. “It was a castrato that delivered the angel card to my door.”

They both nodded their understanding.

I turned back to Titolino. “You know Majorano, don’t you? You’ve seen him at the theater several times.”

“Yes, Papa. I know him.”

“Could Majorano have been the man at our door?”

Titolino shook his head earnestly.

Andrea rocked back on his heels. His gaze grew steely. “That narrows the field—if the boy knows what he says—the number of eunuchs involved in this case is limited.”

“Titolino tells the truth as a nine-year-old child sees it.” I gave the boy’s hand a bracing squeeze. “He’s not wrong about Majorano. But he’s never met Angeletto and probably wouldn’t remember Emiliano…though he did meet him several years ago.”

Gussie jumped in to defend the singer who held his fascination: “How would Angeletto get loose from his sisters long enough to come all the way to the Cannaregio on his own? How would he even know where you lived?”

Andrea harrumphed. “The idea is rubbish at any rate.”

I rose and told Titolino to take Matteo to the kitchen and ask the girl for some dates and almonds. Once the two boys had trotted off, I said, “What do you mean by rubbish?” I was not so inclined to give up on Angeletto as my two companions.

“I’ll tell you, but come, Tito, sit. You look all in.”

I was feeling unsteady again—but not too weak to concentrate once I’d settled back under my covers on the sofa and the others were also seated.

Andrea leaned forward. “With the delivery of the card to your door, it’s clear that someone is calling your personal attention to Angeletto—not to his star billing over the Teatro San Marco’s resident primo uomo. As you are no longer in charge at the theater, that would make no sense. But your penchant for solving a mystery is common knowledge. In this case, you’ve had not only the sting of being suspected, but also the close relationship you shared with Maestro Torani to goad you toward finding the killer. Why would Angeletto call your attention to himself in this way?”

Gussie nodded appreciatively. “I see. It’s much more likely that someone else is trying to make Tito believe Angeletto killed Torani.” He rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and applied his chin to his palm. “Emiliano? Perhaps at Caprioli’s behest?”

“You may be sure I’ll be inquiring into Emiliano’s whereabouts at half-past two. And also into Majorano’s—just to be safe.” Andrea tapped the toe of his boot in a rhythmic staccato. “Now, Tito. Do you suppose our young Rocatti has any castrati at his beck and call?”

“I wouldn’t think so. He teaches at an institution confined to the education of girls and young women. He’s not even a voice master. He gives lessons on the violin. Besides, I barely know Niccolo Rocatti. You may know more about his circle of acquaintances than I do…if you questioned him about the Vivaldi manuscript.”

That statement hung in the air for a moment, then Andrea nodded briskly. “I did pay a call on Signor Rocatti at the Pieta. When I placed
The Noble Peasant
in front of him, he denied ever seeing that particular manuscript before—”

“What the devil?” I burst out. “Now that Rocatti has the Savio’s confidence, does he think he can get away with boldfaced lies?”

“
Pace
, my friend. Rocatti claims that he wrote
The False Duke
from exercises given him by his teacher. Maestro Vivaldi would supply a libretto and the skeleton of a tune to go along with the poetry. Rocatti would expand on what he was given, experimenting and attempting to find his own style. Under The Red Priest’s tutelage, Rocatti entered enough material in his student notebooks to compose several operas—or so he reports. Moreover, when Maestro Vivaldi left Venice for the Hapsburg court, Rocatti says he was given leave to do as he liked with them.”