Die Upon a Kiss (32 page)

“. . . Cinderella
on Tuesday, and the incomparable Roman tragedy
Norma
by Bellini on Friday, which will bring us to the final opera of the season,” Belaggio continued over the surge of polite applause,
“Orfeo ed Euridice,
for which I promise you, with my hand upon my heart, the most unsurpassed and dazzling spectacle of all.”

“Orfeo ed Euridice?”
said Hannibal, startled, as the gaslights in the house went up. “What happened to
Der
Freischütz?”

“Orfeo ed Euridice?”
January pinched out his candle and got to his feet, gathered his gloves and music. “GLUCK’s
Orfeo ed Euridice?
He’s going to put that on for Americans?”

“You think Americans won’t appreciate the Dance of the Blessed Spirits?” Hannibal’s eyebrows quirked. “The most beautiful piece of music Gluck—or almost anyone else—ever wrote?”

“I think Americans won’t sit still for two hours of people singing arias about Love at each other without anything resembling a duel, or a riot, or even a kiss . . . Sir.” He hastened to overtake Belaggio as the impresario strode backstage, almost running to the shelter of the green room.

“Sir, are you sure
Orfeo
is a good choice? Please excuse me for speaking, but—”

At January’s first word, Belaggio slewed around, the blank terror of startlement on his face changing swiftly to pugnacity. “What is a bad choice about it?” His jaw thrust forward, as it had when January had raised the subject of
Othello.
“It is Gluck!”

“It is absolutely static. Sir. The music is beautiful, but absolutely nothing happens on-stage. Nothing. It’s like trying to stage Dante’s
Paradiso.
Two people stand and sing at each other, then two more people come and sing at each other—”

“Nonsense!” The big man waved January back as Anne Trulove and Caldwell, champagne and
foie gras
in hand on plates of gold-rimmed china, looked at one another uncertainly: January had spoken, not in Italian, but in English. “You are thinking of another
Orfeo,
my friend. We will have fire,
varoosh!”
He swept his arm in the direction of the satanic cave, still faintly wreathed in smoke, on which several of the Sicilians in the chorus were perched with their plates of bread-and-butter. “We will have writhing choruses of devils—ba
run
da-da
dum!
We will have angels floating down from the heavens—”

“Dancing angels!” cried Mr. Trulove ecstatically, clasping white-gloved hands before his breast and casting a lovelorn eye at Oona Flaherty.

“We will have an audience that falls asleep in its chairs,” muttered Hannibal, fortunately in German, which no one but January—and the Herren Smith and Pleck, currently out of earshot—understood.

“Fire always makes a spectacle on-stage,” approved Caldwell, who probably couldn’t have distinguished Gluck from Goosey-Goosey-Gander. “And it’s the spectacle that puts bums on seats, you know. That’s where we’ve been ahead of Davis all the way along. We’ve got the French Opera House licked—absolutely licked!” he added, throwing a triumphant glance back at the patrons of the Opera Society. Jed Burton and Hubert Granville raised their glasses to him; their wives nodded in a forest of plumes. “Of course, I’m sorry about Mr. Davis—it’s ridiculous to think he’d have had anything to do with poor Marsan’s being killed that way—but it’ll come to nothing in court, you mark my words.”

He put a hand on Belaggio’s massive shoulder, steered him away in the direction of the overcrowded green room, and January knew better than to follow. “Now, how, exactly, do you propose we dress the ballet for this Dance of the Blessed Spirits? Could we have them
all
come down from the flies on wires? And if we used ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ . . .”

“Cheer up.” Hannibal handed January a plate of pound-cake. “Austrian agents may murder the lot of us before we have to participate in a debacle of this scope.”

“If they don’t,” retorted January glumly, “I can guarantee you the American audience will.”

TWENTY

“Have you learned anything?” Cyril LeMoyne lifted a stack of ledgers, newspapers, and two volumes of Blackstone’s Commentaries from the spare chair in his office, looked around seeking another place to set them, and finally settled for moving a half-empty cup of coffee aside to balance them on a towering column of similar composition on the corner of his desk. “Anything at all?” January would have shifted his chair sideways to get a better view past it of the little attorney’s face, but a couple of deed-boxes and another stack of books—the Code Napoleon and most of the Law Code of the State of Louisiana— wedged him immovably into place.

He leaned sideways to talk.

“No more than I told you Monday morning,” he said. “No further odd occurrences, unless you count Caldwell’s plans to replace the ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ with ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ No threats or attacks on me or anyone else. Marguerite seems a little better—she’s conscious for a few minutes at a time—but still doesn’t remember what happened.” He had just come from breakfast with Olympe and her family, and though his friend’s listlessness still troubled him, he was beginning to feel hope.

“I made the time before last night’s performance to speak to the stable-hands at the Promenade Hotel,” he went on. “One of them—Scipion—heard the attack on Belaggio in the alley and went to open the gate; he says a man in a cloak and a mask thrust it open moments before he got there, shoved him aside, and darted across the yard and into the hotel. He thinks the man was short. The yard was dark by the gate, though there was some light closer to the hotel. Scipion’s not a tall man himself.”

“Telling us exactly nothing,” responded LeMoyne gloomily. “The number of not-very-tall men walking around New Orleans masked, armed, cloaked, and in evening-dress on any night during Carnival rivals the mise-en-scène of the average Venetian melodrama. The prosecution would point out that the description fits Davis as well as Incantobelli—or myself, for that matter.”

“Or a woman,” said January. “Breeched or not— cloaked and in darkness, it would be difficult to tell. What happened at the arraignment?”

LeMoyne flung up an ink-smudged, despairing hand. “What didn’t happen? Tillich positively identified John Davis as the man he saw at the City Hotel the night of the murder—waistcoat, watch-chains, voice. . . . Davis swore he was at home in bed. Wasn’t this a peculiar place for the owner of a gaming-house during Carnival? Davis said he hadn’t felt well, hadn’t been well for some weeks. Did he have a physician who could attest to that? Well, no, he hadn’t gone to a physician. . . .”

“If a man’s trying to convince the City Council to award his contracting company the rights to build a steam railway,” said January, “he isn’t about to let anyone think he might be ill. Not that Mr. Davis would admit he was unwell for anything short of a broken leg—and I’ve seen him run the Théâtre with that, or a broken foot, anyway. Nothing slows him down.”

“I should introduce him to my sister.” LeMoyne scratched around in the mounds of papers, all dribbled with pooled tallow and interspersed with candles stuck at random on shelves and corners. January shuddered at the thought of one of them being knocked over some night. “I would, too, except she’s busy running a tile factory, a dress-shop, a printing business in Le Havre, and our sister’s marriage. She even plays dominoes fast. Can you see a blue-bound notebook anywhere? He’d have done better to look a little feebler—God knows his color was as bad as ever I’ve seen a man’s—but he was head-up and scrappy, and seemed perfectly capable of taking on a man Belaggio’s size who’d insulted him. Then, of course, everyone had to get into the act, putting themselves forward as character witnesses, Pitot and Freret and Blanc and Dizon and half the Creole aldermen . . .”

“Pouring oil onto the blaze for those who think Davis is being protected by ‘rich friends in high places.’ ”

“For those Americans who have bids in on that lake-front railway, anyhow. Jed Burton got up and testified that he’d heard Davis threaten to murder Belaggio, and that Belaggio had ‘drawn back in alarm’ from him at some gala the other night. Belaggio apparently said on that occasion that Davis was hiring assassins. . . .”

January rolled his eyes.

“I’ve located Incantobelli, by the way. He’s staying at the Hotel Toulouse, on Rue Toulouse, under the name of Castorini. . . .”

“Which probably is his actual name,” said January. “A lot of the castrati took stage names—not that they’re the only ones to do so,” he added, thinking of Lucy Schlegdt, alias Rutigliano, the company’s diminutive Swiss mezzo.

“Surely Incantobelli would be able to testify that Belaggio was mixed up with things he shouldn’t have been, at least to the extent of ‘reasonable doubt.’ That’s all we need, really. Greenaway—he’s the prosecutor on this case—will say your friend Cavallo is Belaggio’s enemy because he thought he was stealing, but Incantobelli was his partner. . . .”

“Whose opera he stole.”

“Doesn’t the man have
anyone
who doesn’t hate him?”

“Not that I’ve heard.” January leaned back in his chair, then had to lean forward again as LeMoyne vanished behind the dizzily piled papers and books. “But Incantobelli ran like a rabbit the moment I called his name. Since there’s nothing to connect me with the City Guards, I can only assume he’s jumping at shadows. Having spent the past week looking over my own shoulder, I can understand how he feels. I’ll take a note to his hotel and see if I can arrange a meeting in a private place, but my guess is, he won’t testify publicly.”

“Maybe not.” The lawyer sighed, and picked a cup at random from among the several tucked like swallows’ nests in the insane jumble of papers. “But like the Gower boys, he may point us in a useful direction.” He took a sip, and made a face. In the front office a bell rang, and a moment later an emaciated and disapproving clerk appeared in the connecting doorway.

“M’sieu La Ronde to see you, sir.”

LeMoyne looked around for someplace to set the cup and finally wedged it between two deed-boxes on a shelf. “Thank you, M’sieu Janvier. The trial’s the second of March; needless to say, I couldn’t get bail. Dr. Ker testified as to Mr. Davis’s poor health and was pretty much shouted down by the Americans. A good deal depends on the jury, of course.” He walked January out through the scrupulously neat outer office. “But we need to come up with something. When you start mixing in the quarrel between the Americans and the French, mere innocence is not going to be enough.”

Rehearsals for
La Dame Blanche
lasted until nearly five in the afternoon. In addition to the ghosts, hidden treasure, and missing heirs provided by Monsieur Boieldieu, Mr. Caldwell introduced a duel between the evil Gaveston and the noble George Brown in the third act (“To liven things up, you understand”), and added several choruses of “Bonny Dundee” to the baptism scene in the first. When January and the other musicians took their leave, in quest of supper before the Faubourg Tremé Militia and Burial Society Masked Ball, Belaggio was trying to convince Tiberio to find a way of making the White Lady appear out of a column of “unearthly flame.”

“What’s this I hear about you taking the night off, Ben?” demanded Cochon as the group of them jostled onto the worn benches at the Buttonhole and Cora’s husband, Gervase, limped across from the kitchen with the first dishes of a feast of étouffé, grillades, oysters, and dirty rice. “Stealing away for a little walk on the levee while the rest of us sweat?” His wife, Susan, who’d come with several of the other wives and ladyfriends—including Rose—elbowed him sharply and Rose, sitting beside January, laughed and blushed.

“Listening to Herr Smith every morning has left me feeling poorly,” January said gravely, which got more laughs.

“Oh, I just
know
it’s to hear Herr Smith he takes those dance rehearsals,” joshed Cora, batting her eyelashes.

In fact, it was the knowledge that the Militia and Burial Society was having its Carnival ball that night that had caused January, on his way from LeMoyne’s office to the American Theater that morning, to stop at a slop-shop on Race Street near the levee and expend fifty cents of Mr. Davis’s money on a much-worn sailor’s blouse of blue wool, and a pair of wide-legged canvas pants. Changing into these in the kitchen of the Buttonhole after supper, he wrote out a note asking Incantobelli to meet him and LeMoyne in the back room of the Café Venise the following morning. The other musicians had gone, but Rose remained, and they took coffee together in the corner, and talked of matters that had nothing to do with Davis, or opera, or Incantobelli. It was nearly dark by the time he made his way to the Hotel Toulouse.

At this hour of the evening he had no expectation whatsoever of finding Incantobelli at his hotel, and in that he was not disappointed. When he handed the note to the clerk at the desk, however, the man glanced at the envelope and shook his head. “ ’Fraid he’s left.”

“Left, sir?” January felt no surprise, only a kind of dismay. He couldn’t even feel anger. Not after the way he himself had watched the shadows of gathering twilight in the Buttonhole’s yard. Not after he’d found himself staying to the crowded streets, the busy parts of town.

Incantobelli knew these people.

“Cleared out Sunday night.” The young man leaned a companionable elbow on the wooden counter and shook his head knowingly. Being several shades lighter than January, he quite clearly assumed the roughly-garbed January to be someone’s slave, and addressed him as
tu
rather than
vous.
He may have been a slave himself. “Bill-collectors, if you ask me.”

“You can spot ’em just like that?” The clerk had the air of one who thinks himself admired, so January put admiration into his voice.

“Pshaw!” The clerk waved a kid-gloved hand. “After three years behind this counter, my friend, I can tell just about everything about a man the minute he walks through those front doors.” Though waiters and gamblers and men in various stages of Carnival dress came and went around the glass doors of the gentlemen’s parlor just off the lobby, the lobby itself was quiet. A white-jacketed waiter was turning up the gas-jets under their fancy glass shades. “Sunday afternoon we had a couple of men coming in to ask, did the Italian gentleman have a room here—not that I told them a word, that’s not my way— but I thought: all those fancy clothes and la-di-da airs, and who’s paying for it all?”

“And you could tell these men were bill-collectors just lookin’ at them?”

It was like scratching Voltaire the cat under his chin. The clerk almost purred. “ ’Course. The tall one had a notebook and a brief with him, wrapped up with string, but he was a tough. You could tell by the way he looked around. The short one with the winkers”—he touched his own spectacles self-consciously—“sort of looked past me to see which rooms had mail in their slots.” He imitated the action of a man trying not to appear too obvious about inspecting what wasn’t his business. “Only bill-collectors or lawyers do that, and these wasn’t lawyers, for all the one was a gentleman. A lawyer wouldn’t bring his clerk just to hold his brief for him. Got to be bill-collectors.”

Short and tall, thought January, loafing out after another fifteen minutes of superfluous detail about Incantobelli’s hasty packing and departure, and about what a model of discretion the clerk had been in letting him know he’d been asked for, and how he’d made sure he got the singer’s bill paid in cash rather than a draft. Or one shorter than the other, and the shorter one maybe wore spectacles, though there were few forms of disguise simpler to assume. Since it was a French hotel, and the clerk had clearly, like January, been raised in the French Creole world, January guessed that the visitors had spoken French rather than English: as observant as the clerk was, and as proud of showing off his observations, he guessed as well that they’d spoken Creole rather than European French, and had spoken it without accent.

Brains and brawn.

No mention of a woman.

Were they trying to protect Belaggio? he wondered. Or themselves?

Had they assured the impresario that no, no, he wasn’t a target, when in fact they were preparing to dispose of a man whose connection with a flagrant slave-smuggler was endangering their whole operation?

I want him corpsed. Cut him up bad.

Had in fact Marsan been the intended victim, as a warning to Belaggio? Or Belaggio, as a warning to Marsan?

Just ’cause you keep soap in the kitchen . . .

When January reached the Rue Esplanade, it was gaudy with floats and carriages, costumed maskers reeling along the torchlit banquette, and tinsel-bright music flowing out—in various degrees of quality—from town houses and saloons.

As January had suspected, the Lalage servants—including the three he’d watched Lalage send off to work Tuesday morning—had been left with strict orders to remain at home and behave themselves. Naturally, then, the moment the family had disappeared for the Militia and Burial Society Ball, the cook had brought in a few friends for a game of dominoes in the kitchen, and the butler had made an assignation with a woman servant from three streets over. . . .

“But he tell
us
not to make no trouble,” said the stevedore who came out to the yard when January opened the gate at the house’s side and came hesitantly through. “Can we help you?”

“I hope so.” January glanced at the number of the house, which he’d written in large, unsteady figures on the note originally inscribed to Incantobelli. “This here the house of Michie Theodore Lalage? My name Gilles Blancheville. I’m a friend of Michie Lalage’s sister Mamzelle Sidonie. ’Least I
was
her friend ’fore I shipped out to serve on the
Dorchester
back in ’twenty-three. This the first I been back in town since I left, and I’m tryin’ to look up old friends. Woman at the market told me I could find Michie Theo here.”

“He live here, all right,” said the slave. “Zerline?” He called back over his shoulder to the lighted kitchen. “Zerline, fella here say he lookin’ for Michie Lalage’s sister. . . . Michie Lalage have a sister?”